Patch
@Patch@feddit.uk
- Comment on New fuel cell could enable electric aviation 6 days ago:
The real competitor for green aviation isn’t hydrogen, it’s bio-fuel. Bio-kerosene, bio-gas and bio-ethanol all have useful roles in aviation, and are essentially carbon neutral over their lifecycle. Zero carbon at the proverbial tailpipe is a lot less important when that tailpipe is at 30,000 feet.
- Comment on Who owns the press? 1 week ago:
A lot of quality small local newspapers doing an amazing job are financially struggling. It’s very sad.
Sadly not as many as you’d think. The overwhelming majority of local newspapers were owned by a handful of national companies. The three biggest are Reach (owner of the Mirror and the Express, amongst others), Newsquest and National World, who between them own 65% of all local papers. Another 15% are owned by the next two biggest companies (Trindle and Archant). Only 20% of local papers are owned by smaller companies, and most of those aren’t independent, they’re just smaller companies than the big 5.
Anyone lucky enough to still have a genuine independent local paper with at least passable quality should cherish the fuck out of it.
- Comment on Forced E-Waste PCs And The Case Of Windows 11’s Trusted Platform 1 week ago:
ReactOS is a very fun project, but anyone expecting it to be a real useable OS is absolutely mad. It’s been going for almost 30 years, and they’re almost at the point of binary compatibility with Windows Server 2003…
- Comment on X.com blocks access to Ekrem Imamoglu, leader of Turkish opposition 4 weeks ago:
You’ve pretty much just described ActivityPub and the Fediverse.
Anyone can spin up their own instance. You can self host on a machine in your house, or with any cloud provider. You can broadcast messages in Twitter-style or Reddit-style format. Anyone can navigate to your web address and see your messages. Anyone who federates with you can see it on their website. FOSS Android apps are available.
You can’t force anyone to actually read your messages of course, but that’s a different matter.
- Comment on People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies 4 weeks ago:
Turing made a strategic blunder when formulating the Turing Test by assuming that everyone was as smart as he was.
- Comment on Tesla odometer uses “predictive algorithms” to void warranty, lawsuit claims 1 month ago:
I wonder how sophisticated this fraud is? They could have it rush to 50k, and then “catch up” by running more slowly for the next few 10s of thousands to cover the tracks.
- Comment on Vets tell BBC they are under 'consistent pressure' to make money 1 month ago:
I’ve just discovered that the vets in my town are owned by Mars Inc.
You know, of “Mars Bars” fame.
Who knew?
- Comment on UK creating ‘murder prediction’ tool to identify people most likely to kill. 1 month ago:
maybe turn the three sisters
Two of the three precogs were boys, by the way.
- Comment on Approving US-made cars would make UK roads less safe 1 month ago:
Even the US he ce why Vauxhall exists.
Not to detract from your point (because you’re completely correct), but just an FYI that Vauxhall/Opel has been European owned for some time now. General Motors sold it to Peugeot back in 2017, and it’s now part of Stellantis.
Ford had (and still has) essentially the same arrangement, only in their case they use the same brand. Ford Europe and Ford USA are pretty much entirely separate companies, owned by the same parent; hence why their European car lineup looks mostly nothing like their US lineup.
- Comment on Mailfence email 1 month ago:
That’s encryption in a nutshell. A message is encrypted until it reaches its destination, and then by necessity is unencrypted in order to read it. Once your recipient has the unencrypted message, you don’t have any control over what happens to it.
Fundamentally, if you don’t trust the recipient (or their system provider), no amount of encryption will protect your message.
- Comment on Final Fantasy 9 Remake Seemingly Teased by Square Enix 1 month ago:
FFIX is my favourite FF game (yeah, fight me on it), which means this news is either very good or very bad depending on how the remake ends up.
- Comment on “It Wouldn’t Be Surprising If, in Two Years’ Time, There Was a Film Made Completely Through AI”: Says Hayao Miyazaki’s Own Son 2 months ago:
trying to tell us that in a couple years we’ll have a full-on AI film
To be fair, he never said it would be any good.
- Comment on The Signal and the noise: Why the messaging app is great for privacy but not for war plans. 2 months ago:
We need a US Community on Revolt too not just Lemmy
Never heard of it before.
What’s the elevator pitch?
- Comment on Nintendo delays Switch 2 preorders over tariff concerns 2 months ago:
There’s a direct quote from the company.
According to a statement sent to The Verge by Eddie Garcia on behalf of Nintendo, it says preorders will no longer begin on April 9th:
“Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.”
I’m also in Europe.
- Comment on Nintendo delays Switch 2 preorders over tariff concerns 2 months ago:
They’re definitely creatively stale, but they’re also undeniably good at what they do. They have by far the best selling console of the last generation, and are the only console company to consistently post healthy profits on their operation.
Is it a bit naff that their next generation of games will almost certainly be yet another Zelda, yet another Mario, yet another Pokémon? Absolutely. But if their next Zelda game is yet another best-selling critically acclaimed success, who are we to say that they’ve got the wrong approach?
- Comment on Mozilla Thunderbird Challenges Gmail With Its Own Email Service 2 months ago:
Depends what you’re after. I’m a Thunderbird user, but if user friendliness is the aim then Geary is quite good.
- Comment on Network Rail to set up property company to deliver 40,000 homes 2 months ago:
Both Network Rail and LCR have already been working in this space for a long time; this is more about increasing the scale than about doing something new.
Reading is an interesting example; all those big towers and blocks that have sprung up around the station in the last decade? The vast majority are on what was previously railway land.
- Comment on Google will develop the Android OS fully in private; Will continue open source releases. 2 months ago:
There’s also just no real incentive for them to do it. The number of devices running fully de-googled Android forks are miniscule in the grand scheme of things. Everyone running devices with non-standard Android but which still uses Google Play Services and the rest are just as valuable to Google as the ones running stock. And it suits Google to have the small ultra-privacy hobbyist market still running Android forks, even de-googled ones, rather than moving on to something else entirely.
- Comment on Google will develop the Android OS fully in private; Will continue open source releases. 2 months ago:
For as long as it’s still under the Apache licence, they’re still obligated to release the source under the terms of that licence. They’d need to change the licence to stop providing code; which as you say, they could do, but that would also kill AOSP entirely overnight so is a bit of a bigger problem than the one described in the OP.
- Comment on Google will develop the Android OS fully in private; Will continue open source releases. 2 months ago:
Is it possible? Sure.
Even then, not really. Not legally, anyway. Open source licences require that the user be provided with the source code (if requested) alongside the binaries. If they roll out an update to Android (to code which is under an open source licence), they have to release the code at essentially the same time. Rolling out an update and then withholding the source code for an unnecessarily long time would be against the terms of the licence.
- Comment on How Tesla blew its lead. 2 months ago:
Yep. Feel like I see more Ioniqs than anything else, although things are gradually diversifying.
- Comment on How Tesla blew its lead. 2 months ago:
BYD is eating everyone’s lunch at the bottom not just Tesla.
It’s not just BYD. SAIC (whose main international brand is MG) isn’t far behind, Chery (whose main brands are Omoda and Jaecoo) are starting to get about too, and there are myriad smaller Chinese marques.
Chinese cars in general are really hitting the market hard.
- Comment on Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are. 2 months ago:
Ironic coincidence of the name aside, it appears to be a legit bricks and mortar university in a town called Elon, North Carolina.
- Comment on The Volkswagen ID. EVERY1 is an affordable EV for the masses 2 months ago:
VW says the production version of the ID. EVERY1 will be the company’s first vehicle to feature a new “powerful” software architecture that promises over-the-air updates. (Software has proven to be a bit of a pain for VW, with bugs and infrequent updates plaguing its ID family of vehicles for years.)
- Comment on FCC chair says we’re too dependent on GPS and wants to explore ‘alternatives’. 2 months ago:
Yes, it is!
- Comment on FCC chair says we’re too dependent on GPS and wants to explore ‘alternatives’. 2 months ago:
there’s also GNSS which is mostly used in Europe and Scandinavia
GNSS is the generic term that covers all satellite navigation systems (GPS included).
Galileo is the EU/ESA system you’re thinking of.
GLONASS (Russian) and BeiDou (Chinese) are the other two major constellations with global coverage. The only other full system I know of is NavIC, which is Indian and has only regional coverage.
Most devices actually connect to all of them. I’ve just checked my phone, and it’s connected to all of GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou. People just say “GPS” because it’s catchier than “GNSS”.
- Comment on The Volkswagen ID. EVERY1 is an affordable EV for the masses 2 months ago:
They’re not going to create entirely new ones just for this vehicle.
If you read the article (I know, controversial) you’re see that that’s exactly what they’re suggesting they’re doing, yes.
Personally I wouldn’t hold my breath that it’ll be better, but it is going to be completely different to their current software stack.
- Comment on The Volkswagen ID. EVERY1 is an affordable EV for the masses 2 months ago:
Concept cars are, by definition, not actually finished. Nobody will be able to buy the car that was being shown at the car show. The car that will be on sale in 2-3 years will be a thematically similar but fundamentally different creature.
Things like the onboard computer software/hardware/data sharing model won’t be defined yet. VW’s first party servicing costs or the price of replacement brake pads are not defined yet. It’ll be a job for a future car journalist to report on all those things once it’s actually defined.
- Comment on The Volkswagen ID. EVERY1 is an affordable EV for the masses 2 months ago:
It’s a concept car; none of those things are actually known or knowable yet.
- Comment on "Reach" news websites 3 months ago:
They don’t use Reach; they are Reach. That’s the name of the company that owns them all (plus The Mirror, The Express and The Star). That’s why they all have the same website.
Most of the ones that aren’t Reach are Newsquest. Their website is also pretty terrible, but at least it doesn’t do that annoying swipe/scroll thing that Reach does.