Patch
@Patch@feddit.uk
- Comment on Amazon and Audible flooded with 'forex trading' and warez listings 18 hours ago:
The thing to remember about investing (forex or otherwise) is that it’s an enormous global industry. One of the largest and richest there is. If you’re a normal person, with a normal day job, tinkering around in the evening trying to pick stocks or write algorithms, just remember that there are countless thousands of professional, experienced, trained analysts all over the world doing the exact same thing 40 hours a week, week in week out.
There are no easy bucks to be made. If it was easy, it’d already be done.
- Comment on X adds Twitch to its advertising boycott lawsuit 18 hours ago:
It seems insane to me that the US system lets you literally specify the exact judge (that you’ve already bought and paid for) as the only judge that can hear cases against you. And that the system is basically OK with this.
- Comment on Apple's controversial iPhone accessory may have been discontinued 2 days ago:
Speculation in the sense that the article says it’s "suggested’, and the source cited is “Mac Rumours”.
Not sure why you’re being so weird about it.
- Comment on Apple's controversial iPhone accessory may have been discontinued 2 days ago:
Apple made the transition a little easier for those who weren’t ready to give up on their wired headphones by including a $9 adapter. However, it looks like it could now be confined to the annals of history, as the Lightning to 3.5mm jack adapter has sold out in the US and other countries, suggesting Apple may have quietly discontinued it
It says “sold out” and "discontinued. The latter is currently just speculation.
- Comment on Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk’s X from its official accounts 3 days ago:
I don’t know why I forgot this, but there is of course already a solution for this; mbin/kbin, which has both Lemmy-like and Mastodon-like interfaces on one platform.
Not that I’m actually suggesting anything you understand. Just recalling that this is a thought process someone’s already had at least once!
- Comment on "What Is Your Dream for Mozilla" - Mozilla is doing a survey, questions include "What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?" 3 days ago:
All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human.
I’m no AI enthusiast, but this is clear hyperbole. Of course there are uses for it; it’s not magic, it’s just technology. You’ll have been using some of them for years before the AI fad came along and started labelling everything.
Translation services are a good example. Google Translate and Bing Translate have both been using machine learning neural networks as their core technology for a decade and more. There’s no other way of doing it that produces anything close to as good a result. And yes, paying a human translator might get you good results too, but realistically that’s not a competitive option for the vast majority of uses (nobody is paying a translator to read restaurant menus or train station signage to them).
This whole AI assistant fad can do one as far as I’m concerned, but the technologies behind the fad are here to stay.
- Comment on Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk’s X from its official accounts 5 days ago:
You can use Mastodon to interact with Lemmy content and vice versa, but generally speaking the user experience isn’t good. Lots of manually typing URLs and trying to figure out what you’re looking at when you get there.
In theory you could host a Lemmy and Mastodon server under the same domain (using subdomains, e.g. lemmy.feddit.uk and mastodon.feddit.uk), but they’d be different servers in most ways that matter. I presume they would maintain separate user account databases (without some concerted hacking).
- Comment on Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk’s X from its official accounts 6 days ago:
We don’t have a Mastodon server, do we?
I joined Mastodon years ago, but the server I joined was always a bit moribund and I sort of lost interest. Wouldn’t be against someone doing a Fedwitter.uk…
(It should not be called Fedwitter.uk under any circumstances)
- Comment on Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success 4 weeks ago:
Intel as a company isn’t going anywhere any time soon; they’re just too big, with too many resources, not to do at least OK.
They have serious challenges in their approach and performance to engineering, but short of merging with someone else they’ll find their niche. For as long as x86-derived architectures remain current (i.e. if AMD is still chugging along with them) they’ll continue to put out their own chips, and occasionally they’ll manage to get an edge.
The real question would be what happens if x86 finally ceases to be viable. In theory there’s nothing stopping Intel (or AMD) pivoting to ARM or RISC-V (or fucking POWER for that matter) if that’s where the market goes. Losing the patent/licensing edge would sting, though.
- Comment on Why are we building homes when so many are standing empty? 4 weeks ago:
261,471 are classed as “long-term empty,” meaning no-one has lived there for six months or more.
If all empty homes were brought back into use, the housing crisis would be solved at a stroke and, arguably, the government would not have to build 1.5m new homes.
I know number literacy is not journalism’s strong point, but surely even the author can grasp the basics of “which number is bigger”.
Bringing 0.25 million houses into occupancy does not “arguably” negate the need to build 1.5 million houses. At best it reduces the required new builds to 1.25 million.
The larger figure (700k) is a meaningless figure for this discussion, because short term vacant homes are by definition not a problem that needs to be solved. Most of them will be homes which are vacant “been occupants”, e.g. ones where the tenant has moved out and a new one hasn’t moved in yet, or the homes of the recently deceased whose estate is still in the process of winding up.
Heck, even a proportion of the 250k “long term” ones won’t be actual problem vacancies; some of those will just be ones like those of the recently deceased for whom the process takes longer than 6 months. A relative of mine recently died, and it took maybe 4-5 months to sort out probate, another couple of months on the market before an offer was accepted, and as far as I know now (about 6 months on again) the new owner is still in the process of renovating it prior to moving in. That’s “long term vacant” in those stats, but it’s not a problem that needs anyone to solve it- it’s just that sometimes things take time.
- Comment on So tired to see Elon Musk in my home page EVERY DAY 4 weeks ago:
Ha, my thoughts exactly. I’ve dipped out of Lemmy for a few weeks, just dipped back in today. “I wonder if it’s still wall to wall Musk?” I thought, logging in; and this was the first post I see.
- Comment on US Court Rules Google a Monopoly in 'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century'. 3 months ago:
What with Trump recently declaring (in his usual completely coherent and not at all deranged manner) that Google are Bad, the Supreme Court might not necessarily be feeling so keen to help out on this one.
- Comment on Netflix mulls introducing free ad-supported tier. The circle is complete 4 months ago:
See, now I’m fine with that. I pay for Netflix and I want what I pay for to stay ad-free. Having an ad-supported tier with no fee in addition to that means that there are options for other people without enshittifying my experience.
That’s a world of difference to what Amazon have done where they’ve shoved ads into the service that I thought I was paying for, and then offered to charge me even more to get my original ad-free service back.
- Comment on Royal Mail waives £5 penalty charge for fake stamps 6 months ago:
If they’re doing it the same as unpaid postage, paying them is still optional as a recipient. They’ll just only give you the item of post if you pay what’s owed.
- Comment on Royal Mail waives £5 penalty charge for fake stamps 6 months ago:
To send things in the post?
- Comment on UK inflation falls as meat and crumpet prices drop 6 months ago:
The Government has abdicated its duties; for the Government who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: meat and crumpets.
- Juvenal, 100 AD (mostly)
- Comment on Whistleblower 'would not' put family on Boeing 787 jet 7 months ago:
Yes, it’s always going to be unfeasible to cross the Atlantic or Pacific by train.
But the vast, vast majority of air journeys taken every day aren’t trans-oceanic ones. Most journeys are between destinations within the Americas or within Eurasia and Africa. There are an awful lot of journeys by plane that could be moved to trains if the infrastructure was right.
- Comment on Whistleblower 'would not' put family on Boeing 787 jet 7 months ago:
That seems to be a rather unfair assertion to make. Boeing seems to be unique amongst the big airlines in having these problems; and they’re relatively new problems for them too, in the grand scheme of things.
I’ve never once heard of systemic issues of this sort at Airbus, and it seems lazy to do a “they’re all the same!” when this really does seem to be a Boeing problem first and foremost.
- Comment on YouTube is finally cracking down on third-party apps that enable ad-blocking 7 months ago:
Realistically Google Search and Google Maps don’t provide anything unique that isn’t provided by competitors, although a) they may provide a superior experience, and b) the competitors are not necessarily much more palatable (that is, Bing Search and Bing Maps are hardly a great ethical improvement).
YouTube is probably the only Google service where this is a genuine monopoly of sorts. That is, content that is on YouTube is not generally available on other platforms, and if you want to watch that content you have to watch it on YouTube. We might all live for the day when all content creators are dual-hosting in PeerTube or the like too, but we’re a long long way from that right now.
Although I write that as someone who only very rarely actually uses YouTube, because largely the content isn’t to my interest. Other than my local football club’s channel, I can’t think of anything on there that I actually seek out.
- Comment on Alan Bates considers private prosecutions of Post Office bosses 7 months ago:
The barristers the CPS employs to bring prosecutions are the same barristers used by the Post Office, using the same courts and the same judges.
That’s actually not entirely true. Although the CPS does engage “free” barristers via chambers for some cases, most CPS prosecutions are handled “in house” by salaried barristers working directly for the CPS.
CPS’s in-house barristers are (as a rough rule) extremely experienced at prosecuting common-or-garden cases, but lack the specialist experience of barristers available to hire via chambers, who they will usually bring in for the more complex prosecutions (or ones involving a specialist area of expertise).
All barristers are only as good as the evidence given to them, though, and one of the real strengths of the CPS barristers is experience in working with the police- both in terms of knowing how to get the best evidence out of them, and knowing a police wild goose chase when they see one. This is the part that really breaks down in cases like the Post Office, where it’s private corporate investigators throwing complex technical evidence over the fence at random barristers who have mostly not worked with them before.
- Comment on Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here. 9 months ago:
The trick isn’t making hydrogen, it’s capturing it, refining it (so that it isn’t mixed with a tonne of air), and compressing it into a pressurised storage tank for later use.
- Comment on Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here. 9 months ago:
Solar costs whatever it costs to buy, install and maintain a solar PV farm, which is not nothing.
If you’re going to build a solar PV farm, you’re obviously going to want to sell the power you generate in whatever way is most profitable.
At the moment, it’s still magnitudes more profitable to sell solar back to the grid than it is to feed it into an inefficient hydrolysis plant, create a load of hydrogen and oxygen, and then move it by tanker somewhere to sell it.
- Comment on Microsoft revives aggressive Windows 11 upgrade campaign with intrusive popups for Windows 10 users 9 months ago:
The pain of this. I have two separate Windows work laptops (one for my employer, one for the firm we work with; data separation fun). The number of times I’ve booted up the second laptop ready to dive into a meeting or to quickly grab a reference only to be confronted with 15 minutes of that.
Between pestering me to check for updates, pestering me to restart to complete updates, hanging on shutdown to carry out updates, and hanging on startup to finish updates, I feel like I spend an unfeasible amount of time and brainspace thinking about system updates. Why? I’ve got actual work to do too!
- Comment on Boffins find AI models tend to escalate conflicts to all-out nuclear war 9 months ago:
Now I’m as sceptical of handing over the keys to AI as the next man, but it does have to be said that all of these are LLMs- chatbots, basically. Is there any suggestion from any even remotely sane person to give LLMs free reign over military strategy or international diplomacy? If and when AI does start featuring in military matters, it’s more likely to be at the individual “device” level (controlling weapons or vehicles), and it’s not going to be LLM technology doing that.
- Comment on Google Chrome Warning Issued For All Windows Users 9 months ago:
What I really want to know is why and how it went away.
The move was in place because of the fear that IE was becoming a monopoly. Now Edge is very very far from the most popular browser, and Google Chrome is looking like the overwhelmingly dominant player, there’s no reason to make MS prompt people to download rival products anymore.
- Comment on How can open source hardware be a movement if the raw materials still have to be mined and factory produced? 9 months ago:
This is essentially a novel version of the “free as in freedom” versus “free as in beer” distinction. In this case not exactly about the cash value per se, but about the physical aspects and systemic realities behind the having of a thing.
An open hardware design means nothing more and nothing less than freedom to access, share, use and modify the designs. It is about ownership and reuse of the intellectual property.
Open hardware doesn’t change the fact that most hardware will still be manufactured by the same large corporations. It says nothing about the technical feasibility of amateur fabrication. It has nothing to do with the environmental impacts of a technology or the production thereof. It isn’t fundamentally a socialist paradigm.
For an open hardware spec like RISC-V, the reality of it is that the freedom afforded by the open designs is a freedom of large corporations to enter market with a competitive product without being squeezed out by a handful of established monopolistic giants. This is a positive thing, but it’s a positive thing with distinct limits that fall very short of any ideas of utopia.
- Comment on Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading “10G Network” claims 9 months ago:
It doesn’t really mean anything anymore. The transistors are not 5nm either. It’s just marketing.
Quoth Wikipedia:
The term “5 nm” has no relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors being 5 nanometers in size. According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by IEEE Standards Association Industry Connection, a “5 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 51 nanometers and a tightest metal pitch of 30 nanometers”. However, in real world commercial practice, “5 nm” is used primarily as a marketing term by individual microchip manufacturers to refer to a new, improved generation of silicon semiconductor chips in terms of increased transistor density (i.e. a higher degree of miniaturization), increased speed and reduced power consumption compared to the previous 7 nm process.
- Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription 9 months ago:
No shit that is easy to live with marginally slower (but still really pretty fast) shipping and access to a second-tier streaming service.
It’s pretty much the definition of a luxury purchase.
- Comment on X appears to be juicing MrBeast’s views to woo the YouTuber to the platform, pushing video upload into users’ feeds as an unlabeled ad 9 months ago:
Some of them were actually pretty good artists; occasionally you’d see them do other stuff and it’d be genuinely good on an artistic level.
The whole stick man, lumpy face, primitivist thing was just an “in” aesthetic (while also being conveniently really quick to produce).
- Comment on Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find 10 months ago:
DDG is largely Bing search at the backend, unless I’m much mistaken. They do value-add work around privacy, but in the basic sense of “does a DDG search return good results”, it’s largely the same as Bing.