palordrolap

@palordrolap@kbin.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Average British house price hits record high of £375,000⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is mean sale price, right? Got to wonder what the current median property value (not sale price) is, and how close that is to this mean.

  My point being that a lot of churn at prices near the mean would keep that mean away from a true median property value.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MS-DOS has been Open-Sourced!⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Compilers were much less complex back then and didn't do a great deal of optimisation. Also hardware was slow, so your compiled code, which wasn't necessarily optimal either before or after the compilation phase, was at least half as fast as you wanted it to be.

  If you wanted speed, you hand-rolled assembly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨in search for a YouTube alternative to upload my video⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Peertube is the Fediverse equivalent of YouTube, the Fediverse being what Lemmy (where you are), Kbin (where I am) etc. are also a part of.

  As far as I'm aware, it's a matter of finding an instance you resonate with, create an account and share away.

  Do bear in mind that since it's the Fediverse, Peertube instances aren't usually backed by a large organisation with bags of cash, so if you can afford to donate to your instance, at least consider doing so.

  I'd also recommend not using Peertube as a be-all-end-all storage for your videos. Always keep a copy for yourself. People do this with YouTube and they shouldn't unless they're OK with suddenly and forever losing that content at some unspecified future date. The same can happen with PeerTube, but the reasons are likely to be different (instance closing rather than unexpected account deletion).

  Corporation-backed video hosts include: Twitch, Dailymotion and Vimeo. You could probably also host on Facebook. While these are options, they might make you feel as unclean as I did typing that out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hello GPT-4o⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It's not yawn, but not because it's great. It's because it'll be around for just long enough that it will create reliance on it, ruin many things, and then those people who have become reliant will find themselves in the position of having to unruin the many ruined things without the crutch to help them.

  Or maybe I'm being the next iteration of the schoolteacher or parent who said that you won't have a calculator in your pocket all the time.

  But then, a calculator doesn't need a terabyte of RAM. We're a ways off that being consumer-affordable as yet. If past consumer RAM size trends are anything (and the only thing) to go by, a portable LLM would be a 2040s or 2050s expectation.

  Assuming that you'd be allowed to have the terabyte of data for nothing, anyway. Exorbitant subscription models are likely to be the norm by then.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Verge shows how Google search is useless⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Where does Yandex's money go these days?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Autonomous excavator constructs dry stone wall⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oddly enough, Spock solves the problem (because of course he does, and it's a comic that has to be done in 30 panels or so) by discovering that the city construction materials can be chemically dissolved into goo. Thankfully not the sort that overtakes a planet.

  ... at least assuming there wasn't a sequel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Autonomous excavator constructs dry stone wall⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Somewhere around here I have a 1960s or '70s Star Trek annual with a story where machines like this end up converting an entire planet into one enormous city, and the people that live there can't stop it.

  The story is basically a warning about turning everything over to AI, not that they call it that specifically.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨School leaders warn of ‘full-blown’ special needs crisis in England⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  One wonders how a state with increasingly fascist tendencies would handle this crisis if it became impossible to ignore...

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Catholic 'media ministry' defrocks AWOL AI priest after it told faithful you can baptise babies in Gatorade and that, sure, it can totally perform your wedding⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If my hasty checking is valid, there's nothing in the Bible about holy water. There's holding a baptism, but nothing about holy men blessing water to imbue it with the Holy Spirit.

  As such, I assume that any liquid blessed by a priest might be considered holy.

  Something something Godly Gatorade, Blessed Baja Blast etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Royal Mail waives £5 penalty charge for fake stamps⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That's how it works. If mail isn't paid for it's made unavailable to the recipient.

  I don't know how long they hold onto unpaid mail, but I assume they eventually destroy it, or open it, remove anything valuable for auction and get rid of anything else. Maybe if they're lazy, you might get something non-valuable for nothing if you know what landfill their waste goes to, but I expect they'd at least shred it.

  Chances are they don't get valuables all that often because if the contents are valuable, someone's probably going to want to pay the price of postage to get it... and whoever sent it probably put the right postage on it in the first place, dodgy stamps notwithstanding, as well as a return address.

  And that last part is why the policy is for the charge to go to the recipient. The postal service often has no idea who sent a letter, only where it's going.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China unveils video of its moon base plans, which weirdly includes a NASA space shuttle⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Article now contains a link to a tweet showing a reissued image that has the Shuttle blurred out. Got to wonder if someone got in trouble for putting the Shuttle in there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Royal Mail waives £5 penalty charge for fake stamps⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Only if they want the letter. If they don't want it, the postal service will gladly destroy it at no charge.

  Thus, this isn't necessarily a good way to exact punishment on an unsuspecting recipient. Someone who gets a lot of fan (and hate) mail will gladly forego the small handful that don't have postage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Royal Mail waives £5 penalty charge for fake stamps⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Charging the recipient for insufficient postage has always been the policy of the British postal service. These fraudulent stamps have thus been included in with that policy because as far as they're concerned a fraudulent stamp is as good as no stamp at all.

  Anything with insufficient postage is held at the sorting office closest to the recipient and a note is posted (ironic, no?) to the recipient telling them to come and pay the postage if they want it.

  The reasons they've backed down this time are 1) their newfangled bar code stamps have failed to stop the very forgery they were designed to prevent, and 2) public outcry causing them (the postal service, not the stamps) to reluctantly admit that this whole thing might, maybe, uh, perhaps just a little bit, be their fault.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨𝕐: What Comes After 𝕏?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not aware of any specific usages, but maybe they're used as meta-sets. e.g. "consider a set of numbers 𝕏 and a set of numbers 𝕐 ... etc, which can't be done with the defined letters.

  Unicode originally only had the double-struck letters for the defined sets ℂ, ℍ, ℕ, ℙ, ℚ, ℝ and ℤ, but the full alphabets were later added at higher code-points with "reserved" gaps where the defined seven letters would otherwise appear.

  (Complex, Hamiltonian quaternions, Natural, Prime, Quotient (rational), Real and Zahlen, a German word for counting numbers, for anyone wondering. Also, ℍ not getting "ℚ" because ℚ couldn't have "ℝ" is kind of funny.).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rightsholders Want U.S. “Know Your Customer” Proposal to Include Domain Name Services * TorrentFreak⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Prediction: Once everything is an app, there'll be no need for generic encryption and anyone found using it will be labelled a terrorist enabler and locked up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Disability benefit claims can’t be made on ‘unverifiable assertions’, argues Sunak⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you want deforestation because that's how you get deforestation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IBM sues a Zurich-based startup over 'unlawful' use of mainframe technology⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  These IBM folks need to have a chat with whatever department recently agreed to open-source MS-DOS 4.00 (IBM had joint control with Microsoft), because they know full-well that third-party copyright-free largely MS-DOS compatible products exist and have existed for quite some time now.

  This is the same deal but with their bigger iron.

  Now it's true that there were a few DOS clones that somehow fell afoul of copyright that were killed off pretty quick, but the only other way to get DOS-compatibility is by... reverse engineering.

  And if they sued about that, they must have lost because alternative DOS clones continue to exist.

  The only caveat I can see here is that the successful clones are open-source and free of cost.

  If this company are charging anything at all, that could be the angle of attack. It might be the only angle of attack.

  But I'm not a lawyer and have probably missed something blindingly obvious. Or devious.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Poe's Law in action.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The downside - and I'm in favour of wikis like Wikipedia - is that any yahoo or otherwise can also put misinformation in there, perhaps even in good faith, and that's in the wiki forever too.

  And those who comb through article histories will have to contend with both the truth (we hope, whether we like it or not) as well as the nonsense.

  One other difficulty is Internet-based sources disappearing or re-formatting, breaking links from Wikipedia and other places. This is the reader's reminder to donate to the Internet Archive if not Wikipedia itself, providing you can spare a little money to throw their way.

  Speaking of the archive: Anyone know whether Russia blocks the archive or maintains their own equivalent?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No more 12345: devices with weak passwords to be banned in UK⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Only four of them?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why haven't I heard calls for sanctions on this abominable regime yet?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  An older person I talk with (older than Boomer generation if you can believe that) keeps trying to moot that it's an "invasion" and then goes on about how these invaders have paid thousands to some people trafficker to be able to get over here.

  I point out that invaders generally don't pay more than their life savings to invade, they get paid to do so. And they usually turn up with weapons.

  Bless 'em, I keep having to reset their compassion because the newspapers must be what's putting these "invasion" ideas in their head.

  There's a vague chance they might not vote right in the upcoming elections.

  In other news, and riffing on the "skulls" comment elsewhere, I'd quite like for someone to stand up in the Commons and ask what the government's jackboot budget is these days, and whether teaching armed troops to goose-step is coming back into fashion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are already stories about companies being sued because their AI gave advice that caused the customer to act in a manner detrimental to themselves. (Something about 'plane flight refunds being available if I remember correctly).

  Then when they contacted the company to complain (perhaps get the promised refund), they were told that there was no such policy at their company. The customer had screenshots. The AI had wholesale hallucinated a policy.

  We all know how this is going to go. AI left, right and centre until it costs companies more in AI hallucination lawsuits than it does to employ people to do it.

  And all the while they'll be bribing lobbying government representatives to make AI hallucination lawsuits not a thing. Or less of a thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Post Office executive denies cover-up over Horizon back door⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably because some n-eyes (is n still 5?) nation state "we're the good guys, honest" protocol insisted that there be one. And if it wasn't that it was probably some misguided attempt to permit remote maintenance.

  The former hiding as the latter is not impossible either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CEO Alarmed to Discover That Laying Off 1,500 Workers Had Consequences⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tenets*

  But don't sack your tenants. They need a place to live.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The only place this will be active is on the computers of home users who don't know how or don't care to deactivate it. The computers of the common clay of IT usage. You know. Morons.

  And to tie that meme in with an older one: A fool and his money are soon parted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zilog Calls Time on the Venerable Z80, Discontinues the Standalone Z84C00 CPU Family⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The Z80 was a secondary processor in the C128. The main processor was the rival MOS8502, a descendent of the Z80's main rival, the MOS6502.

  The Z80 was included so that the C128 would be able to run CP/M software which was considered to be an important inclusion at the time.

  CP/M was supplanted by the ubiquity of IBM-compatible PCs and MS-DOS, which is a shame considering that MS-DOS started life as something deliberately quick and dirty based heavily on the syntax of CP/M. The dir command? That's from CP/M. The peculiar *.* wildcard syntax? Also from CP/M.

  Now, it's true that CP/M took a lot of inspiration from Unix and similar, but it wasn't trying to replace Unix. MS-DOS though? Arguably, it came to fill the same niche that CP/M already occupied. Except everyone was then on x86, not Z80.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Researchers develop paper battery that generates power from water, air - Interesting Engineering⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No numbers in the article, so I'm going to assume that a modern smartphone would chew through several hundred of these per day and an EV would need a battery the size of a house.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit Is Taking Over Google⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Quora was supposed to be the high-brow answer to Yahoo Answers, but then Yahoo Answers was killed off.

  Eventually the muppets found their way to Quora. Probably by accident at first, but the Quora moderation didn't stop enough of the muppetry and now it's just Yahoo Answers pretending not to be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK inflation falls as meat and crumpet prices drop⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Mean and crumpet? Haven't we learned not to use these terms for each other? "Desirable partners" is the preferred termino...

  whisper whisper whisper

  I am told that I have misunderstood the headline. Please carry on about your business.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Commodore 64 claimed to outperform IBM's quantum system — sarcastic researchers say 1 MHz computer is faster, more efficient, and decently accurate⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Someone in the article's own comments section makes the same assertion as me, so my guess is that they've corrected the image on the article and the Fediverse's various caches still have the original.