dgriffith
@dgriffith@aussie.zone
I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.
- Comment on When AI summaries replace hyperlinks, thought itself is flattened 1 week ago:
I search for complicated things on google, because that’s when I need to search for stuff.
I take about three seconds to look at the LLM-generated summaries/answers, disregard them as tedious monotonic bullshit, and then scroll down to links where real people are discussing the real problems and the real solutions they have.
- Comment on So what are we going to do with all this social media age-gate stuff? 1 week ago:
I certainly wouldn’t stake my money on just being deemed “too small to care about”
Something to consider on that point is that there might be a spike in the userbase once the major players put in whatever irritating form of age verification the govt dreams up.
- Comment on 22 million on bluesky 4 weeks ago:
22 million users. 2700 million likes. 122 likes per user?
That engagement ratio seems a little off?
- Comment on Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash 5 weeks ago:
You’ve got the motive back to front.
yah, let’s get rid of these cheap, easily manufactured and implemented dials and knobs
In modern cars those buttons are an input to a body computer which then sends commands over the vehicle data bus to another module that performs the appropriate function. The touchscreen option is much cheaper once you have more than a few buttons to deal with.
Buttons have different physical shapes, the little decal for the button on each one has to be printed and put on top, each one needs to be connected to power, each one needs to be slotted into the dash somewhere , each one needs to be backlit so you can use it at night, and the signal for each one has to be routed somewhere through increasingly bulky harnesses, etc etc.
A touchscreen sits on the vehicle data bus and with a bit of software, sends whatever command is needed.
Is it a great user experience to press fiddly buttons on a touchscreen while driving down a bumpy road? Fuck no. But it is definitely cheaper and less complicated for the manufacturer.
- Comment on Slaughterhouse video taken by ‘extreme’ animal activists amounts to ‘ongoing trespass’, federal court told - Vegan Theory Club 3 months ago:
If they’re so legit, they should be happy to share the footage.
Put the moral implications aside for a second and translate their actions to any other business. The business being ok with sharing the footage obtained via trespass implies that they’re also ok with trespass.
That’s a legal minefield no business wants to get into and out has knock-on effects. If employees are identifiable and haven’t given consent - and they are not in a public place , working in a private area - then that’s another headache.
If they use proprietary methods or equipment it gives a chance for competitors to gain insight and possibly an advantage if they happen to view those methods.
There are health and safety requirements as well. Regardless of who is on their site, they have a duty of care to protect them from hazards. Having people on site that aren’t aware of safety processes (and processes in general) isn’t great. If the trespassers method of entry was relatively easy, it means that protections that stop the general clueless public aren’t the best either, and that puts them in hot water with safety regulators.
So basically, no legal counsel will tell the business, “sure, let them show the footage they illegally obtained, it’ll be fine”. They have to resist it, regardless of whether it’s a shining example of best practice or not.
- Comment on Proton Now Has a Bitcoin Wallet 4 months ago:
What if I want to buy a cheese sandwich today with BTC?
A cheese sandwich can remain the same fixed price in dollars for years, with only the relatively slow change in actual value due to inflation.
I’ve seen BTC swing 10% in 24 hours. Does the cheese-sandwich-maker have to look up the rate this instant and calculate a spot price for me?
Will they have more or less dollars at the end of the day, when they need to pay their bills and buy more cheese from their suppliers?
“Just buy cheese from someone who takes BTC”, doesn’t help, it just kicks the can further down the road.
“Just add a bit of a buffer in the price to take fluctuations into account”, means that I go buy a cheese sandwich with dollars from next door because it’s 50 cents cheaper for the same thing.
As an investment vehicle, BTC is doing hot laps of the track, but until its volatility issues are sorted and it becomes “boring”, it’s not going anywhere as an actual currency.
- Comment on Generative AI Hype Cycle is Hitting the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ [according to technology research and consulting firm Gartner, which has popularized the concept of the 'new technology hype cycle'] 5 months ago:
To be honest, I was surprised it had any idea about FFMPEG. The biggest problem is that it sounds so authoritative.
If it said, “hey I don’t know a huge amount about X” then you could work with that. But it will blithely say “no problem” and spit out 6 pages of non working code that you then have to debug further, and if you don’t know the terms in the area you’re working in you end up blundering around trying to find the right trigger word to get what you want.
- Comment on Generative AI Hype Cycle is Hitting the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ [according to technology research and consulting firm Gartner, which has popularized the concept of the 'new technology hype cycle'] 5 months ago:
I end up having to play twenty questions with chatgpt. For example, I’ve been asking it for code examples for ffmpeg mpeg4 encoding with C++.
It will happily spit out completely non-working code, where the core part - feeding image frames to the encoder - works, but it doesn’t initialise or tidy up the encoding afterwards.
Until I say, “hey this code doesn’t seem to work and creates corrupted files”, and then it’s like, “oh yeah you also need to do a bunch of other stuff, just like this”. Repeat as it slowly adds more and more pieces until finally you end up with something that actually works.
Or it will happily dream up function names or mix python and C functions, or will refer to older APIs even when I’ve specifically said “use API version x.y” and so on and so forth.
If I didn’t know enough about the subject already, I’d never be able to tease out the answer. So in a sense it’s a mostly useful reference, but it can’t be relied on to actually and consistently provide a result because it’s all statistics and fuzzy text generation behind the scenes, not actual knowledge.
- Comment on Why don't electric car manufacurers put solar panels on the car roofs? 6 months ago:
Assumption: someone crams a 300 watt solar panel onto the roof of their EV and manages to integrate it into the charging system so that it’s pretty efficient to use that power.
Numbers:
One hour of good sunshine on the 300 watt panel = 300 wstt-hours (Wh).
Average EV energy usage : 200Wh per kilometre these days.
Result:
One hour of perfect sunshine hitting the roof of your car equals 1.5 kilometres of extra range, or you can drive your car in a steady-state fashion at a few kilometres per hour.
Conclusion:
Probably better off increasing the storage capacity of the battery as a full day’s sunshine will get you about 10 kilometres of range.
- Comment on Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue 6 months ago:
I would like to hear your opinion on crumbed, deep fried, pineapple rings. 🤔
- Comment on Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue 6 months ago:
Also, things not designed for food use or human consumption don’t have to follow strict rules regarding their composition, and they’re not monitored.
Nobody is checking PVA glue for heavy metals or melamine or pesticides or any other number of things that will give your insides a bad day.
Nobody is issuing a recall if your bottle of glue ends up with ground up glass in it.
Because it’s not food, and it doesn’t matter, until you put half a cup of it in your pizza because Google told you it was a good idea.
- Comment on The inside story of Elon Musk’s mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff 7 months ago:
Mmm I’d take Common Sense Skeptic’s spaceX videos with about a ton of salt. They’ve got a real big bug up their ass about spaceX for some reason.
- Comment on Sydney man wrongly named as Bondi Junction stabbings murderer settles defamation claim with Seven 7 months ago:
So there’s a history of this kind of bad reporting. You’d think they’d learn.
It’s a race to get the scoop and breathlessly report names before other news agencies do. This, to them, is just minor collateral damage compared to being FIRST TO REPORT ON THIS BREAKING SITUATION.
- Comment on space 8 months ago:
I prefer the H.G. Wells style, where you affect the flow of time instead of a discontinuous jump.
You’re still attached to your current location, things just happen faster (in forwards or reverse). It also means that time travel takes time, which can be a handy plot tool.
- Comment on Are We Watching The Internet Die? 9 months ago:
And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, “content that only sort of helps”
Hello, my name’s dgriffith. I’m a Fediverse Support community member, and I’m here to help.
Have you tried running sfc /scannow and making sure your antivirus is up to date? That usually fixes the issue that you are describing.
If that does not help, a complete system reinstall often solves the problem you have.
Please mark this comment as useful if it helps you.
Regarding the death of hyperlinks, it’s probably more a case of “why bother clicking on yet another link that leads me to another page of crap?”.
That is, it used to be the case that you’d put information on the web that was useful and people would link to it, now it 80 percent of it seems to be a variations of SEO’d recipe sites and AI hallucinations.
- Comment on Where have all the websites gone? 11 months ago:
Small ISPs at the start of the internet used to provide you with space that you could ftp a few html files to and they’d be visible on the internet at myisp/~yourusername.
Of course that cost them a little bit of money and storage space so when they all got absorbed into megaISPs that kind of thing got dropped. Then it was all up to Geocities and friends or you had to go buy hosting from your ISP, both of which was enough of a hurdle to stop the average person from playing with it.
- Comment on HP sued (again) for blocking third-party ink from printers, accused of monopoly 11 months ago:
HP and/or Compaq used to make their own PCs in the 90’s going into the 2000’s.
For example they used to have special motherboards that were basically backplanes and CPU cards to suit.It’s quite possible they did dumb shit with IDE connectors/pinouts that meant that some devices didn’t work.
It wouldn’t have been a major scandal, it just would have been, “yeah some aftermarket drives don’t work with HP”, which was pretty common across the entire market back then. We’re basically in the golden age of system compatibility right now, things were an absolute shitshow back then.
- Comment on What the hell is this shit? Instead of pushing for the return to traditional pensions, capitalism is celebrating the idea that Millennials & Gen Z may simply never be able to stop working. 1 year ago:
You’re absolutely right, but I’ll just point out that superannuation (pension) funds in Australia are hitting 8 percent annual returns over a 30 year timeframe. You need a broader investment base to do that, and that’s hard for individuals to do by themselves. How do you diversify your $50 a week investment to maximise return? You can’t.
Here, superannuation funds do all the heavy lifting for you, it’s mandatory for employers to put a nominal amount of each pay into one. There are no minimum investment amounts with them and fees are waived if the balance is below a few thousand, so even if it’s $10 a week you get something back eventually.
So it’s possible to have it work if your government sets things up right.
- Comment on What the hell is this shit? Instead of pushing for the return to traditional pensions, capitalism is celebrating the idea that Millennials & Gen Z may simply never be able to stop working. 1 year ago:
Yes it’s paid for via general income tax here in Australia, not something you pay into yourself per se. So even if you never worked you still get it.
Which is why the government set up superannuation schemes in the '90s because they realised a pinch point was coming down the line in the 2030’s or so. At that time there would have been too many people on the pension for it to be sustainable.
- Comment on What the hell is this shit? Instead of pushing for the return to traditional pensions, capitalism is celebrating the idea that Millennials & Gen Z may simply never be able to stop working. 1 year ago:
It’s pretty much the opposite in Australia with our setup. Those starting work now will end up with the required 3-ish million at retirement if they work the standard average job here for most of their life.
But I think what you refer to as “social security” is the government “aged pension” here which is about $550 a week or so. That’s enough for a pensioner to live a very modest lifestyle here if their accommodation has been sorted previously.
It’s also suffering the same kind of squeeze you mention and is means-tested on a sliding scale so the more you can afford not to have it, the less you get of it.
Right now most boomers are on the aged pension to some degree because superannuation schemes here only really kicked in during the last 15-20 years of their working lives so they didn’t have much of a balance.
Probably in the next 30 years or so only the truly destitute will be able to get it and the rest of us will have to rely on what we’ve saved.
- Comment on What the hell is this shit? Instead of pushing for the return to traditional pensions, capitalism is celebrating the idea that Millennials & Gen Z may simply never be able to stop working. 1 year ago:
Is there any form of “mandatory” saving in the US? I know you guys have company pension plans of some sort, is there a government version?
Eg where I live, Australia, employers are required to put in 10 percent of an employee’s wages into a superannuation fund. This is basically “invisible” to workers, it’s a cost that’s factored into the cost to have an employee basically. The superannuation fund can be a “default” one selected by the business, or an employee nominated one, and you can transfer/roll over your accumulated funds between any superannuation fund you like as you hop between jobs. You can draw from it in some specific dire circumstances, but usually you can only access it at retirement age.
It seems that a lot of things in the US are carefully designed to keep you in servitude to your current employer, which I find a little ironic coming from the land of the free.
- Comment on What the hell is this shit? Instead of pushing for the return to traditional pensions, capitalism is celebrating the idea that Millennials & Gen Z may simply never be able to stop working. 1 year ago:
I saw a report that someone my age will need $3m to retire at 65. The average total income from 22-65 for people my age is around $1.4m. So I guess we never get to retire.
Compound interest might get you to that goal, maybe, if you start saving now.
The “start saving now” part is the bit that fucks most people.
- Comment on An £8 sandwich in Starbucks 1 year ago:
Same. Been to a few places in southeast Asia and Starbucks is pretty much the same everywhere there. So I can step off a street full of stalls selling all sorts of food items that I would class as “extremely adventurous” into a store with recognisable sweet/savoury cafe food options. I can relax in consistently dark-hued wood decor with a consistent assortment of tables/couches/chairs/charging points, and a consistent range of coffee drinks that each have enough calories to sustain a local family for a week.
- Comment on An £8 sandwich in Starbucks 1 year ago:
It brings that consistent Seattle blandness everywhere it goes.
Neal Stephenson said it best in Snow Crash :
In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere.
But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto.