tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Any other games that have a similar vibe to My Summer Car? 1 day ago:
I’m looking for other complex open world games that throw you into the deep end without any explanation, and are completely unforgiving when you make mistakes.
UnReal World? It’s never really grabbed me when I’ve tried it, personally, but it might be up your alley.
- Comment on How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi 1 day ago:
Your statement was about 60%. Median was the correct value to cite.
- Comment on How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi 2 days ago:
60% live on $40k or less
www.census.gov/library/…/p60-286.html
Median household income was $83,730 in 2024
- Comment on Russian satellites linked to mysterious GPS disruptions across several countries 2 days ago:
This doesn’t seem like a fantastic strategy for Russia, seeing as Russia’s GNSS system is also probably subject to jamming.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EKS_(satellite_system)
In a report published in June 2026, researchers identified three satellites from the EKS constellation as a source of space-based GNSS interference, such as GNSS jamming. Beginning in 2019, the researchers tracked powerful wide-area interference from the satellites over Europe, Greenland, and Canada. Significant interference was detected with the US American GPS, European Galileo, and Chinese BeiDou satellite networks, but interference was minimal on Russia’s own GLONASS network[27][28][29].
Any one of those parties might decide to reciprocate.
- Comment on Judge Learns Lawyers on Both Sides of Case Used AI, Cancels Trial, Kicks Everyone Off the Case 4 days ago:
A federal judge in Mississippi has punished all four lawyers on opposing sides in a civil trial and canceled the proceedings after some of them, relying on artificial intelligence, cited fake legal cases in court filings.
nytimes.com/…/ai-lawyers-sanctioned-mississippi.h…
In an order filed on Monday, Sharion Aycock, a senior U.S. District Court judge, wrote that the four lawyers had violated Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure when they certified that the information in their filings was factual.
I think one concerning thing is that this is the easiest thing to check. I mean, at some point, I assume that someone is going to rig something up to LexisNexis to actually validate the existence of cited cases, because that’s pretty simple and mechanical. Heck, even those lawyers, even if they don’t have any tech people at their fingertips, could have had a paralegal check citations or something.
My bigger concern is that if lawyers are willing to put stuff like this out, they’re presumably also willing to put out information that hasn’t been checked where the errors are subtler and it’s harder to find erroneous material. In the case of citing nonexistent cases, it’s really easy to say “the lawyer clearly didn’t even look at this”, because it’s hard to make that kind of error if you have read over it. But…there’s potential for subtler errors, where it’s harder to tell whether the lawyer just made a basic error, and thus harder to impose punishments for it.
- Comment on 20 Jobs that people once thought were irreplaceable are now just memories 5 days ago:
- Lamplighter
Lamplighters were responsible for lighting and extinguishing gas street lamps in towns and cities before electric lighting became standard. They typically carried ladders and torches to perform their duties. The job was crucial for maintaining public safety during the evenings. However, with the introduction of electric streetlights, the need for manual lamp maintenance disappeared, leading to the decline of this occupation. Lamplighters are now part of history, representing a bygone era of urban infrastructure.
The lamplighters themselves were machine operators that replaced earlier professions.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy
A link-boy (or link boy or linkboy) was a boy who carried a flaming torch to light the way for pedestrians at night. Linkboys were common in London in the days before the introduction of gas lighting in the early to mid 19th century.
- Comment on 20 Jobs that people once thought were irreplaceable are now just memories 5 days ago:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washerwoman
A washerwoman or laundress was a person, usually a woman, employed to wash laundry by hand, before the widespread use of washing machines and commercial laundries. The profession existed in many cultures, spanning from antiquity to the early modern period. While the profession has historically been gendered, often associated with women, in some contexts, men also performed laundry labor. It was typically low-paid, physically arduous, and associated with lower social status.
The occupation began to decline with the rise of commercial laundries. The spread of domestic washing machines and self-service laundries further reduced the need for the independent washerwomen profession. By the late twentieth century, the profession had largely disappeared in industrialized countries.
- Comment on 20 Jobs that people once thought were irreplaceable are now just memories 5 days ago:
A hostler (/ˈhɒslər/ or /ˈɒslər/) or ostler /ˈɒslər/ was traditionally a groom or stableman who was employed in a stable to take care of horses, usually at an inn, in the era of transportation by horse or horse-drawn carriage.[1]
- Comment on 20 Jobs that people once thought were irreplaceable are now just memories 5 days ago:
- Ice Cutter
Ice cutters were essential in the days before modern refrigeration. These workers harvested large blocks of ice from frozen lakes and rivers during the winter, storing them in ice houses for use throughout the year.
Related:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceman_(occupation)
An iceman is someone who sells or delivers ice from a wagon, cart, or motor-truck. While the advent of modern refrigeration and freezers have made the profession increasingly uncommon, in previous eras of human history, the iceman transported and sold ice harvested in frozen regions to customers in warmer climates intended for cellars and iceboxes, to help preserve food and cool down beverages and homes.
Iceman and ice-wagon in Crowley, Louisiana, 1938
- Comment on 20 Jobs that people once thought were irreplaceable are now just memories 5 days ago:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filling_station_attendant
A filling station attendant or gas station attendant (also known as a gas jockey in the US and Canada[1][2]) is a worker at a full-service filling station who performs services other than accepting payment. Tasks usually include pumping fuel, cleaning windshields, and checking vehicle oil levels. Prior to the introduction of self-starting vehicle engines, attendants would also start vehicle engines by manually turning the crankshaft with a hand crank.
In the United States, gas jockeys were often tipped for their services,[3] but this is now rare as full-service stations are uncommon except in New Jersey, 16 “urban” counties in Oregon, 4 cities in Massachusetts, and the town of Huntington, New York, where there are laws or restrictions against letting customers pump their own gasoline.
- Comment on 20 Jobs that people once thought were irreplaceable are now just memories 5 days ago:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis_Worldwide#History
In 1925, the world’s first fully automatic elevator, Collective Control, was introduced. In 1931, the company installed the world’s first double-deck elevator at 70 Pine Street in New York City.[11][12]
End of an era.
- Comment on Bright City Lights Might Be Making Your Allergies Worse 1 week ago:
If you live in a big, brightly lit city and you feel like allergy season just never ends, you might be right: New research shows that light pollution prompts plants to shed pollen longer, increases the growth of notoriously allergenic ragweed and makes our bodies more prone to allergic reactions, from runny noses to asthma.
But on the flip side, there are also going to be fewer trees in a city. That is, one might have more pollen in a city with a lot of nighttime lighting than one would relative to a less-lit city, but I doubt that one has more pollen in a city than outside cities.
- Comment on Red Hat npm Packages Compromised in Supply Chain Attack 1 week ago:
The attack targeted a wide range of sensitive credentials typically found in developer and CI/CD environments. Aikido’s analysis shows the malware attempted to collect GitHub Actions tokens, AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure credentials, HashiCorp Vault tokens, Kubernetes service account tokens and kubeconfig files, npm and PyPI publishing tokens, SSH private keys, Docker registry credentials, GPG keys, and .env files.
This doesn’t solve the problem of people storing credentials where credential-stealers can steal them, but it’s not a bad idea to periodically invalidate your credentials and generate new ones, even if you don’t know that they’ve been compromised, just on the off change that someone has grabbed yours and has them stored up, ready to use them at some point in the future.
That’s especially true if you develop or package software (and thus users of your software trust you to keep their systems secure) or have administrator access to any networks or multiuser systems (and thus your users trust you to keep their data secure).
- Comment on ‘That’s why we work in finance – so one day we can afford air-con’: Britain’s unequal heatwave 1 week ago:
A group of eight men in their early 20s were enjoying a lunchtime beer in a dizzyingly hot, artificially turfed square outside the shopping centre. “We can’t afford AC yet,” one said, “that’s why we work in finance, so one day we can afford it!” Most of them had invested in a Dyson fan, which retail for between £300 and £600.
If the concern is a few really hot days, just doing one room should be viable. A small window unit should be pretty inexpensive.
checks
At Home Depot here in the US, a small window A/C unit is maybe $170.
I mean, sure. You can do a split mini to avoid blocking a window (or having to remove and remount the window unit twice a year) and reduce noise, or do a major renovation and put in ducted central A/C. You can definitely spend considerably more than the bare minimum. But the bar to getting a air conditioned room in the house should really not be very high.
- Comment on Why there’s no legal “too hot to work” temperature in the UK 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
So the prices never go back down.
So, the bottleneck here is really the memory prices, and while Steam Deck sales do affect memory prices — as with anyone buying anything with memory — my guess is that it’s a pretty small factor relative to other devices using memory.
According to WP, the Steam Deck has 16GB and sold uh, 4 million units over its entire lifetime as of February this year. It’s been out for four years. So figure ~64 petabytes of DRAM over its lifetime, or ~16 petabytes of DRAM per year.
For comparison, in a single year, looking at smartphones:
wifihifi.com/1-25b-smartphone-units-produced-in-2…
1.25B Smartphone Units Produced in 2025, Apple & Samsung Tied for Tops
counterpointresearch.com/…/Global-Smartphone-Aver…
Global Smartphone Average DRAM Hits Record 8.4GB in 2025
8.4 GB is the per-phone average, including older phones, so this is probably a conservative estimate, but assume for 2025, that meant that phone manufacture consumed ~10,500 petabytes of DRAM in a single year.
- Comment on Mastermind without the fiddly pegs? 2 weeks ago:
Maybe if Mastermind had made the pegs green and yellow like Wordle squares I’d still have my old set…Bit gutted about that now because I’d love to still have the original board game.
- Comment on Nearly 500 seriously injured in e-scooter collisions in Great Britain last year 2 weeks ago:
worldpopulationreview.com/…/road-quality-by-count…
According to this scoring of road quality, the non-UK European average is — if I haven’t missed anything — 4.46, and the UK is 5.17.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Looking at the bottom of your screenshot, I note the text:
“Note: Steam Deck OLED may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.”
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
So, I don’t use iOS devices, and I’m not in Europe, so I can’t provide a lot of first-hand data on your particular widget. I’m just saying that that’s how the weather software I’ve used in the past across a number of platforms works.
Regarding your change as you traveled towards the coast, if they’re choosing the closest weather station to your location, though, you’d expect the weather station in question to shift as you travel.
If they are reporting temperature at a weather station and if this database here represents the weather station set that is used (again, I don’t know, not familiar with weather reporting in Europe):
eea.europa.eu/…/locations-of-stations-with-temper…
Then it looks like France is operating far fewer weather stations than some other countries in Europe, which might tend to cause more average deviation between a given location of someone checking the weather and the conditions at the local weather station being used.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
So, I don’t know how European weather reporting works, but if it’s like the US, the temperature that they’re reporting for your area may be for wherever your local weather station is (probably your local airport?), which may well differ from that at your house or wherever you’re taking the picture.
- Comment on Polanski calls for workplace temperature cap as Labour dithers 2 weeks ago:
At the time, people had called his decision to locate his fledgling business in frigid Dalwhinnie, in the Scottish Highlands a foolish move, but Noah MacGregor had had faith that it would all work out.
- Comment on Valve raises Steam Deck prices by more than $200 2 weeks ago:
No.
pcworld.com/…/lenovo-legion-go-prices-have-jumped…
Lenovo Legion Go prices have jumped by up to $650 in six months
Every Legion Go S and Legion Go 2 device I could find was more expensive than it was last year. Thanks, AI-driven RAM crunch.
- Comment on Valve raises Steam Deck prices by more than $200 2 weeks ago:
Some years back, I had a friend who had lived in Germany for some time who came to the US and did a cash transfer without thinking at an ATM and couldn’t figure out why her account got frozen. She’d used a comma instead of a period when entering the amount of money to be moved.
- Comment on Valve raises Steam Deck prices by more than $200 2 weeks ago:
And that’s not counting the NVMe, which also went way up.
I got a 128GB version last year with an 8TB NVMe drive. Was, IIRC, $2,500 at that point.
Now it’s $4,178.
- Comment on Valve has raised Steam Deck prices in the US 2 weeks ago:
unaffordable for the next decade
If you’re talking RAM prices, those are expected to come down in early 2028, so 18-ish months.
- Comment on New Halo Campaign Evolved Report Claims Heavy Outsourcing and Major Gameplay Changes 2 weeks ago:
I assume that it’s intended to be a nod to the original game’s full title, Halo: Combat Evolved. But “combat” is an uncountable/mass noun:
combat (countable and uncountable, plural combats)
But “campaign” is a countable noun:
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/campaign
campaign (plural campaigns)
So I guess it’s grammatically incorrect without an [article](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar) before “campaign”.
- Comment on People living in Leebotwood say their community has been split in two because of the challenges they face crossing a busy road. 2 weeks ago:
google.com/…/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x4870737b8b3bdee9:0…
Looks like there’s no way for drivers to bypass the village. Right now, there’s one major road there, and it goes through the center of town.
Might be a good idea to build a bypass, which would move traffic out of the center of the town and create a way to keep traffic moving.
- Comment on UK experiences ‘tropical night’ after hottest ever May day 2 weeks ago:
I didn’t even get the usual evening breeze last two nights to cool my room down.
For some reason the hot air really wants to stay in my room.
Aim a fan in/out a window to increase airflow.
Aim a fan at yourself. That’ll increase wind chill.
- Comment on Hottest May day on record in UK as temperatures pass 34C 2 weeks ago:
Can’t open the windows much as our cat is an indoor cat.
If you don’t have or want to get some sort of air conditioning, maybe obtain and stick a window screen on the window, then have the fan blow through that?
Not as common in the UK — here in the US, they were necessary to deal with malaria back before that got eradicated and kinda stayed for the convenience — but it looks like there are UK-based vendors and manufacturers, and that they’re often called “fly screens”.
You could even use something with larger-diameter holes, like chicken wire, if all you care about is the cat, but I figure that if you’re going to go to the trouble of putting something up, might as well block insects too.
