tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Number of US-style pickup trucks on UK roads up 92% in a decade, data shows 5 hours ago:
Anything they purport to do a van can do better.
There’s towing a fifth wheel trailer. Not sure if they’re a thing in the UK.
searches
Sounds like it:
CCRV: The Best Name in UK 5th Wheels
Whatever your fifth wheel need, we’ve got you covered
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravan_(trailer)#Fifth-whe…
A fifth-wheel is a travel trailer supported by a hitch in the centre of the bed of a pickup truck instead of a hitch at the back of a vehicle. The special hitch used for fifth-wheels is a smaller version of the one used on 18-wheeler trucks and can be connected by simply driving (backing) the tow vehicle under the trailer. Fifth-wheel trailers are popular with full-time recreational vehicle enthusiasts, who often live in them for several months in one place, using their pickup truck tow vehicle for local errands. A fifth-wheel trailer tows more securely than a traditional travel trailer because the hitch weight sits directly over the pickup truck’s rear axle or tires. Since part of a fifth wheel sits in the bed of the pickup, it reduces the overall length of the vehicle-and-trailer combination while allowing the same room as a comparable-length travel trailer. Additionally, the hitch’s location in the pickup’s bed reduces the risk of jackknifing and allows for more maneuverability when backing. Because of the greater room available on the roads in North America, these vehicles are more popular in the United States and Canada than in Europe or other parts of the world. For uneven terrain, a gooseneck hitch is an option for fifth-wheel trailers.[citation needed]
The downside is that the hitch takes up room in the pickup truck’s cargo bed regardless of whether the trailer is hitched or not. The hitch can be unbolted from the bed but this takes a lot more time and effort than the unhitch operation.[citation needed]
The largest fifth-wheel trailers are full-size semi-trailers that range from 14.5 to 17.5 m (48 to 57 ft) in length and require an tractor unit as the towing vehicle due to their weight and the use of air brakes.[citation needed]
- Comment on Playback speed past X2 is now a YouTube paid feature 2 days ago:
I don’t know what YouTube does when you increase playback speed, but a lot of people who listen to podcast-type material or lectures will use software that has the ability to time-stretch the playback without changing the pitch. That is, we can often understand people perfectly well speaking more quickly than they actually do.
I imagine that some people are most-likely looking at content of that sort on YouTube.
- Comment on r/Silksong joins lemmy! 2 days ago:
Plus, I mean, unless you’re using a Threadiverse host as your home instance, how often are you typing its name?
Having a hyphen is RFC-conformant:
1. A "name" (Net, Host, Gateway, or Domain name) is a text string up to 24 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z), digits (0-9), minus sign (-), and period (.). Note that periods are only allowed when they serve to delimit components of "domain style names". (See RFC-921, "Domain Name System Implementation Schedule", for background). No blank or space characters are permitted as part of a name. No distinction is made between upper and lower case. The first character must be an alpha character. The last character must not be a minus sign or period. A host which serves as a GATEWAY should have "-GATEWAY" or "-GW" as part of its name. Hosts which do not serve as Internet gateways should not use "-GATEWAY" and "-GW" as part of their names. A host which is a TAC should have "-TAC" as the last part of its host name, if it is a DoD host. Single character names or nicknames are not allowed.
The syntax of a legal Internet host name was specified in RFC-952 [DNS:4]. One aspect of host name syntax is hereby changed: the restriction on the first character is relaxed to allow either a letter or a digit. Host software MUST support this more liberal syntax. Host software MUST handle host names of up to 63 characters and SHOULD handle host names of up to 255 characters.
- Comment on r/Silksong joins lemmy! 2 days ago:
I imagine so. I don’t use Bang, but I posted about the behavior to the Bang community, so hopefully they’ll get it straightened out.
- Comment on Playback speed past X2 is now a YouTube paid feature 2 days ago:
I think it uses yt-dl on the backend though? Like the original yt-dl.
You’re probably thinking of
youtube-dl. I’d guess that it most-likely used that at one point, but probably switched toyt-dlpwhen YouTube started throttling single-stream downloads. - Comment on Playback speed past X2 is now a YouTube paid feature 2 days ago:
You can use
yt-dlpto download it and play it in whatever movie player you want that supports variable speeds, unless and until YouTube cracks down on downloading. - Comment on Europeans set to launch an alternative to X. It’s called W 5 days ago:
I am somewhat-cynically wondering if the optimal political strategy is to sit on Twitter (which has more European voters to see one’s actions) and loudly complain about a lack of Twitter alternatives (which probably scores points with European voters) than to actually use a Twitter alternative.
- Comment on Europeans set to launch an alternative to X. It’s called W 5 days ago:
Well…I mean…even assume that they did. Mastodon fits that, and was built specifically to be a Twitter alternative. Heck, even on the Threadiverse, Mbin supports both formats, does both Reddit-style Lemmy/PieFed Threadiverse communities and Twitter-style Mastodon microblogging.
- Comment on Europeans set to launch an alternative to X. It’s called W 6 days ago:
X is no longer a public square
A group of 54 members of the European Parliament called for European alternatives to the dominant social media platforms on Monday.
IIRC the EC actually paid for some of the development of Kbin (now Mbin) with a grant.
- Comment on Europeans set to launch an alternative to X. It’s called W 6 days ago:
The Threadiverse is also social media. I mean, it’s distributed and not owned by a single company, and much of it is funded by donations, but…
- Comment on Elon Musk and Sam Altman clashed on X after Musk shared a post about a man who committed a murder-suicide following delusional conversations with ChatGPT 6 days ago:
Never wrestle with a pig. You’ll just get dirty, and the pig enjoys it.
- Comment on EXCLUSIVE: OnePlus Is Being Dismantled 6 days ago:
Are Motorola ok?
Depends on what you value in a phone. Like, I like a vanilla OS, a lot of memory, large battery, and a SIM slot. I don’t care much about the camera quality and don’t care at all about size and weight (in fact, if someone made a tablet-sized phone, I’d probably switch to that). That’s almost certainly not the mix that some other people want.
There’s some phone comparison website I was using a while back that has a big database of phones and lets you compare and search based on specification.
goes looking
This one:
- Comment on EXCLUSIVE: OnePlus Is Being Dismantled 6 days ago:
We just had an article on how ASUS is pulling out of the smartphone market too:
- Comment on Micron to boost DRAM output with $1.8bn chip fab buy 6 days ago:
I don’t think that memory manufacturers are in some plot to promote SaaS. It’s just that they can make a ton of money off the demand right now for AI buildout, and they’re trying to make as much money as they can in the limited window that they have. All kind of industries are going to be collateral damage for a while. Doesn’t require a more complicated explanation.
Michael Crichton had some way of putting “it’s not about you” it in Sphere that I remember liking.
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“I’m afraid that’s true,” Norman said. “The sphere was built to test whatever intelligent life might pick it up, and we simply failed that test.”
“Is that what you think the sphere was made for?” Harry said. “I don’t.”
“Then what?” Norman said.
“Well,” Harry said, “look at it this way: Suppose you were an intelligent bacterium floating in space, and you came upon one of our communication satellites, in orbit around the Earth. You would think, What a strange, alien object this is, let’s explore it. Suppose you opened it up and crawled inside. You would find it very interesting in there, with lots of huge things to puzzle over. But eventually you might climb into one of the fuel cells, and the hydrogen would kill you. And your last thought would be: This alien device was obviously made to test bacterial intelligence and to kill us if we make a false step.
“Now, that would be correct from the standpoint of the dying bacterium. But that wouldn’t be correct at all from the standpoint of the beings who made the satellite. From our point of view, the communications satellite has nothing to do with intelligent bacteria. We don’t even know that there are intelligent bacteria out there. We’re just trying to communicate, and we’ve made what we consider a quite ordinary device to do it.”
Like, two years back, there was a glut of memory in the market. Samsung was losing a lot of money. They weren’t losing money back then because they were trying to promote personal computer ownership any more than they’re trying to deter personal computer ownership in 2026. It’s just that demand can gyrate more-rapidly than production capacity can adjust.
- Comment on Micron to boost DRAM output with $1.8bn chip fab buy 6 days ago:
This deal may make matters worse for more buyers, because PSMC used the Tongluo site to make legacy DRAM products – the kind of memory used in less advanced products. With the company now exiting the legacy chip biz, that memory will also become more scarce, giving the laws of supply and demand another moment in which to work their way on markets.
dqindia.com/…/microns-acquisition-of-psmcs-tonglu…
PSMC’s current DRAM capacity mainly relies on 25nm and 38nm nodes, which restricts DDR4 production to lower-density products.
I guess that that’s more DDR4 supply drying up. It’s going to be some very scarce years for memory.
- Comment on GitHub - CombinEC-R/Pixel-Perfect-Aligner: A GIMP 3 plugin that converts messy, AI-generated or upscaled sprites into clean, grid-aligned pixel 1 week ago:
Might be interesting to infer optimal dimensions. Glancing at the source, looks like that doesn’t presently happen.
- Comment on Move Over, ChatGPT 1 week ago:
In all fairness, while this is a particularly bad case, the fact that it’s often very difficult to safely fiddle with environment variables at runtime in a process, but very convenient as a way to cram extra parameters into a library have meant that a lot of human programmers who should know better have created problems like this too.
IIRC, setting the timezone for some of the Posix time APIs on Linux has the same problem, and that’s a system library. And IIRC SDL and some other graphics libraries, SDL and IIRC Linux 3D stuff, have used this as a way to pass parameters out-of-band to libraries, which becomes a problem when programs start dicking with it at runtime. I remember reading some article from someone who had been banging into this on Linux gaming about how various programs and libraries for games would
setenv()to fiddle with them, and races associated with that were responsible for a substantial number of crashes that they’d seen.setenv()is not thread-safe or signal-safe. In general, reading environment variables in a program is fine, but messing with them in very many situations is not.searches
Yeah, the first thing I see is someone talking about how its lack of thread-safety is a problem for TZ, which is the time thing that’s been a pain for me a couple times in the past.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38342642
Back on your issue:
Claude, being very smart and very good at drawing a straight line between two points, wrote code that took the authentication token from the HTTP request header, modified the process’s environment variables, then called the library
for the uninitiated - a process’s environment variables are global. and HTTP servers are famously pretty good at dealing with multiple requests at once.
Note also that a number of webservers used to fork to handle requests — and I’m sure that there are still some now that do so, though it’s certainly not the highest-performance way to do things — and in that situation, this code could avoid problems.
searchs
It sounds like Apache used to and apparently still can do this:
old.reddit.com/…/why_does_apache_spew_a_new_proce…
But it does highlight one of the “LLMs don’t have a broad, deep understanding of the world, and that creates problems for coding” issues that people have talked about. Like, part of what someone is doing when writing software is identifying situations where behavior isn’t defined and clarifying that, either via asking for requirements to be updated or via looking out-of-band to understand what’s appropriate. An LLM that’s working by looking at what’s what commonly done in its training set just isn’t in a good place to do that, and that’s kinda a fundamental limitation.
I’m pretty sure that the general case of writing software is AI-complete, where the “AI” referred to by the term is an artificial general intelligence that incorporates a lot of knowledge about the world. That is, you can probably make an AI to program write software, but it won’t be just an LLM, of the “generative AI” sort of thing that we have now.
There might be ways that you could incorporate an LLM into software that can write software themselves. But I don’t think that it’s just going to be a raw “rely on an LLM taking in text and spitting out code”. There are just things that that can’t handle reasonably.
- Comment on Micron addresses Crucial exit backlash: 'We are trying to help consumers around the world' — company warns that DRAM drought could last until at least 2028 2 weeks ago:
Moore also noted its upcoming ID1 facility in Idaho, which is scheduled to come online in mid-2027. However, he warned that it will be 2028 before we see “real output, meaningful output,” in its DRAM supply chain.
Also, another thing to keep in mind: he’s going to be citing Micron’s target timeline for getting that new plant up and running. And I’m sure that they aren’t dragging their feet on that, probably not a lot of room to shave time off in any other areas if there’s a holdup of any sort. If there are any form of production hitches or problems getting it running, that’ll push things back further.
- Comment on GitLab discovers widespread npm supply chain attack 2 weeks ago:
It looks like I was wrong about it being the default journaling mode for ext3; the default is apparently to journal only metadata. However, if you’re journaling data, it gets pushed out to the disk in a new location rather than on top of where the previous data existed.
CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that the file system overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way to do things, but many modern file system designs do not satisfy this assumption. The following are examples of file systems on which shred is not effective, or is not guaranteed to be effective in all file system modes:
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log-structured or journaled file systems, such as those supplied with AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)
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file systems that write redundant data and carry on even if some writes fail, such as RAID-based file systems
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file systems that make snapshots, such as Network Appliance’s NFS server
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file systems that cache in temporary locations, such as NFS version 3 clients
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compressed file systems
In the case of ext3 file systems, the above disclaimer applies (and shred is thus of limited effectiveness) only in data=journal mode, which journals file data in addition to just metadata. In both the data=ordered (default) and data=writeback modes, shred works as usual. Ext3 journaling modes can be changed by adding the data=something option to the mount options for a particular file system in the /etc/fstab file, as documented in the mount man page (man mount).
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- Comment on Bose open-sources its SoundTouch home theater smart speakers ahead of end-of-life 2 weeks ago:
open-sources
To repeat my comment over on !technology@lemmy.world, “open-sources” isn’t really the right term here, as the source code that runs the speakers isn’t being released. This is just releasing API documentation to let software interact with the speakers.
- Comment on How ATSC 3.0 aims to win over cord-cutters in 2026 2 weeks ago:
ATSC 3.0 allows broadcasters to track consumer viewing habits much like Facebook and Google use today.
Sure wouldn’t want to miss out on that.
- Comment on Capital i and lowercase L look the same in pretty much any sans-serif computer font 2 weeks ago:
Mother fuckers just base 58 that shit.
I’m assuming that this is the point you’re making, but just to clarify:
The most widely used[citation needed] base32 alphabet is defined in RFC 4648 §6 and the earlier RFC 3548 (2003). The scheme was originally designed in 2000 by John Myers for SASL/GSSAPI.[2] It uses an alphabet of A–Z, followed by 2–7. The digits 0, 1 and 8 are skipped due to their similarity with the letters O, I and B (thus “2” has a decimal value of 26).
This is generally considered to be a preferable encoding for things like this.
- Comment on 'It can be unnecessary - and even too much': Are violent video games like Grand Theft Auto 6 becoming too realistic? 2 weeks ago:
I remember the “are the Doom developers Satanists” era. Oh, and there was Night Trap, when CD-ROMs came out and games incorporating full-motion video had their brief time in the sun.
- Comment on 'It can be unnecessary - and even too much': Are violent video games like Grand Theft Auto 6 becoming too realistic? 2 weeks ago:
I don’t know what a Halo battleship is, but basically an amphibious assault ship — can deploy amphibious craft and aircraft — with a deck gun.
There have been a couple games in the line. Carrier Command, a very old game, which I’ve never played. Hostile Waters: Anteus Rising, which is a spiritual successor and is oriented around a single-player campaign. Carrier Command 2, which is really principally a multi-player game, but can be played single-player if you can manage the workload and handle all the roles concurrently; I play it single-player. I like both, though I wish that the last game’s had a more-sophisticated single-player setup. Not a lot of “fleet command” games out there. Oh,
But in this context, it’s one of the games I can think of, like Race the Sun or some older games, Avara, Spectre, Star Fox, AV-8B Harrier Assault/Flying Nightmares that use untextured polygons as a major element of the game’s graphics. Rez wasn’t untextured, but it made a lot of use of untextured polygons and wireframe. Just saying that one can make a decent 3D game, and one that has an attractive aesthetic, without spending memory on textures at all.
- Comment on 'It can be unnecessary - and even too much': Are violent video games like Grand Theft Auto 6 becoming too realistic? 2 weeks ago:
I think that there should be realistic video games. Not all video games, certainly, but I don’t think that we should avoid ever trying to make video games with a high level of graphical realism.
I don’t particularly have any issue specific to violence. Like, I don’t particularly subscribe to past concerns over the years in various countries that no realistic violence should be portrayed, and humans should be replaced by zombies or blood should be green or whatever.
Whether or not specifically the Grand Theft Auto series should use realistic characters or stick with the more-cartoony representations that it used in the past is, I think, a harder question. I don’t have a hard opinion on it, though personally I enjoyed and played through Grand Theft Auto 3 and never bothered to get through the more-realistic, gritty, Grand Theft Auto 5.
- Comment on Accuweather handling rain and snow differently 2 weeks ago:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_(unit)
Britain
Main article: English units of measurement
A digit (lat. digitus, “finger”), when used as a unit of length, is usually a sixteenth of a foot or 3/4" (1.905 cm for the international inch).[6] The width of an adult human male finger tip is indeed about 2 centimetres.
Full standardization on decidigits it is!
- Comment on Xbox 360 superfan amasses all 1,353 North American discs after two‑decade collection spree 2 weeks ago:
We’d have achievement parties, work on multiplayer cheevos, and just compete for the highest gamescore in general.
I take it that “cheevo” is what people are calling achievements now.
- Comment on The right FUCKING time to get TWO ram sticks damaged 3 weeks ago:
Back to the topic at hand - doesn’t it seem strange that only CPU4 finds issues in memtest86? It could be a CPU or even motherboard that got damaged and not the DRAM itself, no?
I noticed that, but OP said that he ran the thing in three different systems, so I’m assuming that he’s seen the same problems with multiple CPUs. It may be — I don’t know — that memtest86 doesn’t, at least as he’s running it, necessarily try to hit each byte of memory with each CPU, or at least that the order it does so doesn’t have errors from other CPUs visible.
I also wondered if it might be a 13th or 14th gen Intel CPU, the ones that destroyed themselves over time. But (a) it’s a mobile CPU, and only the desktop CPUs had the problem there, and (b) it’s 11th gen.
- Comment on How Are You Guys Handling This? 3 weeks ago:
The good news is that single-player games tend to age well. Down the line, the bugs are as fixed as they’re gonna be. Any expansions are done. Prices may be lower. Mods may have been created. Wikis may have been created. You have a pretty good picture of what the game looks like in its entirety. While there are rare cases that games are no longer available some reason or break on newer OSes with no way to make them run, that’s rare.
With (non-local) multiplayer games, one has a lot less flexibility, since once the crowd has moved on, it’s moved on.
- Comment on How Are You Guys Handling This? 3 weeks ago:
It looks like it doesn’t support ARM architecture systems at all:
docs.bazzite.gg/…/Hardware_compatibility_for_gami…
Minimum System Requirements
- Architecture: x86_64