stsquad
@stsquad@lemmy.ml
FLOSS virtualization hacker, occasional brewer
- Comment on How come nobody does anything about North Korea? 1 week ago:
Well Trump had a go on his first term but unsurprisingly didn’t get far.
- Comment on How come nobody does anything about North Korea? 1 week ago:
Are you familiar with the Korean war? There was a massive conflict which got drawn out into a stalemate and everybody agreed a temporary ceasefire was preferable to even more destruction.
Trying to topple a regime that has nothing to lose and a highly indoctrinated population is not an easy ask. We can only hope that like most authoritarian regimes they eventually succumb to the weight of their own opression. It’s better than torching the whole continent in the name of freedom.
- Comment on Developer interview: my Q&A with a PC game 'repacker' 2 weeks ago:
So back in the days of the Atari ST we had compact disks (sic).
Most games shipped on a single floppy disk (so 720k or 1.4Mb) and rarely used compression given the base system only has 512k of RAM. The crackers would strip the protection, repack the data and patch the loading routines to handle that. Depending on the games they could fit 3 or 4 games on a single disk.
Nowadays the dynamics are different - games on consoles do use compression but they have to favour speed because they are streaming assets just in time. The PS5 even had dedicated decompression hardware to keep up with the data rate on it’s fast SSD.
- Comment on Majority of children will be overweight or obese in nine areas of England by 2035, study shows 4 weeks ago:
My eldest understands the need for good diet and exercise. They exercise at home doing various aerobic exercises and crunches to keep in shape. They hate sports at school and there doesn’t seem to be any effort to find the a sport they might enjoy or even just focus on improving their personal exercise regime.
I get teaching time is limited but the impression I get is the kids that want to be in the school teams get the most out of sport and the rest just go through the motions because it’s a compulsory subject.
- Comment on All babies in England to get DNA test to assess risk of diseases within 10 years 4 weeks ago:
You don’t think having a full genome and medical history of everyone who’d been in contact with the NHS would be useful to researchers?
- Comment on All babies in England to get DNA test to assess risk of diseases within 10 years 4 weeks ago:
One of the things we did during the pandemic was significantly scale up or ability to sequence genomes. We were literally watching the virus evolve near real-time because a large chunk of samples could be sequenced and processed.
While they’re are obviously data privacy concerns, for which the UK has a fairly long history of legislating for, having a full sequence for every newborn could allow for all sorts of cheaper early interventions. I’m sure the dataset would also be very useful for researchers as well.
- Comment on how do I stop being a sucker for alcoholic stuff on sale? 1 month ago:
I can second the alcohol free beers. The modern ones have excellent taste and hit the refreshing hoppy spot for me and are much better than juice or sodas when it comes to calories. I’m not totally dry, I drink 2-3 units a week, but I’m certainly feeling better for not having alcohol every day.
- Comment on Industrial Light & Magic's Chief Creative Promotes AI Slop During His TED Talk 2 months ago:
There were some AI pictures in the talks I saw last week. But they where put in to illustrates a point - I doubt otherwise the engineer would hire an artist for some bespoke art for their talk. It’s probably better than just copy and pasting off the internet without much attribution.
- Comment on Industrial Light & Magic's Chief Creative Promotes AI Slop During His TED Talk 2 months ago:
I used to when they first came out. There are some genuinely good talks in the archives. However there is definitely a trend and style to them.
- Comment on Keir Starmer does not believe trans women are women, No 10 says 2 months ago:
It’s probably cowardice.
I totally get why people are upset but the real question is what to do next. You can try lobbying the government with the massive majority by accusing them all of being bigots or form a new party (or join an existing one) with this reform at the top of their agenda.
Sadly while there may or no may not be a majority in the country who have sympathy with the plight of trans people I doubt there are enough where it is the top off their priorities when deciding who to vote for.
- Comment on Trans women should use toilets based on biological sex, Phillipson says 2 months ago:
Urinals. Most restaurants and cafes have unisex cubicles. When you get to pubs and nightclubs you can get more pee draining space per square foot with a urinal.
As far as I understand it nothing stops an establishment just declaring all their toilets as unisex. I’ve certainly been in a number of drinking establishments where this has been the case.
- Comment on Keir Starmer does not believe trans women are women, No 10 says 2 months ago:
“when looking at the Equality Act” is the key missing part off the quote. Would you expect an ex-barrister to contradict the ruling of the supreme court?
What’s actually needed is new clear primary legislation to address all these issues. Parliament still had primacy here but good luck getting MPs wading into such a toxic debate?
- Comment on YouTube considers a daily timer for users looking to cut back on Shorts 3 months ago:
I migrated away from the mobile app to PipePipe just to avoid shorts and I pay for premium.
- Comment on ‘A Minecraft Movie’ Mushrooms To $163M, Higher Than ‘Barbie’s Opening, Record For Videogame Pic; Warner Bros Brings The Box Office Back Alive – Update 3 months ago:
I went into it not expecting anything great but I laughed several times. More importantly the kids loved it.
- Comment on If you like to have music while playing games like Elite Dangerous or No Man's Sky, try this SYNTHWAVE playlist out 3 months ago:
Very handy site. Nice 🙂
- Comment on Does Google scan yt videos to know what products appear in them? 3 months ago:
Do you think there is information YouTube wouldn’t collect about you even if they could be better at selling ads to people based on it?
Do you live somewhere with data protection laws? If so you could request a dump of all personally identifying data they hold on you.
- Comment on What are some slow acting poisons? 3 months ago:
It used to slowly drive haters insane, hence mad haters. There was a theory Napoleon was exposed to excess levels of Arsenic over time although that might have well been background exposure. Nevertheless over time it’s not good for you. Neither is lead.
- Comment on What ever happened to QAnon? 4 months ago:
I don’t doubt the a MAGA crowd leant into the Q conspiracy and were happy to co-opt it’s adherents into it’s electoral base. However is there any evidence that links its genesis to the like of Banon? Most of what I heard (from across the pond, indirectly) was more traditional wedge issues like anti-DEI and anti-trans rhetoric.
- Comment on What ever happened to QAnon? 4 months ago:
A corrupted Mrs Davies?
- Comment on Now that Trump is getting real chummy with Putin where does that leave China? 4 months ago:
You need to pair 1984 with Huxley’s Brave New World to see where we actually ended up.
- Comment on What are the exact ramifications and consequences of the recent meeting with Zelenskyy and Trump/JD? 4 months ago:
It didn’t work out for Littlefinger in the end.
- Submitted 4 months ago to [deleted] | 23 comments
- Comment on Bill Nye The Science Guy on Climate Change 4 months ago:
It’s a bit he did for Last Week Tonight if I remember correctly. Definitely post watershed.
- Comment on Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row 4 months ago:
I don’t think Google drive supports encryption.
- Comment on What would you consider the 3 greatest movies ever made? 5 months ago:
To be fair those aren’t bad choices. I would certainly recommend the Shawshank redemption, I’ve seen it many times and it hasn’t gotten old.
- Comment on Beautifully written video about Language, AI and Human Connection 5 months ago:
Very mediative.
- Comment on Excellent explanation of the mid air collision in DC 5 months ago:
I’m usually wary of hot takes of developing situations but he obviously knows his stuff. Very clear explanation, very professional response from the controllers who must be in shock in the moments after.
- Comment on WFH with privacy? 85% of Brit bosses are snooping on staff 5 months ago:
I just spec a machine up to the defined limit and then buy it, install and claim back on expenses. I’m fact “do I have root on my machine” is one of my standard interview questions.
- Comment on Is there any movie you are looking forward to? 5 months ago:
I fancy a bit of Star Trek but it didn’t look like I have long to wait.
- Comment on 'The Brutalist' criticised for its use of AI 5 months ago:
One of the most interesting applications of AI I’ve seen for film recently is the ability to re-dub actors with their own voice in different languages while maintaining lip synch. That’s something that could have a positive effect on accessibility to the medium without the language barrier.