Thorry
@Thorry@feddit.org
- Comment on NOW! 2 days ago:
YSK that this is indeed illegal in many places such as the EU for example.
However those tricky manufacturers have a few tricks to get around this. One of the things they do is to create special “discount” SKUs. Despite their name, these SKUs are often not discounted at all and kept artificially high. Their specs usually aren’t great, so the value for money is poor most of the time. However when something like a holiday sale comes around, these SKUs get discounted massively. That way the shops can still claim the discount is huge and would technically be legal, even though there are plenty of other very similar SKUs in the same series that were available for less.
This isn’t a new thing, so called “retail” SKUs have also been around for a long time. Ever since webshops started out-competing retail stores manufacturers have been creating retail SKUs. These are often very similar or the same as another SKU in the series, but given a unique number and sometimes name. These SKUs are then only sold by distributors to retail outlets. Then when a shopper is in the store and looks up the price of the SKU on the internet, they don’t see a dozen webshops with a lower price, but instead only other retail chains with a very similar price. This is to stop people from going to stores, get advice and look at all the models, only to then buy the selected model online. Of course smarter people can easily figure out which SKU is the corresponding non retail SKU. But if you are smart enough to do that you can probably figure out what model to buy without going to a store.
Still it’s good for the law to exist and it does help a lot. The whole SKU shenanigans are only for some things, such as TVs, notebooks, appliances such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and some other stuff people usually go to stores to buy. For a lot of smaller stuff, such as PC components for example, this usually doesn’t happen.
- Comment on monumentale 3 days ago:
// - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
// Note added by employee 871 - S. Sandler - 10-31-2003
// Chapter 1
// Dear reader, let me tell you all about this here function.
// You see it was a dark and rainy night, like the nights often were in the place I once called my home.
// My grandma used to tell stories about those nights, the nights where the cold creeps in and the fog rises up from all around.
// She used to tell us those nights were haunted, evil things happened which could not stand the light of day.
// I never put much stock into those stories, but when the rain beat against the window and the wind would rustle the trees, I figure she might have been onto something.
// So you see it was one of these typical nights where I learned evil does indeed come out. But not from outside as one might expect, no… The evil comes from within
// Chapter 2
// Just like every other Friday, I got stuck with night duty. I wanted to go drinking with friends, but my manager told me I needed the extra shift since quarterly reviews were coming up.
// I was in a faul mood and cursed my manager, but like my grandma used to say curses can be a dangerous thing. They have a tendency to backfire when not used in moderation.
// Frankly I’m not sure my grandma knew what moderation meant, otherwise she would have cut down on the amount of beans she ate.
// Let me tell you; old folk and beans aren’t a great combination. But I digress.
// Getting stuck with night duty wasn’t bad, it didn’t pay much, but you could work from home and usually nothing much happened, especially on a Friday.
// So I sat around watching some old X-Files episodes, keeping half an eye on my mailbox to see if any tickets came in. I do say that Scully chick is one hot mamajama, I kinda forgot about the story.
// It was at this moment I heard loud thunder rolling by and the familiar wee-woo sound of my email client getting a new mail.
// As I read the ticket number: EI-WA-98215-6-66 the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
// Chapter 3
// I wondered who could be submitting tickets at this hour, but it must be important so with one eye on Scully I checked out the ticket.
// For some reason the user name wasn’t in the ticket, just the user number. I had complained about this to IT and they said they would “get to it” whatever that means.
// I swear to the gods if you think developers have their own code to make fun of users, IT guys are way worse. They probably just sit around crimping their cables or whatever they do.
// Anyway this ticket was really weird, the user said when they opened up the admin portal the menu would freak out.
// They said, I kid you not: “The menu is haunted and we need an exorcism”
// Must be some kind of joker who also got stuck with the night shift and doesn’t have anything to do, so let’s mess with the poor devs right?
// Chapter 4
// When I opened up the admin portal I didn’t see anything weird at first, this dude was messing with me for sure.
// I got hungry so I wanted to make myself a quick snack, I found a buldak ramen packet in the kitchen.
// Perhaps I shouldn’t have judged my grandma for eating beans, as I know these spicy ramen will be much worse.
// While waiting for the water to boil, I saw movement from the corner of my eyes, it was like there was someone in the room with me.
// When I walked over to investigate it was suddenly gone, but I saw on my screen the menu was freaking out, opening and closing like crazy.
// I turned to walk back to the kitchen and get my ramen going, but as I did suddenly I hear a loud bang in the apartment.
// Chapter 5
// As I investigated the noise I found a door had slammed shut due to the wind, I was pretty sure I had closed that door earlier…
// With my snack in hand I went in to investigate the code running the menu.
// After thorough investigation, I found no fault in the menu. The code hadn’t been touched in months and nobody had ever complained before.
// But I had seen the menu misbehave myself, surely something must be wrong with it.
// Suddenly it was like my hands had a mind of their own, they started writing code like I had never seen before.
// With horror I saw what they were doing and I gasped. The only brief pause I got was when my hands turned to my ramen.
// I felt sick by the code they had written, but they forced the spicy buldak into my mouth and when I refused to swallow, poured the lukewarm Mt. Dew in my mouth.
// Chapter 6
// Even though I have no explanation for the code that now lays before you, in order to clear my conscience I will briefly try to explain what it does.
// My understanding isn’t complete, but what I’ve been able to glean from beyond the veil is the following:
// Lines 8 - 26 deal with getting the user details, they appear to use the regular API for this but also some calls I’m not familiar with.
// Lines 43 - 78 seem to get the users actual GPS coordinates, I have no idea how?
// Around line 156 the weather.com API is used to get a current report at the users location.
// The rest of the code seems to deal with various time and weather related checks. As far as I can tell it checks if it’s dark and stormy out.
// In the last part of the function there is some simple logic that cancels the menu animation if it triggers too often.
// Chapter 7
// It was with a heavy heart I pushed commit 54D3AD into production with the simple message “Fixes ticket EI-WA-98215-6-66”
// I went to close the ticket, but somehow I couldn’t find it in the ticket system anymore. Probably those IT guys messing up again.
// The mail was gone as well, but with Microsoft Outlook that was pretty much par for the course, so I didn’t think anything of it.
// Wanting to put this horrible experience behind me, I resumed watching X-Files, such a classic show.
// A few minutes later my VLC crashed and kept looping on Mulder saying “Thank you”, but it was slowed down a bunch and distorted.
// In the few seconds I needed to get my hand free from my sweatpants, all my power went out. We really should invest more into infrastructure…
// - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
// Note added by employee 2548 - Martin (intern) - 07-02-2009
// New Weather.com API premium key added, no idea why we need this, but without it the menu breaks.
// Could not find contact info for employee 871 - presumably left the company.
- Comment on PC Master Race 4 days ago:
That’s a lot of words to say you are jealous
- Comment on philosophical tetus 6 days ago:
- Comment on When the webpage doesn't want you opening new tabs 1 week ago:
Oh but it can be so much worse. I’ve had to work with a task management system of a company I was doing some jobs for. This system was the absolute worst. It’s one of those SPA this isn’t a website but an app kind of thing.
First thing I hated, as soon as you did anything, it was immediately done. Edit a title? It saves all the time, so other people see you editing. Click on a toggle, oops it’s toggled now, hope that didn’t just send an email to 30 people. Clicked somewhere in the page and it did something, but you aren’t sure what exactly? Sucks to be you. Just want to see what options pop up when changing some setting, nah it’s already set and screwed up everything.
Another system I work with doesn’t do anything unless you explicitly click the save button. And for anything that does something right away, there is always a confirm prompt. I love that for business applications, when you do something you know what it was you did. And you can mess around with stuff, without worrying you’ve messed something up.
But that cursed task management system was designed so you could just leave it open and the view would automatically update with any and all changes. That way you didn’t need to refresh and new stuff would always be seen immediately. Sounds like a pretty nice feature and something I would actually want (even though I do like the old refresh to make sure it’s up to date and not stalled in the background). However the way they implemented this was to have a view state. That view state was what you wanted to see and would be kept updated. Navigating wasn’t really navigating, it was just updating your view state to look at something else. This meant if you open two tabs and navigated in the first tab, the second tab would also change!
Alright not the biggest of issues, just open up another browser profile or incognito or something and log in to for example compare two sets of data. NO! They connected the view state to the account, not the session! I simply couldn’t believe it when I first ran into this. And the app had no way of opening two tasks side by side, it was infuriating. For a second I even contemplated getting a second account, but of course it was one of those SaaS things that you’d have to pay for per account.
- Comment on Rise of the Tomb Raider -SteamDeck 1 week ago:
I got a message Necesse got it’s 1.0 release. I played it about a year ago and it was rough around the edges. So I’m giving it another go this weekend.
- Comment on Eventually I'll have enough to just keep finding random ones 1 week ago:
That’s easy, I keep my Ethernet cable tester next to my Ethernet cable crimper! Where is that? Well it’s where I keep my Ethernet headers! Where are they stored? Easy, next to the Ethernet cable tester!
- Comment on One more LLM 1 week ago:
One of the things I’ve really had AI fanboys going crazy over is by asking them to feed their AI generated code back into the AI and ask for potential issues or mistakes. Without fail it points out very obvious issues and sometimes some less obvious ones as well. If your AI coder is so good, why does it know it fucked up?
This is basically what these new “agent” modes do. Just keep feeding the same thing in on itself till it finds some balance. Often using an external tool, like building the project for example, to determine if it’s done. However I’ve seen this end up in loops a lot. If all of the training data contained the same mistake (or the resulting network always produces that mistake), it can’t fix it. It will just say oh I’ve made a mistake let me fix that over and over again as the same obvious error pops out.
- Comment on Fight me 1 week ago:
Sure, but like the other commenter said, everything turns into heat eventually
- Comment on Fight me 1 week ago:
Well that’s just objectively wrong. Light is EM radiation, where heat is movement of atoms and molecules. Via incandescence objects can radiate away their heat (following black body radiation), however they are not the same thing.
- Comment on Fight me 1 week ago:
In the end we are all infinitely falling into the pit of entropy
- Comment on Fight me 1 week ago:
Nah this thing puts out light and probably vibrates as well, so not even 100%.
- Comment on I'm in danger 2 weeks ago:
Presenting to the emergency room
- Comment on Grab your pitchforks 2 weeks ago:
I’m a huge fan of sweet and savoury in the same dish. Pineapple on pizza is great, but there are a lot of dishes from South-Asia that combine unique flavours. One of my favourites is rice with a yellow curry sauce with raisins and peach slices on the side. There can even be nuts in the rice to mix it up some.
People need to step outside of their food comfort zone and try out different things.
- Comment on It's a miracle! 3 weeks ago:
Is that a tail or a penis?
- Comment on It's a miracle! 3 weeks ago:
Or, you know, FUCKING DEAD
- Comment on AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel - Kurzgesagt 3 weeks ago:
The ways they say they are going to use AI is exactly what they said was causing harm. If that isn’t hypocrisy, what is?
They call out the issues, only to completely ignore those issues in their own use.
- Comment on AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel - Kurzgesagt 3 weeks ago:
Good video, one bit of criticism tho.
They state that AI summarizes websites instead of sending those website traffic, which is true. This is obviously a bad thing, since those websites can’t exist without that traffic (on top of being bombarded with requests from bots collecting data for AI training). They also state AI plagiarizes without giving credit, also a true and bad thing. But then on the part where they explain how they are going to use AI, they say they will use it to write little scripts for their animations and such. And as a quick Google alternative.
Have to call out the hypocrisy here. Those things you said were bad, that contribute to the end of the web and the end of your channel, you are going to simply use? OK it’s a good thing you aren’t going to use the AI in the research and writing stage of the video, but elsewhere is just fine?
- Comment on Piegoth Ur 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Microsoft Is Abandoning Windows 10. Hackers Are Celebrating. 4 weeks ago:
Which would be the reason the hackers are celebrating
- Comment on Tell me I'm wrong 4 weeks ago:
You should know any man that wears an ascot with pride fucks a LOT.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong pre-patch 3 beta update brings extra controller support and dispels nagging lategame curses 4 weeks ago:
I’ve heard it from many people, shame it isn’t fixed yet.
I replaced my cable and bought a 5 pack in the store, so if this one starts acting up, I can replace it right away.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong pre-patch 3 beta update brings extra controller support and dispels nagging lategame curses 4 weeks ago:
I hope they fix that bug where on Linux when the controller disconnects for whatever reason, all of the analog inputs like the triggers and sticks stop working. I connect my controller using an USB-C cable which is kinda broken, it usually works just fine, but every once in a while it disconnects before immediatly reconnecting. Usually that’s not an issue, it just hiccups a bit and then I can continue playing. Since it doesn’t happen often, I can blame my skill issues on it and I’m lazy, I hadn’t bothered to replace the cable. With this annoying bug, I had to restart the game every time it happened. After a couple of times I replaced the cable, but still would be cool if they just fixed it.
- Comment on Impossible 5 weeks ago:
That’s mostly because digital cameras were known at the time to be extremely shit. I remember having a webcam in the 90s. It kinda sorta worked, but even in high res picture mode is was 640x480 and the images looked like shit. So it would be more a case of convincing people a digital camera can be as good as an old school one. The concept itself would be familiar. In fact, calling it a webcam instead of a digital camera would be a lot easier for a 90s person to understand.
- Comment on important event 5 weeks ago:
Not even true, where I live the moon was visible for half of the day and set just after sunset. So no moon tonight.
- Comment on Microsoft forced to make Windows 10 extended security updates truly free in Europe 5 weeks ago:
One little snag: You need to be signed into Windows with a Microsoft account. Using local accounts won’t allow for the updates.
- Comment on Anon becomes Snake 5 weeks ago:
Second floor basement?!?
- Comment on EU tax officials confront the most pressing legal question of our time: If you sell RuneScape gold to someone and they use it to buy a magic sword, do you still have to pay taxes? 5 weeks ago:
Yeah EU VAT opened up a whole can of issues. It’s super complicated and annoying, with all sorts of weird exceptions. The exact opposite of what VAT was supposed to be. EU countries should have just gotten their shit together instead of this patch work.
I’ve actually seen that fraud in action. People used to ship around huge amounts of phones and CPUs, because they were high value, but took up very little room. A truck full of pallets of tray CPUs could be worth a huge amount.
I think now most of the holes are patched. But for a while there were special rules surrounding phones and CPUs just because they were often used in the fraud scheme.
- Comment on EU tax officials confront the most pressing legal question of our time: If you sell RuneScape gold to someone and they use it to buy a magic sword, do you still have to pay taxes? 5 weeks ago:
The real genius behind VAT is that it isn’t just applied to transactions between business and consumer, but to all transactions. The rule is normally very simple, it’s applied to all transactions, with few exceptions. The rate can vary, but those rules are also usually very simple. The trick is: When a business has a transaction with another business, VAT is still applied, but the selling party has to levy the tax and forward it to the government and the purchasing party can ask the government to give back the tax they paid on the transaction.
This may seem a bit convoluted, where the tax goes through the government only to end up back in the business. But this ensures the tax is applied always. Normally a profitable company would sell their products for more than the components they purchased. The difference between these two is the value added. And by getting back less from the purchases as what they have to pay for sales, the tax is only applied to the value added. And for consumers it functions as a sales tax, being applied to all transactions and no way around it.
This system is way harder to mess with than any other form of sales tax. The rules are simple with few exceptions and thus very easy to reinforce. It’s also a more fair system, where each party in the chain pays a part instead of the consumer paying for all of it.
In the end the consumer pays most, but as the taxes are supposed to be used to make their lives better, it seems like a fair deal? Now if you have a government that’s more about filling their own pockets than actually doing what they need to do to improve the lives of the people living there, well then you are going to have a bad day. But that doesn’t happen in civilized countries right?
- Comment on smol 5 weeks ago:
Outer Wilds has taught me these dudes are larger than my space ship.
