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WaterWaiver

@[email protected]

I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It’s not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.

Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

WaterWaiver ,

We rented our technology and could not read nor write.

HP bricks ProBook laptops with bad BIOS delivered via automatic updates — many users face black screen after Windows pushes new firmware (www.tomshardware.com)

On May 26, a user on HP’s support forums reported that a forced, automatic BIOS update had bricked their HP ProBook 455 G7 into an unusable state. Subsequently, other users have joined the thread to sound off about experiencing the same issue....

WaterWaiver , (edited )

This is something HP should have handled.

If a bad update is rolled out then it’s the responsibility of the software maker partner (HP) and the distributor (Microsoft), not just one or the other.

Those laptops are THEIR products, not Microsoft’s.

Both Microsoft and HP have branding on their laptops and a responsibility post-sale for the reliability of their systems. Hardware, firmware and OS responsibilities are all party to this chain of failure.

WaterWaiver ,

Windows update fetches all sorts of things now. If the hardware advertises X device then Windows update will check if it has anything for it. Approved vendors can provide all sorts of guff. Historically that has included drivers that intentionally brick your devices. HP probably packaged up some software that updates the BIOS and got it into the Windows Update DBs.

WaterWaiver ,

You have nothing on the Tri-Fan 1200W …com.au/online-ritmo-force-1200-tri-fan-gaming-po…

WaterWaiver , (edited )

And they claim cheap SMRs don’t exist yet xD

Here they are in an MSY (Australia) catalog from 2012:

https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/f3dab433-f0dd-4a1d-bf24-8c97ee9d03ae.png

Ritmo == SHAW == A-Power, all were in-house brands at MSY. I suspect the 1500W and 1200W might have been the same thing with varying amounts of lying, but perhaps they did also size the components slightly differently.

WaterWaiver ,

Something weird ace-ev.com.au

  • Claim to be "made in Australia"
  • Don’t provide any photos of their production line or factory.
  • Underpowered (max speed 100kmph)

Perhaps imported and then assembled in Australia?

WaterWaiver ,

Bad bot. Several of your selected sentences are verbatim repeats.

WaterWaiver ,

Only for certain types of capacitors. In practice they can overlap quite a bit, especially with common aluminium electrolytic capacitors (these form & dissolve complex aluminium oxide & hydroxide layers on the plates).

WaterWaiver , (edited )

There have been constant news articles coming out over the past few years claiming the next big thing in supercapacitor and battery technologies. Very few actually turn out to work practically.

The most exciting things to happen in the last few years (from an average citizen’s perspective) are the wider availability of sodium ion batteries (I believe some power tools ship with them now?), the continued testing of liquid flow batteries (endless trials starting with the claim that they might be more economic) and the reduction in costs of lithium-ion solid state batteries (probably due to the economics of electric car demand).

FWIW the distinction between capacitors and batteries gets blurred in the supercapacitor realm. Many of the items sold or researched are blends of chemical (“battery”) and electrostatic (“capacitor”) energy storage. The headline of this particular pushes the misconception that these concepts can’t mix.

My university login no longer works so I can’t get a copy of the paper itself :( But from the abstract it looks first stage, far from getting excited about:

This precise control over relaxation time holds promise for a wide array of applications and has the potential to accelerate the development of highly efficient energy storage systems.

“holds promise” and “has the potential” are not miscible with “May Be the Beginning of the End for Batteries”.

WaterWaiver ,

I wouldn’t know, but it’s totally not on there, or so I’ve been told.

WaterWaiver ,

Meanwhile the fan PC port is absolutely amazing. I couldn’t play my copy of PD on my actual N64 because the low framerate made me motionsick, the fan-made PC port runs smooth.

This makes me remember what happened with the re3 and revc (GTA III and GTA Vice City) projects. Fans fixed so much in those games, in their spare time, and published it as a patch (so you still had to own the games). Take Two DMCA’d and sued them just before releasing their the maligned “GTA Trilogy”. I wonder if Microsoft would have done the same before releasing new Perfect Dark content?

WaterWaiver , (edited )

I wouldn’t say placebo. It’s definitely doing something.

I would say this is still a placebo. Placebos always still do something. A sugar pill tastes sweet and modifies the sugar levels in your blood. The important questions are validity and effectiveness, not whether or not it does something.

Balanced audio will not eliminate noise in most of the circumstances where a headphone user hears noise. There are far more likely sources (the source file itself, DAC limitations, audio amp limitations, external sound from their environment, etc). It will help in some very specific circumstances, but that’s like trying to sell snow chains to all car owners on the planet because you can claim that they improve traction.

If you do work in an environment where changing to balanced headphone signalling helps… why are you working with your head inside an RF hazard zone?

(From page): However, balanced audio does a better job of eliminating noise, should it exist in your signal. In a case where extraneous noise is present

Misleading.

Noise exists in all signals. Balanced audio only “does a better job” in circumstances other than what this product is being sold for. Discussing this at all gives it false merit anyway.

EDIT: Giving this some further thought: balanced and unbalanced signalling is mostly moot when you’re an isolated device with one cable attached. From an RF standpoint you’re not forming both halves of an antenna (dipole or monopole+ground). Electrically they both look extremely similar in this scenario. Your partially conductive human arms waving around will probably couple to RF noise better than the headphone cable.

WaterWaiver ,

I don’t like adaptors, as they almost always noticeably reduce audio quality.

Huh? 3.5mm to 6.35mm adapters, the small bits of metal and plastic, or are you talking about something else?

WaterWaiver ,

That’s really weird o.o The adapters should just be metal and plastic, same as the cables.

Maybe they have a really weak connection internally, ie high resistance? This might lead to both lower volume in the headphones and (in some circumstances) higher noise, especially if it’s an unstable resistor.

I recommend starting a shelf of cursed items :)

WaterWaiver ,

Balanced will reduce noise (in terms of RF noise, of course) significantly better than unbalanced,

In this situation I don’t think it will at all.

I don’t think that balanced vs unbalanced is actually electromagnetically that different in this particular configuration (see my edit at the end of above). Things like where the wire is sitting on your body and what pose you are in will probably affect RF noise pickup levels on the headphone wires much more than changing between bal & unbal signalling.

but the source of noise does need to be far enough away from the capturing device to not affect it directly and, therefore, be able to be negated by the balanced cable.

I didn’t get into near-field and far-field effects. I’m not sure that it really matters here, but I might be wrong.

WaterWaiver ,

This could end up competitive.

Invite people to your house, give them a tour and briefly mention the shelf before scurrying them on. Watch their faces contort but don’t give them the opportunity to ask any questions.

EDIT: I have a vague guess at what could have gone wrong with your adaptor. It might have had OK L and R contacts but a broken G contact. You would then hear the difference between the L and R channels, which most often sounds like garbage. Music would be weird (entire instruments/vocals disappear) and mono audio would be silent or near-silent (so you’ll have to turn it up a lot and will hear noise).

WaterWaiver ,

learned from experience the differences between using a standard jack and an XLR, and I can say that the sound is vastly cleaner with XLR (at least on a set).

Your experiences were correct, don’t doubt them. That would have been ground-referenced equipment, ie plugged into wires that eventually join a wall. RF interference would interact with that quite differently, unbal vs bal would be quite different.

WaterWaiver ,

Oh. Back to resistance: Doesn’t really matter audio quality doesn’t care it’s still the same AC signal just with less amplitude

Only for ideal resistors.

Resistors are noise sources. Intentional resistors tend not to be too bad (and probably won’t be heard in this situation unless you have super-high-impedance headphones, perhaps 10’s of K), but unintentional resistors (eg corroded unstable metal contacts inside a plastic part) can be atrocious.

A few things to add to this:

(1) If your resistor acts even slightly like a diode then you will encounter partially rectified RF signals (more noise yay). Metal oxides between metals can do this, eg if the connector has crimped two badly-plated bits of metal together.

(2) Plasticisers in some plastics can leak out, causing corrosion on unseen internal metal parts.

(Of course linking all of this together is just conjecture, the causes of Moss’ bad adaptors might be something completely different)

Besides lemmy, what's another good reddit alternative?

Hi! Recently exiled reddit user, here. I’m curious what other alternatives to reddit there are, besides Lemmy, and Raddle, of course. Also, imho, Phuks is a good alternative, there’s no hate-speech (that I’m aware of) and people are pretty respectful. Anyways, let’s hear your suggestions! Thank you!

WaterWaiver ,

Slashdot.org

Don’t forget its fork, soylentnews.org

WaterWaiver ,

Brilliant book.

I like the bit about how proud the author was to develop a purple liquid rocket fuel, but then discover it wasn’t useful :(

WaterWaiver ,

I assume you’re joking, but if not: the 4MB of flash you see is not mapped 1:1 with 4MB of actual flash on the SD card. Instead there might be something like 5MB, but your OS only sees 4MB of that.

The extra unallocated space is used as spare sectors (sectors degrade and must be swapped out) or even just randomly if it somehow increases IO performance (depending on the firmware).

Erasing the 4MB visible to your OS will not erase everything, there still may be whole files or fragments of your files sitting in the extra space. Drive-vendor specific commands can reliably access this space (if they exist and are available to you, which they mostly are not). Some secure erase commands may wipe the unallocated space but that’s vendor specific, not documented and I don’t think even supported over the SD interface (although I might be wrong on this last point).

Encryption and physical destruction are your best bets.

WaterWaiver , (edited )

A good search term is “SSD over-provisioning”

The file size discrepancy is usually due to 1000 vs 1024

No, that’s something else entirely. It doesn’t matter what measurement system you use, the drive juggles more sectors than your OS can see.

but filling the drive with random data until its full should wipe the drive.

Only if you assume people can’t access the reserved/unallocated/over-provisioned sectors. If you are only worried about small thieves then this might not be an issue. If you’re handling sensitive data (like medical records for other people or anything with sensitive passwords) then it’s completely inadequate to leave any form of data anywhere on the disk.

WaterWaiver ,

Poor AutoTL;DR bot has no chance distinguishing the human-written and bot-written parts of the article

WaterWaiver ,

Magazine CDs and DVDs were my bacon.

WaterWaiver ,

10 sec

Filthy casual.

My family has a Chiq U58G7P. Warm boots take about 30 sec and cold boots a few minutes.

Don’t try and press any buttons on the remote during this time or for a minute or two afterwards. They might work, 15 seconds later, or they might get ignored. Sometimes your button press inputs get re-ordered too.

Factory resets do work, but then all it can do is broadcast TV. If you let it update and install streaming apps then you will be back to the same problems.

I suspect that it might be running out of RAM and thrashing some poor innocent MMC as swap, but I can’t find a USB ADB port to properly find out (maybe it has one internally?).

WaterWaiver ,

25/10 for 65AUD/m (43USD/m). Australia, NBN (monopoly across entire country, technically government owned but run like a private corp because of politics). It’s the lowest speed now available, but it’s already overpriced. $780/year is far more than all of my wifi capable equipment is worth together, including laptops.

janbartosik , to gaming
@janbartosik@witter.cz avatar

A coop PvE game for two dads and three sons?
A shooter, preferably. Any recommendations, guys? The youngest lad is 10, so as little violence as possible. Thanks 😉

@gaming

WaterWaiver , (edited )

I did this previously by using MultiMC (now PrismLauncher). Make a mix of mods, send them the zip of the whole game instance and ask them to drag and drop it onto MultiMC. The biggest issue I encountered was one family member having a black ingame world until they changed a setting in the graphics mod, otherwise it didn’t seem to be too hard.

By comparison Minetest is much easier for playing mods with family. Everyone downloads the server’s mods when they join. But the interest is lower.

WaterWaiver ,

“The uploader has not made this video available in your country”

(Australia)

Any other way to see this?

WaterWaiver ,

I had to look this up, so I’ll leave it here for others:

youth group = religious organisation trying to sign people up

(In my country if you look this term up on the web you get youth.gov.au . They probably wear thongs too)

WaterWaiver ,

Ditto with my printer. Print over LAN: sure. Printer connect to internet: hell no, that’s the first-party version of printer malware.

WaterWaiver ,

Congrats :) The idea that a few software bits are between you and getting a pile of junk working is infuriating. Did you extract and modify an image from flash or find a way in live?

WaterWaiver ,

Nice, ty. I’ve only revenged PC firmware, not embedded, so I wouldn’t think of several of those tools.

I know a model of HP inkjet from my childhood that had a service/factory mode where ink checks were disabled. After years of claiming that its carts were empty I was suddenly able to print perfect full-colour pages. RIP HP Photosmart 3110

WaterWaiver ,

USB/2.0 (4.0; Gen 2; rv:1.1) USB4.1 Gen 3x3 (FIREWIRE, like RS232)

WaterWaiver ,

Can’t understand sigils. Printer was cursed. Makes sense.

WaterWaiver , (edited )

halestrom.net/darksleep/blog/054_nvme/

Summary: two Silicon Power P34A80’s died within a few months of use, the second one was the warranty replacement of the first. In both cases sectors suddenly became permanently unreadable.

WaterWaiver ,

Smart locks are worse. They have all the insecurity of a regular lock, plus more methods of insecurity, plus more failure modes that will shut you out of your house.

WaterWaiver ,

“The formerly successful website known as Twitter”

WaterWaiver , (edited )

In Kerbal Space Program your ships sometimes catch the NaN virus. If one fuel tank level is reading NaN then whatever you do DON’T try and fill it from another (full) tank. I’m not sure if it can spread to physics (thrust, mass, etc) EDIT: Yes it can happen to physics, oh dear.

I wonder what would happen if you landed a NaN-infected spaceship on a planet.

WaterWaiver ,

Transactions per second. Bitcoin is slow and expensive to get your transaction “approved”.

Computer RAM gets biggest upgrade in 25 years but it may be too little, too late — LPCAMM2 won't stop Apple, Intel and AMD from integrating memory directly on the CPU (www.techradar.com)

Computer RAM gets biggest upgrade in 25 years but it may be too little, too late — LPCAMM2 won’t stop Apple, Intel and AMD from integrating memory directly on the CPU::LPCAMM2 is a revolution in RAM, but it faces an uphill struggle

WaterWaiver ,

We already have memory wafers glued to our CPU wafers in the form of L3 cache. It’s lower latency, higher throughput, up to a few hundred MiB in bigger models and can potentially be used without external RAM sticks (but I’ve not heard of using that feature outside of BIOS firmware early boot – that’s probably the only change we’ll see). Sometimes it’s DRAM, sometimes it’s SRAM, its size varies quite a bit.

WaterWaiver , (edited )

I would like a smaller phone, but they’re aiming too cost-premium for me. To me “premium” would be decent custom ROM support and a replaceable battery; I don’t care about flagship processors or holepunched screens.

I wish them the best of luck :)

WaterWaiver ,

The Timekeeper

WaterWaiver ,

Agreed - you need to tell users why you exist, don’t expect them to know everything.

WaterWaiver ,

Conversations

"If you tell a lie big enough and tell it frequently enough, people will eventually come to believe it". What is an example of this happening today?

I would really rather that these were actual examples, and not conspiracy theories. We all have our own unsubstantiated ideas about what shadowy no-gooders are doing, but I’d rather hear about things that are actually happening.

WaterWaiver ,

Supply-side Jesus (short animation) is a brilliant take on trickle-down economics and circular arguments about why the successful are successful and the poor are poor.

“Tax cuts will double our revenues and ensure that the empire never declines or falls!”

“Should you feed the lepers, Supply side Jesus?”
“No Thomas, that would just make them lazy.”
“Then shouldn’t you at least heal them Supply Side Jesus?”
“No James, leprosy is a matter of personal responsibility. If people knew I was healing the lepers there would be no incentive to avoid leprosy”

WaterWaiver ,

Is it bad that I suddenly want to build my own navy and rockets? This is like model trains.

WaterWaiver ,

Apparently something similar was once wargamed by the US and the carrier was lost en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

(The politics in that article remind me of a Kris Longknife book)

WaterWaiver ,

I am not so sure that it will end up faster or better.

**In theory: **A CPU scheduler should give programs as much CPU time as they want until you start nearing CPU resource saturation. Discord doesn’t need very large amounts of CPU (admittedly it’s a lot more than it should for a text chap app, but it’s still not diabolically bad). It will only start getting starved when you are highly utilising all cores. That can happen on my 2-core laptop, but I don’t have any games on my 6 core desktop that will eat everything. Nonetheless on my laptop I’d probably prefer my games take the resources (not Discord) and I’d happily suffer any reasonable drop in responsiveness of Discord as a result.

I don’t think that a new process (a new dedicated browser-client) instead of a new thread (tab in existing browser) is intrinsically faster or better. CPU schedulers are varied and complex, I wouldn’t be surprised if any differences in performance measurements would end up down in the noise. If anything the extra memory usage might cause more IO contention and memory starvation, making everything slower rather than faster. But this is all conjecture, so don’t give it much credit.

Basically, it’s faster to focus on painting a single canvas than it is to painting 3 at the same time.

I don’t think that’s much of a problem in practice, at least for Firefox: one tab can crash and stop rendering completely (or lock up 100% of 1 CPU core) but the others will keep going in other threads. For the most part they shouldn’t be able to affect each other’s performance.

In practice: What’s the actual metric that you think will be better or worse? I assume responsiveness to typing and clicks in the discord UI?

I’ve never seen discord lag or stutter from causes other than IO limitations (startup speed, network traffic, heavy IO on my machine) or silly design (having to refresh the page after leaving it open all day, I suspect it’s intentionally auto-disabling but I’m not sure). That’s not something that running a separate discord client in a separate dedicated/embedded browser will fix.

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