r00ty Admin

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

Yes. Counter-strike. Best of 5. 1 map ban each. Go go go.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

Later. Let's play global thermonuclear war.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

I'm a bit confused by this:

“For [the pro-Palestinian protesters] to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message, Mr. Putin’s message. Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see.

Let's just put aside the fact that asking for a ceasefire for most people is a humanitarian request. You don't need to have picked a side to accept that the ordinary people need some kind of help getting to safety (or relative safety). I'm not commenting on that here though.

It may be that I'm missing something obvious, in which case fine. But, how does a cease-fire in Gaza benefit Putin? I would say that any instability elsewhere in the world (Gaza, Houthi rebels, the Iran Pakistan thing the other week) work entirely in his favour. While the west (and some of the rest of the world) need to move to stabilise problems aside from the war in Ukraine, they have less time, resources to spend checking up on his activities in Ukraine. The media time is split away from what's happening over there and of course, military budget is redirected away from arms for Ukraine, to operations in these other regions and arms for Israel.

I must be missing something, right?

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

Not sure why I expected Paulaner Spezi to be some kind of ready-made Cola-Weizen.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

The problem was that every phone needed its own cable and software. I bought the entire Nokia set since it was barely any more than a single cable and just did ringtones/custom screens etc for everyone I knew.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

Well, their argument would extend to the hiring practices of the manufacturers and their contractors. At the end of the day though, I'm more inclined to blame corporate cost-cutting.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

#pragma OccasionallyCrash false

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

I think they call algorithms AI these days. At least I caught one of our VPs saying that a few months ago.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

Well I think goingToCrashIntoEachOther needs to return another drone object. Then don't can take that object. Based on self.serialNo and other.serialNo a mutually beneficial avoiding manoeuvre could be executed.

If you're about to crash into more than one other drone.. Good luck the function specifies "EachOther" meaning just one other drone!

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

Back in the olde days of programming (I'm talking about compilers from the 80s) the coding connoisseur knew that getting a certain error that seemed like nonsense could easily be solved by adding an extra, or removing a remark line from the top of the code and recompiling.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

How does that work exactly? In most countries, surely you only get access to any state pension at the ever-increasing retirement age. My point being, if you are able to retire early, it's on your own dime, right?

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

That's all true. But then they're not really a drain, and while not paying income tax any more they're usually spending their retirement in other ways which produces tax income still.

I'd agree we have a problem though. I'm Gen X and my state retirement age is already +4 years on what it would have been. I cannot see that getting any better any time soon.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

I think there will be (and there already have been) significant downsizing over the next few years as businesses leverage AI to mean the same work can be done by less people paid less.

But the job cannot go away completely yet. It needs supervision by someone that can see the bullshit it often spits out and correct it.

But, if I'm honest, software development seems to be targeted when I think design writers should be equally scared. Well, that is if businesses work out that AI isn't just chatgpt. A GPT or other LLM could be trained on a company's specific designs and documentation, and then yes designers and technical writers could be scaled right back too.

Developers are the target because that's what they see chatgpt doing.

In real terms a lot of the back office jobs and skilled writing and development jobs are on the line here.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

Here's the thing. Pay for work isn't based on skill alone. It's scarcity of a given demographic (skill makes up just part of that).

If the number of people overall is cut for software development worldwide, then scarcity at all levels will reduce and I reckon that will reduce pay.

I think our pay will start to diminish.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

That's a worst case. I think at the moment at least gpt type ai isn't good enough yet to not be used as a tool.

But yeah with some improvements we'll end up being quality control for automated systems.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

If the toaster has a metal chassis, you DEFINITELY want that earthed, since any failure where the element or live hits the chassis will instantly trip the RCD/Ground protection whatever you guys call it. But, for devices that really don't need a proper earth, we just put a plastic earth pin connected to nothing in the plug.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

There's a lot of dangerous stuff coming from questionable countries that are referencing neutral in bad circuit designs. That can make chassis/buttons/exposed parts live if the polarity is set as such. Even worse, it might work great for a long time and then a diode or capacitor goes open circuit and suddenly something is live that wasn't before.

In a device I trust, sure polarity won't matter. But, there's a lot of bad stuff out there, and I really don't want to count on my RCD to stop the current before it's done enough damage to me.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

I'm biased, from the UK. But it's pretty much the order I'd do it too. UK first, the round Europe ones only very slightly behind (maybe even on par, I have just a slight issue with the fact that polarity isn't assured).

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

You can get RCD sockets if you want in the UK (and mainland Europe too). But we generally at the minimum have sockets protected by an RCD (which is the same thing) and in more modern installations all circuits are protected by one.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

What I'd rather see is a standardization of PD installed in houses. That is, as part of the electrical installation a high capacity PD power supply is installed, and USB C sockets available on all power sockets. It would be more efficient to do a one-off central supply.

The problem is, that PD supports many voltages, so there'd need to be some way to dynamically generate those.

But, a good DC house supply would be a good thing and easier to provide some kind of battery backup for.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

I think 30ma is about normal. There's a good reason, in an average socket ring (or even radial) you will always get SOME leakage. So there's always going to be a common sense allowance made depending on whether it's a single socket, a small radial or one or more rings.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

Yeah, there'a many in socket options. Sometimes they're too big for standard recesses too. I'm thinking more of a central solution.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

For new installations in the UK that's true. But my house, for example was wired in the 1990s and has an RCD only on the sockets (the reasoning I think was that an old style incandescent bulb failing might trip the single RCD taking out the whole house power, but could be wrong).

Since the early 2000's they changed it for new installs to be RCD for all circuits I believe.

r00ty Admin , 5 months ago

One wire is live in that it moves between —x and +x volts in a sine wave. The neutral is often connected to earth/ground somewhere upstream and should be 0v. So if you just pop that power into a transformer and then regulate and only use the DC then it's completely irrelevant which way you plug it in.

However there's plenty of cheaper ways to get a lower voltage, or to power a device from mains power that when done badly can reference what is thought to be neutral (and this ground) but could easily become live and make something metallic become live either without fault, or with fault to a minor component.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

So, also usable as a weapon if required. Another feature.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

I generally change every 4 years anyway. It's around the time battery performance starts to become noticeable I find.

I suppose if there was nothing worth upgrading to I'd just change the battery. But after 4 years there usually is.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

This is the right way to do it. Make it clear this IT process is causing reduced performance. Especially if you're a profit centre you will likely see the problem solved soon enough.

This specific thing. A password on task manager is really dumb though. I assume they have some spyware they don't want users to be able to stop. But, most of this kind of software (think antivirus) generally have other ways to prevent tasks being closed. They don't need to remove task manager. Task manager is an important and needed tool for any windows user.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

I think most of Western Europe is on the same page with that rule.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

This seems like they took all the downsides of contracting and all the downsides of being an employee and none of the upsides of either.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

Capitalism seems to run in a cyclic manner. If you remember in the 80s we had movies like Wall Street and Other People's Money, because I think things were at a similar point then to where they are now. But, through the 90s (and I joined the workforce in the mid 90s) I recall a more customer-centric view, and even some level of consideration for employees. This has gradually deteriorated starting in the new millennium.

The last 10 years I think has seen this accelerate such that the only consideration for a company is to the shareholders (public or private), customers are in the equation somewhere but way, way after providing value to shareholders via cost-cutting in any way possible. Employees are absolutely just a cost of doing business and if they could eliminate them too, they surely would.

The only hope I have is that I've seen this reverse before, so it CAN happen again. But what makes me place some doubt about this is headlines like the four richest people doubling their net-worth in an incredibly short period. The economy is a zero-sum game, if they doubled their worth other people lost everything, MANY people needed to lose everything to achieve that. Those people need to lose, and lose a lot to bring us back, and I can't imagine they will let that happen.

Maybe things will improve, maybe there will be a revolution/uprising when it just gets too bad. Who knows?

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

Hahaha. If they remove the "basic" which I believe is standard since that's the lowest I see. Only leaving the Premium option then I'm afraid I'm going to pull a full dragon's den.

I really did like Netflix, but they're just getting greedy and trying to extract blood from stone now. And for that reason, I'll be out should they remove the standard tier.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

Well, I've not been affected so far. But this will definitely be a huge hit to me and that will be it.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

The thing is, every Boeing plane that has any problem is going to make it to the news right now. So it's very hard to see what is relevant and what is just "one of those things". So, this will make them look worse than they really are.

Having said that, they have problems. My opinion is that cost-cutting has created all their recent actual problems (MCAS, missing bolts, loose bolts etc) and I'd argue that unless the actual location(s) responsible for these problems is identified, the safest thing to do would be to recall ALL aircraft recently (last 3 years AT LEAST) serviced, repaired or had their configuration changed at a Boeing owned or subcontracted location should be reviewed for substandard work.

My reasoning here is that if we have loose/missing bolts on the 737 Max 8/9 and -900ER. It won't stop there, it is going to almost certainly be an institutionalised problem of quality control slippage that could affect any aircraft maintenance, repair, or adjustment operation.

But, I'm not an aviation expert, so my opinion is worth very little.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

I don't think we have enough information to say whether it's a Boeing thing or not. The reason I say that is, that my understanding is some maintenance and repair operations will be performed by Boeing, or Boeing appointed subcontractors. What we may never find out is whether there was any work done on, or requiring access via the nose wheel area, and whether it was performed by Boeing/Boeing subcontracted technicians.

But, as I said in my other comment. This will be an ongoing problem where every Boeing plane issue will be reported now and unless announced by the operator or Boeing themselves, we'll never know whether it was a Boeing maintenance problem or just neglect by the operator.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

You know, I'd not be surprised if some brexit votes were to leave Eurovision. :P

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

Just fence off those two squares forever, and we'll never talk about it again.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

So, you print the story on the front page the next day and print double the copies. And keep going.

Make them work for it.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

Favourite of all time? Between snes and dreamcast.

I stopped with consoles after the first Xbox. PC ever since.

Consoles I had.

Phillips odyssey / intellivision (don't remember too much about those)

Atari 2600. Amazing for the time, and now I know more about the architecture, I have huge respect for the developers of the time.

Sega master system / nes. I cannot remember which we had first, probably Sega. Again, good good for the time. I think we had double dragon and golden axe on sms (and it had cool built in maze game). Mario games on the nes were of course also great.

Megadrive. Mortal combat and sonic, that is all. Great system for the time.

Snes, Mario kart. Mode 7 was pretty good.

Psx, was quite good but pc gaming was starting to warm up.

Dreamcast, I mostly remember metropolis street racer. I loved that game.

Xbox. Burnout games were great. But it was around the time I was getting more into PC gaming.

Mostly retro stuff as you can see.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

I'm on mbin BTW. The fediverse arch.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

It's all smoke and mirrors!

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

Well base operating system or hardware driver. There are exceptions, the pps driver for timekeeping makes sense to be kernel level too.

But games developers? No, they have no right to ring 0. I understand they want to protect from cheats, but they're just moving the battleground to a part of the system that results in blue screens/panics when it fails. And cheat developers will follow them there and even move to the hypervisor if needed, trust me on that.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

I don't think either of the main mobile platforms allow users or developers on unrooted devices to install software at this level.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

Because it just moves the fight to kernel level where the stakes aren't task crashed, but blue screen instead.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

It's true, our plain old dinosaur fuel car was notably slower in turning over on the -5 and colder days we've had recently.

But since tesla bother to heat the propulsion battery why don't they either 1: have a 12v power supply to provide ancillary power from the propulsion batteries if the 12v supply fails, or 2: also heat that battery too?

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

But, what kind of software do they have that uses one price source for the unit pricing display and another source for calculating the total? It seems that it is destined to create more problems like this one.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

Deductions should also appear as a line item though.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

I think people confuse anonymity (similar to the made up names we use here, or character names in online games, and your wallet ID in a crypto coin) to privacy. Technically, if you receive all your funds in crypto, and you spend all the crypto directly (on goods and services that do not require you to give any PII) without it ever turning to fiat. Then yes, it is anonymous but not private. People can see that wallet hash x received funds from wallet hash y and send some of that to wallet hash z and will be able to confirm that for as long as a copy of the ledger exists somewhere.

Really not sure a codebreaker needed to work this out. Anyone that spent a bit of time understanding how it worked would realise this right away. I have no doubt though, that many people had a total pikachu face when their barely concealed illegal activities were easily discovered.

r00ty Admin , 6 months ago

Well, I'm not advocating against party banning. I'm just saying that if the reason a party is being banned is because there's a real chance they might win an election. Then it really is just deferring the problem.