Notices by Phil Dennis-Jordan (pmdj@mstdn.social)

@skinnylatte This seems like the an approximation of the experience I've had with EVERY phone-based public transport fare system with fare gates.
Oh, convenient -> this inconsistent need for phone unlocking is annoying -> hey, why won't it let me out the gate/why did I get charged extra? -> switch back to a physical card
(These days our eldest needs a ticket as well, and as soon as kids are involved, cards are the only option anyway, so I don't bother with phone-based systems at all.)

@dalias Yeah, see my second post, I couldn‘t quite squeeze all the context into one.
I really don‘t understand what @scottjenson is getting at, or why this sudden concern. I mean, it‘s great if they genuinely want to improve quality of discourse, but “hey, be nicer to the people shilling for the tech oligopoly that’s eating up all of the world’s energy & computer hardware, undermining labour, & stealing all the creative works in the world” hints at questionable motives.

@scottjenson @dalias So, the harassment via randos (or bots) in mentions/replies has been a problem for at least as long as I‘ve been on the Fedi. You absolutely need standards on how to behave, and those need to be backed by technological and social mechanisms or things devolve into a toxic mess. I think most of us are with you so far.

@dalias @octothorpe @trisweb @cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron Yeah, I don't know what Fedi everyone else has been hanging out on, but there seem to be plenty of "AI" believers on here. I used to follow quite a number of them prior to their going off the LLM deep end. I have to maintain an extensive filter list to avoid having that stuff constantly surface in my feed.
This whole thing is just another variant of the tired old "free speech means you have to listen to my crap" argument.

@skinnylatte The “no one way of life” thing resonates with me; I don’t set out to be the weirdo but just seem to end up prefer doing everything in a way that’s unusual. The UK seems to lean a lot more into “no one way” attitude than Central Europe, which made some aspects of life in Britain nicer/easier. (Though a bunch of other aspects were significantly worse from my point of view.) But yeah, that whole thing is probably why I periodically toy with the idea of moving elsewhere.

@skinnylatte Amtrak stations somewhere on the outskirts of cities with no public transport or even rental car offices at the station always mystified me during our US trips.
Either the Thruway service didn’t exist for the places we struggled with or it was poorly publicised. (Tucson stands out in my memory - I think we waited over an hour for a taxi to be available to take us to the rental car company downtown; the station was crowded with fellow passengers similarly needing a ride)

@skinnylatte Their customers (hostages?) are so vocally unhappy with them, that they the only power company I know anything about in a place I‘ve never lived.
That said, I wish we only paid $200/month for energy - our bill is well over twice that. Our house is somewhat larger, and we get rather more drastic temperature swings. I suppose our utilities do just work, for the most part, so I can’t complain too much.

@skinnylatte That could possibly end up being useful knowledge, thanks! (from the other direction 😅)

Oh no. I have previously become an accidental expert on JPEG and written my own (reasonably fast) encoder in GPU shaders. I have now started investigating why an h264 stream encoded with macOS's VideoToolbox isn't successfully decoding on a particular target device. I fear I am getting dangerously close to being shoved down that particular rabbit hole as well.

@cwebber @indigoviolet "slop kiddies" as in the (now out of fashion) derogatory "script kiddies" term which actually had a pretty analogous meaning?
Though possibly offensive to kids.

@azonenberg @gsuberland I’ve been thinking about using bistable relays and optocouplers to determine current state. Wire the relay as just another light switch in a daisy chain. Reverting to “dumb” house mode is a matter of turning off anything that might drive the relays.

@CommieGIR @Mustardfacial @GossiTheDog They aren’t GPU cores, there are chunky but (supposedly) efficient purpose-built neural processor subsystems on the Ryzen AI and Intel Core Ultra 200V SoCs. Impetus seems to mostly be Microsoft’s “Copilot+” branding which requires a 40TOPS+ NPU. Plus, keeping up with Qualcomm. There is very little software that actually uses it though. (The GPU is probably faster but consumes more energy for the same job.)

@CommieGIR @Mustardfacial @GossiTheDog More or less! I don’t know if it can be used for anything other than neural networks, e.g. general matrix operations. To be fair I’ve also not looked into what APIs you use to program these things… it’s certainly nothing as general purpose as OpenCL though.
On the plus side, the specialisation means that it’s fairly compact and doesn’t wast all that much die area.

@CommieGIR @Mustardfacial @GossiTheDog Cynics might say it’s worthless even if you do use AI because there’s virtually no software that uses it. 🤪 Supposedly the background blur in MS Teams will use it, and so will the video speech recognition/live translation feature that’s apparently in the latest version of Windows 11.

@gsuberland I feel like in today’s state of computing and the world at large, I care more about data autonomy and sovereignty than licenses on specific bits of code. (And yes that implies interoperability.)

@alexhall @anna Maybe the phone number IS the scam. If a mark receives an invoice for something they didn’t buy, logs into the website and can’t see it, they might still worry and phone the number given. Then the scammers can string them along with any old “ah yes, that one hasn’t made it to the web interface yet, but I can cancel it for you now. I’ll just need your card details to verify…”

@alexhall @anna It takes some effort to make a convincing looking scam website, and I suspect a lot of people are now sensitive to web based phishing. So it’s maybe just not worth it anymore, whereas running a scam phone bank is.

@sinbad Not just me then huh. (Not that I really get invited to parties these days.)

@silverwizard Not currently supported, as far as I’m aware. The closest you can get is to pass through a whole USB host adapter PCI device to the guest, then all devices connected to its ports will end up in the (same) VM.
Proper USB passthrough isn’t ridiculously difficult to implement by any stretch, but I guess nobody’s got around to it yet.

@uliwitness At least within the significant digit group they are sized by value. (5c > 2c > 1c, 50c > 20c > 10c, €2 > €1)
And I suspect you’re supposed to identify the group via the kind of edge ridges.