Notices by Graham Sutherland / Polynomial (gsuberland@chaos.social)

monitor manufacturers' dead pixel policies are unequivocal daylight robbery

"we can sell you a product with up to 5 dead pixels and you cannot get a refund"

fuck right off

anyway, apparently the state of the colour accuracy focused monitor market fell down the toilet while I wasn't looking. everything has coil whine, £700+ monitors are turning up with messed up panel bonding leading to bleed issues, the variance between units (even in the same batch) is huge, reviewers are receiving monitors with dead pixels (beyond the manufacturer's own stated limits!), HDR support and implementation is a mess, and feature priorities are wonky as heck. absolute madness.

I saw a review where a guy bought three Dell U2725QE monitors and had to return *eight* monitors in total before he got three units that had no dead pixels, minimal coil whine, and only one with a slight bit of excessive backlight bleed.

eight.

I suspect there's also something else going on beyond the bit rate reduction, because if you upload a 4K video but watch the 1080p transcoded stream it's nowhere near as bad as uploading a 1080p video and watching at 1080p. my guess would be that they've semi-recently cost-optimised their transcoder in a way that ends up producing worse results for same-resolution conversion.

PSA: if you upload stuff to youtube, I highly recommend upscaling your videos to 4K first even if they're 1080p.

they've tanked the bitrate on 1080p, even on premium now, and it looks awful. it's particularly problematic on anything with lots of hard cuts because the keyframe intervals have been stretched out. the very second you go up to 1440p or 2160p source it fixes it.

I've seen multiple creators have to reupload videos because they look so bad, and it hurts their views as a result.

Microsoft employees trying in vain to get the Copilot bot to sign the CLA because they can't merge changes until it does is absolutely sending me.

never seen a company dogfooding their own product turn into such a massive own-goal.

@ariadne I would describe that conversation less as a red flag and more as a nuclear air-raid siren rupturing my eardrums

@munin @xssfox @da_667 having literally just gone through the hiring process and *barely* just avoided homelessness, by a margin of about a week, my response is still 100% fuck no.

doesn't matter how dogshit the hiring market is, you don't offload that shit to chatgpt and expect to get hired. write it once and copy-paste to a hundred jobs, sure. no problem. but at least have the basic dignity to write the words yourself.

@xssfox @da_667 how has the average level of effort fallen so low, in a technical field no less

it's fucking depressing

@da_667 @xssfox like if you have to offload your basic human interactions to a computer how the absolute shit am I supposed to trust you to effectively communicate with anyone in the team, let alone customers

it's an own-goal of absurd proportions

@GossiTheDog not to mention the IMEI and IMSI of the other user's handset and SIM.

Italy is now less then 500 signatures away from reaching their threshold too. they'll be the tenth country to meet the voting threshold.

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home

@UkeleleEric @tim they messed up my billing enrolment and didn't charge me for over a year (I didn't notice, as far as I knew it was going out), then demanded several thousand in back payments all in one go. I eventually got them to strike off a lot of the debt because it was their fault, but it took me another 14 months to pay it off and the financial impact has sucked.

I've been logging the rate at which people have been signing the EU initiative today. deeply impressive mobilisation.

the average rate since 12:00 UTC is a little over 6 signatures per second.

srsly, if you're a citizen of any EU country, go sign the thing. it actually matters and we're so very close to the threshold.

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/

just realised you can do this in C#

const int MaxStackAlloc = 1024;
Span<int> indices = count <= MaxStackAlloc ? stackalloc int[count] : new int[count];

so you dynamically get stack or heap allocation depending on the count.

wanted to get some more of the high activity liquid rosin flux I got from a BGA reballing supplies place, but the site disappeared. checked wayback, looks like it was up as recently as just a couple months back. wanted to ask the owner if he could tell me where to get more, so I did some digging to find the registered business name, got his name, found his nickname, looked him up and... well I guess that explains why the site is down. he died two months back.

that "Google made their search results worse on purpose to get more ad impressions" article that's going around is based on an internal email chain from a legal filing, in which an employee mentions this potential approach for increasing engagement metrics... as an example of a bad approach and not something they'd be comfortable doing.

based on my reading, there's nothing in here that says they actually did it. I can't see anything in there that supports that claim.

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417557.pdf

cursed idea

aside from the connector itself being kinda large on smaller boards, SATA is a pretty good form factor for this sort of thing. the cables are cheap and shielded, it's got a locking connector with low insertion and removal force, the connectors are rated for plenty of cycles, and there are enough lines for ICSP.