Notices by Graham Sutherland / Polynomial (gsuberland@chaos.social), page 2

@whitequark doing the solder balls by hand is an extreme headache, but you can get BGA reballing frames reasonably cheaply where you clamp the part in the lower section after applying a little flux, clamp the stencil in the upper section, they're spring loaded so it presses the stencil down, then you pour a ton of solder balls into the top and roll them around, then it has a little channel in the corner where you can tip the excess balls back into the container. pretty painless.

@whitequark decent job!

spotted a couple that might need some extra attention. the far left and right ones are probably ok (low solder quantity), but that middle one looks like it has an extra solder ball stuck to it and you might get a short.

starting an aggregates company, gonna call it GritHub

@da_667 ok who turned the roomba into a fucking machine by strapping a dildo to it and setting its path to go back and forth in a tiny area?

building a little log analyser thing and testing it out on my site and blog

holy shit people are not joking about the AI bots. 92.2% of my total site traffic is from eight user agents directly affiliated with AI. another 6.1% is from SEO related companies that have some sort of AI offering.

only 0.3% of my traffic comes from a regular browser. most of the remaining 1.4% is fedi servers pulling previews, plus some RSS readers grabbing posts.

@whitequark the problem I'm targeting can be done with a regex, I was just massively overdoing things

I am writing a thing to solve a simple use case and almost dove headfirst into writing a lexer/parser, someone please take the keyboard away

fucking damnit the internet has officially broken me, because half the time I see "ffmpeg" I read it as "ffmpreg" now

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