Notices by DrYak (dryak@mstdn.science)

@glassresistor @HauntedOwlbear oh, that's indeed an interesting new standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auracast !

I wonder if it would be possible to retro-fit into headphones with community firmware (e.g. @pine64 's Pinebuds Pro)

@abolisyonista ...
This requires a ton of public eduction and is not perfect: Swiss population tend to vote a bit more conservative.

E.g.: Just last week-end close to 80% of voters rejected a popular initiative for inheritance taxes of ultra-rich. 😠

That's metaphorically the "turkeys voting for christmas": the general population (mostly middle class) voted against their own self-interests, in a way that only benefit a few (ultra-rich class).

@abolisyonista ...well direct democracy has a bit less "class" problems, specially since modern-day implementations have extended the definion of "citizen" well beyond antiquity Athens.

It's not perfect, but it seems better at capturing the inrerests of the grneral population than the legalized corruption systems or representative democracy.

@robinfarrell @aral ...and that's assuming that the nukes are still functional.

It's a highly technical weapon.
And once you start to try restricting higher education to rich white failsons, try to cut funding to universities, and in general wage a "war on education", I am not sure how long you'll be able to have the necessary highly skilled workforce to keep the nukes functional.

@JessTheUnstill Good metaphor as there is also a whole spectrum there too: between "I am helping a megacorp to abuse underage slaves in some south east asian country and get rich in the process" and "I am making my own clothes, from scratch. Threading my own wool. Shaven straight from the sheep that lives on my balcony".

(e.g.: repairs, reuse and modify, thrift, shop from local makers, etc...)

@foone did the Melon at Xitter decide to stop providing account backup, that you could download and host locally?

@prahou @lanodan Wikipedia has a table: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#Tape_lengths
ntsc T-240 tapes are 500m long (a bit above 2m/minute, PAL has different speed)

Slow speed & short lenght despite large data amount, because the head does "helical scan":
vcr isn't moving the whole tape fast past a fixed head (like music). the head is moving and does a high-speed pass across the width of the tape from one edge to the other (1 pass per frame), while the tape is advancing slowly along the length.

@Infoseepage yup, ut's a question of "when", not "if".

Unless one of the neglected tropical disease pops its ugly head first, thanks to climate change.

(e.g. here around in Europe, dengue is already present in some of the southern countries, up to France)

@codewiz wishing you a happy repairing project!

@jab01701mid @slothrop @MichaelBishop @cwebber @Gorfram @alyx
No! I am John Mastodon!

@tess Saddest part:
These thing are built like tanks, and trivial to swap parts for repairs.
(I've got one which approaching 15years )

I.e.: capitalism has forgotten how to be successful, without so much planned obsolescence that you need to throw away and replace an expensive device every two years.

Also works wrt Roomba being able to work without a cloud connection, and modern capitalism unable to stop slurping all your private data and resell them for profits

@freemo Ripping apart monopolies and splitting them into multiple smaller competing entities is litteraly what anti-trust government organizations (such as US' FTC) have been trying to achieve.

So as long as @stux 's new tax code defines "big corpo" and "small business" in a way that would encourage competitors (and not merely "in the name only" small companies under the same umbrella / same holding), it's a win/win.

@dalias oh, you mean someone has written a driver+firmware combo for those CH375 ISA cards that does NE2000 emulation instead of HD? That would be very interesting to me!

(context: my Pocket386 has such a CH375 onboard)

@dalias oh, I see. Well, thing is: these are not like PCI USB cards (or built in port) which work as long as you have standard UHCI or OHCI drivers (some even exist for DOS).
The CH375 is a small microcontroller which on one side speaks to a USB device and on the other exposes an emulated peripheral on the ISA bus.
i.e. the handling of USB devices doesn't happen inside the host computer, but inside the card itself, thus you can use it an meager ancient 8bit hardware (e.g. Book8088)

@bellinghman @simon3270 @Antiqueight I am in sevetal toots of this thread and feel seen! 😹

(seriously, I am also an adept of "RasPi under the desk as an off-site backup" and obsessively labelling cables)

@ct_bergstrom Though this has still the usual drawbacks associated with using a LLM to generate an output for which the user doesn't have knowledge: there still risk that the Chat AI "lies"/hallucinates (i.e. Bullshits with confidence) by accident and the result is then taken for truth by the user.
[...]

@ct_bergstrom [...]
To quote @pluralistic:
"The problem isn’t that the chatbots lie all the time — it’s that they usually tell the truth, but then they start spouting confident lies."
and:
"That means that when Google ingests and repeats a lie, the lie gets spread to more sources. Those sources then form the basis for a new kind of ground truth, a “zombie statistic” that can’t be killed, despite its manifest wrongness."

https://doctorow.medium.com/googles-ai-hype-circle-6158804d1299