Dave.

90% of users when they are presented with the UAC popup when they do something:

“Yes yes whateverrr” <click>

I’ve got photos in Flickr dating from 1999 onwards. Ten thousand or so of them, and a couple of the early ones are now corrupted.

But they are my “other backup” for Google photos so I don’t mind too much. I also have a USB Blu-ray drive at home that I use to periodically burn M-Discs that I hand out to a few relatives.

That’s about as good as I can conveniently do for backup, and it’s probably better than the single-point-of-failure box of negatives that my parents have in their cupboard.

when they’re powered down.

There’s no periodic cell refresh in flash memory like there is in DRAM. When USB sticks are plugged in, all you are doing is powering up the flash chip and interface ICs.

You’d have to read a block then write it back to actually refresh the stored charges in the cells.

Most times what I get when asking it coding questions is a half-baked response that has a logic error or five in it.

Once I query it about one of those errors it replies with, “You’re right, X should be Y because of (technical reason Z). Here’s the updated code that fixes it”.

It will then give me some code that does actually work, but does dumb things, like recalculating complex but static values inside a loop. When I ask if there’s any performance improvements it can do, suddenly it’s full of helpful ways to improve the code that can make it run 10 to 100 times faster and fix those issues. Apparently if I want performant code, I have to explicitly ask for it.

For some things it will offer solutions that don’t solve the issue that I raise, no matter how many different ways I phrase the issue and try and coax it towards a solution. At that point, it basically can’t, and it gets bogged down to minor alterations that don’t really achieve anything.

Sometimes when it hits that point I can say “start again, and use (this methodology)” and it will suddenly hit upon a solution that’s workable.

So basically, right now it’s good for regurgitating some statistically plausible information that can be further refined with a couple of good questions from your side.

Of course, for that to work you have to know the domain you’re working in fairly well already otherwise you’re shit out of luck.

They also came from a time when hard drives could draw several amps while in use and much more on spin-up. There was a good reason why SCSI drive arrays used to spin each disk up one-by-one.

Molex connectors are good for 10 amps or so, SATA connectors couldn’t have handled that amount of current.

Excuse me, “UXers” is not the preferred term any more. You should be using “HXers”, as per the article.

In my opinion, replacing “users” with “humans” feels wrong in much the same way as when incels replace “women” with “females”.

They are reducing the accuracy of the description. All users of computers can generally be assumed to be human. All humans cannot generally be assumed to also be users.

I’m guessing something like:

Robots.txt: Do not index this particular area.

Main page: invisible link to particular area at top of page, with alt text of “don’t follow this, it’s just a bot trap” for screen readers and such.

Result: any access to said particular area equals insta-ban for that IP. Maybe just for 24 hours so nosy humans can get back to enjoying your site.

Me: “This binary file is merely an approximate mathematical and statistical transform of the complainant’s “Deadpool 3”, your honour. If you care to glance through a few A4 pages of the binary representation of both items, you can clearly see that there is no direct copying involved, thus, no copyright claim can be upheld.”

Result: $250k fine, two years community service in anti piracy groups.

NVIDIA: “Each copyrighted work was ingested and a statistical model was generated that leverages that information for our own profit. We have no intention of compensating copyright owners for their information.”

Result: Oh you! Get out of here, you scamp! Ruffles hair

I hate the camera bumps. Just make the entire phone the same thickness and - hey! This is crazy, but maybe then you could then add a bit more structural integrity and put a bigger battery and a SD card slot and a headphone jack in there as well.

Absolutely SLAMMMMED haha.

Yep, I bet after that they’ll think twice before using excessive superlatives again!

I may be harsh, but I’m fair. If they publish a grovelling retraction, I’m willing to consider forgiveness.

I mainly take issue with the word “guzzle”. When something “guzzles petrol”, I expect it to be choking down something like twice as much petrol. Not 7 percent.

7 percent is basically 4.0 versus 4.28 litres/100km. In a motor vehicle that’s the difference between careful driving and slightly less careful driving. Or the difference between a motoring magazine’s figures and factory figures. It’s not “guzzling extra fuel”.

“guzzle more petrol”

“7 percent more than advertised”

Guzzle Def: “to drink quickly, eagerly, and usually in large amounts.”

🤷‍♂️

The US system is broken. I have a tax file number in Australia, which is the broad equivalent of a US SSN, and you know what someone can do with it if they also have my name and DOB? Fuck-all, except file my taxes for me, because you can’t use it as an identifier anywhere else than the Australian tax office.

If I want a loan or a credit card or to open a bank account or any number of things , I need enough verifiable documents including photo ID to satisfy the other party that I am really them. Basically it’s a points system where any form of government photo ID gives you about 80 points and any other item of identifiable data gives you 10-20 points and usually you have to clear 100 points to be “identified”.

So my passport plus my driver’s licence is enough. My driver’s licence plus my non photo ID government Medicare card or my official original copy of my birth certificate is enough. My driver’s licence and two bank or credit cards is enough. About 5 or 6 things like my birth certificate, electricity bills in my name or local government rates notices and bank cards is sometimes enough, although photo ID from somewhere is usually required, or you need a statutory declaration from someone in good standing saying that you are who you say you are.

This kind of thing, while slightly more inconvenient, requires a number of physical items that can’t be easily stolen en-masse. I carry enough of them in my wallet that I can do anything I need to do, as my driver’s licence provides photo ID. People who don’t drive or have a passport can scrape together enough bits and pieces to usually get by.

So it’s time for a change. But it doesn’t have to involve technology or a huge shift in the way of doing things. It just requires a points system similar to what I describe. Whether the US can effect that change now with the millions of systems that rely on a SSN for a trivial key in a database in some small retailer somewhere, I don’t know.

In the phone world, the jump in capacity that modern phones have from my 4370mAh battery in my A71 is negligible. They haven’t increased power density much because that way leads to fires and lawsuits when users bend or otherwise damage their ridiculously fragile phones

My point was, if modern phones had the physical space that my phone + case has, they could have a bigger battery, and that bigger battery would then power all the hungry, hungry electronics.

I had a full run of vaccinations and got COVID about 6 months later. Nothing serious, in bed for a few days, cold and flu tablets kept everything under control, a perfect case of the effectiveness of the vaccines in taking the edge off.

But for about two weeks after “recovery” I was constantly forgetting keys, or my wallet. Drove halfway to the airport for a week away for work one morning and went, “oh shit, where’s my wallet?” and I’d placed it on a bench behind my car when I put my suitcase in the back and didn’t pick it up again. I’m 50 years old, I can count on one hand the number of times I’d forgotten my wallet before that.

That brain fog eased off after that but I wonder sometimes if there are still long term effects that I’m not aware of.

Yeah if you’ve got home charging it’s not a real issue. We use 240v here in Aus so you can pull quite a bit out of domestic outlets before having to get serious and generally overnight charging to top up the day’s commute would be fine.

So it wouldn’t be a fast charger on every street, and you could always enforce limits by time of use pricing to put a dampener on peak loads.

I just wonder if utility planners might get caught with their pants down on this one. Like, could you say 5 years ago chargers might run to 800kW?

Yeah, just the random added load equivalent to 80-100 houses per car, any time between 5am and 9pm would be enough to send local suburban grids into a spin, especially in summer evenings when there’s peak loading already underway. A lot of infrastructure would need to be beefed up to make it reliable.

*Inspects saucepan*

It does? Wow this technology stuff is more insidious than I thought.

Fucking hell, imagine the requirement of a couple of megawatt substation for fast charging, urban power planners must be shitting themselves.

I have to wonder if there is a way for clients to glom together duplicate posts across your subscribed communities into one, and if you reply to a thread in that post it passes it back to the correct discussion.

I mean, you’d still see repetitive stuff in the post’s comments from your point of view, but everything would be in one place from your perspective and it would be semi-transparent, at least for the communities you subscribe to.

All the information is there, it should be doable…