WaterWaiver @ WaterWaiver @aussie.zone

I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It's not the

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2 yr. ago

year 2038 problem?

secretly hopes 2032 isn't too bad of a year

Alternative:

        Ctrl-z  
    kill -9 %1   # Shell keeps track of job pids for you, job 1 is %1, job 2 is %2, etc
    fg  # Not technically necessary, but it's fun to see the corpse
  

My favourite is a forum question about a first-person shooter called "Still Not Dead" where you are chased by zombies, floating skulls and spiders carrying upside-down crucifixes: Does this have any satanic references in it?. Good quotes:

I would buy the game if it didn't have any of that stuff in it.

I already told you why, I hate 666 and pentagrams

Preach!

We definitely need more games changed. I consider it to be the major victory when we petitioned that satanic game DOOM to be changed and got Super 3D Noah's Ark

Projects that attempt to put things in the road tend to fail to be economical or practical. It's almost always better putting the same (or less) investment into something equivalent that sits next to the road rather than inside it.

The key features of roads that make them so economically successful are:

1. They are very cheap per km to build
2. They are very cheap to maintain (they're fully recyclable, they get remelted during resurfacing).

Installing anything in the road surface completely voids these two points.

Detailed problems:

• You will need a pickup device on the bottom of your car. To make it efficient you will need it as close to the road surface as possible.
• Roads are dirty and covered in debris. Your pickup device will get torn and worn.
• You will need a LOT of road installed with this, which makes it intrinsically much more expensive than roadside chargers. 10 mins of charging at a standstill requires one charger, 10 mins of charging at 40kmph is about 7km of underroad chargers. Intersections might do better, but they're intermittent and provide unreliable charging opportunities. Even 1km (6kmph*10min) is silly expensive compared to a cluster of roadside chargers.
• The charging coils underneath the road will need to be as close to the road surface as possible (to make it efficient).
• Worn or buckled (from truck braking) road surfaces will require specialised work and extended road shutdowns to repair.
• You can't ignore this costly maintenance: exposed electronics (even if isolated) will have inconsistent traction and may damage tires.
• Under-road assets such as communication wires (even just for traffic lights, let alone internet infrastructure), power cables (11kV and up), water, sewage, stormwater and gas will be much more expensive, slow and complicated to install and maintain. More and longer road shutdowns will result.

The fundamental, core problem of all of these "put solar panels in roads" or "put chargers in roads" projects is that they are romantically and narratively attractive. Roads are ugly wasted space, but if we could put them to better use then wouldn't it be magic? Sadly this never works. Roads are ugly and wastes of space because nothing else works as well for transport infrastructure (other than railways).

The EPG on my old TV was brilliant.

Any suggestions for online TV guide sites? I presume some of them might be better than others.

Ways chocolate baked products get ruined (even one of these things is bad):

• Sugar too high. It might taste nice on the initial bite, but then 15 seconds later your mouth tastes disgusting. This continues for several minutes to half an hour, which you have to intentionally forget and ignore to be able to enjoy the rest of the product. Example: Timtams.
• Replacing cocoa butter with cheaper vegetable oils. Again it tastes fine initially, but then tastes weird as you go on. Most chocolate chip cookies do this. "Compound chocolate" drops sold for cooking are made like this, try eating those directly if you're not familiar.
• Stupidly low amount of product in big packaging. I feel like a victim of a crime and never buy your stuff again.

I think all of the companies focus too much on (1) the initial purchase decision and (2) the initial flavour/sensation. They're idiots that are prioritising specific metrics rather than "actually nice product".

The broadcast freeTV electronic program guide (EPG) on my current TV is trash. It's clear they only cared about big corporate apps (that paid to get dedicated branded buttons on the remote).

• Squint to see the tiny text (probably because it was designed & tested on a non-4K tv)
• You have to visit the channels first for the EPG to populate for them.
• There is no line to denote your current position in time on the chart. Instead you have to read the (tiny) time at the top right, then guesstimate its position on the chart, then look down.

My decade+ old Samsung plasma is so much better; but it wasn't a "smart" tv, so broadcast TV was its tea.

(Of course this still doesn't fix the fact the "apps" are buggy and slow. Already had the TV warrantied and parts replaced once because of some of them going black and white. I have no idea how such as weird problem could manifest OR how the solution was to exchange hardware components)

Workaround for fingers having the wrong count.

Not sure why people are downvoting you :| If you misunderstood me then others will too, it's useful having reply chains like this.

Gah English.

"My sketches" as in "me using the AI software to draw pictures". It's not my podcast, I was trying to guess at what the presenters looked like based off the topics they discuss.

I've been encountering this! I thought it was the topics I was using as prompts somehow being bad -- it was making some of my podcast sketches look stupidly racist, admittedly though some of them it seemed to style after some not-so-savoury podcasters, which made things worse.

How old?

Early 1900's: Yes. Metal panels had the same problem, timber panels did not (their thickness stops them from flapping).

Late 1900's: I don't think anyone used flat? There were definitely designs intended to look flat (esp 80's and early 90's), but there were still subtle curves to those panels to bias them and stop them flapping, as far as I recall.

Happy to be proven wrong :)

Inspired by the ABC Article "North Korea was floundering under sanctions. Now it's making billions from stolen cryptocurrency" I thought it would be nice to cast Santa and Kim Jong Un as friends. My biggest worry about this picture is that it portrays crypto in a positive light, that's probably not as light hearted as I intended.

Bing Dall-E. Prompt: "Santa Claus has a manic smile as he helps the Supreme Leader of North Korea count their bitcoin." Bing blacklists the words "Jim Jong Un" but this synonym seems to work.

Other manufacturers of all manner of stainless products seem to have figured out a solution to the problem.

Two design choices together probably make the problem multiplicatively worse:

1. Flat panels are not anywhere as stiff as curved panels.
2. Mechanical parameters of the stainless alloy they're using (eg it might retain the coiled shape more than some other plain steel alloys).

I can't get over the flatness... those panels surely rattle too? Or do they void-fill the doors and body with something?

I'm very curious about the downvotes to this one. May I ask people's thoughts? Perhaps I'm too vague? I can put a bigger story about my experiences with various init systems in production & research if people are interested.

https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio

A custom discord client that supports streaming with audio on Linux

Jaysus, I wish this were a world where stuff like that wasn't necessary.

Uneducated question: what's the benefit of a dedicated client over running it in a normal browser?

That absolutely sucks :| Thankyou for the detail.

The fact this issue is happening on both Pipewire and Pulseaudio also suggests it’s more likely a bug in the drivers… It might not be obvious on ALSA directly, but that doesn’t mean an issue doesn’t exist there…

I probably made the overlap unclear, sorry:

• Pipewire issues: My 2023 desktop and 2016 laptop, very different hardware.
• Pulseaudio issues: All of my pre-2023 desktops and several family laptops

I do a lot of middleware development and we’re regularly blamed by users for bugs/problems upstream too (which is why we’ve now added a huge amount of enduser diagnostics/metrics in our products which has made it more obvious the issues aren’t related to us).

Eep, that's annoying. You also probably don't have direct interaction with the users most of the time (they're not your customer) which makes this worse, people in a vacuum follow each other's stories.

In practice, very few people have issues with Pulseaudio (I haven’t seen issues since launch). Sometimes as well, keep in mind it can be the sound interface (especially if its USB)

There might be a bias here because these problems are not persistent, ie a reboot fixes them.

In regards to setup, most distributions will handle that anyway I’m guessing. So not sure why the configuration process should matter unless you’re in Arch or Slackware? As long as the distribution handles it, it shouldn’t matter. It’d really a non-issue honestly.

That's potentially more things different distros can do differently and more issues your middleware will start getting blamed for.

Yes it's not a problem for user-friendly distros, but why does the user friendliness problem exist anywhere anyway? It's better to fix problems upstream, not downstream.

If you check SystemD, its a HUGE step up, which is why everyone is using it now

I think that's a "winners write history" situation. There were other options at the time that might have been better choices. Everyone uses it now because of Redhat and Debian being upstream to most users, desktop and corporate. I was not surprised by Redhat adopting it (it's their own product) but Debian was quite the shock.

Yes systemd is definitely a step up from traditional initscripts (oh god). In terms of simplicity, reliability and ease of configuration however it's a step below other options (like runit). I don't have distro management experience but, given the problems I've encountered with different init systems over the years, I suspect there would be less of a maintenance burden with the other options.

The formerly successful site known as Twitter.