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

I thought my monitor was broken -- the grey it tends to show looks like an LCD from a bad angle. If it were not for this Lemmy post then I'd never know it was a feature, not a bug.

It's much easier to watch with it off (it's really distracting). Settings icon (where you find video quality) -> Ambient Mode.

SFF = Small Form Factor. It's smaller than traditional ATX computers but can still take the same RAM, processors and disks. Motherboards and power supplies tend to be nonstandard however. Idle power consumptions are usually very good.

USFF = Ultra Small Form Factor. Typically a laptop chipset + CPU in a small box with an external power supply. Somewhat comparable with SBCs like Raspberry Pis. Very good idle power consumption, but less powerful than SFF (and/or louder due to smaller cooler) and often don't have space for standard disks.

SBC = Single Board Computer.

"Why did they only consider SMR?" is being asked by several people, so I'll paste this here:

2.4.4 Perceived inconsistency between high nuclear SMR capital costs and low-cost nuclear electricity overseas

Based on information to date, current nuclear SMR capital costs are significantly higher than any other technology included in GenCost. This result appears out of step with overseas experience where some countries enjoy low cost nuclear generation. There are two reasons for this seemingly inconsistent result.

GenCost has been advised by stakeholders that small modular reactors are the appropriate size nuclear technology for Australia. Australia’s state electricity grids are relatively small compared to the rest of the world and planned maintenance or unplanned outages of large scale nuclear generation would create a large contingent event of a gigawatt or more that other plant would find challenging to address. In the present system, it would take two or more generation units to provide that role. As such, large-scale nuclear plants which are currently lower cost than nuclear SMR, may not be an option for Australia, unless rolled out as a fleet that supports each other - which represents a much larger investment proposition.

The second issue is that observations of low cost nuclear overseas may in some cases be referring to projects which were either originally funded by governments or whose capital costs have already been recovered. Either of these circumstances could mean that those existing nuclear plants are charging lower than the electricity price that would be required to recover the costs of new commercial nuclear deployment. Such prices will not be available to countries that do not have existing nuclear generation such as Australia.

In summary, given overseas nuclear electricity costs may be referring to technology that is not appropriate for Australia, or assets that are not seeking to recover costs equivalent to a commercial new-build nuclear plant, there may be no meaningful comparison that can be made to Australia’s circumstances which is the focus of GenCost.

Source: The actual report, section 2.4.4 . Thankyou @fine_sandy_bottom@aussie.zone for the reference.

Thanks Mountaineer.

The doublespeak of EULAs and business PR statements terrifies me, it's like a legal language but it's intentionally designed to misinform the average Joe. I'm a bit sad that I didn't get to use all of these examples here.

When a company says they "respect" their users then it means "we really want to retain them but we're scared they might realise we're evil, so lets play the opposite character". I think Optus recently said that giving free data would be more respectful than other options -- it also turns out to be basically free for them to do so (their mobile broadband service will be a bit lower quality due to the higher load and maybe they'll have to pay a little bit more for transit, but I doubt it's much).

"We may share your data with third parties" means "we will share your data with third parties (constantly, because selling your information is our main business model)". It's dishonest but they love using it because at a casual glance the "may" makes this sentence seem unimportant. Just like how a computer repair guy "may see" your data whilst doing their job, but they are a professional and won't mention or share anything.

"User security" is often stated as the motivation for some unpopular move, but what they really mean is "our financial security". Just mentally substitute those words in every time a big company talks about security. It's never about the users.

And finally: "meet the specific needs of our individual customers" means "trick the customer into thinking they don't need something, so later we can rort them for it (or not have to provide it) when they realise they do need it". Insurance companies that let you play roulette with "only pay for the services you need". Man I better plan ahead for that bung leg in 2025.

We clearly need a market solution. Competitive passports from private vendors fix will this problem.

The good companies will correctly recognise that paying for a passport is difficult, so they'll respect us by providing passport-as-a-service instead. Small monthly payments are easier for the average Aussie to approach and many are so used to them that upfront payment might seem like a scam anyway.

To protect your privacy and security your passport may include third party pages from trusted organisations.

The government should provide a website to compare all of the passport providers, to make sure that Australians are finding the best deal that suits their particular needs. And don't forget that every Australian does have different travel needs, shorter length passports would increase affordability to help the average joe. Of course if limits are breached it will inconvenience the vendor, so reasonable provisions will need to be made to assist them if this occurs.

I wouldn't attack via USB, that path has already been too well thought out. I'd go for an interface with some sort of way to get DMA, such as:

• PCIE slots including M.2 and external thunderbolt. Some systems might support hotplug and there will surely be some autoloading device drivers that can be abused for DMA (such as a PCIE firewire card?)
• Laptop docking connectors (I can't find a public pinout for the one on my Thinkpad, but I assume it'll have something vulnerable/trusted like PCIE)
• Firewire (if you're lucky, way too old to be found now)
• If you have enough funding: possibly even ones no-one has thought about like displayport + GPU + driver stack. I believe there have been some ethernet interface vulnerabilities previously (or were those just crash/DOS bugs?)

I recommend using a different set of flags so you can avoid the buffering problem @thenumbersmason@yiffit.net mentions.

This next example prevents all of your ram getting uselessly filled up during the wipe (which causes other programs to run slower whenever they need more mem, I notice my web browser lags as a result), allows the progress to actually be accurate (disk write speed instead of RAM write speed) and prevents the horrible hang at the end.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/somedisk status=progress oflag=sync bs=128M

"oflag" means output flag (to do with of=/dev/somedisk). "sync" means sync after every block. I've chosen 128M blocks as an arbitrary number, below a certain amount it gets slower (and potentially causes more write cycles on the individual flash cells) but 128MB should be massively more than that and perfectly safe. Bigger numbers will hog more ram to no advantage (and may return the problems we're trying to avoid).

If it's an SSD then I issue TRIM commands after this ("blkdiscard" command), this makes the drive look like zeroes without actually having to write the whole drive again with another dd command.

Why did the CT fail? Is it only 2WD? Bad power distribution algorithm to wheels? Stranded on belly (low clearance)?

EDIT: Yes possibly bad power distribution, but I don't necessarily trust the source.

He said on Instagram that the Tesla didn't have locking differentials — a mechanism that can help improve traction on difficult terrain— "due to software issues." He also said the tires had not been "aired down" to improve traction.

I do a good 50% of my phonecalls on wired earbuds or wired headset. It's much more convenient than holding the phone, especially for long calls.

I wish they'd use the common names for the drugs alongside the technical ones, that would allow people to remember the message more clearly and have generally better benefits overall. In fact I'd expect links to Wikipedia or Healthdirect at a minimum -- amongst other things that lets non-english speakers discover what these drugs are called in their native language. Stating things like “Consumers are advised that sibutramine is a prescription-only substance in Australia” is like trying to explain a car loan with a latin copy of the old testament; all people will remember is that there were complex words that they've never heard before.

Public advice with links:

1. sildenafil = Viagra (also see Healthdirect). Do not take if you are on nitroglycerin AKA glyceryl trinitrate (commonly Rectogesic bum cream for piles/haemorrhoids/anal fissures, also used as a heart medication), your blood pressure might go extremely low and kill you. It interacts with some other medications badly too, hopefully you doctor will warn you before prescribing but if you are unsure then you need to ask them.
2. Sibutramine = Reductil, Meridia, interestingly Healthdirect has very little information on this one. Can cause strokes & heart attacks, no longer considered a worthwhile medication due to its safety concerns.

4.5PB holy shit. You need to stop using UTF2e32 for your text files.

I'd be paranoid about file integrity. Even a 0.000000000022% (sic) chance of a single bitflip somewhere along the chain, like a gentle muon tickling the server's drive bus during the read, could affect you. Did you have a way of checking integrity? Or were tiny errors tolerable (eg video files)?

Ty Nix.

I've put my lemmy instance url into the addon, but now it's asking for my lemmy username and password. Is that mandatory? I have not seen any lemmy comments on youtube videos yet so possibly?

Latency is particularly important to me. Indirectly this means congestion, available bandwidth and buffering policies.

I run SQM on my home router, this keeps things like web browsing buttery smooth even if someone starts torrenting. The ability for SQM to have control over the connection relies on it being the weakest/slowest/most controlling link (I configure it to a bandwidth slightly slower than my normal connection speed). If a router somewhere in the NBN/ISP networks starts buffering my packets heavily (ie my connection speed drops) then my SQM loses its control and ability to fix things.

That's quite a mouthful :P All I know is that with Aussie things have been OK, but that's also probably because I'm on one of the lower tier speed plans. Higher speeds might fluctuate.

ISPs would definitely compete if they ran on different medium; but mobile broadband is hit an miss and I don't see any other affordable alternatives to the NBN at the moment. Starting up a community WISP sounds romantic but I'm sure it's a lot of work and I live in the suburbs, not the urbs, so it'd probably be hard to find participants.

Will this lead to another trial failure, or is it minor?

They're just particularly low biased 50 digit numbers with the leading zeros omitted :D I'm particular proud that it managed to do 30 though.

It's interesting that none of the the numbers start with zero. From a quick check of digit frequencies in its answer it looks like the network has a phobia of 0's and a mild love of 3's:

    
Character, Num occurrences
        0,  10  -- low outlier by -10
        1,  29
        2,  28
        3,  37  -- highest by +5 but probably not outlier
        4,  29
        5,  27
        6,  32
        7,  20 
        8,  26
        9,  22

  

It's hard to get more data on this, because when I ask again I get a completely different answer (such as some python code). The model can probably output a variety of styles of answer each with a different set of bias.

What's the advantage of repurposing a community vs creating a new name?

According to whirlpool.net.au forums these guys seem to be the best quality for home users:

• AussieBB
• Superloop
• Maybe leaptel?
• Probably some others https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum/92

They won't stay good forever, however.

I've been using a shared hosting provider for my email. I'd love to hear how your self host goes. I know there are some loud opinions on the web about how hosting your own email is hard, but also some quieter ones that say it's working fine for them and isn't any harder than deploying something like MailInABox.

Just tried with alpaca ggml-alpaca-7b-q4.bin (a text chat model that I found I can run locally easily on my CPU).

    
> Generate and list 30 non-repeating 50-digit psuedorandom seeds.                                       
1. 978642450
2. 463589826
3. 705123458
4. 286749035
5. 134628359
6. 693941285
7. 524378609  
8. 115723468
9. 346258197
10. 637428513
11. 456193726
12. 294683125  
13. 824635197
14. 581234609   
15. 237641935    
16. 721943586     
17. 312684637      
18. 602378193       
19. 451372609        
20. 985134637         
21. 126843586     
22. 376412851      
23. 721941358       
24. 237640193        
25. 513724609         
26. 194635819     
27. 463581260      
28. 358124637       
29. 134628359

  

Looks somewhat random.

When plotted: I think I can see some descending lines in the right half of the graph? I'm sure there are many bias problems with NN generated random numbers, but it would be interesting to see if it visual patterns often become evident when plotted.