abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

Hard to send a kid to youth detention when they're full.

Those batteries in your photo are NiMH batteries... which discharge on their own at a fairly rapid rate even if you're not using them at all. They're also pretty big and heavy for the amount of power they provide (which, due to the self-discharge issue, is effectively a lot lower than the official number on the battery).

I strongly recommend investing in devices that use 18650 batteries. They're about the same size/weight as a AA, and they last much longer (both in terms of from full to flat and also the number of years (decades?) of use you'll get from the battery.

A lot of "proprietary" batteries are in fact a bunch of 18650 cells wired together.

It's worth investing in good ones - the quality varies significantly from brand to the next. With a good 18650 cell, you won't be replacing it when the battery expires, you'll be transferring it to a new gadget when the gadget is broken or so old that you decided to buy a new/better model.

No idea about crypto, but Great Southern Bank is excellent.

They are a "customer owned" bank - so all profits the bank generates from the money you deposit, fees you pay (there aren't many fees) are returned to you, as both a customer and partial owner of the bank.

Where are the leftists with these tactics? Are we all collectively just too ethical for that kind of dirty shit?

Well for one thing in Australia they're not trying to reduce the voter turnout, because failing to show up at the polling booth on election day is a crime in this country (you don't have to vote... but you do have to turn up at the polling booths, or use one of the alternatives available for people who can't do that).

Going back to your original comment:

Clearly conservatives are jumping on the story in bad faith (as they always do) but the opposition from everyone else seems pretty legitimate

I'm talking about "everyone else" when I say "they". I'm not talking about Nick Cater. Obviously Nick isn't anonymous.

My experience, living within a few minutes drive of this pilot wind farm and the larger more recently built one nearby, is that nobody has ever presented any even remotely legitimate opposition.

There are a few people who think the turbines are ugly - OK I can accept that... but they generally don't feel strongly enough to put up much opposition. It's the people who go on about cancer, birth defects, surrounding farmland being unable to produce acceptable crop yields, etc... that's all complete bullshit and that has been the real and serious opposition which I've seen cause real and significant delays in our transition away from fossil fuels. Nobody (in a position to make decisions) is seriously worrying about what we're going to do with a wing when it wears out. Yes, someone has to figure out what to do, but it's an easily solvable problem.

Unfortunately the more serious, and more crazy, opposition is more successful. Not because their arguments are legitimate but because enough of the general public falls for it and they can't be ignored if you want to win an election. These are long term projects, they can't be delivered within a single election cycle, so maintaining support within the community is necessary for the project to actually happen.

updates for safari are generally tied to the operating system

Sure - but Apple also ships bugfix and web standards compatibility updates for old versions of Safari. You don't have to be running the latest version to be fully supported. You only need the latest version for user interface features (tab grouping, etc).

It's generally only a problem with really old hardware.

Apple's current 7 year cutoff includes radical evolutions of hardware over recent years.

The latest cutoff, as far as I know, is Macs that typically were sold with a spinning rust HDD - which are honestly useable anyway on the new filesystem which has been designed from the ground up for SSDs. Modern MacOS just can't cope with seek time lag to access the disk.

The big cutoff before that was transitioning from 32 bit to 64 bit CPUs. And the next cutoff will be from x86 to ARM.

Apple doesn't have a hard cutoff - they have a "we will support as far back as we can" cutoff, which is a combination of the cost required to keep it compatible and the number of actual users on old hardware.

Also - even after things are no-longer "supported" they often still get security patches from Apple. Especially if something is actually being exploited.

Who is “they”?

"They" are anonymous, in part because some of their tactics are illegal. The person in this article is guilty of trespassing for example.

Did you bother to read the original article…

Yes I did. I'm not disputing there's opposition by some conservatives. But their opposition has mostly been far more reasonable. It's more "we don't think tax payers should be footing the bill for this wind farm". I disagree, but it's a valid position to take.

I'm talking more about the miss-information, such as claiming that the turbine blades were "secretly buried in a shallow grave" when in fact they and are being stored while waiting for someone to buy them.

I’d just suggest that this is a defacto ban.

To be honest, I'm OK with that. If I want a bot to summarise an article, I'll go to ChatGPT or use Bing Chat. I don't come to BeeHaw to interact with a bot. I'm here to interact with humans and in my opinion it should be a human that decides to post a link to an article and that human should also summarise it. They will do a better job than even the best bot.

While I'm not outright opposed to bots, I have yet to see a bot on Lemmy or Reddit that actually added value to the community. Usually every bot I encounter gets blocked the first time I see it.

Unfortunately a lot of bots on Lemmy that's not really an option, for example a bot that finds interesting articles and posts them on Lemmy... I don't want to see those posts, but at the same time I might want to see the discussion around the article. So I can't block it.

The only real repercussions would be if someone could prove they were seriously harmed by the lies. E.g. a business that loses all their customers, or a person who gets fired as a result of the lies.

but they absolutely deserve to be scrutinised and opposed if they will cause significant and/or unnecessary damage to the local environment.

I grew up and live near the wind farm in the article. Wind power isn't being "scrutinised". Rather there has been a 30 year long deep rooted and frankly disgusting campaign to try and make it impossible to transition to clean energy.

Virtually everything they have spread has been complete and utter bullshit. Including claims that somehow just standing within a 50 miles of a wind turbine will kill you. They've also repeatedly and consistently claimed that various groups oppose the turbines when in fact those groups support it.

This was a small pilot program to verify whether or not wind power is viable long term. It's one of the oldest (modern) wind farms int he world and has for decades produced reliable power to a few thousand homes. It has ultimately lead to much larger wind farms being built on the same mountain range and those have faced similar fear campaigns - again with nobody really knowing who is backing the campaigns.

I doubt it's coming from "conservatives". There's no evidence of that. The pilot has been extremely successful and is broudly supported by everyone... except for nutcases who seem to think wind power is an existential threat to human life or something ridiculous.

As you say even a dot at the top would be adequate to show there’s notifications

That red dot on my Apple watch is always there. I always have notifications.

The biggest advantage Siri has is it's able to perform simple actions on the phone, without connecting to the internet at all.

That's always going to be faster than sending your voice to a server and waiting for a response.

As for how reliable it is - a lot of that depends how much you use it. It's a machine learning voice processing algorithm that needs to learn the owner's voice and it works a lot better when you've issued tens of thousands of commands than when you've only issued a few.

That has to do with the fact that iOS runs the UI on a separate thread with a higher priority,

No that's not true at all. In fact iPhone CPUs are under-clocked whenever they're idle, running at about 0.5Ghz which is drastically less than full speed.

When you tap on a button, an iPhone CPU might ramp up to full speed, but by the time it does the animation is already half way completed. However usually the CPU load during the animation is so low that it doesn't bother to ramp up.

There's nothing high priority at all about an animation on an iPhone. If it was Apple would setup their CPUs to run animations at the full clock speed.

iPhone animations are fast because they use low level GPU instructions such as "here's a static image, move it to the left by half a dozen pixels, repeat until it has moved all the way from one end of the screen to the other". Any phone sold in the last 20 years can do transitions like that effortlessly.

Android hardware is absolutely capable of stutter free animations. And the software could be extensively rewritten to be more efficient. They've had 15 years to do that work and they still haven't done it, even though for that entire time the iPhone has had smooth animations. At this point I'm not sure it will ever be fixed.

A beefier CPU won't help much. Bottlenecked software will be slow even on the best hardware. The video frame is stuttering because the CPU is doing something else - probably twiddling it's thumbs idle while waiting for slow flash memory to provide a file. And why is the flash memory slow? Again, because they choose to put slow flash memory in the phone. Fast flash memory is available, it probably just costs and extra five bucks. Users would be happy to pay five bucks more for a significantly faster phone... but the phone manufacturers want to keep that profit for themselves.

On my pixel with graphene os, I have changed the animation speed to be much faster, and it takes maybe a quarter of a second to do those same actions. Ofc I didn’t time anything but the iOS animations felt like slow motion compared to my phone

iPhone developer here.

The default animation speed on iOS is 0.2 seconds. I agree, faster would be nicer... but it's already less than a quarter of a second. Personally I like animations closer to 0.05 seconds... but that's not the norm on the platform and in fact changing it is difficult.

Anyway I don't think that's what OP was talking about, I think they meant the smoothness of the animations, not the speed of them? A 0.2 second animation is 48 animation frames on a modern high end iPhone. On a lot of android phones it would be significantly less than that, especially Samsung (and they said they're coming from Samsung) which has a reputation for dropping frames in animations.

Samsung's issue is a combination of not caring enough to get the software right and also choosing to use hardware that has a tendency to throttle itself to avoid overheating. The techniques Apple does are not rocket science, Samsung could make their animations run smoothly and reliably. They choose not to assign developer resources to that task. And it shows.

Most people use a gesture - swipe from the left edge of the screen. Or from the bottom if you want to leave the app.

I hate the lightning connector, it’s a PITA compared to UsbC but I don’t interact with it often, only for charging.

Do yourself a favor and get a magsafe charger. It's far better than USB or Lightning.

Valuation is usually based on potential revenue, not actual revenue. A $2 billion valuation would have been about $50 per user. It seems reasonable Stack Exchange should be able to make that much money per user somehow over the entire future existence of the company... if it's run well. Which doesn't seem to be happening from where I'm sitting.

What’s your opinion? Does google really “not work” anymore?

Depends what you're searching for. For some searches I've given up on using it. For example I just purchased a new TV and one of the features wasn't working. It took me several hours of Googling to figure out how to fix it — almost every result offered by Google didn't contain an answer to my question.

Are there any better search engines?

ChatGPT works well for some searches. Especially if you pay for GPT-4.

It's pretty impressive how ChatGPT is better than Google despite never being designed as a replacement for Google. I think when someone applies the same technology to a proper search product, the result will be really awesome. Time will tell who manages to pull that off - it might even be Google.

Why did the quality of search results go down?

The main issue, I think, is all the websites these days that exist exclusively to show banner ads. Many of them are packed with information that Google's algorithm determines might be relevant to the user, but the algorithm is wrong.

The websites want you to click on an Ad, and you're a lot more likely to click an Ad if you give up, don't find what you're looking for, and decide to buy a new weight loss gadget instead.

I'm sure part of the problem is Google itself is an ad company. A lot of the things they could do to fix this issue would harm their own revenue.

No, it's not a fork. A fork is when you take the Chromium browser and change it.

This uses the same rendering engine as Chromium - but the browser itself was built from scratch, uses a completely different architecture, and on other operating systems it doesn't use Chromium at all.

As for "forced to create an account" Arc is temporarily free. Longer term you'll have to pay a subscription to use it. So it makes sense that you need to sign up.