abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

You pay for every "token" that goes into or comes out of the model.

You can loosely think of a token as as word - though it's not exactly right.

In USB-4 the only "alt" mode is Thunderbolt, which is basically PCI over a cable.

The latest USB standard has a minimum of 20 Gigabit. Of course, they could only support USB 2, but there would be complaints.

Also I want to say, your scenario is troublesome that GitHub itself could not come up with a satisfactory answer. Strange.

They have github.com/search, but for some reason it returns zero results... presumably it's a limitation (optimisation?) of their search index.

1000% disagree. The web, for example, would never exist if it was limited to a single browser - regardless of wether that browser was open source or proprietary, it has only been as successful as it is because it's an open standard.

Web Extensions are finally going the same way - https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/blob/main/charter.md — there have been attempts do this in the past, but they never worked. It is working this time and Chrome's stance on ad blocking is a direct threat to that.

I don't think the missing pin is a data pin - I think it might be a charge pin and possibly one that is only required for "fast" charging.

AFAIK a proper lightning cable can provide up to 30 watts, but way back in the early days of the cable the maximum was 5 watts and I wouldn't be surprised if there are physical differences in the wiring that separates those two speeds. There are probably other speeds in between those two as well.

They both showed the same speed of around 1400mA at time of testing.

... yeah that's only 7W. Like I said, lightning does up to 30W, though with an iPhone 8 the maximum is 12W (or 18W for an iPhone 8 Plus). So it seems my theory is correct, the missing pin is compromising charge speed.

You said you compared ti to an "original Apple cable"... but not all Apple cables have the same specs. The ones that charge faster are generally heavier and not as nice to use (also, more expensive).

Lighting is loosely based on USB (Apple was heavily involved in the USB-C cable/connector design process and working on it at the same time as they were inventing the Lightning cable. They seem to have done a lot of things the same in both - since they both had all the same requirements).

USB can operate with anywhere between 4 and (I think) 14 wires. And a lot of those extra wires are redundant, for example you can fight EM noise (interference from other nearby electrical devices) by sending the same data "inverted" at the same time across two cables running in parallel. If there's no interference, that doesn't gain you any performance at all, but if there is interference it could be the difference between a cable that works perfectly and a cable that doesn't work at all.

It's pretty common for cables to have pins that aren't being used - a USB-C cable with only 4 internal wires will have a lot more than 4 pins... so removing a pin is probably fine. However I'd question what else they also removed... some things are definitely not OK to remove from the cable and many of them can't be seen from the outside. You'd have to disassemble the cable or do a CT scan.

As far as I know, MFI certification involves sending sample cables to a third party company that will test the cable and make sure it's compliant.

Just because the cables they sent in for testing were complaint doesn't mean the one they sold you is compliant. In a country with strong consumer protections, you'd be entitled to a refund if someone sold you a non-compliant cable that they claimed was compliant.

Don't mess around with this stuff. People have literally been killed by unsafe phone chargers.

Not the same one, but basically the same crime committed elsewhere and this time with a few photos, though they could be better.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/secret-crawlspace-cryptomine-discovered-in-routine-inspection-of-ma-high-school/

You don't actually need that many computers to draw a stupid amount of power. For example if you're willing to run a Peltier cooling system... which burns ridiculous amounts of electricity to rapidly transfer heat out of the GPU and into the surrounding air (where more power will be consumed by the building's HVAC system working it's ass off to cool the room even when it's snowing outside)....

I could easily see just several mining rigs burn 20,000 watts. Run that for an entire year, and you're looking at an electricity bill running up to tens of thousands of dollars.

You wouldn't be able to draw much more than that without major upgrades that would be very difficult to do stealthily.

They are. Chrome will have to be optional on Android.

Microsoft is being very pro-active by acting on this in November when the regulation stipulates a March deadline. I'd expect most gatekeepers to be well on the way towards that March deadline by now but they'll start actually shipping that work around February.

Sure - but this isn't just about chrome extensions. There's a (good) movement towards standardised browser extensions that work in all browsers and all the major browsers (including Chrome/FireFox) are on board with that.

So, Chrome allowing ad blockers to function properly is good news for everyone. We don't want to go back to a world where every browser needs a different ad blocker.

Yep, they said a software update is coming next year.

Probably part of their legal appeal to get themselves removed from the Digital Services Act... something they're a niche player in the messaging services industry... Never mind the fact iMessage has billions of users sending a quarter million messages per second.

Did you mean FTC?

And just Apple’s word and a pinkie swear is enough to trust that they won’t censor content for China?

Probably not, no. But before smashing down the door guns blazing... how about a polite knock on the door and a few simple questions?

Doesn't mean you trust the answers, but it's worth asking first. Because they might have an answer you weren't expecting such as "yeah I'm pretty sure it was the house next door that had screams coming out of it half an hour ago... whoever called 911 gave you the wrong address".

Maybe they cancelled the show because nobody was watching it, and the fact an episode china might not have linked was just a coincidence.

Congress is absolutely capable of affecting this. For example they could force Apple to withdraw from China (they way they have done with Nvidia).

(I'm not saying they will, but they definitely could)

Or ... they could just get their magnets from one of several other countries that have the capability to produce them, but aren't doing so because there's no demand for it.

Absolutely. You can easily create electricity on a remote mountain. Creating gasoline... that's not really possible. You have to pay a fortune for someone to deliver it (or worse, go get it yourself). You can't get gasoline delivered in bulk either - common ethanol blended gasoline can spoil in just two months and wherever you're buying it from might have already stored it for a month or more.

Gas prices in back country areas are often double or quadruple what people pay in the city and living there also means driving a lot more per week. Electricity on the other hand is practically free if you produce it yourself (small scale hydro for example can cost a couple thousand dollars for reliable continuous power and if you're in the mountains then you probably have that option).

otherwise every panel will become discolored over time.

Yeah I don't care about that. My issue with my current truck is many of the places (50?) where I've scratched the paint off, and cleaned/re-painted it as soon as I could, have started to rust - which is probably going to result in the car being sold for scrap metal even though it's still perfectly drivable. Eventually that rust is going to become more than just a cosmetic problem and the car definitely isn't worth the time required to fix it properly (cut out the rust and put new sheet metal in it's place).

I won't be buying a cybertruck... but I definitely would prefer stainless steel over mild steel body panels. I'd like aluminium even better (stainless steel does still rust, just not as easily).

The standard @ symbol has four horizontal lines and worse the right side of the "a" is a vertical line contained inside a circle without touching it.

In a variable width font it's often fully twice as wide as a regular "a" character. The variable width font lemmy uses for example, at least as rendered by my computer has six pixels for a lowercase "a" and also six pixels for the small one contained inside the "@" symbol, then another six pixels of width for the circle around it.

That's an impossible task in a fixed width code font where users typically choose a size so small that the regular "a" can't be reduced any further while still being readable.

Which is why basically all code fonts (including Source Code Pro) cheat and modify the symbol so the inner circle overlaps the outer one on the right edge. Some of them do that better than others at inventing their own variant of @.

I've been trying a new font every few months for years - and then I discovered Intel One Mono:

https://github.com/intel/intel-one-mono

Hard to describe what I like about the font but it just feels perfect.

Straight from the horses mouth:

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

Apple has a privacy policy that is not only easy to understand, but easily organised and with links to more details/etc - often small privacy features have entire white-papers published explaining how they work in detail. And all of it is thoroughly reviewed by third parties and Apple would be screwed (especially in countries that are not the USA) if they lied in their privacy policy.

The key takeaway, though, is this (not my words - copied verbatim from the privacy policy):

You are not required to provide the personal data that we have requested.

The key is Apple always requests access to your data. And, you can simply say no when they ask.

That might mean a feature won't be available - for example, if I leave my phone at a party... I'll get a message on my watch alerting me to go back and get it within a minute or so of leaving. That feature requires allowing your devices to track your location. I'm willing to do that, in part because Apple goes to extra lengths to hide the identity of the people they are tracking, but if you're not then fine with it, then don't enable the feature. It's disabled by default.

CarPlay is essentially a HDMI connection. Your car doesn't get anything except a raw video signal and Apple forces car manufacturers to have their systems audited by a trusted third party which, among other things, will check to make sure the car isn't doing anything else with the data (such as OCR on the video signal).

When you use CarPlay - it's your phone that has your texts, contacts, call log, etc. The car doesn't get any of that. You phone does.

And if you don't want your phone to know where you are, it's disabled by default. You don't have to do turn by turn navigation in CarPlay - turn by turn is disabled by default (because enabling it requires tracking you) and you can just listen to podcasts and you can use a third party podcast app if you don't want apple to know what podcasts you listen to.

Years later its now multiple unskippable ads on a paid service where we pay to avoid ads.

You must be listening to different podcasts to me. Those "hobbiest" content creators are still there, and they tend to have decent microphones now and have learned how to create fairly high production value content. Yes, they have ads, but they're short and skippable (or even at the end of the episode) and you want them to get paid for their work right? Otherwise they won't do it.

Sure, shitty podcasts are also available. Just don't subscribe to them.