abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Then there are fairly good projectors for like $80 or less

Um. You and I have a very different idea of "fairly good". The only good projector I've used (at work, not my own) cost $12,000. It's overkill for a home theatre, but not by a wide margin.

If you want a projector as bright as a TV you could buy for 20 bucks at a goodwill store, you need to spend quite a bit of money on it... especially if you also want decent black levels and of course significantly larger than a cheap LCD (otherwise why get a projector).

You also forgot sound. Good speakers aren't cheap either. And you definitely don't want the sound coming from the projector itself. Or from your laptop speakers.

I recommend rectangular cable ducts where one face can be removed instead of using conduit. Also, it should never run parallel to a 110/220V power cable - you can cross them, but don't run alongside them. Low voltage power (like PoE) is fine.

Finally - tell anyone who works on your house that if you find any electrical tape or cable ties — you're going to ask them to come back and remove them - I wouldn't do it yourself especially cable ties since there's a non-zero risk you might damage the cable and have to run a new one.

Those two things should never be used — they're quick and dirty tools used by lazy people who want to spend 10 seconds less time on today's job, and don't care if it creates hours of extra work in a few year's time.

Velcro strapping tape is the way to go. It lasts longer and is easily removed. The only drawback is it's a little ugly - I'll use tape or cable ties if the wiring is exposed... but you shouldn't have any exposed wiring in a house.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Reusable-Fastening-Cable-Double-Sided-Management/dp/B09C3SVY9Q

https://www.amazon.com.au/Rectangular-Cable-Duct-25-16mm/dp/B07QM6X9V7

2.4Ghz is the right frequency to use - it has pretty good internal wall penetration and you want that. You don't need much bandwidth to turn alight on, so there's nothing wrong with a bit of competition on the channel.

Your TV/etc shouldn't be on a wireless connection.

Things are incredibly unstable right now and this surplus is evidence of that. Just a few years ago we had deficits around $100b.

The budget was designed to create a surplus of $4b which would have given government the ability to start thinking about how to recover from the recent massive defecits.

But because of the instability, the budget estimates were way off the mark — a large part of that was companies raising prices and making higher profits, therefore paying more tax. That's both something the government has no control over and also something the government tried to prevent.

iTunes didn't start life as a first party app though. They bought a third party app (SoundJam MP) and hired the entire development team. That team shipped iTunes shortly after and at least one of them still works for Apple today.

While iTunes 1.0 was quite different from SoundJam, it's likely they were working on a major redesign when Apple bought them and they simply finished it off - I'd guess Apple's only real contribution was the "glass" user interface elements which eventually became systemwide.

iTunes got progressively less logical/intuitive with every release after the initial purchase.

Here's SoundJam MP, iTunes 1.0, and iTunes 10.0 which was either the best or worst version (best, because it had the most features, worst, because do you really want a social network and movies/tv shows in your music player?) — from iTunes 11 onwards they finally cut features, but threw out the baby with the bathwater.

Why doesn't your survey include email? That's by far the most widely used decentralised messaging system.

I would probably just uninstall the app and switch to something else to be honest.

I can't remember the last time I cleared a cache. Ten years ago maybe? Also, I don't need to be told to clear a cache when I'm not having any problems.

Sure - for example we migrated all our stuff from MySQL to MariaDB.

It was completely painless, because all of the source code and many of the people who wrote that code migrated to MariaDB at the same time. They made sure the transition was effortless. We spent a months second guessing ourselves, weighing all of our options, checking and triple checking our backups, verifying everything worked smoothly afterwards... but the actual transition itself was a very short shell script that ran in a few seconds.

I will never use a proprietary database unless it's one I wrote myself and I'd be extremely reluctant to do that. You'd need a damned good reason to convince me not to pick a good open source option.

My one exception to that rule is Backblaze B2. I do use their proprietary backup system, because it's so cheap. But it's only a backup and it's not my only backup, so I could easily switch.

I'm currently mid transition from MariaDB to SQLite. That one is more complex, but not because we did anything MariaDB specific. It's more that SQLite is so different we have a completely different database design (for one thing, we have hundreds of databases instead of just one database... some of those databases are less than 100KB - the server just reads the whole thing into RAM and slow queries on our old monolithic database are less than 1 millisecond with this new system).

never use anything vendor specific like stored procedures, vendor specific datatypes or meta queries

Yeah we don't do anything like that. All the data in our database is in a JSON type (string, number, boolean, null) with the exception of binary data (primarily images). It doesn't even distinguish between float/int - though our code obviously does. All of the queries we run are simple "get this row by primary key" or "find all rows matching these simple where clauses. I don't even use joins.

Stored procedures/etc are done in the application layer. For example we don't do an insert query anywhere. We have a "storage" object with simple read/write functions, and on top of that there's an object for each model. That model does all kinds of things, such as writing the same data in different places (with different indexes) and catching "row not found" failures with an "ok, lets check if it's in this other place". That's also the layer we do constraints which includes complex business rules, such as "even if this data is invalid — we will record it anyway, and flag it for a human to follow up on".

I don't — I just use S/MIME which doesn't require a server. You could argue PGP is more private, but I'd argue it's only "Pretty Good". 😋

Both are more than secure enough for anything I'd be willing to put in an email.

Because people already had a server to run Exchange, which is actually pretty good, and if you're already paying a fortune for Windows, why not use it?

Linux is definitely not free, you need to hire staff who know how it works and you probably also need to pay a support contract for someone even more qualified where necessary (e.g. Red Hat, who can patch the kernel if that's what it takes to fix your problem).

Since you're already paying for both of those with your Exchange server, it was cheaper to use IIS as well. These days Linux is a lot lower maintenance and support contracts are cheaper, so it's less of a concern.

It preemptively also includes any other future technology that aims to try the same thing

No it doesn't. For example you can, with compute power, for distortions introduced by camera lenses/sensors/etc and drastically increase image quality. For example this photo of pluto was taken from 7,800 miles away - click the link for a version of the image that hasn't been resized/compressed by lemmy:

The unprocessed image would look nothing at all like that. There's a lot more data in an image than you can see with the naked eye, and algorithms can extract/highlight the data. That's obviously not what a generative ai algorithm does, those should never be used, but there are other algorithms which are appropriate.

The reality is every modern photo is heavily processed - look at this example by a wedding photographer, even with a professional camera and excellent lighting the raw image on the left (where all the camera processing features are disabled) looks like garbage compared to exactly the same photo with software processing:

Aren’t we already in a kind of dark age?

A bit over 150 years ago, slavery was legal (and commonplace) in the United States.

Sure, lots of shitty stuff in the world today... but you don't have to go far back to a time when a sherif with zero evidence relying on unverified accusations and heresy would've put up a "wanted dead or alive" poster with a drawing of the guy's face created by an artist who had never even laid eyes on the alleged murderer.

I don't think OpenAI should be offering ChatGPT 3.5 at all except via the API for niche uses where quality doesn't matter.

For human interaction, GPT 4 should be the minimum.

The next step is to implement things like this:

https://github.com/WebAssembly/tool-conventions/blob/main/Coredump.md

After that, all we need is a rich ecosystem of libraries in other languages. It's still a fair way off, but it's coming.

Is there some huge benefit that I’m missing?

For example I recently fixed a bug where a function would return an integer 99.9999% of the time, but the other 0.0001% returned a float. The actual value came from a HTTP request, so it started out as a string and the code was relying on dynamic typing to convert that string to a type that could be operated on with math.

In testing, the code only ever encountered integer values. About two years later, I discovered customer credit cards were charged the wrong amount of money if it was a float value. There was no exception, there was nothing visible in the user interface, it just charged the card the wrong amount.

Thankfully I'm experienced enough to have seen errors like this before - and I had code in place comparing the actual amount charged to the amount on the customer invoice... and that code did throw an exception. But still, it took two years for the first exception to be thrown, and then about a week for me to prioritise the issue, track down the line of code that was broken, and deploy a fix.

In a strongly typed language, my IDE would have flagged the line of code in red as I was typing it, I would've been like "oh... right" and fixed it in two seconds.

Yes — there are times when typing is a bit of a headache and requires extra busywork casting values and such. But that is more than made up for by time saved fixing mistakes as you write code instead of fixing mistakes after they happen in production.

Having said that, I don't use TypeScript, because I think it's only recently become a mature enough to be a good choice... and WASM is so close to being in the same state which will allow me to use even better typed languages. Ones that were designed to be strongly typed from the ground up instead of added to an existing dynamically typed language.

I don't see much point in switching things now, I'll wait for WASM and use Rust or Swift.

The big difference is Memcached is multi-threaded, while Redis is single threaded.

That makes Redis more efficient - it doesn't have to waste time with locks and assuming the server isn't overloaded any individual operation should be faster in Redis. Potentially a lot faster.

But obviously by sharing the load across threads as Memcached does, and that cant theoretically allow higher throughput under high load... if your task is suited to multithreading and doesn't involve a shedload of contested locks.

Which one is a better choice will depend on your task. I'd argue don't limit yourself to either one, consider both, pick the one that aligns best with your needs.

Unless of course the corps use “fuck you” money to kill redis.

I doubt the corps are angry at redis. They just don't like the new terms.

The "mega-corps" have enough money that there's zero chance this is a money issue. It will be about control.

They don't want Redis to dictate terms over the software running on their servers. No amount of money will change their mind on that - they wouldn't accept the new terms if redis offered to pay them billions of dollars.

I was reading an article the other day about a couple who bought an ocean view home to retire.

It was perfect, but the neighbours driveway ran along the beach between their home and the beach - and they thought it would be nice to have a garden there instead... so they spoke to their new neighbour about maybe buying the land for the driveway, and selling him an equal sized strip of land on the other side of their property. Basically, no change to their neighbour's home at all - but the neighbour's driveway would go between two houses instead of along the beach.

All perfectly reasonable, but somehow it fell to shit when the neighbour... turned out to be a nutcase and bought two huge rusty shipping containers, an old bulldozer, cars that had been crashed, etc and dumped all of them along his driveway right next to their house. And when they complained, he added huge a canvas tarp sections between all that mess and the ocean. So now they can't even see the ocean at all from their home - all they can see is a huge white wall and a bunch of rusty old crap along their fence line.

If they were in a HOA... they would be able to force him to remove all of that junk. But they're not, so there's nothing they can do. They tried taking it to court, but the judge said "yeah, he's obviously an asshole... but it's his land. He is allowed to have shipping containers and ruined cars on his land".

If you're in a HOA, you might occasionally be forced to do something you'd rather not do. But you will never have to deal with totally unreasonable neighbours like that example. Living in a HOA definitely isn't something I'd want - but I can see why some people like them.

But anyway... I fail to see how that is any way like X. If anything X is exactly the opposite of a HOA... it's like buying a house in a suburb that's full of trolls and assholes. A "HOA" social network is a place where everyone is boring and if you're not boring, you get kicked out.