arc @ arc @lemm.ee

Posts

0

Comments

598

Joined

2 yr. ago

Not necessarily. It might be privacy but it could also be a combination of other reasons too - a cultural aversion to paperless transactions, a lack regulation for electronic payments, lack of a decent indigenous payment system, lack of financial safeguards, prevalence of fraud / skimming devices etc.

Some European countries were more into electronic transactions than others but with stuff like SEPA, chip & PIN, contactless payments I think most people are just fine using electronic payment unless they have reason to control the transaction in some way. For example I usually pay pretty much everything electronically but I still pay taxis and most restaurants with cash. Also tradesmen if they'll give me a discount for cash.

Not to mention the impending massive economic crisis they're about to go through - Japanese automotive industry is heavily in debt and watching China eat their lunch. While China was building battery plants and electric cars, Toyota was chasing hydrogen and other go-nowhere technologies.

It definitely seems like an irrelevant point. All car sheet steel arrives in rolls.

I'd be more concerned about how it is formed into panels, how resistant it is to corrosion, what tolerances parts have, how easy is it to replace parts, whether there are visible production flaws due to it being naked steel, and if construction techniques or material thickness makes it more dangerous to occupants or pedestrians in collisions.

I certainly won't be surprised if pictures start appearing in a year or two of cybertrucks that have been completely fucked by salt water corrosion, or heat warppage or other issues caused by their design.

Nah you tried to imply something not born out by reality and got downvoted for it.

Twitter is filled with idiots who'll pronounce London/Paris/wherever is under Sharia law. Never seems to occur to them that this is very easy to fact check.

Elon was mulling pulling out of the EU and I really want this dumbass to follow through on that threat.

I live in Europe where trucks are fairly rare but you still see large SUVs, 4x4s and vans around. My own feeling is that certain classes of vehicles should be considered commercial for the purposes of insurance, taxation, VAT, inspection, tolls, permitted usage and everything else. The legislation already exists for commercial vehicles so extend it to these kind of vehicles.

So is someone must have a stupidly oversized vehicle purely for personal reasons they can enjoy all the bullshit and restrictions that goes with it. Doesn't stop them complying but making it more onerous to do it will take demand for these vehicles off the market entirely.

Yup. Not much of it survives in the code since it was mostly rewritten from scratch but I guess if you looked at the nspr (portable runtime) or nss (crypto) code that there are remnants of those early days still in there.

There are still bits of XUL around but I believe the preference is to use HTML elements wherever possible and they've been stripping XUL elements out.

The way Mozilla worked and Firefox still works is there is a cross platform front-end implemented in XUL which is XHTML, CSS and Javascript. The engine underneath is the same (Gecko) but the frontend app over the top is what the user sees and controls buttons, menus, functionality.

Firefox was basically a fork of Mozilla stripped of the not-browser stuff and a cleaned up UI. It proved popular as a prototype so it grew into its own thing and Mozilla suite was abandoned. There is still a Seamonkey project that keeps Mozilla suite alive but it's outside of the Mozilla foundation.

The reason it's faster is that Mozilla was an entire suite expressed as a lot of XUL so it impacted loading times. XUL also had this neat trick that you could overlay XUL over the top of other XUL so the mail app was injecting buttons, menus and whatnot into the browser and vice versa. This was cached but it still had to be loaded. In addition and probably just as impactful, was that Mozilla shipped as dynamic libraries (DLLs) and a relatively small EXE, so it took time to start. In Firefox, the number of DLLs was reduced with static linking so it was more efficient to load.

Erm yes it was But here is a more or less chronological ordering of getting to Firefox today.

1. Netscape Navigator
2. Netscape Communicator 4.x (a suite of email, browser, calendar, HTML composer)
3. Netscape Communicator 5.0 is abandoned as a commercial product because engine is getting old and Microsoft is being anti-competitive
4. Netscape open sources Netscape Communicator 5.0 as Mozilla with the proprietary bits & crypto stripped out. BTW Mozilla was the internal name of Netscape exposed in the user agent and easter eggs like about:mozilla
5. Netscape / Mozilla starts NGLayout which is a rewrite of the HTML engine
6. NGLayout becomes Gecko
7. Mozilla suite is based on Gecko using extensible XUL architecture
8. Netscape themed browser released based on Mozilla with proprietary AOL stuff like AIM client
9. A bunch of other things happening at this point like versions of AOL, Compuserve using Gecko
10. Microsoft pays AOL a huge amount of money to not use Gecko in AOL client and make a lawsuit go away
11. AOL lays off most of the Netscape staff & tosses some money to get Mozilla Foundation going
12. Mozilla foundation splits the browser into Firefox which doesn't use so much XUL in the browser but is still the Mozilla / Gecko code base. It proved popular because it was more focused and loaded a bit quicker.
13. Mozilla foundation also splits email into Thunderbird along similar lines
14. Firefox progresses to where it is today.

So yeah it's a continuation all the way back. I also worked at Netscape at the time so I got to see much of this transition.

Personally I've never left Firefox. Used to develop on it when it was still called Mozilla, and I'm happy it's still around. Privacy is a major strength of it compared to other browsers.

From what I see Media Matters said ads were placed against antisemitic / racist posts and then Twitter confirmed it. So wtf is the lawsuit even about???? Twitter tried to cast it as "free speech" or that these ads were a fraction of their total but the reality is they happened. So all I see happening if Twitter goes ahead with a lawsuit is a) they get anti-SLAPPed back to where they were or b) they go to trial and get screwed by discovery and reality. In a way I hope they don't get the anti-SLAPP since discovery would kill them.

The dumb part is this vow doesn't even make sense on the face of it to protect national security.

You'd think when Fallout 4 was panned, and when Fallout 76 was panned that somebody in Bethesda might have said "hey maybe we need a new game director". And also "maybe we need a new game engine". Instead they went with the tried and trusted and shat out Starfield to the acclaim of nobody.

Online services like games consoles and the likes of Steam / Epic should really allow games to be bundled such that users can choose to only install the "recommended" content rather than everything - the textures for their display & graphics card and multimedia and other assets for their region & localization. If a game is level based they could even grab it the first time it is used, rather than all up front. I bet in a lot of cases it would shave 30% off the download size.

Another source of bloat would be duplicate content - a hold over from hard disks where the cost of seeking an asset meant game data files would hold duplicates of assets wherever they were needed to load-in which increases bloat. In the days of SSDs, that should no longer be necessary but I bet a lot of games still do it anyway. Publishers just need to decide if they're going to support HDDs or not and if the answer is not, then stop bloating games for no reason.

I have an Ender 3 Pro and bed leveling was the bane of my life. I've more or less conquered it by using heavier springs that keep their compression and not going too tight on each corner. I also use Klipper and a BL Touch to generate a bed mesh to compensate if one corner is higher than the others.

The same Giuliani who hung out with dodgy Russian businessmen & corrupt Ukrainian officials. Who conspired to oust the US ambassador to Ukraine and who took money for "consultancy" on bogus Ukraine projects. These new revelations SHOCK me.

In the UK you do hill starts as a part of the driving test. They're not useless because if you don't know how to do it, then you're going to roll back or cut out when you start off and that's a fail. Plenty of places have roads and hills. Hence why they're part of the test. Typically, you apply the parking brake, release the clutch enough to "bite" and hold you in place, release the brake and continue to release the clutch as you press on the accelerator. All in a controlled fashion.

Of course, fancier cars have hill start assist and electronic parking brakes these days so I don't know what happens if you show up for your test in one of those - they probably just do the test anyway because I'm sure people still manage to screw up.

Most of not-North-America drive around in manual vehicles. Have to wonder what the allure is of something which is kind of mundane and boring. When I'm driving a manual I'm not thinking I'm Steve McQueen, instead I'm just constantly shifting gears between sets of traffic lights. If people really want to connect with a car, then buy an EV. Instant torque and responsiveness without screwing around with extra sticks and pedals or suffering the rubber banding in some automatics.