Dave. @ dgriffith @aussie.zone

I'm a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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2 yr. ago

Chrome mobile put up a pretty good fight. I have been meaning to put Firefox + ublock on my phone, maybe I'll stop being slack and finally do it today.

Accessing that from my phone shows the actual site content for about 3 seconds and then an endless array of "popup and notification blocked messages" as well as the usual combination of "oh noes your PC has three dangerous viruses click here to resolve" type redirects.

Is this just a cunning way to weed out the normies or can I expect the same kind of thing from their allegedly-excellent app? Because they're not leaving a good impression right now.

(looks at his Australian MVNO plan of unlimited calls and text and 100GB for ~USD30 and his ~2.3TB of monthly rolled-over data available)

Oh , it was 80GB a month, now it's 100. Cool.

Anyway, uh, that's great, mate, good to hear you're getting value for money over there compared to what's normally offered.

Competition is a good thing, keep encouraging it.

There were quite a few Delphi applications back in the day, they were easily recognisable by their "exit door" icon.

15 years ago I was running multi-tasking BASIC programs on a controller that had 2MB of storage. We should have been there by now.

Holy shit, they're still kicking around:

https://wilke.de/en/embedded-computer/details/zurueck/computer-module/products/tiny-tiger-multitasking-computer.html

I used a few for high speed logging of a quadrature rotary encoder to measure the speed of a hydraulic sampling arm. Battery powered , had a 4 line LCD and keypad with a simple menu interface to take samples, as well as a serial export function to get .CSV files via hyperterminal.

5 stars, would summon with an unholy mix of C++ and PHP again.

Mmm I have a general dislike of systemd because it doesn't adhere to the "do one thing and do it well" approach of traditional Unix systems.

It's a big old opaque blob of software components that work nicely together but don't play well with others, basically.

Edit: but it solved a particular set of problems in serverspace and it's bled over to the consumer Linux side of things and generally I'm ok with it if it simplifies things for people. I just don't want a monoculture to spring up and take root across all of Linux as monocultures aren't great for innovation or security.

"We're making the clock app cloud enabled! Now you'll be able to set and clear alarms from any of your Windows™ connected devices! We've also implemented customisable actions with PowerShell scripting now fully integrated! Want your display to show a lovely sunrise every morning? Clock App can do it!"

Next minute -

"Security update 13112023-33: A malicious user can access the internet-exposed ClockAccess™ interface on your devices, setting alarms with scripted actions that can cause complete loss or exfiltration of your data.

To mitigate this issue, we have shifted ClockAccess™ to a more secure, fully cloud-based service. This also means that once updated, the application will be unavailable if there is no internet access. Please adjust your usage of the application accordingly.

As the Clock app runs under a Local Administrator account on consumer versions of Windows™ and Domain Administrator on Windows Server™ machines, this is a high priority update and it will be installed on application startup without user confirmation. You may notice increased resource utilisation by the Clock App, this is a necessary increase due to new and improved security features. It is recommended that at least one vCPU and 1.5GB of memory be made available at all times for efficient operation of the app."

Ok I'll just inject a little bit of context into those numbers because it smells faintly of a hit piece by Reuters, simply because of the timeframe used and the number of employees spaceX has.

My experience is 30 years in the mining industry, which in that time has become pretty good at managing safety, and reporting on it.

So I'll dig in a little.

Since 2014, so nine years.

SpaceX employee count : 13000 approximately.

Take about a quarter of that to weed out the paper pushers and company growth since 2014, gives us 3500 or so employees in the line of fire (that is, manufacturing and such).

600 reportable injuries, so about 66 injuries a year. About 5.5 a month on average, over 9 years.

Now those 3500 employees work 60 hour weeks (because: spaceX). So 5.5 injuries and 840,000 man-hours a month. I'm going to round those hours up to 1 million for convenience and to counter the fact that I ditched quite a few people in my initial assessment of SpaceX employees in the line of fire before.

And with a bit of half-assery , I say, "ta-da!" and get 5.5 reportable injuries per million man-hours at SpaceX over the last 9 years.

So, what kind of number is that? Well for tracking this kind of thing normally you would work on a value called that "lost time injury frequency rate" - LTIFR - which is the number of injuries per million hours worked. Oh look, my previous rounding to a million has become very convenient.

Looking at the data that Reuters has given, and my half-assed guesses about employees, spaceX has a long term LTIFR of 5.5. Note that number drops significantly if you use SpaceX's entire employee base, which as a single entity, they would be quite entitled to use and report.

How does that number stand up against industry norms? 5.5 is middle of the road for manufacturing and construction, generally, but that includes all sorts of manufacturing, from building houses, to steel foundries , to making cars.

The fact that Reuters had to take 9 years of data to make the raw numbers sound alarming enough is a bad smell. They could have calculated LTIFR numbers for each year and figured out a trend and if that was alarming enough, they could have reported on it, like "SpaceX increasingly dangerous to work at!". The fact that they didn't makes me suspect it's a hit piece, although I am willing to accept they didn't want to get into LTIFR numbers and are dumbing it down for the general public.

Absolutely the number of serious injuries is a concern. Serious injuries are also at the top of a "injury pyramid", with every layer underneath broader, all the way down to "Ow, I stubbed my toe". If you have real figures for one layer (like a layer where an employee can't hide an injury), you can get a good idea of what the other layers should look like.

Judging from Reuters' numbers, the bottom "minor" layers aren't getting reported enough, which suggests a lack of safety culture at SpaceX. Although that could simply be from Reuters' using only public records, which, you know, only keep track of injuries worth keeping track of, so the bottom of that pyramid might only be seen by SpaceX internally.

In conclusion, the reporting by Reuters of raw numbers over long timeframes is suspect. That's not how things are done in the safety industry, which works with weighted metrics to get results they can compare between companies. Dig in a bit further yourself.

You're asking for help in entirely the wrong way, here I'll fix it for you:

"Linux is shit. I have an Asus Transformer T100TA and I thought I'd try MX Linux and fluxbox. I poked around for a few minutes and couldn't get any sort of battery display to work on it, when it's fully functional by default in windows. If this is the best that Linux can do in 2023, forget it, I'm sticking with windows."

There. That oughta do it!

"Ok where's my Linux Mint USB stick, it's time to make that live distro permanent."

Just put in something random each time.

"The voices told me to."

"Too many chickens."

"Been feeling real itchy lately. Down there."

"Clippy orchestrated 9/11"

"Microsoft Product support said to get some gift cards and then close OneDrive and Defender while they installed some important updates."

Your answer was 501 words, we have uninstalled all browsers except Edge and made Edge your default browser! Enjoy using Edge!

But look how fast we can make those little fuckers go!

It's just like slot car racing, round and round, but.... you know.... faster. And yeah, it's more expensive than a regular slot car track, I guess. But still, those particles will beat any slot car you care to pick! So there's that. Welllll not those fancy slot cars with them high performance motors, I mean, that's a completely different ballgame there, we can't compete with that.

But still, those particles whizzing around, it's gonna be pretty cool. I reckon we should do it.

So anyway, thank you for reading my financial proposal for the SuperLHC.

Oh absolutely. A simple "home theatre room" kind of setup can do wonders, but even at that point you're starting to get beyond what the average person has.

and begin a more organised push for their political aims.

"Anarchists, let's unite, and seize power from the corrupt government! Ok, so first we need a leader...."

The issue is when dynamic range exceeds the buffer you have in your viewing environment.

So you can easily mix a movie with 45dB dynamic range, and you have been able to distribute that to the masses for 30+ years. And so you can also accurately and easily portray a stage whisper at 50dB and then have an action sequence peaking at a modest 95dB in a relatively soundproofed cinema with 30 speakers and a couple of thousand watts behind it.

But for me to hear that movie on my TV in my 65dB environment means the next action sequence is now 110dB, well past the capability of my TV speakers to accurately reproduce, and also well past the level where I would consider it to be fucking loud.

If you're mixing audio for a home release you need to compress your dynamic range to 30dB or so to suit. The number of viewers that have a sound system and a viewing environment that can comfortably allow 45dB of range is very, very, small, and if those people want to complain about the lack of dynamic range, they can get themselves an expander and go nuts.

What do you mean, you don't have a $1400 wooden volume knob to help suppress harmonics? Coupled with a True DC source with microvolt ripple for your final stages It's like lifting a veil from the sound stage!

Edit: No, seriously, there are people like that. This company used to sell a $400 wooden knob some 15 years ago. They still sell a lot of stuff like that for the True Audiophile.

http://www.audio-consulting.ch/?Products

(Don't know how many veils a soundstage can actually have, but apparently, it's a lot).

One Optus engineer to another:

"I dunno....Look it's nearly 4pm. I only had a sandwich for lunch and I've got to get down the shops before knock-off. Tell you what, let's come back tomorrow morning and make a fresh start of it hey? Meet you here 8am sharp!"

You haven't lived until you've eaten dry weetbix with margarine and Vegemite slathered on top.