thehatfox @ thehatfox @lemmy.world

Posts

468

Comments

625

Joined

2 yr. ago

Have you visited a website without an ad blocker recently? Because typical web advertising has become as intrusive and annoying as technically possible, and millions of people willingly accept that.

VR/AR/Spatial Whatever has the potential to be just as bad, if not far worse.

It’s the power of marketing. Apple have crafted a strong brand with broad appeal, which gives the launch of any new product line a wide reach.

Focusing the Vision Pro more on productivity and apps has probably helped in this specific case too. All of the other big consumer VR systems have been heavily focused around gaming. Gaming is a lot more popular than it used to be, but it’s still anathema for a lot of people.

Capturing any data or making any measurement is an approximation, because every type of sensor has a limited degree of accuracy - with some more sensitive than others.

I think there is a clear enough line however between making an approximated record of a value, and making a guess at a value, the latter being essentially how these “AI” camera systems work.

Even for the “honest” data collectors I’m sceptical any of these services really work. Privacy and data protection laws are weak in many places, and even the countries that have enacted better legislation in this regard often have fairly toothless enforcement. Data is the new oil and is far too valuable for companies to want to part with. There seems little real incentive for companies to truthfully cooperate with these schemes.

It would presumably apply to any tech company operating in the UK, including those developing Linux distributions like Canonical and Ubuntu.

The warning runs from 3am on Thursday to 3am on Friday and stretches from Cumbria and the Scottish border down to Cambridgeshire and the Midlands in England.

I’m not sure if the forecast has changed since the article was published, but the current Met Office map isn’t showing it that far south.

I will keep the mittens handy anyway. Can’t wait until it warms up a bit, fed up of this winter lark.

There are some Zigbee dimming relays/modules which should work with your Zigbee stack of choice. I haven’t used them myself as I use Zigbee dimmer switches instead, but I’ve seen others recommend them. There’s a few different brands depending on your country.

I can also second the recommendation for the Shelly Dimmer 2. Works out of the box with the HA Shelly integration, and can also be flashed with ESPHome or Tasmota if you really want. It can also be used in detached mode to work with smart lights I believe too. My home is mostly Zigbee but I have a few Shelly devices and they have all been solid.

There are also a lot of good reasons uniforms are unnecessary or even detrimental to students and families.

• Creates additional stress in having to have a narrow range of clothing always clean and wearable each day
• Uniforms do little to nothing to mitigate inequality, as children will always have other items to compare each other with - pencil cases, sports trainers/boots, lunchboxes, mobile phones etc.
• Prices of uniforms will likely always be higher than regular clothing due to limited choice and supply, and limited utility outside of school
• Workplace dress codes have become increasingly casual in recent decades, and continue to do so, making reinforcing the use of a highly restrictive uniform seem anachronistic

School uniforms create more problems than they solve.

That’s often the case in the UK. The government here issued some flimsy guidelines about uniform policy but many schools are still gouging parents on restrictive and expensive uniforms.

Do all schools in Australia require uniforms or is it just some?

My school had the library in a portable unit like that. The thing was ancient, and had barely any insulation and a leaky roof. In the winter months you could see your breath while reading a slightly damp feeling book.

It was eventually demolished, it was too unsound to be portable enough to move any more.

The tendency of so-called Gen Z to avoid drugs and alcohol has been documented for years, to the annoyance of some of their redder-nosed elders, and now about a quarter of under-25s do not drink at all, due to rising awareness of alcohol’s effects on health and the fear of drunken exploits being posted on social media.

Even if the cost of living and the climate both drastically improve, it looks like there could be deeper troubles ahead for pubs and bars unless they can find new ways to adapt. I don’t think it’s people being dry just for January they need to worry about longer term.

Still seems a bit tone deaf to be use that as a talking point in the current climate.

There’s plenty of people missing meals in this country and not by choice.

Seems kinda sad. I doubt it’s a program many people use (or even know of) these days, but there is an odd charm to super simple rich text editors like WordPad and TextEdit in macOS.

I suppose AbiWord sorta fills that niche as a replacement.

Anyone remember Microsoft Office’s weird cousin, Works?

Unlikely after this long. Sea creatures and the sea water itself will eventually consume and break down nearly every part of a body, including bones.

One thing that might still survive is leather clothing. Many leather items such as shoes have been found at the Titanic wreck site.

Apple was negotiating to buy Be, but they couldn’t agree on a price. The rumours were that Be was asking too much.

The Apple board also favoured NeXT, and the rest is history.

One of the main issues is the lack of competition. There are now only 3 main browser engines, Blink, Gecko and WebKit. Blink (which poses Chrome and Edge) is by far the largest, and has a the enormous marketing might of Google (and Microsoft to a lesser extent) behind it. WebKit runs Safari, which only runs on Apple platforms and arguably only has the market share it does is because Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines to run on iPhones and iPads. Gecko, the engine of Firefox, continues to slide into irrelevance (which pains me to say as a long time Firefox user).

We are in real danger of the web being trapped in a browser monoculture again, like the dark dark times of Internet Explorer’s dominance. This led to a period of stagnation in web technology Microsoft at the time put little effort into developing IE. Allowing Blink/Chrome to do the same will likely be just as damaging, albeit in different ways - particularly for privacy on the web.

For the good of the web no one company should ever be in the position to dictate web standards, which is why we need a healthy and competitive marketplace of web browsers and browser engines. The problem is that web standards have now become so complex developing an indecent browser engine is now a monumental task. Opera gave up on Presto, once the poster child for browser innovation. Microsoft, a company with far more resources, gave up on Trident. Mozilla was developing a new generation browser engine called Servo, but gave up on the project also.

The US used to have nuclear weapons stationed at Lakenheath, but (officially) they were withdrawn in 2008. They still have them elsewhere in Europe.

I think it was announced that nuclear weapons capabilities(but not the weapons themselves) would be re-established there last year.

I’m not sure how this would work in practice. Developers distributing apps independently to be sideloaded wouldn’t be submitting them to Apple to review, and sideloaded code may not even have an identifiable developer to charge.

I suppose Apple could implement some sort of rigid signing system, but I think the EU would see that as just another abuse of power.

The only way it could work out badly for smaller software developers is if companies like Apple decide to recover their losses by charging heavily for development tools and resources.

If they can’t have walls around app distribution they might try and put them around app development instead.

How would that even work? Apps distributed outside the App Store would not (necessarily) be submitted to Apple to review, and the developer of sideloaded apps may not be identifiable to charge fees too.

I suppose they could mandate some sort of signing system for sideloaded executables but I have a feeling the EU would consider that a further abuse.

It will all come out in the wash, but if the rumours are true Apple seems to be going about this in the worst way possible.