I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I feel like the only even remotely acceptable way to do this is to show the ad, prompt for the answer for 10 seconds. They can log the right/wrong answer or if the time expires the lack of one and must move on.

    I can imagine metrics knowing if your advertising is actually reaching people is valid. But to make people answer and especially make them watch more if they answer wrong is about as dystopian as it gets.

    If (and I say if, I really don’t want to believe it is) that is the case, the only correct response is to uninstall Hulu immediately and put on your pirate hat.


  • Yeah, it shouldn’t happen in a release. But, if I had a penny for every time I’ve seen the last minute development that wasn’t tested yet and not even due for the current release squeezed in. I’d literally have a pound, or dollar or whatever else has 100 pennies in.



  • Yeah. I didn’t understand what they meant by the wtf there. Seemed to me someone wondered if the Action would have a localised version of i (making this stay lowercase on a phone was harder than it should be) or if it used the same i. So made a simple test for it.

    Not really sure it’s a wtf unless they expected a different result.


  • Not sure how it is in the US. But here in the UK there’s two ways a business can export.

    1: They pre-clear the customs duty and include it in the sales total (so it’s like paying sales tax at the checkout, except it’s the pre-cleared duty fees). Then the parcel has a nice duty paid stamp and goes straight through customs (I guess unless customs are suspicious and check into it).

    2: They just charge you the item price with no tax applied. In which case you need to pay local tax and duties applicable once the product arrives. Here it’s a bit different. They will hold it at the local depot and you can either go there and pay + collect, or you can pay online and it will be rescheduled for delivery once you pay.

    As others have said, it’s not a scam. There’s no requirement for a business to do option 1, and it’s likely only viable for large businesses to register and have someone/software that knows the various duties required for various countries.

    I’ve ordered from newegg and B&M in the past for example, and in both cases the items were pre-cleared and arrived promptly without any hassle.

    Maybe there’s something similar for imports into the US too?


  • Article 12 (from the 1993 adoption) of the additional protocols from 1974-1977:

    Article 12 — Protection of medical units 1 Medical units shall be respected and protected at all times and shall not be the object of attack. 2 Paragraph 1 shall apply to civilian medical units, provided that they: a) belong to one of the Parties to the conflict; b) are recognized and authorized by the competent authority of one of the Parties to the conflict; or c) are authorized in conformity with Article 9, paragraph 2, of this Protocol or Article 27 of the First Convention. 3 The Parties to the conflict are invited to notify each other of the location of their medical units. The absence of such notification shall not exempt any of the Parties from the obligation to comply with the provisions of paragraph 1. 4 Under no circumstances shall medical units be used in an attempt to shield military objectives from attack. Whenever possible, the Parties to the conflict shall ensure that medical units are so sited that attacks against military objectives do not imperil their safety.

    As I read it, it seems very clear it would contravene section 4 there.

    EDIT: Actually I’d not call it clear. Because it seems to me they’re talking more about using hospitals and the like to shield military units. But I would argue hiding a unit in an ambulance is a good interpretation too.




  • Yeah but they’re a cheat. They’re lithium cells regulated down to 1.5v. Good ones are rare, when you find good ones they’re generally expensive and because they’re regulated down you generally get 100% battery showing until just before they fail.

    I used them for some voltage sensitive stuff, but finding a brand that held a good charge for more than even 50-100 charges was hard.

    Nimh is much better for anything that won’t be upset about the voltage too much.



  • r00ty@kbin.lifetoLinux@lemmy.mlIntel or AMD CPUs for new Laptops?
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    3 months ago

    Well for a gamer no real comment. But there is one metric Intel still trashes AMD in for the APU. Hardware video acceleration/encoding. The quality is objectively better on Intel Quicksync.

    When getting a home box that also needed to do transcoding, Intel CPU was a requirement. My desktop development/gaming system? Ryzen + NVidia.




  • OK, look back at the original picture this thread is based on.

    We have two situations.

    The first is a dedicated system for providing navigation and other subsystems for a very specific purpose, with very specific hardware that is very limited. An 8 bit CPU with a very clearly known RISCesque instruction set, 4kb of ram and an bus to connect devices.

    The second is a modern computer system with unknown hardware, one of many CPUs offering the same instruction set, but with differing extensions, a lot of memory attached.

    You are going to write software very differently for these two systems. You cannot realistically abstract on the first system, in reality you can’t even use libraries directly. Maybe you can borrow code from a library at best. On the second system you MUST abstract because, you don’t know if the target system will run an Intel or Amd CPU, what the GPU might be, what other hardware is in place, etc etc.

    And this is why my original comment was saying, you just cannot compare these systems. One MUST use abstraction, the other must not. And abstractions DO produce overhead (which is an inefficiency). But we NEED that and it’s not a bad thing.


  • r00ty@kbin.lifetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlProgress!
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    3 months ago

    Exactly my point though. My original point was that you cannot compare this. And the main reason you cannot compare them is because of the abstraction required for modern development (and that happens at the development level and the operating system you run it on).

    The Apollo software was machine code running on known bare metal interfacing with known hardware with no requirement to deal with abstraction, libraries, unknown hardware etc.

    This was why my original comment made it clear, you just cannot compare the two.

    Oh one quick edit to say, I do not in any way mean to take away from the amazing achievement from the apollo developers. That was amazing software. I just think it’s not fair to compare apples with oranges.


  • r00ty@kbin.lifetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlProgress!
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    3 months ago

    It does. It definitely does.

    If I write software for fixed hardware with my own operating system designed for that fixed hardware and you write software for a generic operating system that can work with many hardware configurations. Mine runs faster every time. Every single time. That doesn’t make either better.

    This is my whole point. You cannot compare the apollo software with a program written for a modern system. You just cannot.


  • r00ty@kbin.lifetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlProgress!
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    3 months ago

    Wait a second. When did I say abstraction was bad? It’s needed now. But when you are comparing 8bit machine code written for specific hardware against modern programming where you MUST handle multiple x86/x86_x64 cpus, multiple hardware combinations (either via the exe or by the libraries that must handle the abstraction) of course there is an overhead. If you want to tell me there’s no overhead then I’m going to tell you where to go right now.

    It’s a necessary evil we must have in the modern world. I feel like the people hating on what I say are misunderstanding the point I make. The point is WHY we cannot compare these two things!


  • r00ty@kbin.lifetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlProgress!
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    3 months ago

    Except it’s not nonsense. I’ve worked in development through both eras. You need to develop in an abstracted way because there are so many variations on hardware to deal with.

    There is bloating for sure, and of course. A lot is because it’s usually much better to use an existing library than reinvent the wheel. And the library needs to cover many other use cases than your own. I encountered this myself, where I used a Web library to work with releases on forgejo, had it working generally, but then saw there was a library for it. The boilerplate to make the library work was more than I did to just make the Web requests.

    But that’s mostly size. The bloat in terms of speed is mostly in the operating system I think and hardware abstraction. Not libraries by and large.

    I’m also going to say legacy systems being papered over doesn’t always make things slower. Where I work, I’ve worked on our legacy system for decades. But on the current product for probably the past 5-10. We still sell both. The legacy system is not the slower system.


  • r00ty@kbin.lifetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlProgress!
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    3 months ago

    It’s a different world now though. I could go into detail of the differences, but suffice to say you cannot compare them.

    Having said that, Windows lately seems to just be slow on very modern systems for no reason I can ascertain.

    I swapped back to Linux as primary os a few weeks ago and it’s just so snappy in terms of ui responsiveness. It’s not better in every way. But for sure I never sit waiting for windows to decide to show me the context menu for an item in explorer.

    Anyway in short, the main reason for the difference with old and new computer systems is the necessary abstraction.