dan

dan, 17 hours ago (edited 17 hours ago)

On Linux, input-remapper usually works pretty well to remap the extra buttons. I wonder if it’d work on this AI button.

dan, 3 days ago

You mean Google it then go to the 10th page to find a sketchy site with an article that agrees with you?

dan, 3 days ago

What is this GIF from? It’s a perfect representation of my comment hahaha

dan, 3 days ago

thanks I love it

dan, 6 days ago

My reaction when I see a piece of nicely machined aluminum.

dan, 9 days ago

And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you

I recently encountered one that paused the hold music for around two seconds before the “your call is important to us” message. I hated it because every time it happened, I thought that someone was answering the call!

dan, 9 days ago

Where do you live that a store isn’t responsible for products they sell?

dan, 9 days ago

It’s even simpler. They just lie about and always say it’s higher than average.

dan, 9 days ago

Huh I didn’t realise that. I’m Australian but have been living in the USA for around 11 years.

Australia’s consumer laws are far stricter than the USA. In Australia, the store is responsible for fitness and quality of a product, based not just on its advertising but also what sales reps in the store say to you.

Obviously you can’t return something nor ask for a repair/replacement if you’re using it for something other than its intended purpose (like using a chainsaw on bricks or whatever), but otherwise, the law is in your favour as a consumer.

Stores must also accept warranty returns and not say that you need to go to the manufacturer. It’s not legal to say “no refunds”.

Products must last at least as long as a reasonable consumer thinks they should last. For example, a fridge would have to be repaired or replaced under warranty if it stops working after 4 years, even if the warranty is only 1 year, as most people would reasonably expect a fridge to last more than 4 years.

It means some stuff costs more, but it’s absolutely worth it for the protection you get.

dan, 11 days ago

Changing your own lightbulb was illegal in Victoria Australia until 1998.

Australia is pretty strict about electrical stuff, and only qualified electricians can perform electrical work, including work on any electrical fixtures. Light bulbs were counted as a fixture, until the law was amended in 1998 to specifically exclude light bulbs.

Australia is still a lot stricter than the USA in terms of electrical work you can do to your own house. It’s still illegal to replace a light switch or outlet if you’re not a qualified electrician.

dan, 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago)

It’s an immutable/atomic version of Fedora: fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/

My understanding is that the core system is immutable (read-only) and major upgrades essentially just swap out that whole layer. Updates are atomic, meaning the entire thing either succeeds or fails and you can never end up with a broken half-updated system. UI apps all run using Flatpak.

I’ve never tried it though!

dan, 13 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

Why will it be better in just a couple months?

Explicit sync. It’ll fix most of the issues with Wayland on Nvidia CPUs. Wayland landed support for it in April, and Nvidia recently released a beta driver that supports it. I think every graphics driver will implement explicit sync eventually, since it’s a lot better than implicit sync.

Some great information about why it’s important here: zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/…/explicit-sync.html

dan, 17 days ago

For day to day, DD.MM.YY is much more practical.

It’s not though… It’s ambiguous as to if the day or month is first. With the year first, there’s no ambiguity.

If you want to use d-m-y then at least use month names (eg. 7-June-2024).

dan, 17 days ago

Some ISO8601 formats are good, but some are unreadable (like 20240607T054831Z for date and time).

dan, 17 days ago

They’re different things. The metric system uses decimal. All metric units are decimals, but not all decimals are metric measurements.

You’re right that money is decimal, not metric.

dan, 16 days ago

I agree but they’re hard to read at a glance when debugging and there’s lots of them :)

Having said that, a lot of client-server communications use Unix timestamps though, which are even harder to read at a glance.

dan, 24 days ago

I have it on good authority that everybody’s heard about the bird.

dan, 28 days ago

I love this! Thanks for the link.

dan, 28 days ago

Excite still exists, too. My mum had the Aussie version of it as her home page for a long time. By the time she changed it, the news section had been broken for maybe 7 years.

dan, 26 days ago

Language models are just one type of AI, so it’s overly reductive to say thay all AI is like this. The computer players in Mario Kart are also AI, for example.

dan, 29 days ago

They’re copying Apple, which has similar clauses. They’re all going to copy Apple, unfortunately. Say that they support independent repair stores, but in reality place so many restrictions and requirements on them.

dan, 29 days ago

Samsung have gotten better with updates. In 2021, they promised all new models would receive four years of updates (which helped the industry because other brands started matching them), and they bumped it to seven years with this year’s S24 series.

Samsung and LG appliances are interesting things. Some are horrible like their fridges (which are some of the worst available today), but some are fantastic like LG’s washing machines (which rank #2 in reliability behind Speed Queen).

dan, 30 days ago

Are there guides for this in Fedora and Debian?

dan, 30 days ago

My wife sees this feature but I don’t.

dan, 1 month ago

This is a myth. The Win32 API doesn’t even have a method that returns the string “Windows 95”! Windows version numbers are numbers, not strings. Windows 95 was actually 4.0. Windows 98 was 4.1, ME was 4.5, and XP was 5.0.

Actually it’s not entirely a myth - there was some Java library that did this - but it wasn’t widespread at all, and certainly not the documented approach to check the version.

dan, 1 month ago

9x had versions too… 95 was 4.0 and 98 was 4.1. They were mostly just used internally though.

dan, 1 month ago

I remember using Windows 2000 at school. That OS was solid. Far more reliable and stable than what I was running at home (Windows 98, first edition).

dan, 1 month ago

I’m on Windows 2000 which is 1987 versions ahead of Windows 13.

dan, 1 month ago

Thanks for the correction :)

dan, 1 month ago

smasnug

Not sure if this is a reference to f4mi’s video but she’s one of my favourite YouTubers. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJGqbDr5qBE

dan, 1 month ago

Isn’t there some way to force Electron to use Wayland?

dan, 1 month ago

NVIDIA is likely to be stable on Wayland next month.

Do you have a source for that?

dan, 1 month ago

Thanks for the link :)

dan, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I remember them being exactly the dame many years ago

This is one of the reason I like Debian. They don’t change stuff unless there’s a good reason to. Network configuration on my Debian servers is in /etc/network/interfaces in mostly the same format it was in 20 years ago (the only difference today is that I’m dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 everywhere).

dan, 1 month ago

“ButterFS” is one of the accepted pronunciations though.

dan, 1 month ago

Chest freezers don’t actually use a lot of electricity. They’re a big insulated box that’s closed most of the time, and since they open from the top rather than the front, the temperature doesn’t change much when opened (since hot air rises, while cold air stays lower). The compressor doesn’t have to run for very long to maintain the temperature.

In the USA, Energy Star estimates 215kWh per year for Energy Star certified chest freezers (open from the top) and 395kWh per year for certified upright freezers (open from the front): www.energystar.gov/products/freezers

dan, 1 month ago

I always wondered the same thing when I was younger, since my monitor had an Energy Star logo on it even though it was an American thing but I was in Australia. Being Energy Star approved just means the product is more efficient relative to others in the same category.

The Energy Star site is useful since they list all the available rebates for energy efficient appliances (federal, state, county, electricity company, etc)

dan, 1 month ago

One of the reasons stuff costs more in Australia is that there’s significantly more consumer protection. Steam originally didn’t allow refunds at all, and were fined AU$3 million as a result.

In Australia, it’s illegal to say “no refunds” or only exchange or refund as store credit both for physical and digital goods, and customers are always allowed to get a repair, refund or replacement if the product has issues. In the case of a game, that would be things like:

• Game breaking bugs or bug that significantly affects the experience but don’t completely break the game
• Changes that make the game behave significantly differently to how it was originally described on the site or in the documentation
• Games that initially support Linux but the company dropped Linux support later on, etc.

Steam’s policy of only refunding a purchase within 14 days of purchase and less than 2 hours of play time is also not legal in Australia. You can’t have conditions like that on a refund policy. They have a separate refund policy specifically for Australia which excludes the 14 day / 2 hour limits.

Appliances also have to last for as long as a ‘reasonable consumer’ thinks they should last. For example, even if your TV or fridge has a “1 year warranty”, the manufacturer will still have to repair, refund, or replace it if it breaks down in 3 years, as a regular person would assume that a fridge or TV should last more than 3 years. The store or manufacturer has to cover the cost of picking it up and delivering a replacement. It’s also illegal for a store to tell you that you have to contact the manufacturer - the place you bought the product from has to let you handle all warranty claims through them.

dan, 1 month ago

These are usually jobs that are listed by recruitment agencies. They don’t want you to know the company since then you could just apply directly to the company, and they won’t get their cut.

Recruitment agencies often take a percentage of the salary, at least for the first year, as payment for referring a successful applicant. It’s transparent to the jobseeker - the salary you see is after the agency’s cut.

The other time I see that here in Silicon Valley is for “stealth startups” - startups that are operating quietly, out of the spotlight, and haven’t yet applied for or gotten VC funding.

dan, 2 months ago

That’s likely the date the article was written, not the date it happened.

dan, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Depends on what you include in the percentage. 31% is definitely possible if you’re looking at the full effective tax rate, including federal, state, city (if applicable), social security, Medicare, etc.

In California, which has high state income tax, you’ll reach 30% total effective tax rate around $115-120k/year if filing single.

Also, definitely less likely, but an income around $600k/year (if filing single) will also get you a ~30% effective federal tax rate.

(numbers are rough estimates but should be close-ish)

dan, 2 months ago

don’t know if I can run & debug .net 8 applications on a linux machine

The .NET SDK is cross-platform. Try install it then run dotnet run in the same directory as your project file (.csproj).

Most .NET APIs are cross-platform, but there’s a few that still only work on Windows, and it’s also possible to write code that only works on Windows, like using P/Invoke to call a Win32 API.

dan, 2 months ago

Usually I end up moving back to Windows because of font rendering. I far prefer Windows cleartype font rendering on 2160p desktop screens

I’m surprised this is still an issue. I remember it being an issue when I used desktop Linux 15 years ago. At the time, Linux devs didn’t want to risk accidently infringing on Microsoft’s ClearType patents, so the text smoothing techniques had to be completely different.

Those patents all expired in 2018.

dan, 2 months ago

when I switch back to windows after using Linux/Mac then it feels like someone fixed the focus and de-blurred everything.

I haven’t used desktop Linux in a while, but I feel the same about MacOS font smoothing. It’s way too blurry. I’m not sure why people like it.

dan, 2 months ago

I remember running FL Studio using WINE 15 years ago and it worked fine.

dan, 2 months ago

still do the scripting in Bash for portability reasons,

For what it’s worth, Debian and most of its derivatives use dash (a Linux port of ash) instead of bash for /bin/sh. It’s ~4x faster and uses much less RAM than Bash. Usually the only scripts that use Bash are scripts that aren’t POSIX compliant or that use Bash-specific features.

dan, 2 months ago

ICANN doesn’t run country code TLDs. I bought it through an aftermarket domain sale site (like Sedo).

I’ve actually got three of them. d.sb, d.sv and d.ls.

d.sb was around $4000 if I remember correctly.

dan, 1 month ago

The default software was one of the main reasons KDE was created. The original creator didn’t like that every app on their system seemed to use a different UI toolkit, and wanted a consistent appearance across everything.