Dave.

The Apples and Googles and Microsofts of the world are all about offering cloud services to hold your precious data, for what is essentially “free” to the end user. Push you into their services with dark patterns, make it a pain in the ass to do without them, join the cloud, it’s awesome.

Unfortunately all that comes with a catch - when automated services fail, and self-service solutions fail to resolve it, you have zero chance or ability to contact a real live human who can apply reason and judgement to sort out the issue. You and all your data are basically fucked at that point.

showed the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’” had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram.

This is ENTIRELY because of Meta’s content algorithms that buried the content from everyone’s friends under a torrent of shit. It’s pretty disingenuous for the company that controls that algorithm to present this as some inevitable fait accompli, something out of their hands, oh well.

But of course Meta was terrified of people just viewing all their friend’s posts and then logging off for the day because, as everyone knows, line must always go up.

Australian here.

Step 1: design your damn toilets so they do not clog.

Step 2: there is no step 2.

Seriously, half a century of toilet use here in Aus and I’ve never caused - or discovered even - a blocked toilet at home.

Clearly the fact that I can buy a toilet plunger from the local hardware store indicates that this can happen here. But it seems that every American household has a toilet plunger and poop knife on standby and many articles are devoted to what clogs, and how to unclog, American toilets.

There are better designs for both toilets and plumbing out there guys, maybe you should look into using them.

Everything is fine in the Apple ecosystem as long as you want to do something The Apple Way™.

As soon as you want to do something differently to how Apple decrees it should be done, then you’re screwed.

These kind of “manual” a/c units normally have a little sticker or a caution in the manual to “wait 5 minutes before restarting”.

People can easily trigger this kind of thing just by turning the thermostat back and forth, so there is usually a thermal cutout on the compressor to keep them mostly safe.

You can usually hear it when it activates, there will be a hum from the stalled compressor for a few seconds and then a little click, and then the compressor won’t start for a minute or two.

It’ll be fine as long as you don’t try and start it up again within a few minutes of turning it off.

Pressure just needs to slowly bleed from the high pressure side to the low pressure side of the compressor before it starts again, so that it isn’t initially stalled against high pressure.

Are you familiar with https://old.reddit.com/

How much longer do you think Reddit will keep an option that doesn’t maximise end user engagement metrics?

“Why do people do X, when in my opinion if you disregard the two top reasons for doing X, it’s pointless? Prove to me that it would be better!?”

Again,

Ha! Welcome to corporate

There is a catchphrase in corporate - “Minimum viable product” and it means just that, memory leaks and all.

Well, anything’s possible, I say we give it a try and see what happens.

Have you tried…

you know,

(cough)

maybe just, ah …

(air quotes) “heavily implying”

the , ah, you know …

particular…

(taps side of nose)

ah, torrent

in

(eyebrow waggle)

ahem,

QUESTION?

Eh?

Ehhhhh?

Change your thought patterns. Minimise their actions in your mind.

They are not “psychopaths”, they are just “idiots”.

They do not “counterattack”, there is no “attack” from your side. They are just “being a nuisance”. Frame all the bumps and thumps as renovations if you want.

When they make a noise, turn UP your tv, just a little, so you can hear it over it. “Gee those renovations of theirs are a bit noisy, maybe I should put in a complaint.”

When they rattle the ceiling of their apartment, “Hey it must be time to vacuum, thanks for reminding me. I’ll do it now while you’re renovating and making noise so it doesn’t disturb you too much”.

“I hear that plants respond to music so I’m just going to leave some on for Ferris, my pot plant, while I go out shopping for a few hours this morning” - Not too loud, just loud enough for Ferris to enjoy it. If you hear a lot of thumping it must be just them taking the opportunity to renovate while you can’t hear them. I do hope they don’t damage their ceiling with all that thumping while you’re out, oh well.

All that activity on their part takes a lot of energy, your activities take very little. Which one do you think is going to end first?

Inertia, mostly.

Of course Plex then takes advantage of that with the slow erosion of the free edition.

It’s difficult on the back end of the charger as well.

A shopping centre or rest stop can’t just spring for a few high capacity chargers for the car park. A single megawatt charger is 50 houses worth of consumption, so they now need a substation upgrade to provide what is basically a whole neighbourhood-equivalent of power.

They aim to actively deorbit starlink sats.

(Edit: they keep a small amount of propellant in reserve for the initial deorbit burn, and then position the solar array to give maximum drag which hastens things considerably)

As far as I know, apart from the first few batches, the “production run” of sats has a pretty low failure rate and are proactively sent to their demise.

People don’t just leave leaking apps out there for consumption.

Ha! Welcome to corporate, where vendors sell you software and say that the hardware has to have 128GB of ram and when you poke around a bit you discover a single JVM with constantly growing memory usage with a script that restarts it every time it runs out of resources.

AND a log file that describes - in typical Java excruciating detail - the precise lines in each module where the devs allocated resources but didn’t free them. About 40 times a second.

Motor oil tastes funny.

It’s pretty simple:

• USA and Russia have public talks and say they have a “good solution”.
• Ukraine says ,“We are not interested in a solution negotiated by a third party and the aggressor in this conflict”
• USA says “oh look Ukraine isn’t coming to the party here these negotiations were in good faith we can’t believe how they’re acting we are withdrawing support.”
• Ukraine gets stomped on, USA and Russia divvy up the spoils of war.

Lots of expensive industrial equipment runs these kinds of processors still. You can still buy motherboards with 8 bit ISA slots even, although you’ll pay quite a premium.

But all of that kind of gear typically runs its own distro with an in-house build system. For example, my work uses a flavour of Buildroot for their embedded Linux systems and you can just set whatever processor type you like all the way back to plain old i386 when you build it.

“Oh, it’s got an embedded TIFF of the actual content. That explains it.”

Yes, I am quite old now.