Skull giver

Light warmth is something the manufacturer controls. There’s nothing (except for maybe regulation somewhere) preventing manufacturers from adding high-CRI LEDs calibrated to warm white to cars. The price difference isn’t that high compared to the price if a car. The harsh, blue light is a choice.

And while there is a difference between LEDs and halogens, it’s not that big of an issue. Especially with competent diffusers over the LEDs.

LEDs are brighter at the same voltage and amperage, but not necessarily blinding. What’s blinding is the idiotic height at which headlights are mounted today, misconfigured headlights (you’re supposed to adjust them as you add more load to your car so they’re angled right, which many people don’t seem to know), and above all, people who don’t know what they’re doing replacing light bulbs with LEDs without the necessary load in series.

If anything, LEDs having MUCH better lifespans than bulbs is saving people.

uBO effectively blocks every ad that can be blocked. Youtube has started to insert the ads directly into the video stream and that’s not practically blockable.

Combining multiple ad blockers can interfere with ad blocking, though. Try creating a new, temporary profile with default settings and no addons, installing uBO, and see if it’s still broken.

This was much less of an issue back when you couldn’t open a bank account in someone’s name from halfway across the world. Phishing and identity theft were impossible to pull off until companies started trusting phone services and later the internet. You needed to show up in person with a realistic fake ID to do anything malicious. What else would you do? Spend (converted into modern currency) 25 bucks a minute on an international call to scam someone?

Now that nobody meets face to face for stuff like cashing a cheque or even ordering a large quantity of groceries anymore, the few bits of personal information we can use to prove our identity are the only things protecting us.

Because you’re not paying extra for those problems to get fixed. And no, when you receive millions of forms per day, not every piece of feedback makes it back to someone to actually fix the issue. Especially when half those issues are “when I don’t have internet I don’t receive new emails”.

Software, like hardware, is a balance between supply and demand. People would rather pay less for a phone crammed full of ads than pay for a service. Just look at YouTube for that one.

Also, those clunky interfaces are there for a reason. Maybe the interface element that’s a lot better doesn’t work in right to left languages. Maybe the information overload of too many buttons and labels made the old interface impossible to extend. Maybe the prettier solution doesn’t work with screen readers or with the font size and colour cranked up for people with low vision. Maybe the feature redesign worked great but SomeCorp Tweaker Software will bluescreen the machine when it finds the word “checkbox” in a settings page for your mouse. Maybe the design team had a great idea but the feature needs to ship next week so whatever needs to happen to make that works happens, and the five other features planned for the month already eat up the rest of the dev team’s time anyway.

But most of the time, things are suboptimal because there are seven teams of people working on features on the same screen/system/application and they need to make do.

If you have serious issues with some software, many companies will let you partner with them. In exchange for hundreds of thousands or millions, you can directly get support for your use cases, your workflow, and the stuff you need to get done, over the billions of other people that also need to use the software. And sometimes, that means your super duper expensive preference/feature/demand means someone else’s workflow is entirely broken.

If you know what you want, there is a way out: going the way of open source and self hosted. Within a few years, you too will grow resentful of dozens of systems made by different people all interpreting standards differently and not working together. You have the power to fix each and every feature, bug, problem, and design flaw, but none of the time or the detailed knowledge. You don’t have the money to pay experts, and even if you did, what they do may not entirely suit you either. Trying to fix everything will drive you absolutely mad. And that’s why companies and people often don’t try for perfection.

I have a laptop with both USB C and USB a and HDMI. The SD card slot is only full SD, unfortunately, but I did add a terabyte M.2 slot to the inside because it only came with 512GB, so it’s not like I’m lacking any space.

These ports are very useful when I don’t carry my dock with me. Also very useful for connecting multiple screens, as USB-C doesn’t have that much bandwidth.

Though, from what I can tell the MacBook M1 models don’t have the hardware capabilities to run multiple screens without falling back to hacks like DisplayLink that will eat up your CPU like crazy, so I suppose the screen issue probably won’t affect you too much; Apple had some weird design restrictions in their earlier M series chips that means you can’t get multiple DisplayPort streams out.

Docks are neat, and there’s a reason they’ve been in use by businesses since the 90s, but you can have docks and ports on the laptop itself.

All the terrible quality and human rights violations also apply to any other Chinese shop as well as Amazon or whatever your local Amazon equivalent is. I’ve found the exact same shit sold on Temu in physical store shelves for those cost-saving stores. The entire supply chain is fucked.

I do order shit directly from China, but only if I need something specific like phone parts or electronics that I see “local” shops carry with the exact same photos, descriptions, and pictures, for twice or triple the price. I’ve fallen for that trick too many times, I’ll go straight to the source now.

At least the Temu shit isn’t as bad as buying chocolate or clothes…

I’ve had similar issues with getting CSS tables to lay out properly in Chrome. Worked fine in IE/Edge/Firefox/WebKit but Chrome just randomly threw a fit and rearranged items for no reason, even the Javascript engine agreed with me that the tables should look like they were supposed to but they just didn’t when rendered.

My experience with SVGs in Firefox is that Firefox supports pretty much every basic features, but it expects the SVGs to be up to spec. As it turns out, a lot of SVGs on the web rely on quirks and side effects and you only find out they’re technically invalid when digging deep into the spec. Them behaving differently whether or not there’s an img tag around them also doesn’t help, and I’ve run into a few files using SVG features that only worked in some Adobe product and Chrome (only on desktop, IIRC) .

Getting browsers to work consistently still sucks, even when it’s not nearly as big a problem as it was fifteen years ago. I totally get why people don’t test for Firefox. We didn’t use to test for Safari for the very same reason; practically none of our end users used it and there are no usable cross platform browsers to test with even if they were, so we’d probably tell them to download Chrome anyway. Safari mostly worked well enough that if someone decided to pull out an iPad during demos it didn’t completely fail and that was food enough. Firefox only worked because devs preferred its superior web development tools.

If there are obligations, Firefox is such a fringe user agent these days that they can probably go without supporting it. The 3.8% of Swedes not using Chromium or Safari will fall off any serious compatibility requirements.

I doubt anything will break in Firefox, though. They just don’t want the burden of having to support a few hundred people when Firefox implements a feature slightly wrong/non-standard/not at all.

This looks pretty good! Hope someone hacks support for the KDE Connect protocols into this because I don’t really feel like installing yet another app that runs in the background permanently.

The UI looks very slick compared to what KDE Connect has to offer on Windows and I don’t think screen casting is even an option there, so both apps could do with borrowing some code from each other.

Pro: it’ll probably work well enough to get your notifications and maybe even your heart rate and stuff.

Con: it probably won’t arrive. If it does, it probably won’t look like in the pictures if it does, it probably won’t work like described. If it does, it probably has done kind of cheep, toxic chemicals it’ll leave in your arm. If it doesn’t, it’ll probably come with an app that drains your battery. If it doesn’t, it probably sells your live location and notifications to data brokers. If it doesn’t, it’ll probably never receive software updates. If it does, it’ll probably be broken by the end of the year.

There are actually a few relatively cheap smart watches that some people like to reprogram with open source firmware. You can get a Colmi P8 or a Kenboro K9 for less than $30 and flash WaspOS onto it. You have to get lucky and buy the right hardware revision but flashing new firmware onto those things can be as simple as downloading an app and loading a file into it. These devices are underpowered and software availability is limited, but at least with the open source stuff you can rest easy about your data not being sold.

Exactly. Everyone wants the cheap and easy solution when something breaks, but nobody wants to pay the price for the cheap and easy solution to be available upfront, because what are the chances they run into a problem like that?

In this specific case, there is a credible ulterior motive for the company not to make cheap repairs available: the government will pay the bill if they sell a new expensive product and all the training/rehabilitation that comes with it. On the other hand, there is a very valid reason why things like batteries are so expensive to replace and why you can’t find replacement batteries for a lot of products a certain amount of time after production ends.

How do you stuff a 18650 into a smart watch controlling the device? Because that’s what the article implicates is the problem. For the exoskeleton itself there are no excuses.

But people don’t want that. They want small, sleek devices that don’t weigh much. Imagine what smartphones would look like if they still had to be powered by AAA batteries.

From what I can tell the battery in question wasn’t the one powering the exoskeleton itself, but the battery inside watch controlling the device.

Because there is little difference when it comes to passively degrading components like batteries. You can’t produce a battery and leave it in storage for a decade, the battery will degrade on its own. The only way to keep reserve batteries is to keep producing them, and maintain a production line for all that time. That’s prohibitively expensive for small markets like these.

A relatively simple solution is to stick with batteries that have a standard shape and size, but it’s not like you can just stuff a button cell in there, you need more power to operate the controller chip.

It’s pretty shitty that the company didn’t produce a backup controller box that works without having to stick to the wearable watch form factor that just takes a bunch of rechargeable AA batteries, but you can’t expect what is essentially a smart watch to still have accessible replacement batteries in twenty years.

This isn’t exclusive to medical devices, either. Computers running DOS or Windows 95 are still operating millions of dollars of machinery and are slowly failing and collapsing over time. The amount of affordable replacements (even at an industrial level) is slowly starting to dwindle. Nobody is producing floppy drives anymore, nor new floppies for that matter, so if that industrial controller you bought in the early 2000s dies you have to hire a computer greybeard to fix your hardware or replace the entire system.

In my opinion, it should be put into law that once a company stops supporting their bespoke hardware, the copyright and patents protecting them should expire immediately, so that once a company drops support anyone else can pick up where they left off.

However, anything with a computer in it has a limited lifespan, and that lifespan is significantly shorter than that of a human being. Even with the code and blueprints publicly available, someone still needs to find the compatible hardware, alter the designs to operate on modern commodity hardware, or pay a factory to ramp up a production line if they have the million(s) to do so.

Looks like it’s one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nezara_viridula (third instar, maybe fourth?).

These bugs go through five stages of moulting changing shape and size every time, so in a few weeks they may just look like a bug you’ll recognise.

Obviously China’s meddling with academic discourse is troubling, but what universities accept busts for random political activists? I don’t think I’ve ever seen any bust in universities that weren’t of people of great importance to the university itself.

I also completely get universities not wanting to deal with the anger and outrage of nationalist Chinese expats. They can get real angry when you go against Chinese propaganda, probably a result of many years of brainwashing by the Chinese government in their youth. It just takes one weirdo to deface a statue and suddenly you’re in the middle of a massive controversy and need to either file charges (and deal with angry Chinese people) or not (and deal with angry people opposing China’s dictatorial regime).

I’m anti-CCP but that doesn’t mean I’ll accept a bust it a Chinese human rights activist.

Arbitration court with one person is a win for the company. Arbitration court with a thousand people is a massive loss for the company. That’s why these arbitration clauses aren’t always bad. If anything, for small cases they’re good for the people because the bulk of the legal charges are paid by the companies that write these clauses.

A bunch of large companies went through a phase where they all went for arbitration clauses, and a bunch of them moved back quickly after they found out how much more expensive paying for ten thousand arbitration cases was compared to just one single class action lawsuit. Maintaining ten thousand legally binding, individually composed outcomes can haunt them for decades if they’re unlucky.

Steam has learned the same lesson here.

Lemmy has a toggle in the settings to hide all bot accounts. If you don’t like bots, you should turn it on!

The possibilities are limited and the legal responsibilities untenable. It’s a fun idea, though! Technically there’s nothing preventing you from distributing WiFi access points in your neighbourhoods and having everyone hook up their home network into a local, shared mesh for instance.

With a private IP address range (probably best to use IPv6 to prevent conflicts there, but you can try to allocate private IPv4 addresses if you like a challenge) you can even have your own internet next to the normal internet and use both.