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Comment Re:Think smaller (Score 2) 52

> you apparently desire to use systems beyond their design points

Who doesn't include cost in design?

If my CPU/SoC is plenty fast for my task and the DRAM is faster than I need it to be and a CPU instruction to compress takes less power than a write out to the bus - it would just be wasteful to manufacture and purchase twice as much DRAM as the application needs.

Either the end user gets a better price (and all money is the result of expending energy, so we save again) or the manufacturer makes a larger profit (in a constrained market).

Now then - all you lunatics embedding Electron and costing me 400MB to send an 80 character text message - we need to talk about this.

CRAM seems like a great idea but it's not the solution to not caring about the Craft.

Comment Long Road (Score 2) 73

JPEG-XL is a good format but I just realized yesterday that Google Docs on Android doesn't support inserting a webp image a decade after Google was pushing it. I had one from a website and needed to run it through imagemagick first.

Android supports it, all the apps using android image primitives supoort it, but one of Google's flagship apps still doesn't.

We used move much faster thirty years ago. If an app supported say GIF, PNM, and TGA when JPEG came out it was supported in the next release.

Hopefully this round will be better. It's probably a management problem ... maybe they will listen to their chatbot since they don't listen to their engineers.

Comment Alexa already "does whatever it wants" ... (Score 1) 47

I have a set of 5 Echo Dots around the house and ever since I "upgraded to Alexa+" -- it's a train-wreck. Sure, the AI gives much smarter answers to questions. But they continuously forget my preferences for the voice I chose for them to use. (My wife and I both prefer their "female 2, relaxed" voice, as most similar to the original and more "professional" sounding than the others.) But no, it keeps going back to a voice that sounds like a bubbly, annoying teenage girl. Worse yet, there's no way to set a voice as default for all devices. You have to go around changing it for each one independently.

And that's before all the creepy, info-stealing behavior it has. EG. Someone will come over and ask it a few questions. Next thing you know, it's asking them to share their name since it's a voice they don't recognize.

Comment Re:Aux port - how could it even technically pause? (Score 1) 47

I don't know the protocol but old phone headsets had a 2.5 or 3.5mm jack with an extra ring that got you play/pause/hook/next/last.

Hypothetically that could have been implemented. I had a collection of Alexas that got binned as soon as they got caught spying for police so I never got that far. ESP32 is better for nerds anyway.

One thing Australia does right is a statute naming removal of features as a violation of contract requiring full refunds in these circumstances.

Comment Re:Maybe It's Unreasonable Public Records Requests (Score 1) 51

The private sector has a solution to all of this that "just works". You acknowledge the supply and demand. Swamped with public record requests? Great! Hire more people to handle them as their job description/title, and charge enough for them to cover their salaries or hourly contractor rates.

IMO, asking one group to pay $2.3 million for a records request is unreasonable. But why can't you ask all of them to pay a fair share so the process works smoothly and effectively for everyone involved? A qualified govt. contractor hired to fulfill FOIA requests is typically paid a midpoint salary of about $88K per year.

Comment re: TX as "The Republican state" (Score 1) 51

Fact of the matter is, TX has been more the extreme, modern Facist-Republican governed state than "traditional Republican" for decades now. It took a lot of people some time to come to that realization. But definitely by the 1990's, watching what was happening in Texas made me solidify my views as more Independent/Libertarian than Republican.

As just a couple of examples?

- TX passed a law requiring people get a permit to legally possess Pyrex glassware. (Thought was, if you weren't a research lab or a school, you probably only had it around your residence if you were making illegal drugs.)
- TX was well known for their "Vampire cops" who were legally allowed to hold a person down after they were pulled over, and draw their blood to check for alcohol.

The general populace of Texas doesn't necessarily reflect this at all, especially with so many liberal-minded people who moved there from places like California in recent years. But the people in political power there operate with a lot of support from those who like the traditional ideals Texas claims to stand for, while acting in ways contrary to some of those ideals.

Comment Re:First responder perspective (Score 1) 199

AM radios in cars only cover the small intersection of people who don't already have an emergency kit containing an AM radio, but do happen to be in a working vehicle during a disaster.
It's useless for anyone who's outside of a vehicle for whatever reason - eg vehicle is damaged, out of fuel, had to be abandoned, or was not available nearby when the disaster struck.

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