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Comment âoeUsersâ(TM)â Consent (Score 1) 44

Reddit is upset that Anthropic is taking a dubious approach to Redditâ(TM)s usersâ(TM) consent - when thatâ(TM)s Redditâ(TM)s job.

A site thatâ(TM)s switched its terms to grant itself the right to sell its usersâ(TM) content, blocked accounts for trying to delete their content⦠is upset that someone else is acting similarly dubiously.

By all means, Reddit, call it for what it is: You have something you think is valuable, others think is valuable, and you want to force them to pay you for it, not take it for free.

But donâ(TM)t pretend itâ(TM)s about user consent. Youâ(TM)re in NO way doing this to protect your users from exploitation, you just want to be sure youâ(TM)re the ones profiting from it.

Comment Steam Survey Swinging Across The Board (Score 2) 59

A data point, in isolation, can be used to read in any explanation you like.

Elsewhere, itâ(TM)s widely reported that Steam survey numbers are swinging wildly across the board as Steam has recently had an explosion of growth in the Chinese gaming community, who tend to agree to participate in the survey more than Western users, in order to get greater representation.

The average CPU has decreased, the average GPU has decreased, and also Linuxâ(TM)s market share has decreased.

But what the survey doesnâ(TM)t say is whether the U.S. or EU markets have actually changed at all. Or whether the large Chinese market has simply moved the global average points hard.

Meanwhile, those who donâ(TM)t account for that are making pronouncements about how Linux is used much less for gaming⦠while numbers of players, numbers of installed games, have all likely remained very much the same.

Comment Weak Motorcycle Without The Responsibility (Score 2) 176

Motorcycles are awesome. Theyâ(TM)re also pretty deadly. For all those reasons, most governments require you to reach a certain age, undergo training, pass a test to prove you know how to ride safely, carry a license they can revoke if youâ(TM)re a tool, get insurance to cover your own injuries and harm to others, and - other than in FREEDOM! states - wear a helmet and possibly other armor.

E-bikes are lousy motorcycles. While they are annoyingly slow compared to even 125cc motorcycles, they still go more than fast enough for head injuries to be fatal, roadrash to suck hard, and eejits to ride in regular traffic as if they can keep up.

So, carrying the same dangers, what are the safety requirements?

â¦

Yeah, that would be the complete list.

Letâ(TM)s give them to twelve year olds, whoâ(TM)ll refuse to wear helmets as theyâ(TM)re uncool, whoâ(TM)ve never seen a driverâ(TM)s handbook let alone read one or taken any kind of test. Insurance? Nah, donâ(TM)t need that, Americaâ(TM)s got awesome universal healthcare and if they slam into someoneâ(TM)s parked car because a kid has no idea how to handle it, just sucks to be the car owner. License plate for accountability? Nope. If a cop does pull the rider over for being utterly dangerous, thereâ(TM)s no license to take away, no insurance premiums to go up, no accountability whatsoever.

What could go wrong?!

Comment Re:How much energy for video games? (Score 1) 312

...on average one coin is created every 10 seconds.

Shouldn't that be every 10 minutes for Bitcoin?

Which makes it an even worse proposition unless you to look to off-chain technologies.

Fortunately there are other platforms emerging that appear to be able to reach consensus at scale, and with decent transaction rates, without resorting to proof of work.

Comment Itâ(TM)s Not That We Pay Badly (Score 1) 105

Itâ(TM)s not that we pay badly. We pay really well. Itâ(TM)s just that this is a new era where making 10 widgets an hour, forty hours a week, which used to make a living wage, just wonâ(TM)t cut it anymore. Modern thinkers understand they have just have to be making fifty widgets an hour for 80 hours to make money in this modern world!

So five times the productivity for twice the hours isnâ(TM)t just you slashing payments to a tenth and people having to deliver ten times as much, itâ(TM)s just that theyâ(TM)re not thinking in modern enough terms?

Exactly!

Comment Re: Wink? (Score 4, Interesting) 140

Wink has been essentially bankrupt for years. They got bought out by Willwhateverâ(TM)s company but heâ(TM)s apparently not been paying staff and closed his office after a deal in Dubai stalled last year. Turns out having a couple of hit songs doesnâ(TM)t make you a tech visionary and brilliant businessman any more than Bill Gates buying a ukulele makes him a hit musician.

Lawyers are generally only interested in class action suits where they can win something. Taking 100% of the zero assets Wink likely has is still zero.

Comment Re:More like they have to (Score 1) 82

Utter rubbish.

It's the gold plating of our electrical grid that has resulted in high energy prices, as well as the failure of our government to secure local gas supplies and the absence of any leadership on energy policy providing certainty for investment.

https://theconversation.com/br...

As to the AC parent, the Tesla battery in Hornsdale was never intended for storage, but for grid stabilisation, and should have paid for itself within a few years.

https://lucassadler.com/2019/0...

As I type this, most energy in South Australia is being generated by wind, the rest gas and solar, pretty equally divided, and we are exporting more interstate than we're generating.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/ne...

Comment Fortunately, Their Cameras Suck (Score 1, Interesting) 129

Having had both generations of Ring doorbell camera, I can safely predict this only gives law enforcement footage of criminalsâ(TM) backs as they leave the area.

To give Ring credit, theyâ(TM)ve worked with me to resolve issues, they even sent me the v2 camera for free when they couldnâ(TM)t resolve issues with the v1. Their customer service has been exceptional... just with a flawed product.

Even with power saving as disabled as you can get it, even with a mesh Wi-Fi access point only half a dozen feet away, the process of it detecting motion, waking back up, trying to negotiate a Wi-Fi connection, trying to connect to the server and then starting to rec... wait, come back! Iâ(TM)m nearly ready to film you!

It just doesnâ(TM)t work. Iâ(TM)ve ended up putting Nest Outdoor cameras near the Ring doorbell so I can actually get usable footage. Nestâ(TM)s cameras donâ(TM)t work as a doorbell/useful intercom but they actually record footage of people approaching, which is far more cameralike than Ring.

Given the Ring Alarm systemâ(TM)s keypads regularly lose signal, while even closer to the access point, I fear Ringâ(TM)s Wi-Fi engineers may not actually know what Wi-Fi actually is.

Itâ(TM)s a shame. Theyâ(TM)re a great company with great customer service. But lousy internet on their things, which is kind of a key failing for IoT.

And so, for privacy zealots, donâ(TM)t worry: Iqf other Ring doorbells are anything like mine, the cops arenâ(TM)t getting anything useful.

Comment Re:Cheap service, cheap results (Score 1) 508

And then, after you moved them back in house, you retired?

It all comes down to where the business wants their critical vulnerability.

They moved it from a smart guy on site to what was hopefully a decently staffed cloud service.

They were then at the mercy of the business having outages, their hardware having outages, the network connection having outages, their phone support having outages. All of these things led to a moderate chance - that came true - of a failure lasting for several hours at an embarrassing time.

So they moved it back in house to a really smart guy who knew how to maintain the hell out of very well optimized system and was willing to log in no matter whether he was on vacation, sick or whatever.

Which moved them to a single point of utterly massive failure, not a couple of hours of outage but weeks, if not semi permanent, if he got hit by a bus, into a car wreck, had a stroke, etc.

Given I'm yet to find someone who's taken over a proprietary system, without a great hand off, that hasn't cursed out the original guy... no matter how well that first guy thought he'd documented everything... recovery after that single point of failure is now hell vs a stressful few hours - if anything happens to you (or the guy you passed it on to after you retired) vs the more frequent issues with the cloud chain.

Comment Re:Bad news among good news (Score 2) 433

We have to decarbonise our energy production as quickly as is humanly possible. That countries such as Australia are still granting fossil fuel exploration permits is, frankly, insane.

You have seen our current political leaders haven't you?

Australia had a carbon tax. It was working. The Liberal Party removed it, now our emissions are increasing.

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