noodlesUK

On a related anecdotal note, one of the many reasons my peers aren’t changing their names when they get married is because it’s a huge administrative pain to track down every database you touch and get them to change things.

I always think of the ever relevant “Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Names” [1]

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

I can’t load the article because of the captcha, but based on the comments I’m assuming it’s about loud motorbike exhausts.

It’s not just bike exhausts that are loud either. Every night I hear a nearly endless stream of modified cars with pop and bang tunes. There’s not even the supposed justification that it makes you safer in a car, it’s just people doing deliberately inconsiderate things with their vehicles. It’s inflicting annoyance and misery on people for no reason but clout, and we should have less tolerance for it in society generally. It’s also the same drivers who are racing through city centres. I don’t know if they’re just racking up loads of fines and not paying them, or if they’re using swapped plates, but either way, it needs to be enforced better.

My university tried to do this with all android devices connecting to their exchange too a few years back. Hard no from me. I’m not letting some random person in IT wipe my phone remotely because they mixed me up with someone, or because I’m getting fired/expelled.

I’m pretty sure that if they’re using even remotely fast chargers, cleaning and inspection (and associated queuing) would take most of that time. I also suspect that most rental places aren’t so close to capacity that someone returning a car a few hours late would block a customer from pickup. There’s a certain amount of slack in the inventory.

I wonder why they decided to call it 0.1M USD rather than 100k USD. For many of us, a million dollars is a large amount of money, even for a business.

The scan as you shop systems that I am referring to are where you are given a little barcode scanner with a display, and you go around the shop scanning your items as you pack them. At the end of the shopping trip, you still go to the self checkout machine, but you just transfer your scan list from the portable barcode scanner to the till. At no point are you using a phone camera to scan items. Usually the trolleys have a little mount point for the scanner so you don't even need to touch anything.

I agree that having to scan out via the anti theft barriers is idiotic.

I think it's funny that the demo on the website is a video of a chatbot communicating with another chatbot. I worry that this will be the new dystopian hell we all live in.

If you're trying to market this, you should change the demo to something where it shows a success story.

My guess is that right now this isn't viable for lower margin food products. Uniqlo and decathlon probably don't sell that much for less than £10. It's going to be a while before you can reasonably do that for a pint of milk.

Agreed - I think there's also the issue of people needing to be pre-registered with such a system, and not being able to accept cash. I would expect that in the future, systems like that will be an "express lane" for the particularly prepared, but not necessarily the default.

> I doubt the relationship between the rate of shoplifting and ease of shoplifting is anywhere close to linear.

I'm sure you're right. I suspect that there are massive variations from shop location to shop location, even within a region. I also suspect there are different kinds of shoplifting. I remember hearing a friend who is not the kind of person to just pocket an item and leave, bragging about ringing up protein powder from a bulk dispenser as flour to save money. That kind of behaviour is definitely going to be hard to model.

I see a couple people using it at the shops near me in the UK (but it's not that popular here either). It's pretty universally available in the bigger shops, but rare in the little metro shops. I really like just slinging my bag in the trolley and running around the store with a scanner. It's dramatically easier than unpacking a trolley for self-checkout or the old school checkouts. It's annoying when there are security tagged items though, because it defeats the purpose of the self scanning.

Nothing, the same as current self-checkout systems. You can already easily just put stuff in your pocket or ring expensive items up as incorrect, cheaper things. I suspect shops have done a risk analysis and decided that they'd prefer to have more shoplifting and fewer staff.

I think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely the next realistic step for grocery stores. I really like using them, as they allow me to put stuff directly into my bags as I go.

I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got, and then there's no need to scan anything.

One thing that I picked up on the spec sheet there which you shouldn't really have in a ham radio is a scrambler. I don't know if they really mean something like DTS/CTCSS which isn't actually encryption, but the word encryption shows up in the user manual, though this might just be a troubled translation.

I'm curious if anyone who has one of these has any further clarity on what exactly that feature is.

I'm not too knowledgable in this space, so my main questions are what are the advantages of DECT-2020 NR over something like LoRA (which I understand has license problems), zigbee, or 802.11ah (which is rarer but has less of a license issue)?

Why is this part of the 5G spec?

I believe they don't have NFC enabled on the terminals at all. Same with Walmart (allegedly, I haven't been there in a while). I've heard rumours that the reason for this is so they can do customer tracking more reliably, but I'm not sure how much more valuable an actual card PAN is than a DPAN if the DPAN isn't getting rotated.

Timing.app is really good for this purpose. I use it every day, but I am not affiliated with the company in any way.

Essentially it uses the accessibility features on MacOS to see what you are doing and generate time entries for you.

https://timingapp.com/

One thing that is very unintuitive with normalization is that MacOS is much more aggressive with normalizing Unicode than Windows or Linux distros. Even if you copy and paste non-normalized text into a text box in safari on Mac, it will be normalized before it gets posted to the server. This leads to strange issues with string matching.

Anecdotally, I tend to agree. I have both UK and US phone numbers. The US phone number receives dramatically more spam calls than the UK one, despite us not having STIR/SHAKEN in the UK yet. I don't know if that's because the US people are likely to be juicer targets (richer etc) or because of some infrastructure difference that makes it more of a hassle to do in the UK.

This is why there needs to be regulation with teeth.

It needs to make business sense to prevent spam/scams by there being penalties for screwing things up, and incentives for doing well. Otherwise you're right, unscrupulous telco companies like to make money by charging scammers to send messages to customers.

The thing that I don't understand is why the telecom companies that are letting these scammers SMS spam en masse are not being cut out of the domestic telecom market. There should be a certain percentage of spam reports to legitimate messages that is just permadeath for the telco. I'm pretty sure if I tried to use twilio to send these kinds of messages I'd get banned, but there are sketchy sms/sip companies who go out of their way to enable the bad behaviour.

STIR/SHAKEN is a good start, but we need to come down hard on this.

I think that the strength of point b) is the point that a lot of people question. I think for people like me who question the SES - intelligence link, the point of testing is to provide any opportunity for bright people who have lower SES to have a shot, which they would be otherwise denied due to their status.

If anything, testing is one of the things that can help create that link between SES and intelligence.

> like in the airplane to spot mobiles

What are you referring to here?

You usually can't run unsigned kernel modules if you have EFI secure boot turned on, depending on the way your distribution's kernel is configured.

I'm more familiar with that one than the one in swindon. It looks extremely terrifying from above, but what it actually looks like from the ground is a bit of a weird run of roundabouts one after another. If you take them one at a time rather than consider the intersection as a whole, it works fairly simply. It's actually shockingly intuitive.

Compared to the nearby roundabout onto the M40, which is of a much simpler design, but is covered in traffic lights, the Wycombe magic roundabout is actually much better at moving traffic around.

My ISP was not willing to do this for me, but they did give me the admin password for the device so I could change the SSID on the integrated WiFi. From there I was able to configure a bridge interface. Everyone is happy with this outcome.

Most of the time in my experience you can’t BYO ONT because it needs to be authed to the network and the ISP won’t do that other than for their own hardware. On the other hand I’ve never heard of being charged rental fees for an ONT.

If anything, I think GenAI is going to do the opposite. It will be able to mix the content and advertisements much more naturally (and deceptively) than is currently possible at scale.

Instead of seeing: content -- ad -- content -- ad

You will see: just-in-time content which you asked for, which is skewed to inform you about particular products and hide information about competitors.

I would say that a large portion of b2b or internal software tends to come into this category. If you are building something for a single business that only operates in one jurisdiction, and you don't do i18n, why bother with global distribution? A lot of b2b stuff covers process that have legal stuff baked in, like tax handling or other assumptions.

Ultimately this is something that needs to be understood by lawmakers.

Web technology is increasingly designed to make this kind of meddling harder, not easier, for the sake of user security and counter surveillance across the web.

There is no magic bullet for stopping piracy. The anti piracy companies will happily burn down the world to support their business model. There are always tradeoffs, and there are always ways of pirating things, because there will inevitably be a guy willing to point a camcorder at his TV screen.

I think most people here believe that we shouldn’t break the web so that some anti piracy companies can sell their tools.

If people want to investigate crimes, it has never been easier. The reality is that the public is not interested in collectively fining everybody who watches football on a streaming site. Instead we get garbage that breaks people’s internet so that it’s a little bit harder to pirate things.

I wouldn't worry too much just yet. What subject is the course in?