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ssl232

3,782 karma · joined March 5, 2016

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ssl232··on Best of British Design
Spitfire vs Concorde in my final, and Concorde won.
ssl232··on AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons
Isn’t the problem though that AI companies charge money for their models trained on open source and copyleft projects?
ssl232··on Introducing Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS
Tell me about it. It stopped me ditching ever more privacy invading Android for iOS. How has it taken this long?
ssl232··on Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory
> 1296 PRINT "THIS PROGRAM REQUIRES ADVANCED BASIC -- USE COMMAND 'BASICA'":COLOR 15,0,0:FOR I=1 TO 9000:NEXT: RESUME 1298

TIL there is an “Advanced Basic”. I hope the naming was tongue in cheek.

ssl232··on OpenTTD 16.0-Beta1
I’m the same. I once suggested on the Transport Tycoon forums that there be a mechanism for curated sets of NewGRFs that work well together to be selected from the main page and was resolutely told that it’s up to the user to put together their own sets as they like.

EDIT: it looks like something like this is now in v16 as “collections”! I wonder if these can be shared.

ssl232··on Men are ditching TV for YouTube as AI usage and social media fatigue grow
Next in Ofcom’s authoritarian sights: YouTube.
ssl232··on Show HN: Website that plays the lottery every second
I play the national lottery in the UK mainly because of the good causes it supports. Athletes competing in the Olympics for Team GB for example receive significant funding from the lottery. I see my ticket as a charity donation with the added fun of an astronomically small chance of winning money.
ssl232··on Examples are the best documentation
php.net was great for this back in the 2000s.
ssl232··on Toyota runs a car-hacking event to boost security (2024)
The iPhone did everything the Nokia 3310 did, better. Electric cars do not (yet) do better some things hybrids do, such as being able to be fuelled with 400+ miles of range in 5 minutes.

I’m nowhere near the point of wanting an electric car to replace my hybrid. The convenience of petrol and the cost of electricity is too high. High electricity costs aren’t going to be fixed in my country any time soon so Toyota will continue to have a huge market here.

ssl232··on Danish supermarket chain is setting up "Emergency Stores"
Some supermarkets in the UK (e.g. Waitrose) literally just pick items already out and on display in the local store to give to delivery customers. So you’re getting whatever is at the front of the shelf in your local store, which is the least fresh.
ssl232··on Danish supermarket chain is setting up "Emergency Stores"
The greatest downside to online grocery delivery is that you can’t then do this.
ssl232··on LIGO detects most massive black hole merger to date
This is because space is _stiff_. Recall Hooke’s law from high school physics. The k constant represents the stiffness of the object. A rubber band is about 50. A sky scraper, about a million. Space? About 10^46 if I recall correctly. So it takes a truly enormous amount of energy in the form of gravitational waves to be able to move space enough for it to be detectable on Earth. And the only objects that can do that are the most massive ones moving at close to the speed of light: black holes, neutron stars, supernovae (the latter would have to be very close for us to see gravitational waves from - close enough that we’d likely see it with the naked eye as well).
ssl232··on Preliminary report into Air India crash released
> EDIT: Why is there no Cockpit Video Recorder? The days of limited storage are over.

Pilots unions are dead against it.

ssl232··on Show HN: Interactive pinout for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2
Thank you. I found this years ago and look it up every time I’m working on a Raspberry Pi project. Keep up the good work!
ssl232··on $100 Hamburger
I guess landing fees add to the $100?
ssl232··on Show HN: Chili3d – A open-source, browser-based 3D CAD application
Agreed, FreeCAD 1.0 is finally almost usable and supports assemblies. My main issue with it is that the bill of materials tool was DOA but it’s fixed in the main branch. There are still lots of quirks but these can be learned in a few hours of using it.
ssl232··on Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
Wasn’t there a rumour that the next iPhone will be foldable?
ssl232··on Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science (2018)
Agreed. Generations of students had their degree classifications determined by a small number of final exams under exam conditions. Why did we move away from that, opening up all of these routes to score degree grading in non exam conditions?
ssl232··on Why are banks still getting authentication so wrong?
Ah yes it was Sofort, not Klarna.
ssl232··on Why are banks still getting authentication so wrong?
In Germany, paying for goods online using Sofort (direct bank payment, not buy now pay later) literally involves typing in the same credentials used to log into online banking, that’s your account number, branch and PIN, followed by scanning a “TAN” similar to a QR code using the bank app. The only thing stopping them taking my data and logging into my banking it seems is the TAN app part, that could easily be phished.

Edit: changed Klarna to Sofort

ssl232··on Default styles for h1 elements are changing
Related to this, does anyone know why <h5> and <h6> are smaller than <p> by default? I asked this on Stackexchange years ago and didn’t really get to the bottom of it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55696808/why-do-h5-and-h....
ssl232··on macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)
Anyone know how to copy and paste without formatting into Outlook for Mac, without having to click the tiny dropdown box it creates when pasting formatted text? Outlook appears to have no setting for this and also ignores the key combination that works for most other apps…
ssl232··on Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon
> to the point America made a sport from moonshine running cars

Huh, is that NASCAR?

ssl232··on Amazon won't accept written communication
I’d normally be inclined to agree except they went to the effort of getting my video evidence, which gives me hope this did actually end up getting fed back.
ssl232··on Amazon won't accept written communication
I had the same issue when a driver let themselves round the back of my property, opening a latched gate by squeezing their fingers through a gap in the gate, then trying to open a door at the back. The door happened to be a bedroom with en-suite so the possibility of seeing someone naked was nonzero. The gate also can’t be closed again from the outside even reaching fingers through, leaving it open to anyone and everyone once they’ve left (I’ve since patched the holes as several delivery drivers have now done this). They dumped the package in our greenhouse, breaking a plant and leaving the door open. I only caught all this as we have a camera pointing at the back to track our cats, feeding into Frigate.

I also had trouble contacting Amazon by email so I spoke to a rep on the live chat. They put me through to someone on the delivery team who asked for video evidence. I had to send the video by email to some random Amazon address, then they credited my account with £10, apologised profusely, and said they would feed this back to the delivery driver.

ssl232··on Visualizing World War II
> Maps cover the spatial side of war, but in addition it's difficult to follow the timeline.

I'd love for there to be an OpenStreetMap style history project with a slider to change the date, allowing users to fill in battle lines and unit positions throughout history. There must be enormous troves of information on units and battles in archives around the world that can be put online in the right form. One obvious problem would be overcoming conflicting accounts of unit positions, strengths and extents, but even basic information on positions of units over time would allow users to get an idea of what was happening in a theater by dragging the slider.

ssl232··on 1960s tragedies triggered a life-saving law
The article doesn't quite mention it, but today marks exactly 50 years since the Health and Safety at Work Act came into force.
ssl232··on Why Proton VPN doesn't use RAM-only VPN servers
> they can be demanded by the police and are not protected by the fifth amendment

*Within the USA.

ssl232··on Why Proton VPN doesn't use RAM-only VPN servers
They say in the article the encryption passwords are stored off site, presumably in Switzerland where their HQ is. Switzerland does not have any law compelling handing over passwords as far as I am aware. They also say the logs on the (encrypted) drives don't contain any useful information linking back to users anyway.
ssl232··on Ryanair – when every page is a dark pattern
> And that game only ends when you step foot at the plane.

Actually, it ends only when you're off the plane at the destination. They continue to try to rinse you of your money on board with scratch cards (gambling), overpriced food and drink and duty free shopping, even making cabin announcements so you remove your headphones to listen thinking it's important.

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