stephen_g

I hate it, they've just gone and smooshed a bunch more AI crap into Jira too in the last few days.

Useless buttons to "suggest subtasks" and "improve issue" and offer to write the description. Absolutely useless nonsense, I wish I could turn it all off and there is an issue on their bug tracker with that request (turning it off as an individual user), and it has many votes, but at the moment you can only disable it globally as admin.

Honestly I hope people's distaste for AI generated content grows stronger. The existing mass media is bad and inauthentic enough, AI content is even worse...

I find myself mostly watching small creators on YouTube these days and only pay to watch a film if it's unusually good... But I never want to pay a cent to consume the output of some statistical model.

That seems an incredibly generous description (or breathtakingly naive, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt because hopefully most people aren't that credulous).

The point of Hollywood accounting is to intentionally create enough inflated expenses (billed from companies controlled by the studios or related parties of the producers etc.) to ensure that the net profit is zero or less, even when the film actually generated a lot of income.

It's true that tax gets paid eventually (and somewhere, maybe a tax haven) but it is intentionally creative accounting designed to minimise tax and screw people out of their royalties.

Of course there’s no actual official ‘china export’ mark and that is just what some Chinese factories were claiming when they were caught slapping a (accidentally mis-spaced) CE conformance mark on their products! The EC made a statement on this back in 2008 [1] so everyone knows what game they are playing.

1. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-6-2007-5938-...

I doubt it’s even saving cost, it’s just incompetence. It works with the USB A to C cable, so job done. They’ve probably never plugged it into a PD charger, and probably just copied the schematic from the last (defective) product and will copy and paste it into the next one too.

That’s impressive, I have managed to break a lot of micro connectors (not even from proper stress, just from prolonged normal use) but I have never managed to break a USB-C cable or connector!

What solution are you proposing though? As long as people can buy USB-C connectors on the open market, they're going to be able to create devices that horribly deviate from the spec in terrible ways. But it's better that they are available for people who do follow the spec in their designs, instead of, say, trying to tightly control parts availability.

A compliant device has quite a lot of protection against all sorts of faults (short to VBUS etc.) but if the device was non-compliant then all bets are off.

Who knows, the charger might have been so non-compliant that it could have somehow got mains onto the connector, which is potentially deadly so probably good if it's stopped working...

But at the end of the day you shouldn't judge a standard by dodgy and possibly dangerous electronics that completely fail to comply to that specification!

That was exactly the point of the project though - it was designed by the conservative side of politics in our country to try and crowd out investment in batteries and other renewables while taking enough time to build to keep coal plants operating longer in the meantime.

It didn't work at all for that though - we had a lot of private investment in large-scale batteries anyway, because the cost came down quickly just as most people (apart from the conservatives) expected. Then the other side of Government got in and put a subsidy scheme to get hundreds of thousands of home batteries installed, which has been multiple times better bang-for-buck than the Snowy 2.0 scheme, as well as taking far shorter a time. At the same time coal plants are shutting down as expected because they are increasingly unreliable given their old ages.

Snowy 2.0 be an expensive stranded asset basically, it will work and be somewhat useful but extremely uneconomical so basically relying on the cost being written off - if it had to recoup any investment then it couldn't run because it'd never be able to sell the power for high enough.

What kind of part? I use Octopart for a lot of things, like ICs (sometimes some variants are available in low quantities but others aren't and only in thousands).

For stuff like passives it's usually easier to use Digi-Key or Mouser and you can filter by MOQ so you only see things that are available individually.

Buying custom PCBs from China makes sense if you're interested in making electronics. It was more than a decade ago that the equation shifted to the point that making them at home has only made sense if you're interested in the process of making PCBs themselves.

Things like soldermask, multiple layer stackups and plated holes and vias are standard on dirt-cheap Chinese boards but are challenging and time-consuming to do at home.

Strange response... Since when is the idea of ‘duty’ supposed to be ‘deeply American’?

I’m not American but happy to agree with the OP - being an elected MP is not just a job and if they want to take leave whenever they want to and miss critical votes then I’m sure they would have no trouble getting a normal job instead!

Surely the parliamentary sitting schedule gives them plenty of time off already where they would not miss votes (I know it does in my country)

Yes, in this case it's a slightly different (and much more common) strategy - EEE was a bit of a Microsoft trademark but we see what's happening here much more widely, especially by massive companies as well as with PE. I'd say it'd be better described as AEE - Acquire, Enshittify, Extinguish...

Noticed this with hire cars, we have 'school zones' that only operate within certain times (like 7am - 9am and 2pm - 4pm) and new cars pick up the 40 km/h from the sign but obviously aren't smart enough to read the times and realise it's not in effect, so the car thinks you're speeding by 20 km/h and you get all these beeps and bobs.

I also had one that couldn't tell the difference between a speed sign and a speed 'ahead' sign so it'd start screaming at you hundreds of metres before you reach the actual speed zone!

Then there was the fun of driving on a highway at 110 km/h (I think with a friend with a Tesla) and we passed a school bus that had a '40 km/h when lights flashing' sign on the back but with 40 is in the red circle like our speed signs (like [1]). So the car decided that was the speed of the road and the cruise control suddenly slammed on the brakes! Obviously the lights were not flashing (and wouldn't unless it was stopped at a bus stop and letting off children) but the car is also not smart to interpret any of that!

I'm glad neither of the cars our family owns has any of these features!

1. https://www.austockphoto.com.au/image/40-when-lights-flash-s...

That’s nothing to do with the OP’s comment, and ignores the second part which I pointed out too (that nobody is forcing you to use this optional feature that most people want), so swing and a miss on two points…

The OP’s argument is that lots of people wanting CarPlay is evidence some kind of monopolistic anti-competitive behaviour by Apple, which is nonsense. Nothing in your comment relates addresses the argument or the rebuttal!

That doesn’t make any sense… The comment you’re replying to is about people’s desire for a particular feature, but pretty much any car that supports CarPlay also supports the Android equivalent, as well as still having media playback and often some kind of navigation without either!

Your comment would only make sense in a hypothetical situation where the car infotainment only worked if you had an iPhone or if there was some kind of exclusivity agreements to preclude it working with Android, but that isn’t the case in any circumstance I’m aware of.

> The difference isn’t huge (I think it’s 10-20% or something)

A 10-20% reduction in fuel burn is actually considered pretty huge...

Funny though how whenever these laws are pushed though, the legislators are more interested in strongly identifying people to gate services despite the fact that they should have plenty of advice that things like zero-knowledge proofs exist.

I hate to be cynical but I worry that this isn't going to matter, because it really seems that a lot of the pressure behind age verification isn't actually very interested in the age verification part...

Yeah, I expect it's pretty similar to how long-term, constant stress is correlated to poor longevity, but frequent bouts of short term stress of intense exercise followed by recovery is correlated with good longevity.

Yes for other countries, it’s a standards thing not something unique to the US!

I've done a lot of travelling between Australia and Europe via Dubai on the A380, and I've definitely noticed the same thing, you can really feel it. You can also see it on the interactive map thing on the ones that have the 'virtual cockpit' view - the vertical speed goes positive for a bit, then back to zero, then negative for a bit, then back to zero, and repeat, all 10 hours or so of cruise on the long leg!

The 787 is nice but I find the seat width quite cramped in economy, and unfortunately premium economy isn't great value either to pay or for points upgrade on any of the airlines I fly...

Suggesting a video app is more dangerous than 13 year olds playing unsupervised with actual explosives and real guns...

It still does happen though, so not totally wishful thinking - but it seems to go the other way, commercial to miliary e.g. like the KC-30A tanker which are converted from standard commercial A330-200s (and as I understand the new version will be from A330neos).

For the money things have actually got better. If you pay the equivalent (adjusted for inflation or compared to wages) of what they were paying back then for an international flight, you're in first class and on a good airline that's hugely better than anything from the 'golden age'. Even business class is cheaper and (again on good airlines) is better than what people had then - the planes are quieter, the seats lie flat, the food is good, lounge access with free food and drinks before and on any stopovers...

It's kind of crazy that people compare the experience on a $1000 transalantic ticket and bemoan that the experience doesn't seem quite as good as something that was costing people the equivalent of 10-20x as much back then!

I’m not a TikTok fan by any means but that really does feels to me like bordering on delusion…

I’ve mostly seen it at Asian cuisine restaurants where you normally order several dishes and order more as the meal progresses. So it builds up a tab and then you pay at the end.

> 10 Gb/s Ethernet interfaces do not require 20 Gb/s USB ports for reaching maximum performance, they already reach that on 10 Gb/s USB ports, despite of what the writer of TFA believes.

While this may be theoretically (almost) possible, I’m quite sure this is absolutely not the case in practice.

For example see these benchmarks of one of the more recent USB to Ethernet chipsets [1], that can reach ~9.5 Gb/s on USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 but only between ~6.2 to ~7.3 on 3.2 Gen 2x1 laptops.

1. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/new-10-gbe-usb-adapte...

Edit: Haha, didn’t realise TFA was by the same author as these benchmarks but he’s done a lot of testing and benchmarking of these kind of devices over a long time, and it agrees with all the other benchmarking from other people I’ve seen too!

The gold standard makes zero sense. Why should the amount of money the economy needs have any relation to the amount of gold a country holds?

What happens in practice is that you set a conversion rate to account for this, and basically immediately things start to drift further and further out of whack leading to massive distortion. There's a reason the gold standard era was a cycle of big swings of inflation and deflation, with panics, recessions, crashes pretty continually.

It's the same with fixed or pegged exchange rates - you can set it to something reasonable at the start but it will always drift, usually until things are distorted that the system fails. That's why we don't have a gold standard anymore and why fixed exchange rates have all mostly failed and gone away too.

There's just no reason to believe that pegs to commodities or other currencies would ever correspond to the amount of money that the economy needs to be in circulation, so they always fail.

If it’s a “well known tactic” (well known by whom?) then it’s a counter-productive one - the more the extreme is heard in the mainstream, the more rational the slightly less extreme version sounds (It’s something the right-wing tends to use extremely effectively, the left wing spends too much energy infighting)

Neither is road infrastructure basically anywhere in the world... Here in Australia we have a fuel tax and each state has registration fees but combined those don't even cover half of what is spent by Government and local councils maintaining existing roads and investing in new road infrastructure, and that's before even thinking of the hidden costs of traffic enforcement, ambulances responding to accidents, etc.

It's the same case for basically everywhere around the world, driving ends up being quite heavily subsidised too.

Not that simple. In Australia over the last 10 years, the number of dwellings increased by 19% while the population increased by a smaller 16% [1]. Yet house prices still doubled. This is the same trend that has continued for decades, growth in number of dwellings has tended to outstrip population growth but house prices shot up since 2001 when the tax settings were changed to massively benefit speculation.

We also have a pretty high number of unoccupied dwellings that are left empty, since some investors see the bother of renting them out as not worth the money, since they’ll make so much when they sell that it doesn’t matter!

1. https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/is-population-growth-...