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wopwops

104 karma · joined August 12, 2015

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wopwops··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
Please give me the option to not use the, "Innovations."
wopwops··on A third of Perplexity's citations don't contain the number they're cited for
My favorite is hallucinated slop with sources that 404.
wopwops··on I Want to Leave the Internet
"...it feels so fake and so capitalist."

Is there some genuine, socialist Internet somewhere?

wopwops··on How I Left YouTube
Not all women. I'm married and have four children.
wopwops··on How I Left YouTube
I said "F-this" 20 years ago, moved to the middle of nowhere, paid cash for my property and live on next to nothing. Best decision ever.
wopwops··on Why aren't smart people happier?
Once I moved to the middle of nowhere and limited my contact with people---besides my wife and children---I became very happy.
wopwops··on How to build a solar powered electric oven
Why do the images look like someone took pictures of dotmatrix printer output?

---

Update: for whatever it's worth, I just asked the Magic 8 Ball (Perplexity):

Low-tech Magazine uses the option to display images as dithered primarily to reduce the energy consumption and data load of their website. Dithering is an old image compression technique that reduces the number of colors in images to just a few shades of gray (black and white with four levels of gray), which dramatically decreases the file size. The black-and-white dithered images are then recolored via the browser’s CSS, which adds no extra data load.

This approach makes images roughly ten times less resource-intensive than full-color high-resolution images, which supports the magazine’s goal of having a low-energy, solar-powered website. However, some images, such as graphs or those with crucial color information, may become less clear under dithering, so the website offers the option to turn off dithering for individual images to reveal the original, heavier images. This balances energy efficiency with the need for clarity when visual information depends on color or detail.

Thus, the dithered image feature is both an energy-saving measure and a distinct stylistic choice that aligns with the philosophy of reducing the environmental impact of web usage while maintaining visual storytelling appeal.

wopwops··on Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework
Does this mean that we will be able to get the Quicklaunch toolbar back?
wopwops··on California now has more EV charging ports than gas nozzles
"EVs convert over 77% of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels. Conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 12%–30% of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels."

https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml

EV charging doesn't need to deliver anywhere near the amount of energy contained in gas to displace gas.

wopwops··on TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information
"Too long video" lol
wopwops··on Purelymail: Cheap, no-nonsense email
Why does the logo feature an eyeball?
wopwops··on MKUltra
I think this is sarcasm.
wopwops··on Firefox search update
Is Firefox being sabotaged from within?
wopwops··on Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
Draw salary as long as you can, save as much as possible and buy land outright somewhere cheap. No mortgage. I saw where it was all headed back in the early 2000s. I was in my mid 30s and feeling the grind back then.

Rent? Fuck that. Your life is on the line and this is for all the marbles. You find a way to go rent free. Maybe do like the bums are doing all over the place, live in a van, etc. Nobody seems to care. Save that money and then get out.

I did this, ending my career in IT back in 2006. Best move ever. When they fired everyone on the last contract I was on, I can't tell how good it felt.

By the way, the house I lived in at the end... Remember the house in Fight Club? That would have been an improvement.

wopwops··on Show HN: Currl – A free text-based social bookmarking website
Thank you. Simple design = very useful. I like the bookmarklet.
wopwops··on Ask HN: What lesser-known accessories do you use with your computer?
I have a RTL2832U v3 software defined radio that plugs into a USB port.

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/tag/v3/

wopwops··on Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
I raise my own cows on grass, slaughter them and fill my freezer with the beef. My wife and children help with the process and love the results. (I can't wait to see how many downvotes this gets.)
wopwops··on Price of FSD will rise to $15k in North America on September 5th
It's not going to work. I happen to be friends with a top AI researcher and he laughs it off completely. "No way." He referred me to this:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-tesla-self-dr...

"It's all hype," said Steven E. Shladover, a retired research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley who has been involved in efforts to create autonomous driving for 45 years. "The technology does not exist to do what he is claiming. He doesn't have it and neither does anybody else."

---

It's not close to working at all. Musk must know it.

wopwops··on Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy
I was given an Onkyo TX-108 as a gift in the 1980s. I used and loved it up until I left the U.S. for good in 2006. I gave that receiver to my sister and she's still using it. Fantastic sound.
wopwops··on Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
I nearly stopped using it with the terrible color changes to the tabs (no contrast) in v92. I mean, I thought, this is finally the last straw. But I found that I could customize some colors, especially the active tab, with an add on called Firefox Color.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-color...

Maybe it will help someone who has the same problem.

I really miss the old and customizable Firefox.

wopwops··on Hackers breach Electronic Arts, stealing game source code and tools
Maybe a community-made Titanfall 3 will finally happen!
wopwops··on SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up
This is already better than anything I can get (rural NZ). Any info on service tiers and pricing?
wopwops··on Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?
It's a great life! I just wish I'd been in a position to do it earlier. (I'm in my late 40s now.) I do a bit of IT, but nothing like before. Very basic. It amounts to desktop support and basic networking. I do other stuff too. I sold solar power systems for a while, for example. We have a solar power system and a Tesla Powerwall 2. That has almost totally eliminated the electricity bill. We produce a lot of our own food and we have no debt, so we don't need much money to survive.

People I know who are still in California tell me I wouldn't believe how bad things have gotten there. But the thing is, it was already "that" bad to me back in the early 2000s. I feel very lucky to have gotten out of there.

wopwops··on Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?
I left corporate IT for good back in 2005. Then left the U.S. Moved to a small farm in the middle of nowhere. Never went back.

Regrets = 0. Well, there are no Mexican food restaurants here.

wopwops··on Apple is evaluating new keyboard mechanisms to make thinner MacBooks
As someone who gave up on Apple in the late 1990s, I experience schadenfreude when they are having these totally unnecessary issues... Year after year after year after year.
wopwops··on M.I.T. Media Lab concealed its relationship with Jeffrey Epstein
Where, specifically, was the money going at MIT?
wopwops··on Studies Shoot Down Tech’s Harmful Effects on Kids – So Now What?
"Well being." This is tobacco industry grade nonsense.

haha Try looking at language acquisition or physical development and screen time. Many studies linked here:

https://theswaddle.com/effects-of-screen-time-on-children/

wopwops··on Firefox desktop market share now below 9%
Can I get my beloved Firefox addons to work again?

(No.)

wopwops··on Intel's 49-Qubit Chip Shoots for Quantum Supremacy
Breaking Bitcoin With a Quantum Computer

http://fortune.com/2018/01/06/breaking-bitcoin-cybersaturday...

Quantum Resistant Ledger

https://theqrl.org/

wopwops··on How you can contribute to Firefox 57 success
I've just had my "last straw" moment with Firefox after over a decade of using it. Several addons broke with their developers saying, in effect, F-it, and then it lost all of my saved logins. So, yep, F-it. Firefox has been moving toward becoming a clone of Chrome for years. I just skipped to the chase and started using Chrome. Congratulations, Mozilla. Nice work.
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