Migrated from rainynight65@feddit.de, which now appears to be dead. Sadly lost my comment history in the process. Let’s start fresh.

  • 3 Posts
  • 120 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2024

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  • It’s a pity the small chains do exactly the same shit.

    My local supermarket (formerly an IGA, now Drake’s) recently did that with an item I buy regularly. Bumped the price up from $26 to $45, only to have it ‘on sale’ a week later for $28. Wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the only instance.

    The funny thing is that I could have probably lived with the direct price increase, but that doesn’t sell as well to the people who aren’t paying attention. All they see is the ‘price drop’ sticker.



  • Equally then, the nuclear disasters shouldn’t count, right?

    Deaths from an accident at an active nuclear power plant are not the same as deaths caused by a burst dam that was originally intended to produce electricity one day, but has never produced any. Especially if you call the statistic ‘Deaths per unit of electricity production’. At the time of the accident, it was just a dam, construction of any hydroelectric facilities was nowhere near beginning, so calling it a ‘hydropower accident’ is highly debatable (probably as at least as debatable as calling nuclear ‘conventional’). Without the inclusion of those deaths, hydro would be shown to be even safer than nuclear, given that it has produced nearly twice as much electricity in the time span covered by those statistics, while having caused a similar number of deaths (if you continue to ignore the increased miner mortality, otherwise nuclear will look way worse). The article also does not cite how they determined the number of 171000 deaths, given that estimates for the Banqian dam failure range between 26000 and 240000. The author mentions (but does not cite) a paper by Benjamin Sovacool from 2016, which analyzes the deaths caused by different forms of energy but, crucially, omits the Banqian dam death toll. I will try to get hold of that paper to see the reasoning, but I suspect it may align with mine.

    How do you assume it’s ignoring their increased mortality?

    The article makes zero mention of any such thing, and the section about how the deaths are calculated (footnote 3 in this section) only calls out the deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima. Direct quote from the footnote:

    Nuclear = I have calculated these figures based on the assumption of 433 deaths from Chernobyl and 2,314 from Fukushima. These figures are based on the most recent estimates from UNSCEAR and the Government of Japan. In a related article, I detail where these figures come from.

    No mention at all of any other deaths or causes of death, nothing whatsoever. It’s the deaths from two nuclear accidents, that’s all. The figures from the cited study alone would multiply the number of nuclear deaths in this statistic. What’s worse, the author has published another article on nuclear energy which essentially comes to the exact same conclusions. But if you include deaths from a burst dam that has never produced electricity (but was planned to do so eventually), then you must include deaths among people who mine the material destined to produce electricity in a nuclear plant.

    To me it simply looks like the author of this article is highly biased towards nuclear, and has done very selective homework.












  • rainynight65@feddit.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlDear iPhone users:
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    24 days ago

    The USB transfer speed claim is misleading to say the least. The iPhone 15 was already capable of up to 10Gbps transfer speed (USB 3.0 support). You could quibble over the fact that the included cable didn’t support that (if only the USB-IF could get its shit together), but to claim the hardware doesn’t support it is a lie.

    Also, non-US iPhones support both physical SIM and eSIM.


  • Over two hundred phones have been ported to postmarketOS and every person giving it a shot will improve it.

    It’s not that cut and dried.

    A look at the postmarketOS devices page reveals:

    • “the most supported devices, maintained by at least 2 people and have the functions you expect from the device running its normal OS, such as calling on a phone, working audio, and a functional UI” (aka what you need a phone to be); Device count: 5, not a single one of them the kind I can go into a regular phone shop and buy

    • "Devices that have had a lot of work put into them, where regressions are actively fixed, and the port is overall in a pretty good shape (read: your experience will likely be bumpy and not overly smooth); Device count: 28, largely older devices (pre-2018, so again not something I can just go and buy, and exotics like above; There is a lot of orange in the features table)

    The rest is under “Testing”, and the best summary of that status I can find is “All the devices in this table can at least boot postmarketOS. To monitor boot progress, you must be able to receive output from the screen, a network adapter, or a serial port”. So there is a total of 33 devices right now, largely exotics and older devices, that you could reasonably use with postmarketOS for any purpose other than testing and tinkering.

    I am what you’d call ‘tech interested’. I tinker with Arduinos and solder electronics as part of my hobby. I do a smidgen of self-hosting and similar, though I am not nearly as far into the weeds as many people, and it’s not my key interest or activity. The thing about a phone is, I need it to work, because I need it for work. I don’t have time or compunction to go through the process of installing an OS the manufacturer doesn’t want me to install. I don’t have time to deal with a non-polished UX or capricious apps that need workarounds to install on a ‘non-standard’ OS (for lack of a better term). I know that’s not the fault of the OS, but a choice made by phone manufacturers and app developers, but that doesn’t make it any less real or an issue for me.


  • I can get the battery replaced on my phone for a fraction of the money it would cost me to buy a new phone. So I have to take it in to the shop for an hour. Big deal. I can do that once every few years. And I can still use wired headphones with my phone even though it doesn’t have a headphone jack. Sheesh, I wonder how that works.

    The biggest anti-consumer practice to make your device lifespan as short as possible is whatever software update practices the manufacturer has. Annual major versions increase hardware requirements - I can tell every day how my 5 year old phone is getting long in the tooth. Lack of long-term software support is another way to make sure the average user buys a new device well before the old device has reached end of life.



  • Sure, training data selection impacts the output. If you feed an AI nothing but anime, the images it produces will look like anime. If all it knows is K-pop, then the music it puts out will sound like K-pop. Tweaking a computational process through selective input is not the same as a human being actively absorbing stimuli and forming their own, unique response.

    AI doesn’t have an innate taste or feeling for what it likes. It won’t walk into a second hand CD store, browse the boxes, find something that’s intriguing and check it out. It won’t go for a walk and think “I want to take a photo of that tree there in the open field”. It won’t see or hear a piece of art and think “I’d like to be learn how to paint/write/play an instrument like that”. And it will never make art for the sake of making art, for the pure enjoyment that is the process of creating something, irrespective of who wants to see or hear the result. All it is designed to do is regurgitate an intersection of what it knows that best suits the parameters of a given request (aka prompt). Actively learning, experimenting, practicing techniques, trying to emulate specific techniques of someone else - making art for the sake of making art - is a key component to humans learning from others and being influenced by others.

    So the process of human learning and influencing, and the selective feeding of data to an AI to ‘tune’ its output are entirely different things that cannot and should not be compared.