Dave.

You people are underselling yourselves.

A thousand a night, indexed to inflation. First year in advance, and then payment every morning after that, with the condition that if you miss one night, it’s all over.

I think the ongoing payment adds a bit of spice to it. Do you set a goal of X dollars and stop then? Will you be ordered by the court to continue wearing it for alimony for your gold digging ex wife that you met in the first year? Will the temptation of easy money for minor suffering slowly drive you insane? Time will tell.

“I have no mouth and I must scream” could end up being a plausible way to spend eternity.

Not really, it’s just phrased differently to the usual signup pitch, they’re putting in a middle ground between full “premium” subscribers (whatever that is) and public access with tracking and ad metrics.

Companies need revenue to operate. They get that revenue from advertising data and selling ad slots, or subscriptions. Whether they actually cease all tracking and ad metrics when you subscribe is something I’d doubt though, and that could be a case for the legal system if they didn’t do what they claim.

Personally, this behaviour is the point where I would not consider the site to be valuable enough to bother with.

“ChatGPT, write a letter to the community that says I am looking after this issue with untrusted BLOBs and it is of high importance but do not be specific about anything.”

Mainly the issues are about providing ~600 kilowatts for 8 minutes to charge your typical size EV battery.

A row of 5 chargers of that size soaks up 3MW if they’re all in use, and that’s not something that can be quickly or easily shoehorned into a suburban electricity grid.

It’s about 500 houses worth of electricity usage, for comparison. For just 5 fast chargers.

Not to say it’s impossible, but infrastructure doesn’t come cheap, and so it’ll cost quite a bit to cram that 80 percent charge into your car’s battery.

Well this seems to go against all sorts of disaster recovery practices, so I’m torn between believing they are truly incompetent or they are just lying.

Something like a raspberry pi or equivalent, and use reverse SSH set up to connect to a server with a known address on your end.

This means that ports don’t need to be opened on their end.

Also if you go with a gateway host, shift SSH to a randomised port like 37465, and install fail2ban.

I want a music playing alarm app that’s permanently locked to Sonny and Cher’s , “I got you babe”.

What I’m asking is how tf did text messages and whatever in the walkie talkies ignite a spark strong enough to ignite the PETN?

Pager with firmware that activates an output on date/time X/Y and triggers an ignition signal. That signal is sent o an actual detonator in the device, which sets off the explosive.

Radio with DTMF receiver that activates an output when, for example, touchtone 4 is received over the air, or alternatively if the radio has GPS, another date/time activation via firmware.

Both of these things are relatively trivial for a nation-state to pull off.

So yes, in both cases it’s possible that faulty devices are still around. However, if all the rest of your group has had exploding pagers and radios, most people in the same group would have dropped their still-working pager or radio into a bucket of water by now. There’s probably a few, and they’re probably being carefully taken apart right now to see how it was done.

Afaik such an idea was nonsense previously.

It’s not nonsense, it just takes planning and resources. And now that people know it is possible, buying and using any sort of equipment for your group without having the nagging concern there might be a bomb in it is impossible. And that’s a pretty powerful limiter.

That’s easy. Just fly somewhere and bring it in your carry-on, airport security will let you know.

There’s a lot to be said for “http://yourISP.com/~username” being available 24/7 at no particular effort to you.

As if the software was as permanent as the hardware lol

There’s no guarantee that the software will ever be updated to something that the user finds usable though.

Google could just one day go “meh, we don’t think folding displays are where we want to be right now”, and - ta-da! - you’re left with a folding doorstop and Google’s got yet another entry on the “killed by Google” list.

90% of users when they are presented with the UAC popup when they do something:

“Yes yes whateverrr” <click>

Never understood why smartphones are so super bright by default.

Because they have to compete with 50k lux outside and then scale to 600 lux indoors, then down to just to a few lux in a darkened room.

Perhaps the brightness slider needs to be more logarithmic so you can slide from 0.001 percent to 100 percent more easily.

I’ve got photos in Flickr dating from 1999 onwards. Ten thousand or so of them, and a couple of the early ones are now corrupted.

But they are my “other backup” for Google photos so I don’t mind too much. I also have a USB Blu-ray drive at home that I use to periodically burn M-Discs that I hand out to a few relatives.

That’s about as good as I can conveniently do for backup, and it’s probably better than the single-point-of-failure box of negatives that my parents have in their cupboard.

when they’re powered down.

There’s no periodic cell refresh in flash memory like there is in DRAM. When USB sticks are plugged in, all you are doing is powering up the flash chip and interface ICs.

You’d have to read a block then write it back to actually refresh the stored charges in the cells.

I don’t think there’s anything commercially available that can do it.

However, as an experiment, you could:

• Get a group of photos from a burst shot
• Encode them as individual frames using a modern video codec using, eg VLC.
• See what kind of file size you get with the resulting video output.
• See what artifacts are introduced when you play with encoder settings.

You could probably/eventually script this kind of operation if you have software that can automatically identify and group images.

Dammit now I have to reduce the block size of my discord-based cold storage filesystem.

Most times what I get when asking it coding questions is a half-baked response that has a logic error or five in it.

Once I query it about one of those errors it replies with, “You’re right, X should be Y because of (technical reason Z). Here’s the updated code that fixes it”.

It will then give me some code that does actually work, but does dumb things, like recalculating complex but static values inside a loop. When I ask if there’s any performance improvements it can do, suddenly it’s full of helpful ways to improve the code that can make it run 10 to 100 times faster and fix those issues. Apparently if I want performant code, I have to explicitly ask for it.

For some things it will offer solutions that don’t solve the issue that I raise, no matter how many different ways I phrase the issue and try and coax it towards a solution. At that point, it basically can’t, and it gets bogged down to minor alterations that don’t really achieve anything.

Sometimes when it hits that point I can say “start again, and use (this methodology)” and it will suddenly hit upon a solution that’s workable.

So basically, right now it’s good for regurgitating some statistically plausible information that can be further refined with a couple of good questions from your side.

Of course, for that to work you have to know the domain you’re working in fairly well already otherwise you’re shit out of luck.

The problem with stack overflow is that you need to know enough about the domain you’re working in to describe it accurately enough to search and find that previous great answer.

If you have no clue, and then naively ask the no-clue kinds of questions, because you have no clue, then you get beaten over the head about not searching for the existing answer that you don’t know how to search for.