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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • GamingChairModel@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devEvil
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    2 months ago

    Ok so most monitors sold today support DDC/CI controls for at least brightness, and some support controlling color profiles over the DDC/CI interface.

    If you get some kind of external ambient light sensor and plug it into a USB port, you might be able to configure a script that controls the brightness of the monitor based on ambient light, without buying a new monitor.


  • For my personal devices:

    • Microsoft products from MS DOS 6.x or so through Windows Vista
    • Ubuntu 6.06 through maybe 9.04 or so
    • Arch Linux from 2009 through 2015
    • MacOS from 2011 through current
    • Arch Linux from 2022 through current

    I’ve worked with work systems that used RedHat and Ubuntu back in the late 2000’s, plus decades of work computers with Windows. But I’m no longer in a technical career field so I haven’t kept on top of the latest and greatest.






  • Good writeup.

    The use of ephemeral third party accounts to “vouch” for the maintainer seems like one of those things that isn’t easy to catch in the moment (when an account is new, it’s hard to distinguish between a new account that will be used going forward versus an alt account created for just one purpose), but leaves a paper trail for an audit at any given time.

    I would think that Western state sponsored hackers would be a little more careful about leaving that trail of crumbs that becomes obvious in an after-the-fact investigation. So that would seem to weigh against Western governments being behind this.

    Also, the last bit about all three names seeming like three different systems of Romanization of three different dialects of Chinese is curious. If it is a mistake (and I don’t know enough about Chinese to know whether having three different dialects in the same name is completely implausible), that would seem to suggest that the sponsors behind the attack aren’t that familiar with Chinese names (which weighs against the Chinese government being behind it).

    Interesting stuff, lots of unanswered questions still.



  • I wouldn’t describe it as a reversal, the actual serenity prayer as stated already has the “courage to change the things I can,” so anything that is within the speaker’s ability to change should already be covered. And the last part, the wisdom to know the difference, already asks to have the ability to discern the two categories, and seeks to avoid accepting the things that can be changed.

    It’s clever, but doesn’t actually say anything the serenity prayer itself doesn’t already say.


  • Your messages going to and being handled by other services means you’d be subject to their TOS and privacy policy as well.

    This is true of literally every one of your contacts, too. When you send someone a message, they can screenshot, copy, archive, and forward however they see fit (and most people don’t govern themselves by any kind of TOS or privacy policy). Which then means that if any one of your contacts chooses to use another service as a bridge, or as an archival tool, you’re naturally going to expose your messages to that service, on that contact’s terms.

    But that isn’t about interoperability per se. It’s about how other people store and use their copy of data shared between multiple users. Apple iMessage isn’t interoperable with anything, but users still have conversations archived all the way back to the beginning of the service over a decade ago, and can choose to export those messages to be saved elsewhere. (For example, I use a bridge for iMessage so that I can view them on my Android phone, but the mechanism is software that leverages the Mac’s accessibility API).

    Some of us are data hoarders. If you’re gonna have a conversation with people like me, you’ll have to trust that we don’t use those archives in a way that either inadvertently/negligently or intentionally exposes that data to some bad actor. I’d like to think I do a good job of respecting my friends’ privacy, and secure my systems, but I’m probably not perfect.




  • The big thing, to me, is that it can losslessly encode JPEGs, the dominant format for allllll sorts of archived images. That’s huge for migration of images that don’t necessarily exist in any other format.

    Plus, as I understand it, JPEG XL performs better at those video-derived formats at lossless high resolution applications relating to physical printing and scanning workflows, or encoding in new or custom color spaces. It’s designed to work in a broader set of applications than the others, beyond just web images in a browser.


  • A 10% premium doesn’t sound like it would dilute royalties that much.

    If half of the plays are getting paid the bonus and half are not, then you’d have 55 credits for the bonus plays and 50 for the non-bonus plays. 50/105 is 47%, so that’s still half the plays getting 47% of the credit. Or basically a 6% reduction in revenue.

    If the holdouts on the tech are only 20% of the plays, then we’re looking at 20/88 split in revenue, or where the 20% non-bonus tracks will get a 18.51% of the revenue, or a loss of 7.4% of revenue they would’ve otherwise.

    It’s not nothing, but it’s also not a devastating loss of revenue.


  • Apple TV+ and Apple Music do have first party status, subtly favored by the operating system itself. The Siri/search integration is tighter with those services than competing services, which is especially important on a TV interface (where there isn’t a keyboard or mouse or touchscreen). I think search for music still only looks at the Apple Music catalog and won’t search Spotify/YouTube/Tidal.

    It’s not a glaringly obvious promotion of their own products, but that’s what I mean when I say that Apple pushes users towards their own stores. On desktop and mobile, they’re pushing Apple’s own paid cloud storage (and won’t let competing services fulfill the same functionality), at the OS level.



  • Apple TV is just a grid of Apps whereas the Google homescreen immediately hits you with an ad for a show on a streaming service you might not even have.

    Apple TV+, the streaming service, does show ads for content. It’s one of the worst, in my opinion, at pre-roll ads for other shows you didn’t click on.

    Then, in the interface, you’ll get banner-like ads for other stuff, mostly Apple TV+ exclusives. Also, the interface also does push casual browsing (or search) into the paid buy/rent options also.

    Apple’s days of focusing on user experience above all else has shifted towards getting you to pay for stuff. Just because it mainly steers towards stores they own (app store, music/movies/TV, services subscriptions) doesn’t make it any less intrusive of advertising.



  • That problem will always exist to some degree. We want good access to the ability to repair (in our laws, in how things are engineered or designed, in our supply chains and in industry support, in our cultural expectations, etc.), but there will always be certain types of repairs that will cost more than manufacturing a new one from scratch.

    Sometimes repairing some component will take more work than the entire component is worth. For example, the extreme example of a stripped screw shows us that replacing a stripped screw is cheaper and easier than trying to re-machine that same chunk of metal back into a screw shape.

    Or some types of breakage just can’t be repaired practically. A torn piece of paper can be taped back together, but it isn’t quite the same as a new piece of paper.

    Or the repair might require work done on a particular place that makes that labor more expensive. Welding a leaking pipe might be slower and more expensive than replacing that pipe, if the leak happens to be in a place that is hard to access. Or, as you learned, paying for a repairman to drive from one place to another with the right part might cost more than just the general cost of delivery of the whole thing.

    Often, troubleshooting will take a skilled troubleshooter much more time, and their time is worth more than the cost of replacing the broken thing, perhaps by a less skilled technician.

    As the price of a thing goes down compared to the cost of the labor to fix it, the calculus of whether a particular repair is worth the cost is going to shift towards replacement rather than repair. And that’s not always a bad thing, as it usually means the thing is getting more affordable, or people’s time is getting more valuable.