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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • If you have low karma, then edits are reviewed by multiple people before the edit is saved. That’s primarily in place to prevent spam, who could otherwise post a valid question then edit it a few months later transforming the message into a link to some shitty website.

    Even with high karma, that just means your edit is temporarily trusted. It’s gets reviewed and will be reverted if it’s a bad edit.

    And any time an edit is reverted, that’s a knock against your karma. There’s a community enforced requirement for all edits to be a measurable improvement.

    Even moderation decisions are reviewed by multiple people - so if someone rejects a post because it’s spam, when they should have rejected it because it’s off topic (or approved it) then that is also going to be caught and undone. And any harmful contribution (edit or moderation decision) will result in your action being undone and your karma going down. If your karma goes down too fast, your access to the site is revoked. If you do something really bad, then they’ll ban your IP address.

    Moderators can also lock a controversial post, so only people with high karma can touch it at all.

    … keep in mind Stack Overflow doesn’t just allow editing your own posts, you can edit any content on the website, similar to wikipedia.

    It’s honestly a good overall approach, but around when Jeff Attwood left in 2008 it started drifting off course towards the shit show that is stack overflow today.


  • The thing is there are no pure telecoms anymore. There’s a company that maintains underground infrastructure and gets paid when that infrastructure is used, and is incentivised to upgrade the infrastructure because they make more money if it’s used more.

    And there are thousand of companies that benefit from the infrastructure, and they can charge customers pretty much whatever they want… though it better not be an excessively high price because every ISP, even a tiny one with a single employee, can provide service nationwide at the same raw cost as a telco with tens of millions of customers.

    The difference between what we have done, and net neutrality, is our system provides an open book profit motive to upgrade the network. Net Neutrality doesn’t do that.

    Fundamentally there is a natural monopoly in that once every street in a suburb is connected, then why would anyone invest in digging up the footpath and gardens to run a second wired connection to every house? The original provider would have to provide awful service to justify that, and they can simply respond to a threat of a new network by improving service just enough (maybe only temporarily), for that new investor to run for the hills.

    Net Neutrality stops blatant abuse. But it doesn’t encourage good behaviour. Our NBN does both.


  • That’s a real problem for sure, but I’m not a fan of the solution.

    They should have been found guilty of anticompetitive behaviour and split up into multiple companies.

    Here in Australia we’ve gone down that path though there was no actual lawsuit. We just saw problems starting to creep in and dealt with it proactively. The vast majority of network infrastructure is now owned by a company called “NBN Co” (National Broadband Network) which is required to provide the best available network technology to every single household/business in the country. All pre-existing network operators were forced to sell their infrastructure to NBN Co and any business can provide services to anyone for a reasonable fee paid to NBN Co. Mostly it’s broadband internet, but literally anything can go over the pipes. The fee varies depending on the bandwidth and QoS level.

    They are also investing in network upgrades, including state of the art DSL routers that can run at decent speeds for most people (I get about 80Mbps) and all new connections are Fibre as well as existing connections are gradually moving to Fibre (on those, you can usually get 10Gbps). Each building can have multiple connections, at least four but large buildings obviously get more. If you live in the middle of the desert with no wired networking at all, then you get a wireless one. Satellite if necessary, though usually it will be “fixed wireless” which is basically cellular with large/high quality a rooftop antenna.

    NBN Co is tax payer funded, but mostly only to accelerate fibre installations. Aside from that upfront capital expenditure it is profitable and some of those profits are paying off the tax payer’s uprfront investment.



  • The hero photo for the article shows a camera over a road that likely is likely running number plate recognition software…

    Honestly I’d be more worried about where that data is going than the tracking software in your car. They’ve got the most critical information (where did you drive and when), and they’ve got it for every car instead of just Honda drivers.

    This needs to be fixed with legislation, and it needs to be fixed actively. For example by getting rid of number plates entirely and replacing them with something like the transponders used in aircrafts and ships, but with an encrypted rolling code that only shares your data when authorised to do so (by the owner of the vehicle).

    Apple “Find My” works like that… your location is encrypted, and it’s uploaded without any identifying information. When the user brings up a map looking for their keys, that’s the only time encryption keys are handed over allowing the already stored information to be accessed. The car version of that could be police asking you at every traffic stop to hit a button on your dashboard that unlocks your registration/insurance details so they can run a quick check against their outstanding warrant/etc database.




  • It was great, in 2017

    It hasn’t stopped being great. In fact it’s better than it ever was.

    We need better safe guards and checks so that some person can’t just delete France.

    The map is updated millions of times per day. There are checks in place, but minor edits don’t get much review especially if it’s something simple like “this street has a bus stop”. Deleting France, yeah someone would notice that change and block it. Most software doesn’t use the realtime map state - they use a slightly older version of the map in part to avoid using a version of the map that has been compromised.

    You really only see the current map state if you are editing the map.


  • you can’t ignore basic laws of the universe that oil is a finite resource

    TLDR - oil might be a finite resource but gasoline is not oil and it can be renewable. But it’s also a rapidly shrinking market.

    The stuff can literally be grown on trees. It’s cheaper to pump it out of the ground, but it’s actually not much cheaper. Fuel from plants, which we farm in bulk for human consumption, can absolutely be used to create gasoline. It’s also net-zero — because the plant takes carbon out of the atmosphere to create the oil and then it’s simply returned to the atmosphere when your burn it.

    Most gasoline in the USA contains at least 10% biofuel, and some is up to 85%. The latter requires an engine tuned to run on it, however it’s possible (and is an area of active research) if you’re willing to spend a bit more money to manufacture 100% pure biofuel that can run on unmodified engines. Porsche in particular has started selling a biofuel that is specifically designed to run on classic cars that were manufactured decades ago. They plan to produce something like a million gallons a month of the stuff, and it will work in basically any car. And if you have a classic car (designed for gasoline that contained lead) then it will work better than the fossil fuel you can buy at a gas station

    The thing is though, battery powered vehicles are way cheaper than doing any of that. And if you really need a fuel based approach (e.g. batteries are just too heavy for large aircraft), then Hydrogen is a better option than any biofuel.

    So - while gasoline can technically be environmentally friendly and is a usable source of energy for the foreseeable future, in reality it’s destined to follow horse drawn carriages and steam engines, a technology some people only use for their own personally enjoyment or to preserve our history.


  • Everything-but-Windows?

    No. Any device that implements a certain DHCP feature is vulnerable. Linux doesn’t support it, because most Linux systems don’t even use DHCP at all let alone this edge case feature. And Android doesn’t support it because it inherited the Linux network stack.

    I would bet some Linux systems are vulnerable, just not with the standard network packages installed. If you’re issued a Linux laptop for work, wouldn’t be surprised if it has a package that enables this feature. It essentially gives sysadmins more control over how packets are routed for every computer on the LAN.




  • they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early

    My Brother is newer than yours (the cheapest one I could get that prints on both sides of the paper), and has a setting to toggle how it behaves when toner is low.

    The default is to pause printing until you replace the toner - honestly that’s not entirely wrong. Having the printer run out of toner half way through an important print job could be a disaster.

    The alternative mode is to just show a “low toner” warning badge whenever you print a document. That’s what I use, but I also check if it printed properly before closing the document which a lot of people don’t do. It looks like this:

    As far as I know it’s just a simple counter - how many pages have you printed since it was replaced. Obviously that’s never going to be particularly accurate.




  • That eVinci reactor is tiny at only 5MW. You’d need something like a thousand of them to run a single AI data center. It’s also horrifically expensive at over $100 million (each! multiply that by a thousand!) and it can only produce that amount of power for eight years, then I’m not sure what you do. Buy a thousand more of them?

    For comparison, some wind turbines provide more than twice as much power from just a single turbine. And they cost single digit millions to setup. They’re not as reliable and they’re also bigger than a micro nuclear reactor. But none of that really matters for a data center, which can draw power from the grid if it needs to.

    The only really promising small reactor I’ve heard of is the NuScale one - but it may have been vapourware. Republicans made a big splash during the 2016 election campaign and committed to paying 1/12th of the cost of a reactor as part of their clean energy “commitment”. There was no price tag, just 1/12th.

    A couple years later, after they’d won the election, they quietly abandoned that plan and agreed to pay $1.3 billion which they claimed would be 1/4th of the budget. The subtext was the earlier election promise was before a budget had been figured out yet. But going from 1/12th to 1/4th is a pretty big jump.

    And then a few years after that… when the company told the government $1.3 billion would not be enough money for the project to be financially viable… and that in order to sell electricity at all they needed the government to subsidise every single watt of power produced by the plant for the entire period that it operated… because it was going to run at a loss… that’s when the government pulled all funding (except what had already been spent, which was a lot of money) and the whole project collapsed.

    I tried to find references for all of that, but the website for the project is now a “domain for sale” page. All that’s left is a few vague news articles which have conflicting information. But I’ve been following this for decades and the project you linked to was one of the ones that made it crystal clear to me that nuclear doesn’t have a future unless something really big changes.

    Who knows, perhaps if the government had been really committed to NuScale, they might’ve pushed through the pain and helped it succeed int order to become cheaper later. But the government wasn’t willing to take that risk and apparently nobody else was either.