Dave.

They could have hooked the phone up to a windscreen wiper motor (a high torque motor with a crank arm) and left it to run for a few hours, that would have given them about 10,000 open/close cycles. But no, it’s “let’s hang a 5kg weight off it and use the phone as a bit of a hammer”.

What if I want to buy a cheese sandwich today with BTC?

A cheese sandwich can remain the same fixed price in dollars for years, with only the relatively slow change in actual value due to inflation.

I’ve seen BTC swing 10% in 24 hours. Does the cheese-sandwich-maker have to look up the rate this instant and calculate a spot price for me?

Will they have more or less dollars at the end of the day, when they need to pay their bills and buy more cheese from their suppliers?

“Just buy cheese from someone who takes BTC”, doesn’t help, it just kicks the can further down the road.

“Just add a bit of a buffer in the price to take fluctuations into account”, means that I go buy a cheese sandwich with dollars from next door because it’s 50 cents cheaper for the same thing.

As an investment vehicle, BTC is doing hot laps of the track, but until its volatility issues are sorted and it becomes “boring”, it’s not going anywhere as an actual currency.

To be honest, I was surprised it had any idea about FFMPEG. The biggest problem is that it sounds so authoritative.

If it said, “hey I don’t know a huge amount about X” then you could work with that. But it will blithely say “no problem” and spit out 6 pages of non working code that you then have to debug further, and if you don’t know the terms in the area you’re working in you end up blundering around trying to find the right trigger word to get what you want.

I end up having to play twenty questions with chatgpt. For example, I’ve been asking it for code examples for ffmpeg mpeg4 encoding with C++.

It will happily spit out completely non-working code, where the core part - feeding image frames to the encoder - works, but it doesn’t initialise or tidy up the encoding afterwards.

Until I say, “hey this code doesn’t seem to work and creates corrupted files”, and then it’s like, “oh yeah you also need to do a bunch of other stuff, just like this”. Repeat as it slowly adds more and more pieces until finally you end up with something that actually works.

Or it will happily dream up function names or mix python and C functions, or will refer to older APIs even when I’ve specifically said “use API version x.y” and so on and so forth.

If I didn’t know enough about the subject already, I’d never be able to tease out the answer. So in a sense it’s a mostly useful reference, but it can’t be relied on to actually and consistently provide a result because it’s all statistics and fuzzy text generation behind the scenes, not actual knowledge.

There’s geological, and then there’s ecological. Mars has geology but has no ecosystem discovered thus far.

So the question, “should we replace one ecosystem with another on Mars for our own benefit?” doesn’t really make much sense. There isn’t anything to replace, as far as we can tell right now.

Perhaps consider instead that creating an ecosystem where there wasn’t one before is of an overall net benefit to life in the universe, of which all current evidence points to being present on only one planet.

Digg was Reddit, before Reddit came along. And then they tried to monetise it all and pushed out a site layout update that “enhanced” that monetisation aspect (sound familiar?)

Basically they fucked it up right there.

I left Digg in 2010 and never went back, and now the domain and it’s remnants are owned by some advertising company.

I would like to hear your opinion on crumbed, deep fried, pineapple rings. 🤔

For example : https://www.redrooster.com.au/menu/sides-kids-meals/pineapple-fritter/

Also, things not designed for food use or human consumption don’t have to follow strict rules regarding their composition, and they’re not monitored.

Nobody is checking PVA glue for heavy metals or melamine or pesticides or any other number of things that will give your insides a bad day.

Nobody is issuing a recall if your bottle of glue ends up with ground up glass in it.

Because it’s not food, and it doesn’t matter, until you put half a cup of it in your pizza because Google told you it was a good idea.

Scientists estimate that about 48.5 tons (44 tonnes or 44,000 kilograms) of meteoritic material falls on Earth each day. Almost all the material is vaporized in Earth’s atmosphere

There’s been 44 tons of material swept up by earth each day since time immemorial. Let me know once we’re up to 20 tons of sats a day ( about 25 starlink sats ), and then I’ll start to worry about the effects.

Is this news? In the early 2000s I couldn’t stand working with 60Hz monitors, there was noticeable flicker. Setting them to 72Hz was a definite improvement.

About 90 percent of my coworkers were like, “Why are you fiddling with the display settings? Flicker? Wot flicker?”

And he describes exactly what I have to deal with on the regular, “content that only sort of helps”

Hello, my name’s dgriffith. I’m a Fediverse Support community member, and I’m here to help.

Have you tried running sfc /scannow and making sure your antivirus is up to date? That usually fixes the issue that you are describing.

If that does not help, a complete system reinstall often solves the problem you have.

Please mark this comment as useful if it helps you.

Regarding the death of hyperlinks, it’s probably more a case of “why bother clicking on yet another link that leads me to another page of crap?”.

That is, it used to be the case that you’d put information on the web that was useful and people would link to it, now it 80 percent of it seems to be a variations of SEO’d recipe sites and AI hallucinations.

I have an Oki laser printer that I bought for $129. I’ve had it so long I gave it to my kids for university. Duplex, wifi, and I’ve bought two toner cartridges for it in the 8 years we’ve had it.

(Side note: If you go to an airport, you’ll find that the dot matrix printer spewing out the passenger manifest at the gate is often a Okidata Microline-series printer, an updated version of the printer I had in 1992)

Basically, don’t buy an inkjet printer, and don’t buy HP.

I buy a washing machine after a 20 minute search and going to a click and collect website to place an order with a local big brand store.

For the next 6 months:

“HEY CHECK OUT THESE WASHING MACHINES LOOK AT THESE REVIEWS WASHING MACHINES ON SPECIAL CLIIIICK MEEEEEE”

Small ISPs at the start of the internet used to provide you with space that you could ftp a few html files to and they’d be visible on the internet at myisp/~yourusername.

Of course that cost them a little bit of money and storage space so when they all got absorbed into megaISPs that kind of thing got dropped. Then it was all up to Geocities and friends or you had to go buy hosting from your ISP, both of which was enough of a hurdle to stop the average person from playing with it.