radicalbyte

gisterendiscuss

This is the EU Commission. Yesterday was the Christian nutjobs and right-wing ghouls in the European Parliament who undemocratically pushed through their crackhead Chat Control.

EU Commission = US Senate, EU Parliament = US Congress. Kinda.

radicalbyte

6 dagen geledendiscuss

Some of the early models - either the Chevvy or Nissan Leaf - had battery packs which would degrade very quickly. This was causes by the charging system which seemed designed to destroy them.

The expectation in the EV fan world was that modern (> 2019) battery packs were very likely to retain 80% of their charge for well over the time anyone expected with the drop to 80% itself taking most of the car's expected lifetime. This was because the standard extrapolations ignored improvements in charging algorithms and that real-world usages were expected to be better for the battery than the models.

Another prediction we made is that range under cold (or very hot) weather would be significantly reduced and that seems to be the case too.

radicalbyte

8 dagen geledendiscuss

They benefited greatly from the FTC not doing their job. Google too. Overall it has been extremely damaging to the industry but I suspect that it is the main reason for a small part of California (it not even American exceptionalism, it's Silicon Valley exceptionalism) completely dominating tech.

radicalbyte

8 dagen geledendiscuss

Venture Capitalists are now even worse than the marketers.

radicalbyte

11 dagen geledendiscuss

Claude Code are slopmaxxxing and you're considering their "judgement"? :-)

radicalbyte

11 dagen geledendiscuss

No they weren't, 50 years ago is when they were working very hard to get people in from Turkey/North Africa to do those jobs because they wanted to pay peanuts and the natives had options.

These are all hyper exploitative industries based on capital exploiting the poor. Which is something we both agree on.

radicalbyte

12 dagen geledendiscuss

Migration in my part of Europe (Holland) has largely been workers for jobs the Dutch won't do. These people are abused as a sort of semi-serf labour mainly in the farming sector.

Some groups are a big net benefit to our (looking at the income the group benefits / social support costs) and others slight net negative. But once you take the economy into account it's positive.

radicalbyte

16 dagen geledendiscuss

They still are. My kids haven't watched a single Simpsons or Family Guy episode but are quoting both regularly.

Facebook et al also quite literally stole email contact lists and installed spyware at kernel level on mobile phones which they used to spy on all Android users. Via the phone manufacturers.

radicalbyte

20 dagen geledendiscuss

The Samsung with parental control does the same thing as this phone only you don't have to beg Commodore to install the apps your kid's school requires them to install.

It's at most a $200 smart phone (doubling the prices for the DAC + IEMs) being sold at > $500 with a funky design, interesting OS and their own app store.

I hope that they sell millions of these things, enough so that they can afford to buy the Amiga IP... just don't see it happening.

radicalbyte

20 dagen geledendiscuss

It has the same core spec as a $120 (delivered) Samsung phone and will cost between $500-$600 (delivered).

The C64U is an amazing achievement but it seems too early to go for the smart phone.

Hopefully there is a niche and their business plan is viable for a small number of sales.

radicalbyte

22 dagen geledendiscuss

Keeping Linux-based devices up and running and somewhat reliable is horrible. I'm 45, I've spent 25 years doing that. Time I'll never get back. Time I'm spending with my kids instead of dicking around with an obscure bug caused by some random dude who is spending his free time doing thankless work maintaining some C code he wrote 40 years ago.

radicalbyte

23 dagen geledendiscuss

An assumption, I made. Failed, it was.

radicalbyte

23 dagen geledendiscuss

I've been so impressed with Ubiquiti that I've decided to target FreeBSD for my current side project. Their camera system is wonderful. Their DreamMachine is a massive upgrade for my home network. Their APs are rock solid, no hassle, just work, and it integrates so well. I have my work / home on different subnets. I have the kids on a different subnet and behind a firewall providing some protection against ads.

Very happy customer here.

radicalbyte

23 dagen geledendiscuss

I tried to explain to people in The Netherlands this exact problem when they were thinking about switching from single-player to a commercial insurance company model.

Insurance companies always have an incentive to make healthcare services expensive. They have even more incentive to make healthcare expensive and do deals on the backside where their suppliers give them a kickback. Even better if said kickback comes via a side door.

So we went for the commercial insurance companies. It took them 4 years before they change the drug choice from decentralised (Pharmacies deal with drugs companies, received small discounts which funded a good quality of care) to centralised (Insurance deal with drug companies, receives kickbacks) and the Pharmacies funding was drastically cut leading to worse quality of care and more drugs being used. Double-whammy because in the previous system the Pharmacy did medication reviews which almost always result in a reduction in drugs (the thing with drugs is that quite a lot of them are given to reduce side effects of other drugs, the original drug gets cancelled but the side effect reducer gets forgotten and just continues ad infinitum).

Health insurance has been super inflationary since then when controlled for quality of care.

radicalbyte

vorige maanddiscuss

Sounds like me. It's awesome. Only the sheer amount of very clear fraud and the way an entire way of people who, not too long ago, where barely functional, have jumped on the bandwagon (same as with crypto) just sours me on it.

That and Jenson screwing those of us who made him over the last decade.

It'll be better once the fraudsters are in jail and once we're able have boxes with ~1TB ram running off of our solar in the garage.

radicalbyte

vorige maanddiscuss

Thanks for replying, now I remember why I used to spend all day on this site :-) A lot of the political changes and my exposure to some of the VC people outside of public view have soured tech for me. That and the current cult-like behaviour and clear fraud from the crypto and now AI waves... anyhow, I digress.

We were big AV users initially, I think for 2 years? This was 94-97 so my memory of the time periods is fuzzy. When Google came along I have very vivid memory of it providing not only better search results but also faster loads times.

I wonder if Google was already geo-distributed at the time? Latency was real then, it wasn't uncommon to hit 350ms (compared to 20-50ms to Europe) and the difference would have been felt back then. It was a killer for Counter Strike.

radicalbyte

vorige maanddiscuss

No it wasn't. Google had a tiny front page back then, Alta-Vista was visibly slower. Very similar to Excite. All of the others were terrible.

radicalbyte

vorige maanddiscuss

Erm 2008 isn't early, I had been using it for almost a decade by then. They had won by 2001. No-one who knew Microsoft thought that they had a chance with Bing. This was post-Gates and Microsoft were already a laughing stock in 2008 with respect to the web.

radicalbyte

vorige maanddiscuss

Google was easily 10x better than any of their competition. It was effectively alone in the market.

Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet back then, Google's search returned results within a couple of seconds. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading. Then the search results themselves were so good you could often just pick the first result. They eventually added a button which just took you directly to the first result. Which I used.

radicalbyte

vorige maanddiscuss

They learned from the failure of crypto and have found their bag holders.

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