News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

marlor

The European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO) operates facilities in Chile because it offers good weather, good seeing, and it is in the Southern Hemisphere.

None of the ESO’s instruments are in Europe. They’re all in Chile. It would make no sense to place an instrument for Southern Hemisphere observation in Europe.

However, administration is out of Germany, and the captured data is processed by researchers mostly in Europe.

There are also many amateur remote hosting facilities for telescopes in Chile. It really has great atmospheric conditions. If my telescope is in one of these facilities, is it no longer my telescope?

I was waiting for a conspiracy theory to be woven in there, and you didn’t disappoint.
Yes. That is indeed a total rumour.
I’m sure the Yuan will increase somewhat as a reserve currency, but I’m skeptical it will become dominant. China has systemic issues at the moment, with a working-age population that peaked some time ago and a property market that is perpetually on the verge of implosion.

There are mounting pressures in domestic consumers, and an increasing move towards “dual circulation” (with a focus on the domestic part of that duality). Then there’s the risk of a miscalculation in the East China or South China seas.

Given that CNY trades in a tight, centrally-managed range against the USD (it’s almost always between 6-7 CNY to the dollar, and only briefly traded outside that during the pandemic), I’m not sure there’s a big incentive to use CNY as a hedge against USD.

It’s the same in China. My wife’s family is from there, and they hand out antibiotics for everything. Everyone seems to have a stash of them as well.

When my in-laws were visiting Australia for a couple of months and my wife’s mother got a minor cold, she started demanding we get her some antibiotics. We tried to explain that there’s no way a doctor would prescribe them for a minor sniffle, and she totally went if the deep end, acting as if she was going to die if she didn’t get them. But in the end, she survived.

Re:GOOD Meat gets green light from FDA for cultivated meat on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:59PM (#35256648)
I’m not sure if this is the previous poster’s reason, but (given the implication that the poster is a vegetarian) it my simply be that many vegetarians are put off by the taste and texture of meat, whether it be real, cultured or fake (via textured proteins, etc.).

But I think it’s pretty silly to think that vegetarians are the target market for fake or cultured meat. Surely not.

If you’ve been vegetarian for a long time (life-long or for decades), then the distinctive texture of many meat products can be very off-putting. It’s not like anything you find in vegetable dishes (which is why fake and cultured meat products exist!), and if you’re not used to it, it can trigger you to gag as your brain sends signals that “this isn’t food as I know it”.

This isn’t usually a problem. If you’re a vegetarian, you don’t have any requirement to eat meat. Except some restaurants are now excitedly adopting fake (vegetable protein-based) meats as a “vegetarian” option. It must be convenient as they don’t have to invent new vegetable-centric dishes, but many vegetarians just can’t manage to eat them even if they try. I’ve been to a couple of work dinners lately where the vegetarian option was a fake (TVP-based) meat, and had to just eat the side salad because the main dish triggered my gag reflex.

I’m a life-long vegetarian and kind of wish I could eat meat, it would make life simpler. But I just can’t bring myself to chew or swallow it without plenty of water to wash it down. That said, I’m all for cultured meats as an option for meat-eaters. Go for it.

Re:Hyundai Promises to Keep Buttons in Cars on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:37PM (#35256505)
I can’t even get Siri to reliably play a song or skip a track, let alone anything useful. Must be my accent.

I’d hate to try to operate vehicle controls with the same hit-and-miss interface. Give me tactile controls any time.

A few guys in my PhD office 15 years ago used to have a hobby of doing something similar.

They’d invent a “fact”, spin up a webpage with that fact, add the fact to Wikipedia and cite the webpage to add plausibility.

Then one of them would occasionally Google to see if any “reputable” sources were repeating that “fact” (after reading it on Wikipedia) and add/swap their references in to strengthen the Wikipedia text.

As long as the “facts” were trivial enough, it worked.

Re:ChatGPT Explained: A Normie's Guide to How It Works on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @12:04AM (#35065474)
If certain words (like “orange”) are statistically unlikely to be used in that context in that rhyme scheme, then they’re unlikely to be picked to begin with.
Re:ChatGPT Explained: A Normie's Guide to How It Works on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @11:06PM (#35065114)
Previously generated words are added to the input token window.

At the point it’s generating the next word, it knows what its preceding words were. With a conceptual representation of various rhyme schemes, subsequent words will (probably) fit that form.

Re:Poll: Which Chat Solution Does Your Company Use on Wednesday October 19, 2022 @12:12AM (#33257561)
I’m eagerly anticipating our company moving to Teams.

Right now, the only approved chat solution is Skype for Business (with only plaintext messaging - rich text, files and images have been disabled for security reasons).

Other chat and social media sites are blocked at a firewall level (including Slack, Discord, Facebook, etc.).

I’ve heard bad things about Teams, but it’s surely better than the current solution we use with its lack of persistence and plain text limitation.

Even with double blind reviews, it’s often very clear who wrote the paper.

Authors regularly cite work by themselves or their team, so a statement like “In a previous study[1] we established a relationship between X and Y” renders double blind pointless.

Re:My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman on Monday July 04, 2022 @11:58PM (#31984157)
Just Rockbox. I’m using an iPod Video as well. Then I set up the bookmarking and startup settings to suit. It’s very customisable.

I also generated “talk files” to voice the filenames.

My Walkman is an NW-A45 upgraded with custom firmware from www.nwmods.ml.

Re:My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman on Monday July 04, 2022 @12:13AM (#31973420)
I have both a Walkman (for music) and an upgraded/rebuilt iPod (for audiobooks) and prefer them for a few reasons:

- They don’t use any mobile data, and work when in a mobile-phone black spot (e.g. the national parks I go to most weekends). This is the main one.

- I can store all my music on there, without needing to use any storage space on my phone.

- They last forever with some basic maintenance. My iPod was made in 2006. I’ve upgraded the battery and replaced the HDD with an SD-card, but otherwise it just keeps on going.

- I can switch EQ profiles on my Walkman super-easily to suit different music or headphones. No navigating menus, it’s done in under a second.

- Tactile controls and voiced menus on my Rockboxed iPod. I can use the device entirely without looking at the screen. Handy when driving, but also useful when jogging or cycling, any other time you’d rather not stare at a screen instead of being aware of your environment.

- I can load them up with the exact pressing of music I want to listen to. For many old albums, which have gone though a dozen re-releases and remasters, this makes a difference. In fact, for some albums I have several different releases on my player, all with their distinct character, pros and cons.

- Brilliant bookmarking in Rockbox for audiobooks. Super customisable. And dedicated players never do a software update and lose your state. It’s always ready to go, precisely where I left it.

- Car mode. Brilliant for cars like my weekender that predate proper phone connectivity. Rockbox will automatically pause your audiobook when you turn off the ignition and start again when you’re back.

- Ability to enable dynamic range compression to combat road noise. All in a few button presses, without looking at the screen.

Are they for everyone? Of course not. But all of the above things matter to me personally.

Re:My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman on Sunday July 03, 2022 @11:07PM (#31973107)
The pre-Android Sony Walkmans (like the NW-A55 mentioned above) have decent battery life. I typically get around 30 hours from my SONY NW-A45. In a world where many modern “audiophile” players only get 8-10 hours of playback, that’s not bad.

However, they really are terrible for podcasts and audiobooks. There aren’t any real bookmarking features to speak of. For that, I use a Rockbox-compatible player (my preference is for a refurbished old HDD-based iPod with a new battery and SD card storage).

UK Consumer Contract law has a 14-day cancellation period.

For digital goods, the legislation states:

——

Under a contract for the supply of digital content not on a tangible medium, the trader must not begin supply of the digital content before the end of the cancellation period provided for in regulation 30(1), unless—

(a)the consumer has given express consent, and

(b)the consumer has acknowledged that the right to cancel the contract under regulation 29(1) will be lost.

——

Therefore, Nintendo is stating that the 14-day cancellation period is to be waived, and digital goods are to be deemed as supplied immediately upon purchase.

That’s precisely the approach taken in studying the Mpemba effect, with wildly differing results.

The article goes into the difficulties in analysing out-of-equilibrium systems (both experimentally and theoretically).

There’s definitely been a shift in tone in articles from the SCMP over the past five years. It used regularly provide highly critical coverage of both the Hong Kong and Chinese Governments. It was broadly supportive of the Umbrella Movement, and regularly provided unbiased coverage of the localist movement.

The whole media environment has shifted now, and the SCMP, while still providing some critical coverage, is a shadow of what it was.

Frustratingly, critical articles also seem to be edited to within an inch of their life. You can easily spot where content has been removed and/or replaced as the tone shifts dramatically and the subject inexplicably changes within articles.

It’s still a useful resource, because Mainland media is almost entirely devoted to replicating propaganda now (unlike during the Hu era).

It’s just a shame that the critical articles that used to be its bread and butter are now outliers within the newspaper.

It’s likely the FBI mentioned they had an app they could leverage, Australia noted that there was a gap in the local market after Phantom had been taken down, and the two agencies decided to seed the app into the Australian criminal underworld to see how far it would spread.
They covered themselves by ensuring that the devices could only be ordered after private referral from another user. All of whom were underworld figures (the devices were initially “seeded” to “underworld influencers”).

I’m sure that added to the credibility of the device among criminal groups, but it also ensured that the platform wasn’t adopted by your average privacy-conscious user.

I’m sure he has no idea. This is far from the only encrypted messaging system out there.
Re:Sorry everybody, I failed with you on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @01:46AM (#27431013)
Burnout is made worse when you take on too many complex interactions and dependencies.

OSS works best when it’s a small project that does a single thing and does it well, but doesn’t rely on too many upstream projects for its functionality.

As soon as the project tries to do too much, it virtually needs a committee to coordinate it all. If it relies on too many upstream dependencies, then the maintainer will be hammered with complaints that “this doesn’t work with version 1.45 of foolib… fix it!”.

But a project that just lives in its own little world, doing its own little job? It’s something you can just maintain and improve at your leisure.

It’s been running for three years. I suspect something changed recently (perhaps some imminent threat) that meant they needed to act now.
It’s bizarre, because news reports state that the entire app and monitoring system was created by the FBI and Australian Federal Police.

If it’s their system, why would they need to seize its domain?

Re:Why have cameras and lenses become so expensive? on Tuesday June 01, 2021 @02:07AM (#27351165)
The Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 STM is optically just fine if you stop down slightly, and the RF version is even better. It’s not much more than $100.

The Olympus 25mm f/1.8 is absolutely fantastic, and smaller. As are all the Olympus fast primes. You can get it for $250.

More expensive fast primes are worth the price for me. But the entry-level ones are optically pretty great these days.

Re:Why have cameras and lenses become so expensive? on Monday May 31, 2021 @11:48PM (#27350559)
In low light, I’ve never seen a smartphone that will beat a fast prime on a mirrorless or DSLR camera.

A kit zoom lens will struggle in low light, but you can get extremely high quality fast primes for a couple of hundred dollars these days that will blow away any smartphone.

Re:Why have cameras and lenses become so expensive? on Monday May 31, 2021 @11:42PM (#27350527)
When shooting JPEG, I just use an Apple Lightning to USB Camera Adapter cable, and import straight to my phone (and iCloud Photo Library).

The cable is in my camera bag, and it takes less than a minute to do the import.

Re:SKreen: Human Centric Smartphones for Everyone on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @11:06PM (#27298904)
It’s not judging a book by its cover.

It’s judging a company that designs a smartphone UX experience by their website’s UX experience.

My eyes. I hit back.

Re:EU bans Belarusian airlines from European skies on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @12:23AM (#27286310)
Currently, the quarantine system for returning residents is entirely overloaded. Leakage of cases from quarantine has been common, leading to snap lockdowns.

Additionally, there aren’t many commercial flights right now, resulting in the government needing to supplement these with charter flights (but needing to balance this with not further overloading quarantine facilities). Some people have been waiting six months or more to find a flight home or to get onto a charter flight. There are constant news stories about desperate people who are trapped with no way to fly back.

So, the government has decided you need a permit to leave, either stating you have no intention to return in the medium-term, need to leave for compassionate reasons, or have an urgent need to travel.

I entirely disagree with the policy. People should be free to leave, but then if they can’t find a flight home, that’s their issue.

However, the government seems concerned about the optics of seeing people on the nightly news, crying that the government won’t give them a seat on a charter flight.

Older »