PaulWay

decryption, 26 days ago to random

tell me again how toyota not going 100% into EVs is a mistake - they're selling more cars then ever! I love EVs, have been driving one for 5 years, but EVs are not the answer for a large portion of motorists yet and hybrid/ICE engines have a long life ahead of them (20+ years imho)

PaulWay, 11 months ago to random

I love how so much of the AI debate is on things like:

• Will AI take people's jobs?
• Will AI destroy creativity?
• Will AI take over the world?
• Will AI be used to make people poorer?

And not:

• Will corporations that use AI get rid of people's jobs?
• Will corporations that use AI destroy creativity?
• Will corporations that use AI try to take over the world?
• Will corporations that use AI make people poorer?

Because these LLMs and machine learning systems and so forth aren't just wandering around randomly out there - they're owned by corporations. The corporations are the ones putting them to use. The executives that run those corporations are the ones making the decisions to pay people less, to increase their profits, to make creative people act as subeditors for LLMs.

It's the corporations, and the ethics-free systems that govern them, that cause these things. They're the ones pushing to have more AI.

The rest of us would be happy just having a bit more humanity in the world.

PaulWay, 26 days ago to random

Donated to @alexkidman 's run for May to raise funds for Multiple Sclerosis research:

https://www.themay50k.org/fundraisers/alexkidman/the-may-50k-2024

A good cause there Alex, keep up the running!

PaulWay, 21 days ago to random

Today I learned that the Toyota BZ4X can only be DC fast charged twice per day. It's hard coded to prevent further DC fast charging. Sucks if you expected to just drive it like a car on a long road trip, and didn't plan for this weirdness.

To be honest I don't think this is as much of a WTF as the friend who related this news thinks it is. (I don't have a BZ4X so I couldn't give two figs about it). I could still easily structure a 900km drive in one day around leaving home on a full charge, DC fast charge in the morning, AC charge over lunch, DC fast charge in the afternoon, and that probably gets you ~1000KM.

I think it's Toyota trying to protect their batteries - which is interesting because it's something no other car manufacturer feels the need to do. Toyota paternalism or did they just buy a batch of dodgy batteries and fit them to the car anyway?

PaulWay, 2 months ago to random

A friend at work tells me that Rio de Janeiro, where he lives, hit a new peak of 60.1 Celsius from Sunday to Monday.

At what point do I ask him whether he drives a petrol car, or cooks using fossil fuels?

Never? Because that's not polite or helpful?

PaulWay, 1 year ago to random

@alexkidman just listening to your episode on EV trucks.

You need to look up Janus Electric.

Doing EV conversions on medium and heavy haulage trucks, and using battery swap technology. Change over the battery in two minutes at the depot. Faster that filling up with diesel (let alone hydrogen, the never-fuel). And charging the batteries from solar panels on the factory roof...

Also look at SEA Motors, another Australian company building "drop in" replacement drive trains for small to large delivery trucks.

The question really is: can the trucking industry afford not to switch over?

PaulWay, 3 months ago to random

There's a saying in computer programming that debugging is twice as hard as programming, and therefore if you write the smartest code you can you are by definition not intelligent enough to debug it.

I think that also applies to LLMs. If you don't understand the subject well enough to be able to write the content, you are by definition unable to tell if the LLM is telling the truth.

PaulWay, 2 months ago to random

Listening to a Big Ideas podcast about housing in the northern territory. It just makes you wish every politician from every state, territory and federal government would live in one of these houses for a week.

They're taking to the only Aboriginal person that has solar panels on their roof. The power meters there are pre-paid - if you used up your money the power shuts off. The power meter has a plug on the side that says "solar input".

The power and water department said "we can't attach solar, it's dangerous".

They went back to the manufacturer of the power meter that power and water had installed and got the manual and showed that it was perfectly safe.

Power and water put a padlock on his power box so he couldn't plug the panels in.

He took the padlock off with an angle grinder.

This is the kind of stupid, deliberately antagonistic, needlessly wasteful BS that Aboriginal people have to go through to do something that politicians throughout Australia have got without a second thought.

Of course it's a Liberal government there. But things haven't been better under Labor either.

Us city people need to know these things to realise the real gaps in our society.

PaulWay, 2 months ago to random

Has someone already said...

PHP is the COBOL of the nineties.

PaulWay, 6 months ago to random

There's nothing like human beings for creating their own strife...

I play Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance - a 2007 game that was taken up by its fans and maintained after the studio no longer supported it. We in the community maintain a game application and public servers to allow people to play a game that was never really designed for the internet at all. It's called Forged Alliance Forever - faforever.com.

Recently one splinter group has decided to try to run a different set of servers, based mainly on the same open source code. I'm not really sure of the details and I'm not really sure I care enough to try and understand it, but what seems to have happened is that this splinter group has decided to take offence at the Forged Alliance Forever community. So they've taken to DDOSing the public servers and infrastructure that allow people to find other players and join group games.

I run one of those servers - faf.mabula.net - and I keep on getting alerts from my hosting company saying it's been under attack. I've had to shut down the main TURN server on it because of that DDOS attack. Good on Binary Lane for being able to manage that - I'm still well within my limits and they've mitigated the worst of the problems.

Friday, for example, was a complete write-off. Only rarely could one could get a game to connect, and connections seemed to go stale and die fairly quickly. By Saturday it was back up and working.

The people running Forged Alliance Forever have been working hard over the last couple of weeks to cope with this assault. They've had to substantially rework code, shut down services, cope with abuse, and work with their current and other new service providers to try and keep the game going. They're not paid to do this, they're doing it because they want to keep FAF going and because they feel a shared responsibility to us other players.

Personally I say thank you to them. And I'll continue to try and contribute my own server in whatever new form of authentication we need.

But beyond that - why are we so petty sometimes? Why do some people just decide to hate? Why do these things escalate?

We also need to fix our own attitudes, as well as the technology.

PaulWay, 3 months ago to random

Governments should not have to give 'incentives' to landlords to get them to install more efficient and economical appliances.

Governments should be punishments for landlords that don't.

Landlords already see over ten percent more rent and twenty percent higher sale price on properties with those improvements. The ones lagging behind are doing it because they only care about the negative gearing and extracting as much money as possible from that property.

PaulWay, 5 months ago to random

BTW @alexkidman - are you a member of AEVA?

PaulWay, 6 months ago to random

Crazy idea. What if you recorded three voices speaking different languages, but all in distinct frequency bands. For instance, a low English speaking voice, a mid-level Spanish voice, and a high-pitched Japanese voice. Use band-pass filtering to make sure that the voices didn't stray into the other bands.

Would a speaker of any one of those languages be able to listen to that sound and pick out their language? By selectively listening to that frequency range?

PaulWay, 2 months ago to random

I hope some day when these "loud pipes" bikers have had their hearing destroyed by their stupid exhausts, all the things they used to enjoy in the world are tainted and diminished because of their hearing loss.

No putting on nostalgic classic albums. No hearing their children say they love them, or hearing their grandchildren's first words. Every conversation should be a curse of half-heard mumbles and shouted "what was that"s.

All because they decided to annoy their neighbours she the suburbs they pass through with obnoxious flatulent motorbike noises.

PaulWay, 1 month ago to random

Who's in Gladstone for #everythingopen already?

PaulWay, 3 months ago to random

Sorry, but as soon as I see some panic-stricken announcement that China is aiming to take over the world, from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, I ignore it. They're a bunch of scare-mongering war-hawks that want to push conflict because it makes their pronouncements sound edgy and with-it.

Even if they say Nickel prices are falling, and even if China is putting a lot of Nickel on the market, I would still not trust that story as far as I could accurately spit a dead war-hawk.

PaulWay, 9 months ago to System76

I discovered last night that my Darter Pro 6 #system76 laptop can actually be powered from a USB C PD power adapter via the USB C port. Even though their use of a standard barrel jack power socket and 19V adapter is pretty standard and available, USB C PD is becoming more common. Great work, System 76!

PaulWay, 8 months ago to random

Hi @system76 !

I've got a Darter Pro 5, and I thought that with Thunderbolt 3 support and Intel UHD Graphics 620 I'd be able to use my Thunderbolt 3 dock. Unfortunately, while all the dock's USB devices show up and I'm able to use its network adapter, the display stubbornly refuses to show up. My work laptop works with this dock, so I'm fairly sure the dock's OK. Is the Darter Pro 5 just too old? Is there anything I can do to update the firmware?

(I thought I had a Darter Pro 6 but that turned out to be my failed memory.)

I tried support@ but it came back no such address...

PaulWay, 15 days ago to random

As a man, I cannot understand misogynistic men.

Obviously I can rationalise their internal beliefs as to why they do what they do - but it's like explaining the behaviour of an animal. "He's been brought up this way, so he just keeps doing what he's been taught".

OK, except these are also clever people who expect other people to change for them. Why does it never occur that the same might apply to them - that they might have to change and accommodate other people? That's what I can't understand.

Sadly I think a lot of men think of things purely in terms of power. They're constantly worried that they're not top dog, so they have to prove they are all the time by doing stupid aggressive things.

Dude. Let's just put it in simple terms. You're not top dog. You're not even a very high dog. There'll always be people who own more, who have more power, who look more successful. That's not important. It's completely useless to compare yourself to anyone else. All you have to do is to be good enough. You have to be good, and you have to be enough, for those around you.

And what you're going to have to learn, my dude, is that everything is about bargaining. You're always going to have to give up something in order to get something. If you love someone, you have to demonstrate that love by giving them some level of control - over your life together.

I went through some of my early life - up to about my early thirties - convinced I was always missing out. I kept thinking that I had done it tough, I'd struggled, I never got what I wanted. I kept on saying to myself, "on this one point I'm not going to give in, because I've given in on everything else." And I'd still lose.

Then I realised I'd been telling myself a bit of a lie. I'd actually had a pretty good life; we hadn't had a lot but we did have some pretty good advantages that set me up for a good career and a sensible life. And I realised that actually everyone else also saw themselves as hard done by, and if we all fought tooth and nail for the things we considered important then we'd just lose our teeth and nails.

Men are so much nicer when they're kind, when they don't have to show off. We can be courageous and selfless and brave and heroic, we can have chiselled jaws and strong chests - and this doesn't have to come at any cost to anyone else.

I love in "The Incredibles" where Mr Incredible admits that he isn't strong enough to watch his family be endangered. This is a guy who lifts train engines and he's not strong enough. And then Elastigirl says "you don't have to be", because they're all in this together, and they know they can do it. In that moment Mr Incredible is strong.

This won't get read much, I know. But I hope it helps some guys out there feel better about being good, and kind, and gentle, and caring.

All the best, my friends.

PaulWay, 1 day ago to random

Interesting to know that "Dreadnought" is derived (obviously) from the words 'dread' and 'nought' - fear nothing - but "Juggernaut" is a completely different derivation. It relates to a festival in India celebrating Jagganatha (IIRC) where a huge heavy cart is pulled through the streets, and when it gains momentum it is unstoppable. The 'naut' ending is just the English recognising a good opportunity to add a Greek ending to a borrowed word.

Different derivations for a very similar concept - something unstoppable.