They don’t have the capital to pursue an EV

Yes they do. It’s just they’re choosing to spend all of it on hydrogen, which the Japanese companies still think is better than batteries.

Supposedly hydrogen cars are a solved problem now, all the investment is going into infrastructure. The ability to fill your tank in a few minutes is useless if there’s nowhere to fill up.

In October the Gaza Health Ministry claimed 471 people were killed by an Israeli missile strike on a hospital. Widespread credible (independent) evidence proves a small Hamas rocket missfired and hit a carpark near the hospital, causing relatively minor damage (there was a large fireball, but it was mostly rocket fuel - which is far less damaging than an explosive payload intended to kill).

None of the credible evidence was able to put a number to the deaths in that accident but it’s highly improbable that 471 people were in the carpark. And it definitely wasn’t an Israeli rocket.

In other words - Gaza’s health ministry is not a reliable source. Some of the things they report are probably accurate but they have been proven to be unreliable. Don’t trust anything they say unless it’s been backed by someone more reliable (in which case, you might as well refer to the other source instead).

At best, the ministry failed verify facts (e.g. was a large missile even fired at all?) before reporting what happened. But I think that’s being too charitable. For example where did they get the 471 number from? I think they made it up. I don’t have proof but it’s the only believable explanation.

Worse though - they haven’t retracted the claim. Mistakes are understandable… but failing to admit someone in your organisation made a mistake is unacceptable.

Signal Just Works™️

Until you drop your phone in the swimming pool, and every message/photo you’ve ever received is just… gone. Forever.

Sorry but I don’t buy any claim that Signal “just works”. It’s pretty clear they care about security more than anything else even when that means making decisions that are user hostile. And that’s fine - if you feel like you need that level of security I’m glad Signal exists. But it doesn’t really align with the general public and Signal is never going to be a mass market messaging service unless something changes (Signal or the general public).

What’s weird to me is an app that excludes itself from phone backups considers SMS a valid form of authentication when a user links a device to a phone number - especially when you can necessarily link a device to a number that is already tied to someone else’s device. Like how is that ever going to be secure? Spoiler: it’s not. It’d make a lot more sense to me if users simply crated a username and shared it with other people instead of a phone number… and if they forget their password… come up with new username.

The feature does require confirmation.

It also requires accessing your contacts database, which is encrypted on iPhones…

Because it’s encrypted, it’s impossible to share contact details unless someone enters the device passcode (or else does a biometric unlock - which effectively stores your passcode temporarily in a secure location that is wiped whenever the device is powered off or left unused for several hours).

It’s a tough call. Many forums have a rule against changing the title at all.

Those forums are wrong. A title should accurately reflect the content. We can’t choose the title other websites choose… but we can choose a title for our posts and we should take advantage of that.

Also - if you find yourself posting on a forum with that rule, just ignore it. And then tell them the title you typed out yourself was copy/pasted. They’ll have no way of knowing since so many news services A/B test titles anyway.

Here’s the tile I would’ve used: “Police Alert Parents to iPhone’s Automatic Contact Sharing Feature” — I think we can agree it’s more accurate than the deliberately unclear title this post currently has.

It’s not a myth - I just fired up the install of Windows I have in a virtual machine. It’s a clean install, downloaded direct from Microsoft with a license key the gave me through their Developer Program… absolutely nothing has ever been installed on it, and the start menu has ads for:

• Office 365
• Spotify
• WhatsApp
• LInkedIn
• There’s a note under that - the more you use your device, the more we’ll show “New Apps” here. So presumably if it wasn’t a clean install, I’d see more ads in the start menu.
• Even worse - the Task Bar has an ad for Microsoft Teams. I can’t figure out how to remove that one either - right click does nothing, left click asks me if I want to “get started” with installing Teams. At least the ones in the start menu can be removed with a few clicks.

They are definitely ads - when you click on them it takes you to the Microsoft store page… except for Office 365 which I assume is part of OneDrive - I can forgive that one, since it’s part of their free cloud storage service and probably should be integrated into the OS. If you’re not doing cloud storage of some kind, you should be.

It shouldn’t show you as online in discord/slack, but it should be downloading messages/etc so that when you do come online you don’t have to wait for it to sync with all your cloud services.

Also - consider those cloud services might not necessarily be available when you come online - maybe you open your laptop on a train in an underground tunnel or something.

Macs do a good job at this. They have “high efficiency” CPU cores which are still very fast (like, very fast*) but draw about half as much power as the regular cores. Software is also able to schedule background tasks based on various things like power level, network connectivity, how often the user actually launches your app on this device (maybe you have an app installed on all your devices but only actually use it on your phone…).

Background tasks like checking emails, backing up your computer, installing security patches, etc will all run while your Mac is sleeping.

Anti-theft features run even fully powered off. So unplug the battery, and never plug it back in, if you’re going to steal anything with an Apple logo… the fact you can never turn it on does hurt the resale value, but that’s better than going to jail. It’ll phone home as soon as you boot it up too, and even after a full factory reset is still probably tied to the actual owner. You’ll need the owner or Apple to deregister it - and Apple is likely to call the cops unless you’ve got a good story.

(* to give you an idea how fast the “Efficiency Cores” are on a Mac — in Game Mode the “Performance” cores are powered down, because the efficiency ones are more than fast enough and generate less heat - which allows the GPU to be pushed to the limit of the cooling system. The “efficiency” mostly comes from reducing features like speculative execution… though they do also run at a lower clock speed - as in ~3Ghz instead of ~4Ghz)

The Trump government shut down automated mail sorting machines, cut overtime for workers (so if they weren’t keeping up with the workload, they’d just stop delivering mail instead of working a longer shift), replaced a bunch of air mail delivery routes with road ones, added delays to re-delivery attempts when a letter couldn’t be delivered and removed mail collection boxes.

Supposedly all of this would “improve the efficiency” of the postal service. Yeah right.

Yesterday I gave OpenAI’s latest chatbot a photo of a challenging board game quiz card with questions that I couldn’t answer.

The questions were intentionally difficult, no ordinary human is expected to be able to answer them all - at least not without spending an hour googling/etc. Most of us could only answer a couple of the questions before the timer ran out and we all compared answers.

The new version of ChatGPT answered every question, perfectly, in two seconds. It couldn’t do that a week ago, the tech is advancing incredibly fast.

There are definitely some things it’s not very good at, but there are equally things it’s very very good at - the technology is useful, unlike crypto which I see as an interesting solution to a problem that nobody has.

delete all site data of youtube (in the shield thingy left of address bar)

For me that step alone has always worked. No need to touch UBO or restart the browser. Just clear data and refresh.

for the “Rate I currently pay”, which is 0.08c/kwh

How did you get that rate? We pay 33 cents, and it was 24 cents just a few months ago… wouldn’t be surprised if it goes up again next year and the year after since even 33 cents is government subsidised (so - there’s no cheaper option available).

otherwise I would have not have pulled the trigger on a 50,000$ project

Ooof. Why’d you do that? We simply put (a bit over) 5kW of panels on the roof, and a good 5kW inverter. One day of sun generates about as much power as we use in a week, and even if it’s overcast we still come out ahead.

We’re basically only paying for overnight power and pretty easy to keep that to a minimum (with good insulation, efficient overnight appliances, avoiding unnecessary overnight power consumption - such as putting the beer fridge and hot water heater on a timer).

I paid $5k recently without the battery - it’s not just affordable, it’s cheaper than drawing power from the grid. Pay off on the upfront investment will be about 7 years and it has an expected life of 30+ years (we paid extra for long lasting panels).

Battery prices will come down - in the mean time it’s still better to just get that power from the grid.

I don’t think it’s an issue. If your content is good, you should be able to find an audience and if you have an audience you’ll be able to find sponsors. That doesn’t have to be by directly reaching out to sponsors themselves, you can work with intermediaries.

Youtube obviously dominates the space right now but it’s hardly the only viable business model. In fact I think it’s better if content creators have more control than YouTube provides.

Dunno about “the last update” or the current state in each region but as far as I know the default search engine in FireFox has varied over the years and has always depended what country you’re in.

Baidu, Yandex and Yahoo are / have been the default in some countries. They made Bing the default for “1%” of users in a bunch of major countries recently to test the waters (and didn’t take it further than that).

Google blocks traffic from Chinese IP addresses as a protest against censorship there, so nobody has Google as the default in that country.

They made a $40b profit last year. More than half their profits is a “drop in the bucket”?!

Bing (and therefore DuckDuckGo, which is what I generally use and is a wrapper around Bing) is definitely worse than Google especially for dev research, but it’s not as good as it used to be.

I do use Google for a lot of my dev research, and they seem to be losing the ongoing war against spamers flooding the internet with garbage content.

Websites like reddit (and beehaw) are somewhat of an oasis – actively moderated with absolute garbage content deleted straight away and questionable content at least has replies where people have pointing out if they think it’s wrong. If (when?) Reddit goes away, that’s a whole bunch of really good content that will suddenly disappear from google results, which will be sad.

PS: If you haven’t already, try buying a subscription to ChatGPT+ and use GPT4 as the first place you go for all your LUA/React questions. I find it gives far better answers than Google for most things. You can sort of dip your toes in the AI waters by trying Bing Chat… but it’s nowhere near as good for code as ChatGPT+.

Being 20, I’d assume they have friends who are younger than them, and therefore are well and truly in touch with what “the kids” are doing.

Wait, what? Your comment doesn’t read like sarcasm at all.

A patch isn’t (yet) available.

But a workaround is. Configure your password manager (or switch to another password manager) so it doesn’t automatically fill usernames and passwords as soon as you open a webpage. Set it to fill the credentials when you click a button or hit a hotkey.

And after this security flaw is fixed? Leave the settings like that. Because this isn’t the first time autofil has resulted in a major compromise and it won’t be the last time either.

PS: this speculative execution bug was reported to Apple a very long time ago and there are experimental settings you can change to test the fix… but they might be buggy. Modifying your password manager’s behaviour will not be buggy. The setting is:

defaults write com.apple.safari InternalDebugProcessSwapOnCrossSiteWindowOpenEnabled 1

The real concern would be adding the watermark to the real thing, to let it slip through the cracks. However, not only would this be computationally expensive if it was properly implemented,

It wouldn’t be expensive, you could do it on a laptop in a few seconds.

Unless, of course, we decide only large corporations should be allowed to generate images and completely outlaw all of the open source / free image generation software - that’s not going to happen.

Most images are created with a “diffusion” model where you take an image, and run an algorithm that slightly modifies it. Over and over and over until you get what you want. You don’t have to (and commonly don’t - for the best results) start with a blank image. And you can run just a single pass, with the output being almost indistinguishable from the input.

This is a hard problem to solve and I think catching abuse after it happens is increasingly going to be more difficult. Better to focus on stopping the abuse from happening in the first place. E.g. by flagging and investigating questionable behaviour by kids in schools. That approach is proven and works well.