It can do both, lossiness is toggleable.

If you’ve seen a picture on Lemmy, you’ve almost certainly seen a WebP. A fair bit of software – most egregiously from Microsoft – refuses to decode them still, but every major browser has supported WebP for years and since superior data efficiency compared to JPG/PNG means is already very widely used on the web. Bandwidth is not that cheap.

Mathematics articles are the most obtuse I come across. I think the Venn diagram of good mathematicians and good science communicators is very close to non-intersecting.

Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from

The entire mistake right there. Look no further. They saw a solution (LLMs) and started hunting for a problem.

Had they done it the right way round there might have been some useful, though less flashy, outcome. I agree many article summaries are badly written. So why not experiment with an AI that flags those articles for review? Or even just organize a community drive to clean up article summaries?

The questions are rhetorical of course. Like every GenAI peddler they don’t have an interest in the problem they purport to solve, they just want to play with or sell you this shiny toy that pretends really convincingly that it is clever.

This is separate from A-GPS. Google seems to be using WiFi rather than Bluetooth, but the broader point remains the same. No one is stopping any vendor from crowdsourcing the location of every BT device… which is what Apple has done, for Airtags which don’t have the battery capacity to run a GPS chip.

Sure without GPS it wouldn’t be very effective to rely on only nearby devices to guess the current location. But an attacker only has to get lucky once to get your home address. So the only safe approach is to hide nearby devices/networks from unauthorized apps.

Every Bluetooth device has a unique identifier. Any phone that has seen that Bluetooth device in the past could have told google/apple/whoever “hey BTW this device is at those coordinates”.

Google already uses this with WiFi to help “bootstrap” GPS localization. It is much faster to get a GPS fix if you already know roughly where you are (a few seconds vs a couple minutes), so they use nearby WiFi/Bluetooth devices to determine that. Remember 10-15 years ago when getting a GPS fix took forever? GPS didn’t change, this did.
Apple went further and does this with Airtags now. Every Bluetooth device that ever went near an iPhone is in Apple’s database with GPS coordinates.

So unless you live alone in a mountain cabin that has never been visited by someone with a smartphone before and you didn’t disable the “enhanced localization” feature on your phone, yes your Bluetooth is at risk of giving up your location.

Plenty of cars flash their brake lights when ABS(/ESP?) engages, which is reasonable and should be a legal requirement IMO.

There’s lots of room to give additional info in between that and “brake light is on because the driver doesn’t understand that they can do mild adjustments by letting off the gas / stupid bitch-ass VW PHEV computer thinks using cruise control downhill with electric regen requires the motherfucking brake lights”. It’s like no-one realizes or cares that brake lights lose all purpose if they’re on when the car isn’t meaningfully decelerating. ARGH.

Or way worse, what you said but senior techs.

Microsoft has been at this long enough that there is an army of old guys whose only - but extremely specialized - skillset is navigating arcane GUIs for group policies and AD administration. But drop them in a bash terminal and they’re like a fish dropped on a tennis court.

As a European software developer I would love to see that.

Unfortunately I’m afraid those most likely to cry foul aren’t Americans, but the majority of European tech businesses who are either reselling MSFT bullshit or completely locked in AWS/Azure/GCP. Open-source/sovereign software services are the exception, not the rule.

With what money? NPPs only get built on public funds, private equity cannot make the economics viable due to the multi-decade amortization. It’s fine on public debt but breaks down if you have to pay shareholders for billions of euros of loans over 20 years which amounts to so much money the cost is uncompetitive with fossil fuels + renewables. Private equity has been trying to make private nuclear power for 20 years now, mostly with SMRs, with little success and nothing to show for it up to now.

If Belgium ever builds a new NPP, it will be because the government voted on a multi-decade funding plan, which is not guaranteed to happen when the left wants no nuclear and the right wants fiscal austerity. Until then there’s nothing that Engie can do but wait.

TBF work was done to keep it sound until 2025 and it was possible to extend the operational life further (basically you can just keep throwing hundreds of millions at them every 10 years for a long time to come).

What’s fucked up is that in the last few years a bunch of maintenance wasn’t done because the government said “no for real though super pinky promise we’re not extending the contract again they will definitely be shut down in 2025 it’s the law”.

So now Electrabel/Engie is rightfully super pissed because this flip-flopping is going to cost us billions just to keep the existing reactors running. And they have zero guarantee the greens won’t come back into a government coalition in 2029 and fuck the schedule up again.

It’s because the ~*~tech~*~ sector fundamentally relies on different economics than most engineering companies, and that has investors absolutely bricked up.

What investors being sold by “tech” companies is infinite ROI. Sure, [YouTube/Twitter/Uber/whoever] has never been profitable more than a few quarters in a row (if that), but think! They have virtually no fixed costs! That means if we just inject a few more millions in R&D we will finally reach the threshold where we can scale deployments to hundreds of millions of users who will be paying us MRR! Hosting costs are virtually nothing and at that scale R&D is basically free as well! And if push comes to shove, we can reduce costs to nearly zero by firing all the engineers! The economies of scale are practically infinite, they say.

It’s the rare instance where capitalists actually care about long-terms gain a bit too much. The tech industry tends to be single-mindedly chasing monthly user counts first and revenue second or third. Then at some point reality catches up, the accountants start getting their way, the product starts getting enshittified, and the users leave for something else. Did the product actually turn a net profit over its lifetime? Who knows, who cares. Everyone who made those early business decisions has long since cashed out.

Where the markets are unbelievably irrational is that this frenzy has spilled over into industries where the the sales pitch for infinite economies of scale doesn’t even make theoretical sense. Tesla sells physical products, so why are they worth more than every other automotive company combined? OpenAI operates at an enormous loss because LLMs are just expensive to train and run by nature, so they cannot be profitable under the current business model at any scale. Yet here we are. Just because it’s labeled as “tech”, investors are throwing our retirement funds into it. And any time the markets are being irrational, there’s a risk that investors wise up to the bad fundamentals and the whole thing comes crashing down.

In Europe we’ve been spared some of the worst of the craziness. Although venture capitalism is alive and well in the software sector, I would wager that European companies tend to have stronger fundamentals on average (but that’s just a gut feeling, I’m not an economist).

Suse has been trying pretty hard with Harvester. KVM-based, VMs-as-k8s-pods which leverages all existing k8s tooling, as well as the same multi-cluster federation as RKE2.

Seems pretty great from afar, though it’s very much under active development.

I know people in that predicament and they’re, charitably, helpless little babies when you tell them to read two paragraphs of documentation on how to run one command in a Linux CLI.

Fundamentally nothing out there really caters to the needs of resellers. Your average resale company couldn’t automate a backup job to save itself from bankruptcy if it doesn’t come with a neat GUI, a 24/7 support contract, and preferably a Microsoft or oracle logo somewhere in the corner to inspire confidence.

Like I jest but there are Microsoft outfits and FOSS outfits and there is essentially zero professional overlap even though they both sell IT products/solutions. The disconnect is a mile wide. Which translates to wildly different business models where the FOSS people have been running shit in containers for 15 years while the Microsoft slaves are still licensing their monolithic solutions by the CPU Core and doing weird-ass shit like buy 4-core xeons because it’s more economical with these archaic licensing models.

So sure Proxmox/Suse are certainly very happy with their sales number right now but anecdotally I’m not seeing the migration frenzy that one would expect under such intense price gouging. Broadcom correctly identified that it will take years for these super corporate structures to steer away from “the way we’ve always done things” and in the meantime that’s untold millions in additional short-term profits.

This can be hard to implement and avoidable through “creative accounting” (e.g. living off daddy money with no declared income) so as a hybrid/additional solution fines should turn into penalties over repeat offences.

Some countries use points licensing where your driver’s license will simply be taken away if you have too many recent infractions on record.

Companies should also be prevented from doing certain kinds of business if they repeatedly break the law. We have legal frameworks for this, we are just refusing to apply them due to politics and corruption.

That’s a broad topic where I would avoid making generalizations. It’s a matter of tradeoffs.

The key indicators I’d look at are, in no particular order:

• Cost. Does cloud hosting provide economies of scale that dramatically reduce operational costs?
• Risk. If your cloud provider hikes prices or turns out to be based in a hostile fascist dictatorship, can you easily switch to another offering?
• Liability. For better and more often for worse, companies love delegating business because it relieves them of liability if someone cocks it up. It’s a harsh reality that some SMEs have IT infrastructure that looks fine and inexpensive until they find out the hard way that their “IT person” doesn’t know what a firewall is.
• Accounting. Companies strongly prefer OpEx to CapEx due to the way modern accounting incentives, and cloud hosting is tailored to that.
• Practicality. If you want your email to sync to your phone abroad, you’ll need a cloud (though it could be a private cloud, but then I’d recommend a VPN which is more secure but less practical).
• Security. Does the NSA looking at all your files matter? For governments I would hope it does buuuuut…

Either way it goes, be mindful of blind spots. Companies often don’t (IMO) properly assess the risk of locking themselves into walled gardens due to short-termism. But at the same time IT gremlins such as myself tend to underestimate the costs we represent, not just as salaried employees but as people who might cock something up or leave behind us an undocumented mess that will costs hundreds of thousands to rebuild a few years from now.

This is terrifying. Americans are running headfirst into the Greatest Depression, except this time they are the Nazis and they have enough nukes to eradicate life on Earth.

And their political discourse oscillates between “serves us right” and “yes daddy”. Republicans are complicit and literally everyone else will refuse to resort to political violence or disobedience even as Trump orders nukes to be fired at whoever he’s mad at that week.

I just thought of a reason why trying to explain the downsides of solar power generation always goes so poorly for me.

Where I live, solar=good is a given. No amount of oil lobbying can overcome the simple fact that thanks to historically heavy subsidies, PV is free money and therefore anti-solar sentiment is fringe because everyone loves free money.

(Which is its own can of worms because ungoverned PV has externalities which the owners may not be bearing or only partially, while people who can’t install PV are essentially using up some of their own taxes to give a tax break to the bourgeois down the street with a solar mansion, and sure that’s more solar which is environmentally good but it’s also another indirect tax on the poor which is socially deleterious).

Anyway my point is that in a country where nearly everyone has PV or wishes they did, I don’t see any issue with plainly stating “PV is causing major headaches to grid operators”. Because pragmatically we need to justify solutions like dynamic pricing, solar taxes, and the phaseout net metering which are predictably unpopular policies with PV owners who were promised endless riches.
But I suppose from a North American perspective where “renewable energy is good” is somehow the fringe opinion and PV deployment is pathetic, then it makes sense to push back against such messaging.

You’re more likely to win the euromillion than to successfully shift norms away from the 8:30-18:00 working hours. This shit is baked into every employment contract out there. I work an office job where it doesn’t matter so much, but anyone who works shifts or a time-sensitive job is stuck there basically forever regardless of the time zone.

Kind of the whole point of nuclear dissuasion is that we are not, in fact, going to ever do that. And ignoring the existence of nukes (lol), attacking the US on their hometurf is such a monumentally stupid idea people still wonder what went through the Japanese High Command’s mind 80 years ago.

Stop asking Europe for help, because you’re not getting it. You’ve alienated your allies and broken your democracy beyond repair. Either use that 2nd amendment of yours to the fullest extent of its spirit or STFU with the “pwease stop him we’re scawed :(((” rhetoric. We have way more reasons to be scared because we don’t live next door to white cishet male Americans to shield us from his madness. Stop with the victim blaming. Either you stop this child or he starts a war with your assent.

1. He’s dumber than you give him credit for
2. What is the point of the supposed cover story? To cover from who, about what? He’s literally paying people to vote, again. Next to that, buying a social media to influence it almost sounds democratic.

The reason that conspiracy theory is appealing is the same for all conspiracy theories; it’s more comforting to think the powerful have a clever masterful evil plan than the sad reality that we’re all making it up as we go, even the literal Nazis.

Relevant ContraPoints from 4 days ago