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180719578
comment
bylocofungus
2, 2026 @03:48AM
(#65963772)
Attached to: Is the TV Industry Finally Conceding That the Future May Not Be 8K?
but few people can tell the difference [when comparing 8K] with 4K,
I can well believe this. For a very long time I really struggled with sub-pixel rendering because it (to me) left visible colour fringes on the edge of letters. It was "bizarre" when the word "well" at the start of this sentence might have one red and one blue 'l' for example.
Since switching to 4K I've not had a problem. While writing this I double checked and the colour edging is still there but I can't really see it at all. Now I've looked carefully I can see that the 'im' in the middle of "time" has a faint reddish hue which changes as I scroll the text but it's so faint as to be almost unnoticeable.
Additionally, anti-aliased text doesn't look particularly blurred any more, certainly not enough that I'm straining to "bring it into focus" - obviously not going to work as it's not out of focus to start with.
At home, I've still got sub-pixel rendering and anti-aliasing turned off. Yes, text is sharper but it's also more jagged and, at 4K, it's not obvious which one is better (to my eyes) and were I starting from scratch I wouldn't take the time working out how to turn off sub-pixel rendering and anti-aliasing (but I'm also not going to spend the time working out what I need to undo to turn it back on after all these years).
Of course, countless people will say "you can't see colour fringing if sub-pixel rendering is done correctly, you must have it setup wrongly" - but it's a fact that I can, no matter how it is tweaked. Anti-aliasing on lower DPI screens is equally as uncomfortable to me although that difference is visible to others too, just that they disagree with me about which is easier to look at. FWIW, it's obviously a fact that I can see colour fringing that others can't because we can talk about the same text on the same screen at the same time, and I can say "look, that "l" has a green fringe, that "M" is red etc, they can say "I can't see it". Then you take a screen shot, zoom in and they say "Oh, yes, I can see it now!"
180673648
comment
bylocofungus
28, 2026 @02:45AM
(#65954008)
Attached to: US Government Lost More Than 10,000 STEM PhDs Last Year
If this is a transient thing,
I have definitely noticed an uptick in non-white Americans relocating to Ireland. The numbers are too small to be statistically significant but it's noticeable - and also that these are permanent relocations[1] rather than people here on a fixed term contract.
Another reason this might not be transient is that many of these PhDs have very desirable skills in the private sector. They can probably earn 3-10x as much as they were getting. Even if they planned to go back to their government jobs eventually, they might find giving up the money harder than having never earned private sector salaries in the first place.
[1] By that I don't mean that they won't go back, just that their job in Ireland is permanent with no planned end date and at least some are taking salary cuts in order to move.
180658590
comment
bylocofungus
2026 @07:04AM
(#65949538)
Attached to: Richard Stallman Critiques AI, Connected Cars, Smartphones, and DRM
I was updating a program that uses c-ares to use a newer version, some of the functions that were being used were deprecated.
Now I've never used c-ares, this was in a program that I do use and I wanted to bring up to date as it had been neglected for a long while.
One of the replacements gave me a pointer to an opaque type. I needed to know how to get the data out of the opaque type, somewhere there would be helper functions to do exactly this.
So I asked chatGPT, immediately it said ptr->value. Obviously, this is wrong and will not compile. But nothing I could say to it would stop it writing ptr->. It didn't say "I don't know, I can't do that", it didn't say "you need to find the helper functions", it didn't try to look them up, just every time I said something along the lines of:
"If you write ptr-> then it's wrong and will not compile" it just said "You're right. I'm sorry about that. Here's a corrected version" (that included ptr->)
That's why it's not intelligent. Hell, even someone who'd never programmed C in their life, when you told them "if you write ptr-> it won't compile" will write something that doesn't include ptr-> or give up.
I solved it the usual way, looking at the header for likely matching functions and then the docs to see how to use them.
180597358
comment
bylocofungus
2026 @03:54AM
(#65928666)
Attached to: US Carbon Pollution Rose In 2025, a Reversal From Prior Years
I don't know but I'd guess that it makes other CO2 intensive generation more attractive.
Ultimately, the majority of fossil fuel generation is doomed, renewables are now comfortably cheaper by pretty much any metric unless you put a very high value on 100% availability.
For a long while the west will probably need a rump of fossil generation because our entire system is built around 100% reliable grid power at any load. It will likely be the developing world that will get there first as they don't already have a reliable grid, so adding lots of renewable power that might only be available 80% of the time doesn't inconvenience them - indeed, it allows recharging of micro storage so they can have existing levels of power consumption 24/7.
The problem for the west is that the technology doesn't currently exist - you cannot buy a washing machine that can deal with an hour long power interruption part way through a wash cycle. It's not that it cannot be done, it's that it would add to the cost of a machine for no benefit.
Likewise, freezers can easily deal with intermittent power generation - the problem is ensuring that the door isn't opened (except in an emergency) while there is no power. It's easy to imagine a lock that prevents someone who doesn't realize the power is off, opening the door - but that's 100% useless - I remember exactly once in the last 10 years where I lost power (which was a loss of three phase supply to the building due to water ingress into the underground cable supplying the building)
180498075
comment
bylocofungus
01, 2026 @02:47PM
(#65895323)
Attached to: 'IPv6 Just Turned 30 and Still Hasn't Taken Over the World, But Don't Call It a Failure'
There's nothing stopping you doing NAT6 either.
In fact, I do, but that's because my ISP is incompetent and IPV6 doesn't work properly (lots of other things don't work properly either, including DNS where I have to talk to a (remote) DNS server on a non-standard port to do DNSSEC[1]).
The nice thing about IPV6-IPV6 NAT if you're using it as a poor mans firewall is that you can do 1:1 address mapping, which also makes debugging issues easier and forwarding things you do want to allow trivial too, no more only one machine can listen on port 443 and you have to use a reverse proxy.
[1] I suspect that DNS does work if you make the router the (IPV4) DNS server but I've not checked that extensively. IPV6 dns doesn't work properly even if you use the ISPs advertised DNS servers.
180498023
comment
bylocofungus
01, 2026 @02:38PM
(#65895291)
Attached to: 'IPv6 Just Turned 30 and Still Hasn't Taken Over the World, But Don't Call It a Failure'
Agreed, although egress filtering can be tricky if you're using SLAAC with privacy addresses and you want some clients to have external connectivity and not others unless you can partition them onto separate /64.
I use mac based tagging via an iptables firewall rather than have multiple SSID on the wlan.
But egress filtering is getting harder and harder anyway, everybody and his dog talks to something at amazon aws on port 443. So far, I've been able to use SNI inspection and there's been nothing using ESNI that I need to allow to connect, but once that becomes common for things like banking apps I guess the bad guys have won and it will be all but impossible to egress filter, you cannot even use DNS as they'll talk to DNS servers over HTTPS too.
In theory you should be able to MITM bit neither android nor apple make installing an ultimately trusted certificate easy (if it's possible at all)
Hell, it's even hard now to block all outgoing connections on android except via VPN. Always on VPN doesn't actually route everything via the VPN, it likes to chatter to google bypassing the VPN. And it "really doesn't like it" if it cannot confirm direct internet connectivity even though the VPN can connect. You used to be able to divert the connectivity check - which was on port 80, but that seems to be on port 443 with later versions of android and good luck importing a certificate so that you can fake google.com.
180496229
comment
bylocofungus
01, 2026 @08:04AM
(#65894471)
Attached to: Waymos Are Now Coming For Your Coveted San Francisco Parking Spots
and let their cars drive around all day searching for free parking
Or just find the nearest traffic jam, the problem with looking for parking is that if there isn't a space you've got to keep driving. But if you just use whatever traffic information there is to find the most congested bit of the road, you've got "free parking" without needing to park at all.
180491859
comment
bylocofungus
r 31, 2025 @09:26AM
(#65892579)
Attached to: 'Foreign Tech Workers Are Avoiding Travel To the US'
In their minds we are winning. This is exactly what they voted for.
Similar is happening in the UK and we don't even (yet) have a nutty government, only an incompetent one without a plan.
The NHS has relied on foreign born doctors, 42% of all doctors were born outside the UK. While there was a surge in recruitment after Brexit but that has now slowed.
Doctors in the NHS are well paid when compared to the UK population as a whole but not well paid when compared to doctors in other countries. Australia and the US are the two that are typically referenced where pay is significantly higher.
https://www.ukfactcheck.com/ar...
180437417
comment
bylocofungus
2, 2025 @04:18AM
(#65874153)
Attached to: Google Launches CO2 Battery Plants for Long-Duration Storage of Renewable Energy
I don't know anything at all about this technology, I'd not heard about it before. I came to the comments to find out if it was relying on liquification of CO2, which I assumed, or was something else.
First point to note, 80 bar isn't high pressure in an industrial setting and 30C is low enough that there's large parts of Europe where you can assume that ambient air temperature almost never exceeds it. Therefore passive cooling is possible and in many cases, forced air cooling will be is sufficient. (I liquified CO2, indoors, in the summer months, as an undergraduate in the UK with only passive cooling required. I don't recall the exact pressure but it was around 60bar which suggests the indoor temperature was around 20C.)
A long pipe passive atmospheric heat exchanger is almost certainly all that is needed, much like the radiator on domestic fridge.
You don't mention it but the decompression cycle is likely more problematic as, I would guess, ice buildup might restrict the ability to use passive or forced air heating unless you're using dehumidified air (which you might be anyway to avoid corrosion). You also need to avoid the CO2 freezing.
Long term storage - while I suspect this technology isn't intended for long term storage and is expected to cycle in a few days, storing liquid CO2 isn't a problem. CO2 cylinders will store gas for months even after first use. It's not like helium where without incredibly careful setup, you'll lose all the gas overnight once you break the factory seal.
Likewise impurities, The initial loading of the CO2 will require a pure gas and you'll want water vapour in particular excluded. Trace amounts of nitrogen and oxygen probably aren't going to be a problem (I don't know about how they affect the critical temperature, it might be that they also have to be totally excluded but that just makes initial loading harder). But it's not hard to produce equipment that is impervious to CO2, N2, O2, Ar and H2O that can maintain integrity at 100bar (you've got about a 40:1 safety factor for steel at 100bar). If trace amounts of impurity are a problem then you'll probably need to bake the equipment to flush out the adsorbed gasses but I'd guess flushing the pipework with CO2 at high temperature would be sufficient, I doubt you'd need to get to CERN levels of outgassing elimination.
180437269
comment
bylocofungus
2, 2025 @03:39AM
(#65874125)
Attached to: The U.S. Could Ban Chinese-Made Drones Used By Police Departments
Manufacturers in China have enjoyed a distinct advantage in in lax environmental regulations, low material costs and labor rates compared to US. US manufacturing is competitive on the high end. We just cannot compete with cheap volume manufacturing.
I suspect US manufacturing can compete at much of the low end now as labour costs is becoming almost irrelevant to much of it.
However, the up front cost to build a fully automatic factory is substantial, and it requires constant ongoing capital investment to stay useful. You may not recoup your investment unless you can stay useful for 10 years and initial orders may have an estimated run time of 6 months.
One of the things that would help, but is one of the things that seems anathema to western corporations, is standardisation, A fan motor fails in a laptop, it's usually reasonable simple to replace except that that motor is specific to that particular model of that particular laptop from that particular manufacturer and your best source of parts might be a "not working" laptop of ebay.
There is certainly a case for custom parts like motors in some cases but most of the time, like arbitrary power plugs, it's to benefit the manufacturer and force obsolescence earlier.
Imagine manufacturers getting together to standardise some of these things. Maybe they create a new standard every 5 years. If you want a drone motor you'll know what sort of power supply so what voltage it should take, whether it's a high RPM or lower RPM use case, what power and what weight. Perhaps there's nothing suitable, then you have to have a custom part, but then there can be a "custom part tax" - high enough that manufacturers won't ignore it, but low enough that genuine use cases aren't prohibited until the next round of standardisation.
Even washing machines. I have a small kitchen and there is a space for a washing machine but there's no possibility of rearranging things to make more space. This is an absolutely standard (European) sized space. 20 years ago pretty much every washing machine would have fitted. Now lots don't, and even worse, manufacturers/retailers make it hard to tell if a replacement will actually fit. It's not at all uncommon in the UK to visit someone's house and discover a washing machine that is sticking out from the cupboard line by 8cm or so - because "I assumed it was a standard size and would fit". In larger houses it's theoretically, if not financially, possible to replace the entire kitchen with deeper worktops, but in smaller places this can be impossible.
180397887
comment
bylocofungus
16, 2025 @12:12PM
(#65861799)
Attached to: High-Speed Traders Are Feuding Over a Way To Save 3.2 Billionths of a Second
I'm not exactly clear what the issue is. Corrupting the CRC at the end of the packet if you didn't want to send it was something that was talked about in the 90s. I don't know if anyone was doing it but it was certainly talked about.
Around that time, maybe a bit later, Eurex introduced discard addresses. This meant that you could start writing the packet onto the wire and if you changed your mind before you got to the destination address of the TCP header, you could write in the discard address instead of the exchange address.
There's a paper somewhere (from Eurex) showing that the tick to trade back in 2017 was 39ns. It's completely obvious from that that people are starting writing the IOC onto the wire around the time the first 39 bytes of the market data tick are received.
Obviously there are other ways of sending valid orders that won't cross the book. For example, instead of writing the discard address into the TCP header, you write a price that is way off the market into the IOC. Obviously this means you can decide later - alternatively, you can start sending earlier.
180360187
comment
bylocofungus
11, 2025 @03:49AM
(#65850443)
Attached to: Science Journal Retracts Study On Safety of Monsanto's Roundup
There was absolutely no such suggestion of even thought.
Do you people even hear yourselves sometimes? How do you say shit like this with a straight face?
Outside of the US, nobody is going to get a licence to sell a generic herbicide without showing that it's safe to use. This study was an important part of that regulatory process.
The presumption is that the product needs to be shown to be safe to use to get a licence, while getting a licence revoked requires showing that the product is harmful. It's not at all symmetrical.
180360173
comment
bylocofungus
11, 2025 @03:43AM
(#65850437)
Attached to: Google Faces Fines Over Google Play If It Doesn't Make More Concessions
There's absolutely no reason for google to require you to have a google account and register your phone with them just so you can install packages from the playstore.
180340271
comment
bylocofungus
09, 2025 @10:28AM
(#65845749)
Attached to: Science Journal Retracts Study On Safety of Monsanto's Roundup
Seriously, that's how America works? Somehow that doesn't surprise me.
In most of the rest of the world it doesn't work that way.
Firstly things are typically not allowed to be sold unless they can be shown to be reasonably safe - which this study was invaluable for.
But when suing you need actual damages to claim for and you have to show direct harm. There isn't such a thing as punitive damages. The model is to try to prevent bad things from being sold up front rather than assume firms won't do it because of the punitive damages that will be awarded once someone is hurt.
Cancer is particularly difficult to attribute to a particular source.
Technically exemplary damages do exist in the UK but they exist in very narrow circumstances.
Mesothelioma, for example, is extremely rare other than due to asbestos exposure. It is not caused by smoking. This makes it easier to sue successfully (outside of the US I guess) for damages.
In most of the world a study like this is not a defence against damages, but would tend to lead to a presumption that glyphospate was safe to use. But that applies anyway because it's regulated. More likely than not the path to damages would be against someone who used it outside the recommended ways.
Withdrawing this study is unlikely to have any impact on the probability of suing for damages due to glyphosphate exposure or have any claim against Monsanto.
180339493
comment
bylocofungus
09, 2025 @08:50AM
(#65845571)
Attached to: Science Journal Retracts Study On Safety of Monsanto's Roundup
Let me guess, competitors can now produce and market it. So now they need to stop it being sold so they can sell the next great thing at huge markup.
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