• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • On a high level, you can get a cleaner like Deoxit D5 in a spray bottle. Most pots have a slit in them so you can spray into them, then turn the pot through its range a bunch of times. It’s worth a try as a start. Obviously do it while the unit is unplugged.

    If you want to consider a more aggressive rebuild, like a capacitor replacement, maybe find a cheap old amplifier at the thrift shop to use as practice for desoldering/resoldering.

    You might be able to connect the BT to one input on the amp, like the tape input, and the CD to another.




  • We have an entire universe (from snaps up to univere-scale k8s setups) derived from “it works on my machine, so we’ll ship my machine”.

    How much bad software isn’t being shook out because it’s kept alive in a container with just the right dependencies to prevent it from activating bugs and bad assertions?


  • There’s also a longevity mismatch. The streaming device goes obsolete much faster than the display. At worst, you’ve got a bunch of buttons snd icons for dead services or “your device is no longer supported” tutning your home theatre into a dead mall.

    It’s sort of like when they used to make low-end TVs with VCRs and DVD players built in. Nobody was doing that on top of the line sets because you wanted to keep it for 10 years, and the DVD player would give out much sooner.

    I think one brand tried to make a modular component to allow for smart upgrades, but without industry standards, it was a predestined dead end. Thry should have just out a slot in the cabinet sized to fit a Roku/Fire stick and let customers swap them every few years.


  • While there’s some far-end “let’s eliminate cash” sentiments, a lot of the selling point of a CBDC is simply faster, cheaper settlement than current private platforms, so there’s a nonmalovent position.

    Many central banks are pushing for the CBDC as a commercial or interbank-only thing in large part because if end consumers could just have an CBDC demand account with the Federal Reserve/Bank of England/ECB, it would squeeze out commercial banks.



  • I’m surprised there isn’t more of a crowdsourced solution-- community maintained block/allow lists and pluggable tools.

    Part of the reason filters suck right now is that they’re sold to turboprudes and people pushing compliance solutions that will placate litigious turboprudes. So you get blocking all of Wikipedia and .edu/.gov because three pages have an anatomical diagram of a breast. The kids are frustrated, normal parents have to keep unblocking legit stuff, and nobody wins.

    If you could pick from easily managed lists sponsored by groups you personally trusted, with responsive appeals systems, people might be more willing to use them.

    The ad-blocker ecosystem has a lot of precedent for how to work this stuff.



  • What problem does CSD solve? I’d think “some apps look and work differently” is a pretty bad tradeoff for “I want to cram custom stuff in the title bar which was more or less universally treated as owned-by-the-system for the first 35 years of GUIs at least?”

    GTK/GNOME seem to be making themselves actively hostile towards customization, which seems a great way to lose enthusiasts.




  • The Internet boom didn’t have the weird you’re-holding-it-wrong vibe too. Legit “It doesn’t help with my use case concerns” seem to all too often get answered with choruses of “but have you tried this week’s model? Have you spent enough time trying to play with it and tweak it to get something more like you want?” Don’t admit limits to the tech, just keep hitting the gacha.

    I’ve had people say I’m not approaching AI in “good faith”. I say that you didn’t need “good faith” to see that Lotus 1-2-3 was more flexible and faster than tallying up inventory on paper, or that AltaVista was faster than browsing a card catalog.


  • I have to think that most people won’t want to do local training.

    It’s like Gentoo Linux. Yeah, you can compile everything with the exact optimal set of options for your kit, but at huge inefficiency when most use cases might be mostly served by two or three pre built options.

    If you’re just running pre-made models, plenty of them will run on a 6900XT or whatever.