The situation is a heavy machinery example of something that happens across most categories of electronics, from phones, laptops, health devices, and wearables to tractors and, apparently, trains. In this case, NEWAG, the manufacturer of the Impuls family of trains, put code in the train’s control systems that prevented them...
The mere fact that the manufacturer had a remote kill switch is the safety issue that should have a big spotlight. What if a malicious hacker decides to trigger that kill switch while the train is loaded with people and at a sensitive moment (e.g. on bridge/cliff with a huge drop).
If the kill switch were in place for dealing with hi-jackers, perhaps fair enough. But having it for the purpose of business protectionism is an entirely reckless safety risk.
There’s an overlooked failure here: why doesn’t the Polish transport authority have a clause in their procurement contracts that bans trains with remote-control kill switches that are not under user control? And why wasn’t the code reviewed to catch that in advance? The hackers say they did not alter the code, which somewhat implies that the source code might have been available for inspection.
Germany is struggling to get people on-board with a green energy movement that involves banning high footprint domestic heating systems (e.g. gas boilers)-- thus forcing people to migrate to heat pumps. A low-income family who was interviewed said it would cost €45k to install a heat pump in their terraced home in Bremen....
And btw: you don’t need to reach 60°C with a heat pump. That would be pretty inefficient.
Thanks for the feedback.
My boiler gives me control of the temp of the water running through the radiators which is independent of the room air temp thermostat. I set the water to ~55°C which seems to reasonably get the air to 17° without running continuously. I mentioned 60° because I figured that temp would enable someone to heat their room up quickly. I wonder why you say a heat pump would not need 60°. I would think the radiators need to reach a high temp like ~50—60° regardless of the kind of furnace. Maybe I’m doing something inefficient. Should I use a lower temp? I could lower the water temp but then there would be a point where the furnace has to run continuously which i would think is inefficient. I’m not sure how to find the efficiency sweet spot.
UPDATE
That pricetag is just the unit and standard installation probably. Pieces are crazy high Here in Germany because the demand is crazy high. Not many heating installers have made the additional qualifications, so those who did can demand practically anything.
Sounds reasonable. So if the demand has out-stripped supply on heat pumps, I wonder if geo-thermal would actually be cheaper than a heat pump ATM. IIRC the digging would be ~€10k (what I think is a typical price for digging a well… could be off). Though I don’t suppose you could use wall radiators with geothermal. Since geothermal water is only ~6° warmer in the winter, hydro-radiant flooring would have to be installed.
I have noticed that some posts on some Lemmy instances created by others have successfully made use of the details/summary tags which gives an arrow that expands....
~10 years ago hybrid SSDs were a thing. The idea was that one could simultaneously benefit from the high capacity of magnetic media and the speed of solid state chips.
I wonder if it might be useful in the world of small things to have a filesystem that’s smart about this. If a file is rarely overwritten, it could be moved to the SD while new files and frequently overwritten ones could be directed to the microdrive. And important data could be on a separate volume that mirrors a partition on both the SD and microdrive.
I’ve been kicked out of local junkyards ½ dozen times or so now. It’s a tricky game of trying to reach the waste pile when no one is looking, and also seeing who is on duty in hopes of at least ensuring that the same person doesn’t experience the pattern of kicking you out multiple times. Perhaps they would get aggressive...
Sometimes the staff kicks me out just for looking at the junk pile. Sometimes I encounter a balanced live-and-let-live worker who says I can pick through the junk on the edge of the pile, but cannot climb (due to injury risk). On another occasion, 3 workers approached me and I don’t recall what I said I was after, but they let me do my thing as they scattered (they did not want to be seen not enforcing the rules).
I agree liability is the real rationale but if they wanted to flex their muscle it’d likely just be a theft charge. In any case, a right to scrounge under the right to repair would naturally imply that the junk all be laid out at ground level for inspection before getting piled in a prohibited area.
It’s a good start but they really cannot anticipate what will be useful to people. They wouldn’t have obscure knowledge like really old hard drives still have a really strong magnet inside (which is useful for fishing in bodies of water for more junk :)). They would just say “surely no one wants this 2gb hard drive”…
Appliances and electronics in my area go to a non-profit who repairs them and distributes them to 2nd hand shops around town. In principle that’s quite good but I’ve seen them operate. A bulk of the stuff they get goes straight to a pile where it will be broken down and material melted. It would be nice if that pile of stuff they think is not worth repairing were freely accessible to the public.
This one is nothing fancy, but it fit our workflow well. My SO has always saved recipes to a pinterest board - normally she brings a laptop to the kitchen and sets it up on a chair....
There are some battery managers in linux which prolong the life of the battery by only charging it to ~40—50% capacity (which doubles the lifetime). If the tablet is mounted on the wall, then it might as well have continuous power and a power management app (if that exists on whatever platform the tablet runs).
That implies Android. There is a FOSS app that requires AOS 4.0 or greater which cuts off the charging when the battery reaches a user-specified level:
Some new research out of Amsterdam finds that running regularly with a group achieves the same anti-depressant effect as anti-depressant medication....
Sometimes I report a bug & the dev starts off asking for more details. But then there’s a kind of scope of effort creep where you start to realize you’re being tricked into finding where in the code the problem is so you can fix the bug....
Of course… The reaction shows how seriously wound tight people are. Obviously not much sense of humor in this community.
There are a couple rare cases where devs have tried to coerce me into a fix. Sometimes they outright say they expect the bug reporter to fix it, strangely enough. It never happened in a language that I knew, and weird that bug reporters would be expected to know how to program at all. But it’s far from the norm.
Someone tasking someone else without paying them is indeed being not where they belong. In the case of the OP, that’s the dev tasking the bug reporter.
That’s fair enough, but it’s a bit of both (satire and reality). It’s actually a true account (details withheld because I have a bit of respect for the developer in the recent case). This is something that really happens. Not often, but occasionally there are devs & others who expect bug reporters to do a fix. There’s a poor attitude that bug reporters are in some way a beneficiary/consumer and the false idea that the devs are working for the bug reporter. There’s also an assumption that the bug reporter is in some way in need of a fix. When in fact the bug reporter is a volunteer contributor, performing work for the project just like the dev. It’s just as wrong for a dev to demand work a bug reporter work on the code as it is for a bug reporter to demand work from a dev. Everyone gives what they can or wants to. A bug report is not an individual support request. It’s a community bug – one that may or may not even affect the bug reporter.
And? Of course testers do not pay money. Why would they? Devs do not pay for the tester’s work either. Both developers and testers are volunteers who do not pay the other for their work. On free software projects testers and devs pay with their own labor.
much larger contributions of the developers.
It is not “much larger” for a dev to task the tester to implement the fix. The dev is no more than a manager in this case.
What bug report? There’s no bug single report in particular to speak of. I’ve filed hundreds if not thousands of bug reports over the years. The post is a reflection of a subset of those experiences.
When a developer asks a tester to look at a module in the source code, that is not a consequence of a “half assed bug report”. It’s the contrary. When a dev knows a particular module of code is suspect, the bug report served well in giving a detailed idea of what the issue is.
It would need some analysis by legal experts. But consider that archive.org gets away with it. Although archive.org has an opt-out mechanism. So perhaps each Lemmy instance should have an opt-out mechanism, which should push a CAPTCHA in perhaps one of few good uses for CAPTCHAs. Then if Quora wants to opt-out, they have to visit every Lemmy instance, complete the opt-out form, and solve the CAPTCHA. Muahaha!
Note as well how 12ft.io works: it serves you Google’s cache of a site (which is actually what the search index uses). How did Google get a right to keep those caches?
There’s also the #fairUse doctrine. You can quote a work if your commenting on it. Which is what we do in the threadiverse. Though not always – so perhaps the caching should be restricted to threads that have comments.
A link is not a bad link for going to the source. You’ve misunderstood the post and also failed to identify a logical fallacy (even had your understanding been correct).
Whether the link goes to the source or not is irrelevant. I’m calling it a bad link if it goes to a place that’s either enshitified and/or where the content is unreachable (source or not). This is more elaborate than what you’re used to. There’s more than a dozen variables that can make a link bad. Sometimes the mirror is worse than the source (e.g. archive*ph, which is a Cloudflared mirror site).
Just like Greenpeace paves the way for smaller activist groups that can’t stand up to challenges, archive.org would serve in the same way. When archive.org (with ALA backing) wins a case, that’s a win for everyone who would do the same. Lemmy would obviously stay behind on the path archive.org paves and not try to lead.
You’re going to have to name this fallacy you keep talking about because so far you’re not making sense.
Sometimes a paywalled source is the first to report on something. Calling that link a bad link is nonsense.
One man’s bad link is another man’s good link. It’s nonsense to prescribe for everyone one definition of “bad”. What’s bad weather? Rain? I love rain. Stop trying to speak for everyone and impose your idea of “bad” on people.
Many people don’t know all the websites to redirect things through without that, so calling their contribution “bad” just because they posted that link isn’t the greatest.
So because someone might not know their link is bad, it ceases to be bad? Nonsense.
It’s not even like it’s that big an issue, because usually someone else comes along that provides an alt link in the replies,
(emphasis mine) Usually that does not happen.
so saying that this is a social failure is also ridiculous, because both were provided between two people.
This based on the false premise that usually bad links are supplemented by an alternate from someone else.
Also, the notion that you or anyone else is socially filtering non-misinformation news sources from the rest of us, because you don’t see the value in it, or cannot figure out how to bypass the paywall yourself, isn’t all that great either.
(emphasis mine) Every user can define an enshitified site how they want. If you like paywalls, why not have your user-side config give you a personalized favorable presentation of such links?
The browser (more appropriately named: client) indeed needs some of the logic here, but it cannot do the full job I’ve outlined. The metrics need to be centralized. And specifically when you say browser, this imposes an inefficient amount of effort & expertise on the end-user. A dedicated client can make it easy on the user. But it’s an incomplete solution nonetheless.
You don’t know what a logical fallacy is. Bob and Alice can disagree about whether the pizza tastes good or bad. There’s no fallacy there, just subjective disagreement.
I mean, does archive.org get away with it, though?
They get blocked by some sites, and some sites have pro-actively opt-out. archive.org respects the opt-outs. AFAICT, archive.org gets away w/archiving non-optout cases where their bot was permitted.
And do I really have to spell out how Google gets away with caching stuff?
You might need to explain why 12ft.io gets away with sharing google’s cache, as Lemmy could theoretically operate the same way.
I’m extremely skeptical fair use could be twisted to our defense in this particular case.
When you say “twisted”, do you mean commentary is not a standard accepted and well-known fair use scenario?
It’s a big database. It would be a poor design to replicate a db of all links in every single client.
Synchronization of the db would not be cheap. When Bob says link X has anti-feature Y, that information must then be shared with 10s of thousands of other users.
Perhaps you have a more absolute idea of centralized. With Mastodon votes, they are centralized on each node but of course overall that’s actually decentralized. My bad. I probably shouldn’t have said centralized. I meant more centralized than a client-by-client basis. It’d be early to pin those details down at this point other than to say it’s crazy for each client to maintain a separate copy of that DB.
And how would guarantee the integrity of the ones holding the metrics?
The server is much better equipped than the user for that. The guarantee would be the same guarantee that you have with Mastodon votes. Good enough to be fit for purpose. For any given Mastodon poll everyone sees a subset of votes. But that’s fine. Perfection is not critical here. You wouldn’t want it to decide a general election, but you don’t need that level of integrity.
A lot less effort than having to deal with the different “features” that each website admin decides to run on their own.
That doesn’t make sense. Either one person upgrades their Lemmy server, or thousands of people have to install, configure, and maintain a dozen different browser plugins ported to a variety of different browsers (nearly impossible enough to call impossible). Then every Lemmy client also has to replicate that complexity.
I think I need a sewing machine that can do a variety of different kinds of stitches. One use case is to repair holey socks by cannabalizing fabric from other holey socks. Thus the stitch needs to be the kind that can stretch and ideally not create an awkward feeling on the foot....
These are the interesting tasks I can think that I need regularly:
reattach buttons (thanks for telling me this is an option)
hem rigid pants (denim)
hem stretchy pants
cut stretchy pants off at the knees and introduce zippers (so they function as shorts or trousers) as complex hemming alternative
patch holey socks
fix tears
maybe make new designs
embroider over stains
Considering embroidery apparently complicates things and presumably bumps the price up substantially, I would nix the last item on that list.
Some machines have a mechanical dial that shows different stitch symbols. I’m not sure how to look at that and know if my needs are covered. This is why I thought in principle I would like to have it software controlled¹. But maybe that’s overkill for my need. I’d like to avoid buying something that falls short of my needs. E.g. if none of the preset stitches can work on stretchy material it’s underkill.
I saw a Signer on liquidation but did not buy it. It had ~4 or so dials with just digits. Not sure if that was for different kinds of stitches, or other factors like speed.
I’m a bit torn because the modern cheap ones look like they will do the job, but they’re plastic and I wonder if the gears are plastic… which I suspect means short life.
1: regarding software control, someone told me not a single FOSS sewing machine exists. The firmware is always proprietary non-free. But I was told Inkstitch can be used to create patterns that are loaded onto a proprietary machine. I’m fine with that compromise. But IIUC, that’s purely for the embroidery use case not for straight stitches, correct?
I appreciate all the good advice. Testing the machine would have been tricky because I knew nothing about doing even the simplest test. The machine I bought was heaviest I could find at a street market where if I wanted to test it I would have to track down someone at the market with a portable power generator. Some sellers had samples under the presser foot of machines they were selling but the seller I dealt with did not do that. I didn’t think I was going to buy it… asking price was ~220% of my budget. I was walking away but the seller was highly motivated & came way down in price. I thought telling him what I would theoretically pay would end the discussion due to the big gap, but then he accepted. So I agreed to buy before I could really give the machine much thought or inspection. If I had been more knowledgeable and diligent I could have even tested it just by threading it and manually turning the wheel which would have revealed that it needs an adjustment, which I mention here.
I could take it to a pro but I should ultimately try to gain some independence and master the machine. So I guess I’ll fiddle with it to see if I can get it to stop skipping stitches.
I tried to create a community called buyitforlife (in part because !buyitforlife is apparently unreachable from here). When I click “create” the button spins for a moment but reverts back to a “create” button & nothing happens....
I wondered what that article would say about Ada. No mention. But certainly Ada gives you the ability to have the issues that are listed so apparently Ada is memory unsafe (despite it being highly regarded as a safe language overall).
Also worth noting that Ada developers generally consider rust a watered down lesser alternative. OTOH, rust has memory safety and Ada does not, correct?
I’m skeptical. That mention of me in your msg is an URL with the mailto: scheme, which has the effect of launching an email client that tries to treat a Lemmy address as an email address.
I’m using the stock web client of slrpnk.net (whatever version that is), and when I type @Emperor … oh, wow, that worked. Strange. In the cases that failed me, I copy-pasted the user’s address. So apparently it must be typed out manually to trigger auto-complete. I see that the client just makes it a markdown hyperlink to your profile. That’s useful, but what’s more important is that the user get a notification. When i copy-paste the address (e.g. @Emperor) there’s nothing to signal to me that the user was recognized and that they will actually be populated in the “mentions” field of the JSON record.
I’m calling this a #LemmyBug. When an address is copy-pasted into a msg, you have no indication of whether the other account was properly recognized and that they will get a notification. When I view source, it just shows the body of the msg not the JSON record.
When you say “some users don’t trigger it”, that’s probably a feature. It’s important to know if a user is federated with the server the msg is posted to in order for them to get the notification.
Indeed we can always write a markup hyperlink and put the users address in it, but that’s not the point. That would not ensure that they get the notification. It’s the automatic generation of that link that tells us whether the user was recognized.
I believe we 1st have a documentation bug since the docs do not cover this. And functionality-wise, we should be able to see a list of who is mentioned for the purpose of notifications.
There’s a long history of people saying you can never have an open source phone because GSM radios and baseband stack or whatever need costly FCC approval. I also thought it was in the GSM spec that carriers had to be able to update some part of the baseband OS spontaneously. So I wonder how they got around that.
Polish Hackers Repaired Trains the Manufacturer Artificially Bricked. Now The Train Company Is Threatening Them (www.404media.co)
The situation is a heavy machinery example of something that happens across most categories of electronics, from phones, laptops, health devices, and wearables to tractors and, apparently, trains. In this case, NEWAG, the manufacturer of the Impuls family of trains, put code in the train’s control systems that prevented them...
€45,000 for a heat pump retrofit in Germany -- really? (www.bbc.co.uk)
Germany is struggling to get people on-board with a green energy movement that involves banning high footprint domestic heating systems (e.g. gas boilers)-- thus forcing people to migrate to heat pumps. A low-income family who was interviewed said it would cost €45k to install a heat pump in their terraced home in Bremen....
details-summary HTML tags treated as literals (~~BUG or~~ SUE)
I have noticed that some posts on some Lemmy instances created by others have successfully made use of the details/summary tags which gives an arrow that expands....
TomTom satnavs selling for 50¢ each (designed obsolescence)
I saw a street market vendor with a pile of ~20 or so old TomToms. The price: 50¢ each, must buy in multiples of 2....
Getting kicked out of junkyards (right to repair needs to evolve)
I’ve been kicked out of local junkyards ½ dozen times or so now. It’s a tricky game of trying to reach the waste pile when no one is looking, and also seeing who is on duty in hopes of at least ensuring that the same person doesn’t experience the pattern of kicking you out multiple times. Perhaps they would get aggressive...
there’s another DiY community
cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/4160051...
there’s another DiY community
There are several DiY communities in the fedi but if we ignore the big centralized instances, there is:...
prescription meds are wasted on a large scale (presumably) -- are shared doc appointments a remedy?
Meds often expire long before they actually decay. There are a variety of reasons for this:...
Another use for an old tablet (slrpnk.net)
This one is nothing fancy, but it fit our workflow well. My SO has always saved recipes to a pinterest board - normally she brings a laptop to the kitchen and sets it up on a chair....
Running with a group periodically can be as effective as anti-depressants (www.runnersworld.com)
Some new research out of Amsterdam finds that running regularly with a group achieves the same anti-depressant effect as anti-depressant medication....
Using coffee or tea as printer ink
cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/3036509...
Watch out for devs trying trick bug reporters into doing work
Sometimes I report a bug & the dev starts off asking for more details. But then there’s a kind of scope of effort creep where you start to realize you’re being tricked into finding where in the code the problem is so you can fix the bug....
Bug: people are posting paywalls & other exclusive walled gardens
The problem:...
How do FOSS enthusiasts sew? What hardware do they buy?
I think I need a sewing machine that can do a variety of different kinds of stitches. One use case is to repair holey socks by cannabalizing fabric from other holey socks. Thus the stitch needs to be the kind that can stretch and ideally not create an awkward feeling on the foot....
Cannot create community
I tried to create a community called buyitforlife (in part because !buyitforlife is apparently unreachable from here). When I click “create” the button spins for a moment but reverts back to a “create” button & nothing happens....
What is memory safety (alexgaynor.net)
this article brought me back to www.pl-enthusiast.net/2014/07/21/memory-safety/
How to mention a user (undocumented)
When I type @user, there is no hyperlink created. Does that mean I did not properly mention them? I also tried u/[email protected]....
Step-by-step instructions to build a smartphone that is open-source, upgradeable, repairable, and Big Tech free (github.com)