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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • So they progressively increase closing force if it keeps detecting something but the owner keeps trying to close it. I can vaguely see the reasoning only if they aren’t confident in the frunk sensor for some reason. I mean garage doors solved this problem forever ago without having to resort to something like that.

    I wonder if the “vision-based everything” mandate from Musk applies outside of autonomous driving features? Makes sense to not be confident in it if it’s just a camera…



  • To be fair, in that specific case it is almost certainly not YouTube directly censoring the phrase. They aren’t known to do any kind of editing like that on uploaded videos.

    What is happening is the person that uploaded that video censored themselves…because YouTube’s policy around monetization. They’ll demonetize videos with certain no-no words. Part of that is YouTube and part of that is advertisers demanding their ads not be placed on content that they find objectionable.

    Indirectly, YouTube and advertisers are censoring our content. A lot of it is also TikTok, which will ban you for no-no words. This seeps over into YouTube where something that might be fine on YouTube but is banned on TikTok gets censored anyway in case it gets clipped for TikTok.

    Genuinely the power TikTok and it’s advertisers have over how we communicate is pretty scary. Imagine how often you hear “unalive” instead of “suicide” these days. “Pdf” (or others) instead of “pedophile.” The list goes on.


  • Instead of pretending One Man With A Gun is going to do something

    I used to agree with this train of thought, why be armed when the government has tanks?

    But the realities of the past several years have shown us that an armed rebellion can be significantly more powerful. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan, look at Myanmar today where the rebel groups are literally 3D printing carbines. A guerilla group with small arms can put serious pressure on a modern military. Will lots of them die? Probably. Will they “win”? Probably not, but they could easily wear down the enemy with attrition. When you need to move a couple dozen men with rifles it’s an entirely different game than coordinating 12 tanks and 500 men, you can employ completely different tactics. Especially on your home turf that you know inside and out.

    Is an armed rebellion happening anytime soon? I sure hope not. But the threat that an armed populace can at the least put some serious hurt on a military/government is a deterrent to tyranny. Just the possibility of it is a huge deterrent, compared to authoritarian countries where citizens aren’t armed and get run over by tanks.

    I’m not saying gun violence isn’t a huge problem, but saying armed citizenry is zero deterrent is just factually untrue.


  • Why would Amazon want to hinder the accuracy of the price tracking in that way?

    Accurate price tracking leads to people saying “Oh well it was 50% less a year ago. I’ll wait on a sale, not paying full price on that” and waiting on a sale, leading to less conversions. Amazon has pressured Camelcamelcamel into agreeing to not track specific low prices (i.e., Prime Day, if that actually had any good sales). I’m unsure if they track coupons or not, they were not clear about what the criteria for not tracking a price are.

    Camelcamelcamel is unfortunately compromised by Amazon, it’s probably mostly accurate but there are price points they do not accurately log at Amazon’s request.


  • pokemaster787@ani.socialtomemes@lemmy.worldBurgernomics Δ
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    4 months ago

    Even if it started out that way, where “surge” pricing is current pricing and “off-surge” pricing is cheaper, leading to consumers paying less overall, it won’t stay that way. It would only be that way to prime consumers mentally to accept that dynamic pricing. After which they’ll slowly increase prices, 10 cents or whatever every month. Soon enough it’ll cost more and the corporation can brag about how it increased profits again this quarter. Remember publicly traded companies are legally obligated to maximize profit - the only time they aren’t doing so is when they’re burning money to prime consumers to accept bullshit or building a captive base, in order to eventually maximize profits.


  • With guns in general, or with Polymer80 or similar products? I’m guessing he’s intentionally mixing the two to make it sound scarier than it is.

    This is what I hate about the rhetoric around gun control, especially “ghost guns”

    As a gun owner that thinks guns are fucking cool, I’m happy to have reasonable compromises and regulations around them. Compromises and regulations that do something to stop crime. Almost all cases of 3D printed guns being used in crime are when the crime is having a 3D printed firearm (mostly in Europe). Actual violent crime it is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. We should focus on legislation that does something about the problem, not ban things we arbitrarily give scary names like “Ghost guns.” Look at the actual numbers, the actual types of crimes being committed, go after those things. Don’t start background checking people for 3D printer purchases of all things.








  • This is a pretty big overstatement.

    DO NOT USE AN SSD to store your data long-term! Solid-state storage has a very short, finite life-span.

    This has not been true for years. SSDs are generally more reliable than HDDs except in write-intensive applications (and even then… It really depends on what exact models you are comparing). SSDs have a life-span mostly talked about in terms of TBW (terabytes written) rather than years for a reason, if they’re powered on and not written too they’ll last as long as or longer than a hard drive. (Note: Powered on regularly, SSDs can lose data if stored unpowered for a long time (months)). If you just have an archival drive you’re not constantly erasing and rewriting data to, an SSD is a great choice. Reads also barely affect the lifespan of at all, so you can still access the data you want to protect (hell, write-lock the drive even and it’ll last decades if powered on).

    What you want to do is buy an even number of hard drives, plug them in long enough to copy your data to, and then unplug them and store them in a climate-controlled area. bout once a year, copy the data to a different hard drive

    This is just plain silly. Yes, the mechanical wear of the drives spinning up and down means they’ll die faster. But we’re still talking MTBF measured in years. And replacing a hard drive that’s barely used every single year? That’s not just bad advice it’s creating e-waste for no reason. Also note drives fail on a bathtub curve… If you have two good drives that lasted a year, you are increasing your chances of a failure by swapping them for two brand new drives… The best thing you can do for your hard drives is to not power cycle them constantly, any typical usage is fine. Also mechanical parts can actually wear out from disuse as well. Even archival services don’t go to these extremes you’re recommending.

    If you really care about saving your data follow 3-2-1. 3 copies of your data (live, archival (external HDD or similar), off-site), two-different forms of media (HDD, SSD, cloud (yes cloud is an HDD or SSD but they have their own redundancy)), one off-site (in the event of a fire etc.)

    Honestly 99.9% of consumers would be fine with a 2-2-1 scheme, 2 copies (live and off-site/cloud), 2 forms of media, 1 off-site. If you don’t trust Google or don’t want to pay for cloud storage, set up a server with redundant disks at a friend’s house. Just keeping a second copy on a server with redundancy is plenty of fail over for most use cases. 3-2-1 is for data centers and businesses (and any cloud service you rent from will follow 3-2-1…) Let’s not overcomplicate how difficult it is to keep data intact, if I tell someone to buy a new 12tb HDD each year they’re just gonna give up on keeping it safe.



  • They can be or they can be paid through “escrow” and your mortgage servicer will pay them.

    Usually sites like these want to show total monthly cost though, so they tend to include estimates for property taxes and insurance in the monthly payments. Whether it gets paid through your mortgage servicer or directly by you doesn’t change much.



  • I’ve heard that, but once I tried to refund a game at 3 hours and got nothing but an automated response (denial) everytime I requested a refund.

    In this specific case it was actually a game I played 2 hours of during a free weekend approximately 4 years before buying it, played one hour after buying it to see if it had gotten better, decided it hadn’t and refunded it. But Steam counts free weekend playtime towards the refund window…

    If there’s any actual way to ensure a human reviews it, that’d be neat. 100% it was automatically denied by some code just checking my playtime and seeing it was past two hours.