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‘It has officially happened’: Mechanic says he can’t work on your car because they’ve officially been locked out of computer systems
  • Looks like I'm gonna run my Mercedes 300D until it literally collapses into a heap. The engine is supposed to be good for a million miles, after that I guess I can change bearing journals, valves and seats, bore it out and do oversize pistons like they did back in the day.

    I'm appreciating more and more owning a car that only has an electrical system for the lights and radio

  • To all you outside of the US...
  • No I'm serious, I'm here in SK and we're trying to push Moe and his cronies out for the NDP this fall, and our biggest problem is the federal NDP damaging the brand by backing Trudeau. All we say all day is "The SK NDP is not affiliated with the federal party, we stand for working Canadians, vote Moe out"

    If you think $500 for low income and seniors is anything other than a bone thrown to pacify the poor then Singh has pulled the wool over your eyes.

    The requirement for "no access to insurance" absolutely torpedoes the entire thing. Private insurers need to fall, universal coverage is the only way. Dental is the Canadian equivalent to the entire USA health insurance racket.

    Congrats on living in the one green riding, which does give you some power over your single seat party... Which ultimately holds no power at all in our broken system.

    I'm sorry to say I voted Trudeau on the promise of electoral reform, which he then told us we didn't want. I'm in a safe blue riding which means my vote is pointless, so I'm going full protest vote next time for the PPC 🤣 Max is laughable, especially his obsession with dairy supply management, but enough votes for "burn it down" will hopefully send a message.

  • To all you outside of the US...
  • Trudeau over Biden?

    Trudeau is importing the world's problems in the name of propping up the real estate investor class (of which he is a member) and pumping up fake GDP numbers. GDP per capita is plummeting in Canada with excess immigration.

    Singh is in his pocket, a waste of a vote. I was an NDP voter all my life, I'm done.

    Polliviere is an absolute idiot who will ride a wave of hatred for Trudeau into office.

    Voters in Canada have no power and no representation as all votes are whipped. Your MP is a seat filler. We have no ballot initiatives or direct democracy options that America has, and reform will never come.

    Biden listens to people who know what they're doing and stands out of the way... Passed legislation supporting workers and unions, energy infrastructure etc. meaning he's both more left than Singh and more business-friendly than PP

  • History repeats itself.
  • The volume could definitely be higher now, since the box sides are so bloody high that you can't actually put anything in the truck without a ladder.

    As a farmer and actual truck user everyone I know has a beat up farm truck from the 80s for actual truck use, modern truck is just a big car for comfortable city trips

  • To all you outside of the US...
  • America needs some perspective. You complain that your only choices are a doddering fool or a toxic narcissist who wants to actively destroy the nation.

    Here in Canada we look at our options and think "America is so much better, I wish we had an option to vote for a doddering fool. All we have are narcissists"

    No joke I wish we had a leader as good as Biden. The bar is so low that the devil is doing the limbo with it down in Hell.

  • Pressure Builds to Ban ‘Blatantly False’ Ads | The Tyee
  • Coal plants can be fairly easily repowered to natural gas, which decreases CO2 emissions but more significantly drops local particulate emissions nearly to zero. China's air quality is famously poor so this would be a smart move.

    China still needs baseload generation and converting coal to NG is far cheaper than nuclear or advanced stack scrubbers.

  • Apple announced RCS with a whimper when it should have been a bang
  • It's complicated. The main issue is, I live on a remote farm without cell coverage, except in the tiny zone under my 50' tower with booster.

    However I now have Starlink, and wired and wireless APs covering a large area with high speed, low latency data.

    So, port my number to VoIP.ms, which supports SMS, and make all my calls/texts through Wifi using SIP. On the road, use a basic cell plan with unlimited slow data that is still fast enough for voice. Tested, working, so far fairly simple.

    Now the issues. RCS won't work with my now VoIP provisioned number, because there's no SIM for it. The SIM in the phone has a different number, that of the new plan which will be unreachable at the farm by voice/SMS just like the old number used to be.

    This would all be a non-issue if my provider supported VoWifi on anything other than iPhones, but sadly this is not an option. So I've got service everywhere now, but am stuck with voice and SMS, no RCS or MMS.

  • Apple announced RCS with a whimper when it should have been a bang
  • Even worse, I'm migrating to an all-Voip solution because my carrier refuses to support VoWifi/VoLTE and it solves my coverage issues.

    The only disadvantage is I'm forced to fall back all the way to SMS. No MMS even, and what about RCS, the new texting system that works through your data connection well there's no support for that aside from using Google Messages and the SIM that's in the phone!

    Worst "open standard" ever

  • The AI bill that has Big Tech panicked
  • Right, we need to come up with better terms for talking about "AI". Personally at the moment I'm considering any transformer-type ML system to be part of the category, as you stated none of them are any more "intelligent" than any others. They're all just a big stack of tensor operations. So if one is AI, they all are.

    Remember long ago when "fuzzy logic" was all the hype and considered to be AI? Just a very early form of classifier network but everyone was super excited at the time.

  • The AI bill that has Big Tech panicked
  • I'm just stating that "AI" is a broad field. These lightweight and useful transformer models are a direct product of other AI research.

    I know what you mean, but simply stating "Don't use AI" isn't really valid anymore as soon these ML models will be a common component. There are even libraries and hardware acceleration support for tensor operations on the ESP32-S3.

  • The AI bill that has Big Tech panicked
  • It's possible for local AI models to be very economical on energy, if used for the right tasks.

    For example I'm running RapidOCR which uses a modern transformer architecture, and absolutely blows away traditional OCR at capturing data from character displays.

    Doesn't even need a GPU and returns results in under a second on a modern CPU. No preprocessing needed, just feed it an image. This little multimodal transformer is just as much "AI" as bloated general purpose GPTs, but it's cheap, fast and useful.

  • CDC warns of disruptions to ADHD meds after $100M fraud arrest
  • As a farmer, especially during something like seeding or harvest where focus and not making mistakes are critical.

    Fortunately I got my doc to prescribe me XR dexadrine + IR to use as a top up/enhancer. I rarely take the IR or just add a half pill on long days, but always fill the prescription as if I take it every day, giving me a large supply to ride through shortages.

  • We paint the sky in our colors 🇺🇦 - Toro
  • Liftoff is fun, I've always recommended FPVFreerider for serious training, it's more stripped down and focuses on absolute core flight functionality. Less tuning, more flying.

    The graphics are basic but that means you'll never drop a frame even on a potato at 165Hz, the flight controls are insanely tight. Likewise this was the software I paired my radio with and learned to fly.

    It's also only a couple bucks and there's a freeware/demo version floating around out there too.

  • The debate gets interesting sometimes
  • Why should he "care about Muslims" any more than any other group? Would your opinion be the same that he should care about Christians? Jews? Buddhists?

    The president of the USA is supposed to care about Americans.

    Also Biden is not even slightly anti-abortion, wtf. Biden is a Catholic and would not personally choose to abort a child of his own, but as the President he supports the right to choose in service to the office and not to his personal beliefs.

    This is what it means to be President, to do what is right for the people even if it goes against your own opinions. Did Trump really lower our expectations that badly?

  • Justice Alito Caught on Tape Discussing How Battle for America 'Can't Be Compromised'
  • There are many people where there is no Canadian identity

    There isn't really a Canadian identity left at this point. I live in a tiny rural community where we consider ourselves to be keeping the torch in a way... We don't lock our doors, we share and help each other, call each other on the phone just to chat, we sit around and drink too much coffee or beer and wrench on old junk. Drive around in winter plowing driveways and pulling cars out of the ditch. If a neighbour needs a tool it's just "let yourself into the shop and it's in the red toolbox, bring it back when you're done"

    The cities though? I have friends there and that community attitude is long dead. Any available resources are exploited and nothing given in return, everyone is poor and desperate and barely making rent. Our country is very sick.

  • Fetterman has to be one of the biggest disappointments for the left in recent memory
  • Insert "leftists are not liberals" meme

    Fetterman is truly for the left, he stands for the working class against the wealthy.

    Everything else is a distraction, and he realizes this fact. We need more lawmakers like him, not noisemakers like AOC going off about the unimportant issue of the week.

    Seize back control our society from the rich and everything else will follow.

  • Employees Who Stay In Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less
  • Correct, but often the actions of CEOs are performative and don't actually support the goal of bringing money in. They like to put on a show of being ruthless, and often behave more psychopathic than an "optimal" business AI would.

    For example, it's been proven that employee retention is one of the #1 ways to boost productivity. Costco is one of the few companies with a CEO which truly believes in this and despite paying higher wages than any other grocer they are one of the top performers in my investment portfolio.

    Remote work? Totally profitable and AI would maximize it instead of forcing workers back to the office to "put them in their place"

    4-day week? Also proven to be a net gain as workers are rested and motivated.

    A "cold and calculating" AI would be far more likely to make reforms that benefit both the company and the employees, as it isn't motivated by power structures or the need to look ruthless. Cutting pay is a losing move as it loses talent more than it saves money, and deep learning algorithms would realize this easily.

    Also the "person who owns the AI" would actually be the shareholders, who are often ordinary investors. Rather than funneling money to bloated C-suites, the money would be more likely to circulate in the economy through dividends.

  • Unwanted dynamic range compression/ducking of audio on Android

    I've talked trash about Bluetooth for years (and rightfully so, often) but I finally did some detailed testing and determined that it appears to be my Android phone causing this particular effect. Android 10, Sonim XP8.

    The best track I found to replicate the effect was Griz - Wicked due to the massive bass hits that come in around 1:00 really exaggerating it.

    When the bass hits on Android, some sort of compressor kicks in and vocals and everything else get crushed FLAT, resulting in an awful effect where the volume fluctuates, the bass is weak, everything is garbage. This has resulted in crap audio in my vehicles for a couple years now unless I'm listening to the FM radio.

    I paired several BT devices that I had blamed for the effect to my PC, and they sound fine playing this track. Both PC and Android are using the same codec, "High Fidelity" A2DP with SBC.

    It doesn't matter which player I use on the phone, Ultrasonic and BubbleUPNP playing local copies or Youtube Music Vanced streaming, the compression is present on all of them.

    Anyone know what's going on here or want to try to replicate it?

    10
    Looking for resources to rebuild my music collection

    In the pre-streaming days I used to have a large collection of ripped and downloaded music. However as my taste in music is extremely wide and it became easier and more fun to use hacked streaming services (i.e. Youtube Music Vanced) to play music especially on the go, I decided to let my music collection go years ago. Plus... it was a big mess due to undiagnosed ADHD so let's be honest it wasn't a huge loss.

    Now with the streaming ecosystem degrading and me now capable of keeping my things in order, I find myself wanting to start rebuilding a local music collection for the coming post-streaming era.

    Wondering if there are any places I could find huge collection torrents that could be pared down to what I want, rather than spending my life downloading single albums or discographies? I'm ideally talking torrents that would be like 20GB of funk, but not just a shitload of tracks in a root directory with no tagging.

    One of my favourite things about streaming services is getting to hear tracks or artists I haven't even thought of in ages, and it's hard to build a collection when you can't think of exactly what to put in it!

    15
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)EV
    evranch @lemmy.ca
    Posts 2
    Comments 495