ByteSorcerer

joined 2 years ago
[–] ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It was successfull for a while up to 10 years or so ago, when it was the main free option for video calling. But nowadays there are plenty of alternatives, pretty much all of which do a better job than Skype ever did.

Skype has now been pretty much obsolete for years so I don't think it's too bad that it's ending.

The Google approach would have been to already have killed it in 2004 before it ever even had a chance to be successful.

[–] ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Most electric cars are pretty much computers on wheels, and voltages, currents and temperature are constantly monitored. It totally should be possible to log battery health and diagnostic information and generate a battery health report for when the vehicle is sold. But standards would need to be put in place for that to force manufacturers to implement it and to make sure the results are actually meaningful.

Unfortunately Tesla's specifically really don't feel like they're designed to last when looking at their materials choices and build quality (either that or my manager just bought a particularly bad sample, I have to admit it's the only Tesla I ever been inside of) so I don't think having a good reseller experience or longevity is really a part of their business model.

[–] ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org 3 points 6 days ago

Where I live tips are optional and given as a thanks for good service, and often calculated by rounding up the bill to a whole number instead of calculating a percentage.

Waiters still make a liveable wage without them here, though it can still happen that on a good night they get more from tips than from their wage.

I have a family member who works as a waiter, and there they collect the tips together and share them equally amongst the staff working in the restaurant at the end of the shift. So in this restaurant, the cooks do benefit from it as well. Though there is no legal framework for this so not even restaurant does this.

[–] ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org 8 points 6 days ago (8 children)

The battery is still a big problem when selling on the used market because there's not really a way to see how much it has been abused, and it's also not really feasible to replace. If the previous owner abused their battery by constantly fast charging, and always charging it to 100% and driving till the battery is completely empty, then the battery can decrease much faster.

My manager has recently bought a used Tesla model 3, and the battery had been abused so much that he only has about 150km of actual range on a full battery. With the advertised range being close to 500km and the car being only 5 years old that seems to be a lot more than 2% per year. Even if you assume that the effective range when new was only half of the advertised range, then that battery has lost nearly 40% of its capacity in 5 years.

[–] ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago

The main reasons why it's Doom specifically are also because:

  • The game is open-source: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr This makes it much more doable to port it to other platforms (and to strip out anything not absolutely required to get the first level to run when you run into technological limitations) than when you have to rely on unofficial modding tools.

  • It's nearly 30 years old and designed for computers with only a few megabytes of memory and for processors of well under 100MHz, which are specs which the majority of modern systems have, even embedded systems. It also renders fully on the CPU and doesn't require specific hardware like a GPU or a specific graphics chip.

  • Being a first person shooter with 3D-ish visuals it looks a lot more impressive than if you show off a simple game like Pong orTetris or something like that. It has the right balance between performance requirements and impressiveness, and it's also a game that was very popular in its time and it's instantly recognisable to a lot of people.

[–] ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

I use Jerboa. It was unstable at first, but it seems to work great since Beehaw got updated to the newer version of Lemmy.

[–] ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It'll include sources if the sentence structure suggests they should be there, but they'll also just be built by probabilistic insertion of words.

I've seen attempts of people trying to train a LLM on information with sources. The end result was a model that would still hallucinate false information, and follow it up with a convincing looking source that doesn't actually exist or a link that just leads to a 404 page. The way current LLMs work makes it impossible for them to mention accurate sources by default as they don't remember full sentences or even any actual information, but just pick up some underlying patterns.

Currently the best you can do is letting a LLM come up with search engine queries to find relevant and up to date information for a certain question, and then making it formulate an answer based on what it found and including links to the page(s) it used. The main problem here is that LLMs are not great yet at verifying if a source is accurate, and most people will just take anything that mentions a source as a hard fact without even looking at what the source is.

[–] ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

There are several those keys can be obtained, and most of them don't involve fraud:

  • Purchasing keys in a region where they're cheaper, and reselling them in regions where the game is more expensive

  • Purchasing keys during a sale, and reselling them after the sale

  • Claiming keys from giveaways and selling those when the giveaway is over

  • Buying a bundle (such as Humble Bundle) and selling the keys you aren't interested in or you already have

  • Buying games with stolen credit card and reselling those keys

Only the last one is illegal and costs the developers money. Digital storefronts have made it harder to obtain raw, transferrable keys and have introduced region locks to try to combat those top 3 methods, but they all were very common in the past.

Key resellers like G2A are pretty much just an eBay for keys. It's not an illegal organisation, they just provide platforms on which people can sell their game keys, but they don't know (and probably don't care) how those keys are actually obtained. The majority of keys on those platforms are actually legit (iirc by far the biggest category is games purchased out of region).

HOWEVER,

The legally obtained keys sold on the platform are all obtained in such a way that the developers get little to no money from it, so chargeback fees from a few fraudulent purchases easily outweighs the small amount of money they get from the legit keys there. So even though the majority of keys sold on such platforms are not illegal, the few illegal keys that do exist are enough to make the developers still lose money on average with keys sold there.

[–] ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago

That's pretty much how it used to work.

The main reasons why it changed are:

  • Space, as a connector is slightly bigger than a soldered connection, and the battery itself has to be slightly bigger and stronger too to be safe to transport and handle without being protected by the phone's case.

  • Water resistance; it's far easier to make a phone's case waterproof by just glueing the whole thing shut than having to use seals and gaskets and such to make it possible to open and close it at will.

[–] ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

An old forum I used to frequent had a downvote system that required you to specify a reason for why you felt that post or comment required a downvote. That reason (and the account that submitted it) was visible to the person whose post got downvoted and to the moderators, but to no one else.

It still worked well for filtering out troll posts and spam, and legit posts were almost never downvoted as you couldn't do so fully anonymously and moderators could take action when you abused the system.

I could see this becoming highly impractical when communities become as huge as on Reddit though, but for a smaller forum that one had a few hundred active users it worked really well.

[–] ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago

I'd say just try it and see what you prefer. The app also has some occasional weirdness as it's still an alpha version, but it usually works well.

I just prefer having it in an app, and the app is tiny anyway (about 20MB on my phone).

[–] ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org 11 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I'm trying to switch from Rif to Jerboa too. Setting up an account and the front page was a bit unintuitive, but once that was done the app works very well and feels at least somewhat similar to Rif.

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