[-] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 18 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Who doesn’t want to promote and advertise how profitable they are to potential shareholders just before an IPO.

They might want to, but it's illegal.

The "quiet period" is a reference to an SEC law that forces any company to be radio silent for a strict 40 day period during the IPO process. Reddit is in that period now and therefore they cannot say a word.

JPMorgan was fined almost a billion dollars for answering questions on a phone call during their quiet period.

[-] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 45 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The headline misses the real controversy - they tried to cover up the incident and only reported what actually happened after the government came back and asked questions, because the reports from first responders didn't line up with what Cruise themselves had reported.

There are also rumors of internal people who felt the cars weren't safe, with a list of scenarios they didn't handle acceptably. The cars really should have had human safety drivers ready to override the car while fixing those issues.

[-] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 16 points 10 months ago

"how do I build a bomb” or “how do I make napalm"

... or you could just look them up on wikipedia.

[-] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 24 points 11 months ago

The title should be "the person who reported a vulnerability denies it's existence."

[-] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 45 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I could live with an ad before every video

I can't live with that. Often I don't even know if I actually want to watch the video or not, and if I have to sit through three minutes of ads, only to close the video five seconds after the ad because it's not what I expected... yuck. Preroll ads are often a deal breaker for me unless it's content that I'm very familiar with.

Mid-roll ads I'm OK with - by then I've already decided the content is worth watching.

I don't think I'm alone and YouTube seems to be very aware of this issue. They are selective about which videos have a pre-roll ad.

[-] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

honestly, “efficient” can imply several things, and they don’t seem to clarify what (at least from my first pass of this doc).

How would you like to define it?

How about this for an analogy - which of these two is more efficient:

  1. Plant some wheat in your back yard, buy fertilised eggs to hatch into chickens, plant tomatoes and basil, plant an olive to grow a tree, and eventually, years down the track, you can make yourself a bowl of pasta.

  2. Notice your next door neighbour already cooked some pasta and made more than they can eat. Ask politely and they'll just give you a serving.

Obviously - the second option is more efficient, and that's effectively what a heat pump does. They don't heat up your home, they just take a bit of heat from the air outside and move (pump) it into your home. It's far far more efficient than creating new heat from scratch with a gas system.

Exactly how much more efficient will depend on the outdoor and indoor air temperature, and on the brand/model of heat pump you buy, and other factors (such as the length of the pipe between the outdoor unit and the indoor unit). You really should ask for specific advice on your home - but in general, a heat pump is extremely efficient.

Where I am, electricity is pretty cheap, but natural gas is tremendously cheaper per jule… so we can actually pay less by using the “inefficient” fuel for our home.

Have you actually looked into it, or are you just making assumptions?

I can tell you that my heat pump, in my house (yours will be different), in my climate, adds about $5 per week to my electricity bill. Is your gas bill less than $5 per week?

Or at least - that's how much it cost before I had solar panels. Now that I have solar... it uses about 20% of the power typically produced by the solar panels on my roof leaving plenty of excess power that we sell to the grid for about the same amount of money as what we spend buying power overnight. Since we installed solar our entire electricity bill is about $0 (and we use power for a bunch of other stuff, including to cook breakfast and dinner when the sun typically isn't shining*). We don't have a large solar system either - in fact, installing solar cost less than installing heat pumps.

(* our solar system comes with instruments and software to measure our consumption - and I can tell you that heating up a family meal with an electric cooktop uses more electricity than heating an entire house with heat pump... because the cooktop is creating heat, and the heat pump is simply moving heat)

[-] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

We should ban police cars too - because allegedly an empty police car was also blocking the ambulance.

The AV spokesperson said they reviewed the footage and found there was room to pass their vehicle safely and another ambulance and other cars did so.

[-] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sure, it's all about capitalism. Nothing good like this could ever come from advances in technology:

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/08/425986/how-artificial-intelligence-gave-paralyzed-woman-her-voice-back

ML is a tool and like most tools it has broad use cases. Some of them are very, very, good.

[-] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 17 points 1 year ago

I'd bet sites blocking ChatGPT will regret it when (not if) Bing starts using it for search engine relevance.

[-] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Those batteries in your photo are NiMH batteries... which discharge on their own at a fairly rapid rate even if you're not using them at all. They're also pretty big and heavy for the amount of power they provide (which, due to the self-discharge issue, is effectively a lot lower than the official number on the battery).

I strongly recommend investing in devices that use 18650 batteries. They're about the same size/weight as a AA, and they last much longer (both in terms of from full to flat and also the number of years (decades?) of use you'll get from the battery.

A lot of "proprietary" batteries are in fact a bunch of 18650 cells wired together.

It's worth investing in good ones - the quality varies significantly from brand to the next. With a good 18650 cell, you won't be replacing it when the battery expires, you'll be transferring it to a new gadget when the gadget is broken or so old that you decided to buy a new/better model.

[-] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Um, isn't everything everyone does on the fediverse public? I assume it's all being tracked already. By search engines as a bare minimum, but anyone else (including Meta) who does any kind of research/etc. And they don't need to be federated to do it, they can just crawl the network with HTTP.

As for "forcing networks to play by their rules" I don't see that happening, and Google hasn't done it with email. Gmail doesn't have enough marketshare for that. At best they've forced people to make sure they have good outbound spam filtering. That's not just google, every email provider (including small on premise office mail servers) has that policy.

I'm not saying we should federate them (personally I'm undecided) but your explanation hasn't convinced me.

[-] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 21 points 1 year ago

Reddit is one of the most valuable websites on the entire internet. It's being miss-managed, and therefore it either needs new management or it needs to be replaced by something else.

The reddit community has tried to get new management put in place and seems to be failing, so plan B is to replace Reddit with something else.

I don't think just "getting rid" of reddit is an option at all. It needs to be replaced with something better. And that something is not Medium.

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abhibeckert

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