I think the real question is more along the lines of “is western culture prodominantly evil”

Over surveillance? Western culture?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_China

Mass surveillance in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the network of monitoring systems used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and government to monitor its citizens. China maintains the largest and most sophisticated mass surveillance system in the world.[2][3] Surveillance is primarily conducted through government entities, although corporate surveillance in connection with the CCP and Chinese government is also prevalent. China monitors its citizens through Internet surveillance, camera surveillance, and through other digital technologies.[4][5] As of 2023, the country had over 700 million surveillance cameras. The surveillance has become increasingly widespread and grown in sophistication under Xi Jinping’s administration.[6][7][8][9] In the 2020s, China started integrating artificial intelligence into its surveillance systems.

every IP address

every IPv4 address

That’s true, and I remember that being a problem in a number of accidents for older drivers, but it sounds like this guy was just trying to drive quickly.

https://www.teslarati.com/ntsb-findings-on-fatal-tesla-crash-tell-a-very-different-story/

The driver, 44-year-old Michael Butler…

Not elderly.

Butler told authorities he had passed out at the wheel. But security camera footage obtained by the NTSB told a different story, and showed the car accelerating through an intersection before leaving the road entirely. Police also found that Butler’s phone had Google searches including the terms “Tesla FSD not aggressive enough 2026” and “Tesla FSD too timid,” raising serious questions about how he was using the system before the crash. Butler has since been charged with manslaughter. The victim’s family has filed a lawsuit against both Butler and Tesla, alleging negligence.

AI seems mental, though, unless Python is just some glue for calling functions or libraries that are implemented in lower-level languages, which is definitely also a thing.

Most of the work is done by parallel compute hardware on most systems, not the CPU running Python.

Rule #2.

Rule #3.

Rule #7.

Rule #8.

Like, he literally managed to violate half of the community rules in one post.

My Linux distro already comes with a PDF merger. Let’s get some PDF files to merge.

$ for i in $(seq 1 5); do echo $i >$i.txt; pandoc -o $i.pdf $i.txt; done

Now I’ve got five PDF files to merge.

$ pdfunite *.pdf merged.pdf

And done.

True, though they did get into the NASDAQ-100 early and the Russell indices early.

Hypothetically, it might be possible, but there aren’t practical gains to be had from it. Easier to fabricate a new chip.

The optimal design is unlikely to be a straightforward modification of an older chip.

Even if it were, modification would add more variables, where we’re constrained by yields today.

And our processes today aren’t designed for it.

EDIT: That being said, you might be able to repurpose an older chip in a piece of electronics that uses multiple chips in a situation where you’re unable to get the older chip for some reason. I can’t think of many scenarios where that’d be economical, but hobbyists have certainly reused components from older electronic devices.

Could be that Windows is more-aggressively kicking the hardware into low-power mode or that the graphical environment is using the hardware to do more desktop rendering stuff.

If you have a known good (local) and known bad (remote), the first thing I’d probably do is run diff on the local and remote logs. Use a regex or something to strip timestamps or similar that will always differ.

If your tests take 20–30 minutes to run, I think that I’d look into having a way to run a subset of the tests, so you can just run the minimal amount to do the failing one.

If you have a lot of environment problems, I think I’d focus on getting an automated build of the environment to a standard state. If that takes too long, setting up caching or whatever of downloaded packages.

A comparison of messaging systems that doesn’t list XMPP?

Right there with you. The world I grew up in from BBS’s to dial up internet to gaming with friends ( that took serious work to run and connect over phone lines) to innovation after innovation that was for pure excitement and exploration and solving problems and making things easier and simpler is gone.

https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/

The Telnet BBS Guide focuses Bulletin Board Systems – the original Social Network, serving the BBS community for over 28 years! We list both Dial-Up and Telnet accessible Bulletin Board Systems all over the world. We currently list 1010 BBS and related systems with brief and detailed descriptions and a downloadable text-version listing suitable for listing on your BBS or for as a download for others to view and use.

I personally prefer Markdown to BBCode and not having to have a ton of different different accounts, but if you want phpBB forums, they are out there. Search a Web search engine for a string that exists on the website that the forum software displays by default. “Powered by vBulletin”, “Powered by phpBB”, etc.

searches

https://www.findaforum.net/Home/TopForums/

And I still use social media the way many people originally imagined it: as a way to stay connected. My feeds have always been a mix of far-flung relatives, old friends, and high school band chums (because, let’s be honest, band buddies are the best buddies). Most days, I carve out a little time after work to catch up with the people who matter.

The last thing I’d want is for doing so to be…just more work. And yet, more than half of respondents agreed with the statement “Maintaining an online presence feels like work,” with about a third of those checking the “strongly agree” box. Only 16% disagreed, with the rest remaining neutral.

A full 60% of Gen Z respondents feel the pain of maintaining a social presence. Perhaps they have a niggling hope that they might still be discovered as an influencer?

I don’t really care about the following-people form of social media, the Twitter family. I’m more interested in the forum sort, the Reddit family. There, I don’t need to singlehandedly maintain a flow of content, because people aren’t coming to see @tal@lemmy.today, but because they’re coming to see what’s going on in some community that I only incidentally participate in.

I mean, it’s still going to have the pants beaten off it by WebM or AVIF for anything originating from a video camera.

GIF was just never intended to be a video format. I have a hard time thinking of something where it’s really competitive. Maybe if you had a recorded lossless video of a small-palette video game, like, NES era or earlier, then GIF might be a solid choice. I’d still think that APNG or MNG would probably outperform it.

GIF animations really only got a boost because there was a period of time when it was all that a decent variety of Web browsers could display.

EDIT: Also, if one is using GIF…I dunno if ffmpeg does this by default, but most video formats have I-frames and then frames that depend on those. When seeking, a player will seek to the nearest prior I-frame and then decode from there.

I don’t believe that GIF 89a has a formal concept of I-frames, because the format was never intended for real video. But it is possible to create frames in a GIF 89a animation with transparent areas that don’t differ from the prior frame, and this achieves some of the efficiency benefits that a video format would get. I know that there have been GIF 89a conpressors that will do this. The downside is that it kills seekability, since after a seek in a player that just starts drawing from the current frame, you’ll see only some of an image until the next time that a pixel in a frame is non-transparent and gets redrawn. There may not be any frames wirhout transparent areas nearby, and the player has no way to know where to look for one. But for applications where you don’t care about seekability, that may help mitigate some of GIF’s limitations for animations.

In all honesty, though, the right answer for video is almost always “use a newer format than GIF”.

But typing stuff like: /*********************************************************/ is pretty common for me and would be annoying without auto-repeat of the respective character…

If you’re coding, your code editor may have some way to input that.

Some people who frequently input something like that use a snippet system.

In emacs, hitting most keys (like “*”) runs self-insert-command. That takes a numeric parameter, so one can just do something like / M-5 M-6 * / (slash, hold Alt, type 56, hit asterisk, slash) to get a slash followed by 56 asterisks followed by a slash.

I’m not really a serious vim person, but I’m sure that vim has similar functionality.

searches

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5054128/repeating-characters-in-vim-insert-mode

Looks like, in insert mode, / Control-o 56 a * Esc a /. Probably not using correct vim terminology for the keystrokes, but you get my drift.

On US English keyboards, there isn’t a universal, standard way to do it at the keyboard level.

I use Linux, and bind my Menu key on my keyboard to Compose. With Compose, I can tap “Compose-backtick-e” and get “è”.

Emacs has its own input methods, as do other environments.

I was looking for small systems a while back, and the situation is surprisingly disappointing there. It should be technically possible to get portable and window heat/AC units (not split-mini, as one needs a duct for ventilation) that can maintain CO₂ and humidity levels. For putting a floor on humidity, one would need a water intake, and for doing energy-efficient ventilation, one would want a counterflow heat exchanger. As far as I can tell, small all-in-one systems like this just don’t exist.

You can get ERV or HRV ventilators with flex duct attachments, which do the heat exchange bit. They don’t cost that much, though given that it’s basically two fans and a heat exchanger, I was still kinda surprised how expensive they are. I mean, an air conditioner is a lot more complicated. I suppose that there just isn’t enough demand to produce the kind of sales volume required.

looks for an example

https://www.amazon.com/Aprilaire-V22BEC-Recovery-Ventilator-Easy-Install/dp/B0CXQ8RPTR

You could drive one of those off an indoors CO₂ sensor and that’d give energy-efficient ventilation with CO₂ control.

Yeah, I had a year of school in a very elderly school building with limited ventilation. When it was raining and all the windows were shut, I remember it being really hard to stay awake and focused. Didn’t learn until many years later to recognize that and that those are the symptoms of excessively high carbon dioxide levels (at the time, I thought maybe it was “low oxygen”, that everyone’s breathing had used up the oxygen, since I knew that fresh air would wake me up).

I’ve been in some office buildings with poor ventilation that do the same thing, though not as severely as that school.

IIRC, lime or something like that can be used as a carbon scrubber, but it’s not something that you’d want to do constantly and everywhere. Looked this up some time back.

searches

Soda lime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_lime

Soda lime is a mixture of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) and calcium oxide (CaO). It is used in granular form within recirculating breathing environments like general anesthesia and its breathing circuit, submarines, rebreathers, and hyperbaric chambers and underwater habitats. Its purpose is to eliminate carbon dioxide (CO2) from breathing gases, preventing carbon dioxide retention and, eventually, carbon dioxide poisoning.[1][2]

Probably, if you want to regulate CO₂ levels in HVAC systems, best to ventilate to the outside and then run the exchanged air through a counterflow heat exchanger to preserve indoor temperature as much as possible.