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semanticist

2,533 karma · joined December 2, 2009

Om nom nom, delicious knowledge.

Reach me at john@semantici.st

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/semanticist; my proof: https://keybase.io/semanticist/sigs/wwKE3m8b4N40eRJL5LNlmDTDF_2HXIS3bEpXKNwx3Pg ]

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semanticist··on eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible
GameStop's idea behind using their physical locations isn't for ease of shipping so much as ease of verification. People buying brand-name stuff off eBay (and Vinted, etc) pay for verification services to make sure that it's real. The idea - which is the only good/sane part of this entire takeover proposal - is to have retail locations that do the verification in person instead of shipping items to a central location for verification on sale.

But if eBay thought that would bring in more sales, I doubt it would be hard to find empty retail outlets in every city/town in the US and Europe since high street retail has been on a death spiral for years.

You can already use lockers for delivery/drop off with eBay through their courier company partners, at least in the UK.

semanticist··on Man finds $1M worth of Yu-Gi-Oh cards in a dumpster
Not even ill gotten, the guy had legitimately pre-ordered them and was sent them early. They turned up at his door and threatened him and his wife, awful stuff.
semanticist··on Standalone Meshtastic Command Center – One HTML File Offline
There’s no reason to think this works fine given the readme mentions the author is waiting on their first meshtastic device to test against and the install instructions include ‘insert download link here’.

It’s a shame this is just slop, an approach like this could be interesting, using web APIs instead of native apps… but iOS Safari doesn’t support Web Bluetooth so it’s not going to work on iPhones at all which is a big unmentioned limitation.

Probably because it’s untested AI slop.

semanticist··on BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive
There's a difference between BMW ignoring their warranty and who gets found liable during the wrongful death lawsuit after the mechanic gets electrocuted due to poor/unsafe EV design.

I'm sure BMW would love to not be liable in those cases if they could just decide not to be liable, but inspections and fuses presumably turn out to be cheaper than the settlements they'd otherwise be paying.

semanticist··on Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
"Prior to the most recent update, some Knives, like a Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife, could fetch around $20,000 on third-party storefronts like CSFloat."

They're mentioned right there in the article this is nominally meant to be a discussion thread about.

semanticist··on That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
The left accuse the BBC of bias because, eg, the new Green Party leader has not been on any relevant BBC politics programs while Farage and other right wing politicians are regular fixtures.

The right accuse the BBC of bias because they fact-check them when they lie.

These things are not equivalent.

The BBC has lost a lot of credibility over the last decade or so. I can completely understand why they rolled over (often pre-emptively) to placate a Tory government that talked a lot about defunding them, but ultimately it has not served them well.

The newspaper situation in the UK is diabolical for sure.

semanticist··on Why Koreans ask what year you were born
With 'ned' in the username I might've thought Glaswegian. :D
semanticist··on How can traditional British TV survive the US streaming giants
Red Dwarf used practical effects in the era when VideoToasters were a thing. For some reason the BBC replaced the lovely miniature shots of space ships with crap CG in a mid-2000s remaster.
semanticist··on Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral
The OP isn't talking about iPhone devs, they're talking about a decade before that when Apple was called 'Apple Computer' and had mad a series of bad business choices (confusing product line up, allowing other companies to make Mac clones, etc).

Developers had started to abandon the Mac OS platform - or at least start making Windows versions of previously Mac-only software - and getting developer confidence back was one of the key things that kept the company alive to grow into the consumer electronics manufacturer that it is today.

semanticist··on Flame – BBS and MUD
If you're not familiar with MUDs than perhaps a system based on "being a MUD" just isn't aimed at you?
semanticist··on Buy once, use forever A directory of one-time purchase software. Add yours
Literally the first piece of software I looked at there does not have any option I could find for paying once, just one and three year subscription plans. (NanoCAD.)

So it looks like they'll list anyone who pays the fee, making the whole exercise a waste of time.

semanticist··on “The Traitors”, a reality TV show, offers a useful economics lesson
There's no ad breaks on the BBC.
semanticist··on Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities
Oh, that's a pity. I'm pretty bad at keeping up to date on MacOS releases, but I should probably start figuring out `wdutil` so that my muscle memory is adapted before I've got no choice!
semanticist··on Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities
Want to scan the local wifi networks from the command line, and get useful information like signal strength?

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport -s

I set a shell alias so I can just do `airport -s`. I've no idea why this is hidden away inside some framework and not in a directory which is in the normal path, but there you go.

semanticist··on New Mac Mini with M4
Apple offering expensive upgrades for storage and memory pre-dates the existence of iCloud storage by decades. It was entirely standard before MobileMe, or Apple offering any kind of "cloud" services.

Apple just charge a lot of money for upgrades, even did when it was trivial to do them yourself, and they're not going to change once they made it impossible to do any kind of internal upgrade.

semanticist··on OpenAI completes deal that values company at $157B
That doesn't sounds like brilliant margins, to be honest. You've left out the entire "running a business" costs, plus the model training costs. They need to pay their staff, offices, and especially lawyers (for all the lawsuits over the scraped content used to train the models).

It's not unusual for a startup to not be profitable, and they're obviously not as the company doesn't make a profit, but I'm not sure why isolating one aspect of their business and declaring it profitable would justify the idea that this company is inevitably a good investment "even if the company went defunct tomorrow".

Perhaps you meant "win" in the sense of "being influential" or something, but I'm pretty sure the people who invested billions of dollars use definitions that involve more concrete returns on their investment.

semanticist··on OpenAI completes deal that values company at $157B
I don't think it really matters how much people love their product if every person using it costs them money. I'm sure people would love a company that sold US$10 bills for 25c, but it's not exactly a sustainable venture.

Will people love ChatGPT et al just as much if OpenAI have to charge what it costs them to buy and run all the GPUs? Maybe, but it's absolutely not certain.

If they "went defunct" tomorrow then the people who just invested US$6bn and lost every penny probably would not agree with your assessment that it "ended well".

semanticist··on BorgBackup 2.0 supports Rclone – over 70 cloud providers in addition to SSH
Backup testing can be automated. I don't do this for my personal stuff, but at work there's a box that does a restore of our primary DB from backups, loads it into MySQL, and runs some smoke tests to make sure it looks roughly right. A quick script and a cronjob, and backups get tested every night.

I'm sure there's more thorough ways to do this kind of testing, but whatever level of confirmation you need automating it should be viable and then you only have to pay attention if/when something breaks.

semanticist··on Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money
This is called a 'cut-and-shut' and is considered to be extremely dangerous. There's no way you'd get insurance for one if you disclosed its origins, which he probably wasn't when he was selling them on.

In the UK at least, passing one of these off as a standard repair is illegal (it's a 'radically altered vehicle' and would need to be registered as such with a special licence plate).

semanticist··on Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
Even 'salaried' in the UK means a contract that has a specified number of hours in it. In theory if you work more than that you should be getting either overtime or time in lieu, but in practice that might not always happen depending on your role in the company and the type of company.

I don't get overtime, but I do get time in lieu - I did about four hours extra the week before last doing set up for one of our busiest days of the year, and I'm taking Thursday afternoon off to make it up.

Things like 60 hour work weeks also aren't even legal without signing away your EU Working Time Directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003) rights (which isn't even an option in every EU country). I don't _think_ the post-brexit legislation did away with that, but it wouldn't surprise me.

semanticist··on Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards Statement – 22 July, 2024
The statement doesn't say it's the Best Novel. Maybe there's someone who would happily drop a ton of money to be a Hugo-award-winning Professional Artist?

Or maybe Paramount are desperate to beat Doctor Who in Dramatic Presentation, Short Form?

semanticist··on Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards Statement – 22 July, 2024
Volunteering, not working. Few, if any, people involved in running a WorldCon are getting paid for it.
semanticist··on EU Council has withdrawn the vote on Chat Control
They did in the '80s, after a run longer than the current revival. Sometimes things come in and out of fashion.
semanticist··on Sorry, wrong number
If the UK road system interests you at all in any way (if it doesn't, that's probably reasonable), I highly recommend Auto Shenanigans' 'Secrets of the Motorways' series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7f_jBGPY7FtXQuaroTz-...

He visited and documented anything 'interesting' about (and sometimes just nearby) every motorway in the UK, in a pleasingly entertaining style. He's also got series about all the service stations, some abandoned roads, and is currently working on road journeys recommended in a 1920s Michelin guide.

semanticist··on Department of Justice says Boeing may be criminally liable in 737 MAX crashes
"Limited liability" is specifically about not passing consequences through to owners (normally in the context of financial liability), and that's the language the OP used.
semanticist··on Department of Justice says Boeing may be criminally liable in 737 MAX crashes
So the owner of Boeing should be held personally liable? Okay, cool, except Boeing is a publicly traded company which means that the 'owner' is countless individual shareholders around the world, many of which are in turn other companies, whose owners are in turn things like pension funds.

So if you have a pension, should we be locking you up 'cause it was partially invested in Boeing?

Alternatively, you can have a specifically named role which is to be held liable? But then as far as the 'company' is concerned it's still just cost of doing business.

There's only three viable ultimate sanctions for a corporate entity: financial, being split up, and the death penalty.

semanticist··on Cybertruck Owner Breaks His Finger Trying to Show Vehicle Is Safe
Companies that specialise in this do exist, the one I'm most aware of is Electric Classic Cars in the UK (https://www.electricclassiccars.co.uk), who started/specialise in rear-engine VWs, original Minis, and original Land Rover Defenders.

Obviously very tailored for a nostalgic UK market, but if there's not equivalent companies in the US and elsewhere I'd be surprised!

semanticist··on The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
Most people working for Amazon don't get stock options, most of Amazon's employees are doing stock management in warehouses, delivery, etc.

Beyond that, stock _options_ aren't stock, and stock _grants_ to employees are often in restricted classes... they're not meaningful employee ownership because they're structured to ensure that they don't represent any kind of employee control over the company.

semanticist··on A deep dive into email deliverability in 2024
A small company will use a service like SendGrid, or even MailChimp at the higher level.

Those services will do a lot of checking for you and investigating this kind of weirdness/attack is exactly why you pay them money!

If they're sending directly, then they'll definitely be as vigilant as us, or they'd never get emails into people's inboxes!

semanticist··on A deep dive into email deliverability in 2024
We run our own mail servers. I would not recommend it for most people!
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