srmarm

It felt like Superhero movies were the Westerns of the last decade.

I've not been to the cinema lately, hopefully things have moved on.

The creative industries all suffer from this though and as I get older I'm finding I'm both craving originality more than ever and finding myself further removed from it as each year passes :(

Most of the time they do the trick (when rate limited). Even using a birthday will still stop card thieves from emptying your bank account at an ATM.

I'd hazard a guess that asking for an 8 digit pin will see lots of people just repeat the first 4 digits again.

And noise

Rumbelows went bankrupt in 1995 apparently. I was a kids and it sticks in my mind as I used to get my mum to take me into the electrical shops after school as a treat and they had a proper fire sale with everything being sold off cheap.

I find those liquidation sales quite depressing now but at the time it stuck out as being really exciting and we got a stereo quite cheap.

This sounds like a really good way of approaching it. From what I understand the argument against is clear but enforcing it in the face of peer pressure a little more complicated!

My nephews school allows basic 'dumb' phones but not smart phones which seems a fair compromise.

Anecdotally, it feels like it goes through phases. IIRC after the wake word (OK Google) triggers the device to start recording the actual command is processed remotely. I suspect that Google Home voice commands are going to be low down the pecking order when they assign resources so it can work well when there is excess capacity but if resources are tighter they'll degrade the quality.

The thing is the selling point is it ties together loads of different systems and is open source. That is also it's weakness and I'd not want to professionally set up a system and then be at the mercy of third party integrations and have to explain that to the client and support it if it fails.

Furthermore a lot of this you'll need physical access for which limits the scope of remote support.

Once you're paying someone professional rates than the cost of the parts becomes less relevant.

I don't think HA is that unreliable itself these days but if I were charging £££ to install I'd probably want to be able to have a company with an SLA to fall back on.

I suspect there are people using it professionally however they'll be selling automation solutions and just use HA in the background rather than exposing HA to the end user.

There are still even ways to expose the zigbee stuff, I can turn my zigbee lights on from the other side of the world and even access it via Google Home but it's on my terms and under my control. The actual switch itself is relatively dumb (which is a positive in this case!)

(not to say you're doing it wrong btw, just to let others know that zigbee can still be linked onwards to the internet from the gateway)

Good point that it's unlikely to be as simple as a $500m return but regardless of the amounts or structure of IPO my question was more around who are the existing share holders of the commercial company? Is it the foundation or someone/something else? Is this float to get cash or financial stability for the foundation or a cashout by other parties?

At the end of the day I'm not going to be too critical in any case as I've contributed nothing beyond buying a few boards and making a few posts in support!

So who gets the $500m or so they're suggesting the IP will raise? Is that going to be injected into the foundation in which case they could do a lot with it (presumably with some guardrails to prevent them clashing with the PLC)

Your battery usage sounds exactly like the kind of behaviour they're trying to encourage but which aren't apparent to most people without an interest in these things so you left with the energy monitor which is really just a nice bonus to the system rather but is tangible to the lay person.

Of course the very real benefits of this can be abused by the gov and there are some conspiracy types using that to push their own agenda but on the whole I'm largely positive about the smart grid stuff.

For 'dark' storage something in the style of AWS Glacier storage would probably do the trick from an environmental point of view. Drives can be filled and then left unplugged and only spun up when data is requested which apparently isn't very often.

I seem to vaguely recall that some of the glacier data was just put on Blu-ray discs and filed away. Seems like a viable solution and with the cloudesq abstraction it doesn't necessarily matter so long as it's being done properly.

Of course I suspect the environment is being used as convenient excuse to people with environmental policies.

This is interesting. Putting aside AWS, Amazon has for a long time been a logistics company at it's core - the website is terrible from a customer perspective, pricing isn't great and the seller/supplier experience is certainly weighted in Amazon's favour. What they have is the critical mass of customers who are invested in prime and it's the default choice. I hate them but if I need something quick I generally hold my nose and ask my wife to order on her account. Other sellers can achieve delivery just as quick, it's just inconsistent between sites.

As someone who builds ecommerce sites and has seen Amazon become dominant I've thought about how to solve this problem many times - it requires deep pockets and most importantly good logistics. I've often thought if a logistics company expanded their shopping cart plugins to also (optionally) feed back data to a central ordering system and included their own payment solution to allow direct from customer ordering with centralised ordering, payment and logistics - perhaps at a loss until a prime type offering could be built there would be a potential for a strong business. Amazon take a huge amount of fees a chunk of which go to putting the wrong product in front of the customer!

In this case it was Fidelity putting their customers money where his mouth was actually.

I've been using SpamAssassin for at least 15 years and it's sadly gotten less useful as the spam arms race has moved on. We regularly see people on here post about deliverability issues with Gmail/Outlook but the truth is that sender reputation is by far the biggest indicator of whether a message will be spam - these type of rules are just counting deckchairs on the titanic in comparison.

And this plays into the strengths of the big mail networks in detection. It's a bonus to them that every time they block a smaller host there is a good chance that sender will consider a move to office365 or Google Workspace for their mail.

As an aside, not sure if OP is related to them but updown.io is a nice service and I appreciate the simple PAYG pricing! For what it's worth their mails seem to get through successfully to me too.

Also for those facing mail delivery issues (or just practicing good email hygiene) - I recommend www.mail-tester.com - they give you an email address to send a mail to and carry out a heap of tests - including checking against SpamAssassin + blacklists, SPF/DNS/etc testing.

I learnt Perl to a fairly basic level but enough to build quite complex CRUD applications and build back end for flash apps. For a while I wrongly took CGI and Perl as pretty interchangable in my mind and in reality my actual usage of CGI probably didn't go much further than the shebang that invoked the Perl interpreter.

So this was quite an interesting read and long overdue!

It'd be cool if they allowed you to redefine the endpoint for the wifi bit of the controller which was the interesting part of the tech IMHO.

I suppose the usual legal argument of no expectation of privacy in a public space applies.

However the less formal court of public opinion, social pressure, business policies etc will hopefully make these socially unacceptable in enough places as to not be worth it.

Certainly I expect I'd ask anyone to take such devices off if they enter my home or engage with me.

I encountered Google glass once in public and moved from where I was sitting, my dirty look to the wearer as I did so hopefully making them think twice before brandishing a camera in a stranger's direction.

Obviously a lot of factors beyond the AI here but this case will certainly make legal departments twitchy.

Is one of their top 3 supporters, the Titanium level 'User Manuals' just paying for a good backlink?

Bit of an odd way to put it, like saying there are X amount of HSBC dollars because they offer X different financial products.

In this case PayPal's core product seems to be the same as always, they've also added a stablecoin product which you can make a conscious decision to buy. Similarly you can move your money into their savings account which offers additional guarantees.

Presumably in both cases they'd prefer funds are kept as a 'standard' PayPal balance that they can invest to make more profit but if you're going to move your funds out of PayPal why not offer these other options.

The author seems surprised that different financial products offer different levels of protection but different levels of risk Vs reward are what the whole financial world is about. So long as consumers are made aware that's fine.

That's shocking and a shame because the platform itself is a good idea and I'd much prefer to order directly from a restaurant than have up to 30% of my order value go to rent seekers like JustEat, Deliveroo or Uber Eats.

They have the low hanging fruit (large apartment blocks) sewen up and are now spreading out.

Last week I was excited to see FTTH guys cabling up my suburban street and was told it should go live in a month or so. I went onto their website and their register info form didn't work (and still doesn't) due to them using some broken Experian email validator script!

The fortune they're spending on roadworks etc yet their bloody signup form doesn't work!

I'm not really sure what the site does, looks like a cleanly designed proxy for youtube?

If it's a service that's piggybacking on another site there's a good chance it'll get shut down at some point. I get the feeling the author of the post is a little naïve that this comes as a surprise, that their two accounts with Oracle were linked and banned in unison came as a surprise and there wasn't a backup.

However anyone who uses a site like this knows it's easy come/easy go. You get what you pay for and appreciate the time, effort and money the webmaster has put in and make your own arrangements to save anything of importance to your local machine.

Oh absolutely and probably with a manual backup too.

Hey at least it's not a madcatz controller!

The US Navy uses an Xbox 360 controller in active service [0]

Mass market has a lot of R&D to leverage so it makes sense. Nothing to say this is the cause of the fault and probably going to be more reliable than something hand rolled.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16333376/us-navy-military...

Most reddit posts wouldn't be considered PII and I'm not sure the 'delete' function on a reddit post constitutes a GDPR removal request (it's not clear how this user purged their data).

The reddit FAQ around deleting your account[0] suggests that they'll just 'dissociate' your posts from your account (so the user says [deleted]) and remove your account data which should be fine for GDPR purposes.

This[1] support page says mods/admins can't recover your deleted posts for you but stops a little short of saying that it's impossible for them to do it for themselves.

So pretty scummy behaviour but I don't think anything they're doing is illegal (IANAL!).

[0] https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004304793... [1] https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004348345...

I think the point was the binaries would be distributed around different mirrors that might not be under the control of the author - so long as you got the key from the author the actual binary (which is a much larger filesize than the key) could have less secured mirrors.

I had this experience a few years back and just put it in the sorta janky but hacky fun box.

However I did a totally fresh reinstall on some new hardware 6 months ago and it's been absolutely rock solid since and updates have been one click without issue.

Was still a bit of a faff to set up (though tbf that was more around the VM side of things which was my perogative)