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  • Microsoft are such assholes as well.

    Hey do you want this neat feature where we have interesting and pretty pictures on your lock screen? They auto rotate, so you get new pictures all the time.

    Wow sure, that sounds like a cool feature.

    Sike! We put the most dumb and annoying text all over it. And when you accidentally click on it because the monitor didn't wake up in time, we open up Edge with Bing to show you more of our dumb shit. We sell the text as being interesting facts about the image, but then do the old bait and switch and just use it to advertise about our own shit nobody wants or likes.

    Fucking Microsoft, can't help themselves but be assholes all the time.

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    Why limit immigration?
  • Yeah this is the biggest issue.

    The way most housing gets built where I live it works like this: A company handles the project management, buying the land, getting the permits, hiring the builders, doing the marketing/sales etc. This costs a HUGE amount of money, which they don't have. So these projects get designed on paper and then sold to investors. These put in a big amount of money, with the expectation of the project making money in the sales of the housing in the end. This means they can often double their entry in a couple of years, which is really good in terms of investments. As the investors want to make as much money as possible, the company designing the housing have incentives to not only make the houses as dense as possible, but also as expensive as possible. Their margins in percent are about the same no matter the house, so a more expensive house makes them more money. This leads to really big expensive homes crammed together in either high rises or plots. It's really dumb as well since detached homes are worth more, they build homes with like 2 meter between them. The biggest issue is, only rich people can afford these homes. Even though more homes are built, the majority of people looking to buy a home can't afford these. Homes also get sold to investors again, to rent out as the house itself appreciates in value. These expensive homes also have the effect of driving up property prices in the area, which leads to more expensive houses and higher taxes.

    In the end, it's only the rich that profit. They get the good investment projects, making them even more rich. They get to buy the expensive new homes to live in. They get to buy the homes to rent out and use as an investment vehicle.

    Some places have made them build cheaper homes as well, if they want to get the permit. But it's not enough. We need to be building practical affordable homes, but we don't cause the people putting up the money to build stuff don't want to.

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    The entire staff of beloved game publisher Annapurna Interactive has reportedly resigned
  • Yeah but publishing is still work though. It's become much easier to self publish on Steam as a small developer, but there is still value in having a professional publisher. It's hard to say how much value and sometimes the publisher takes up more than their fair share, but it's not like zero value either.

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    Don't buy any automatic litter box from ali express or similar - they can be DEADLY
  • Disagree, if you need a custom big machine made, there are some really good people on AliExpress.

    I have had a couple of customized CNC machines custom built for a fraction of the price it would have cost to have it done over here. Even with the shipping costs it came out cheaper. And the people were really helpful, they use machines like mine all the time so they know their stuff. They offered really good advice and were excited to work with me. It's a bit butt clenching to fork over a lot of cash and hope a big ass pallet shows up 4 months later, but they've come through for me every time. YMMV.

    Temu on the other hand can fuck off. It's just a scam site like Wish.

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    Remove electric motor from garage door - use as manual?
  • In my experience this is a no-go. These things are very compact and hard to modify. The door will be pretty heavy and you need some kind of ratchet system so you can open it without supporting all the weight manually all the time. And also to prevent it from just rolling back closed again, which can be dangerous if the thing just falls and will probably break the door. It needs to be reversible, so you can close it when you want to, but be braked during the close. To do this, you will probably need to adapt some kind of chain hoist or similar. Maybe one with a mechanical advantage if the door is really heavy, it doesn't look heavy but from a photo it's hard to judge.

    You need to pull the thing off the wall, completely disassemble it and then modify it. Which means metal working, cutting, welding etc. On old shitty metal, so skill is required. And you need a hoist to sacrifice for the mechanism to drive it. And you need to be very sure about what you are doing, so it doesn't fall apart or break in use. You do not want to have a door like this slamming down on someone or something, or the whole thing coming free because a weld failed.

    What is the problem you are experiencing? Replacing or repairing the electronics and/or motor is probably the easy way. Noise shouldn't be an issue as the mechanical noise would far exceed the noise from any motor and a manual ratchet would be a lot louder.

    I was struggling with a similar situation and after repairing the old piece of shit motor for the seventh time, I replaced my roll up door with some pretty swing out doors (I had the room). They are not only insulated, but look way better and have windows in them. I actually ended up selling the old motor and got scrap metal value for the old door, but the new doors were still expensive. Still happy with them to this day.

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    High wire act
  • Possibly? This is a poor photoshop my man. Just look at the top of the truck a bit on the left, there is a whole ass section of wire missing where the truck is.

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    Sony announces the PS5 Pro with a larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and AI upscaling
  • Rendering a 3D scene is much more intensive and complicated than a simple scaler. The scaler isn't advanced at all, it's actually very simple. And it can't be compared with running a large model locally. These are expert systems, not large models. They are very good at one thing and can do only that thing.

    Like I said the cost is fixed, so if the scaler can handle 1080p at 120fps to upscale to 2K, then it can always handle that. It doesn't matter how complex or simple the image is, it will always use the same amount of power. It reads the image, does the calculation and outputs the resulting image.

    Rendering a 3D scene is much much more complex and power intensive. The amount of power highly depends on the complexity of the scene and there is a lot more involved. It needs the gpu, cpu, memory and even sometimes storage, plus all the bandwidth and latency in between.

    Upscaling isn't like that, it's a lot more simple. So if the hardware is there, like the AI cores on a gpu or the dedicated upscaler chip, it will always work. And since that hardware will normally not be heavily used, the rest of the components are still available for the game. A dedicated scaler is the most efficient, but the cores on the gpu aren't bad either. That's why something like DLSS doesn't just work on any hardware, it needs specialized components. And different generations and parts have different limitations.

    Say your system can render a game at 1080p at a good solid 120fps. But you have a 2K monitor, so you want the game to run at 2K. This requires a lot more from the system, so the computer struggles to run the game at 60 fps and has annoying dips in demanding parts. With upscaling you run the game at 1080p at 120fps and the upscaler takes that image stream and converts it into 2K at a smooth 120fps. Now the scaler may not get all the details right, like running native 2K and it may make some small mistakes. But our eyes are pretty bad and if we're playing games our brains aren't looking for those details, but are instead focused on gameplay. So the output is probably pretty good and unless you were to compare it with 2K native side by side, probably you won't even notice the difference. So it's a way of having that excellent performance, without shelling out a 1000 bucks for better hardware.

    There are limitations of course. Not all games conform to what the scaler is good at. It usually does well with realistic scenes, but can struggle with more abstract stuff. It can get annoying halos and weird artifacts. There are also limitations to what bandwidth it can push, so for example not all gpus can do 4K at a high framerate. If the game uses the AI cores as well for other stuff, that can become an issue. If the difference in resolution is too much, that becomes very noticeable and unplayable. Often there's also the option to use previous frames to generate intermediate frames, to boost the framerate with little cost. In my experience this doesn't work well and just makes the game feel like it's ghosting and smearing.

    But when used properly, it can give a nice boost basically for free. I have even seen it used where the game could be run at a lower quality at the native resolution and high framerate, but looked better at a lower resolution with a higher quality setting and then upscaled. The extra effects outweighed the small loss of fidelity.

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    $700
  • Be glad you aren't a freedom challenged European plebian, we get 800 EUR, which is around 880 dollar. And the equivalent of sales tax is different per country, so in some countries it's probably over 900 dollar.

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  • Are microservices really the future?

    Serious question. I know there are a lot of memes about microservices, both advocating and against it. And jokes from devs who go and turn monoliths into microservices and then back again. For my line of work it isn't all that relevant, but a discussion I heard today made me wonder.

    There were two camps in this discussion. One side said microservices are the future, all big companies are moving towards it, the entire industry is moving towards it. In their view, if it wasn't Mach architecture, it wasn't valid software. In their world both software they made themselves and software bought or licensed (SaaS) externally should be all microservices, api first, cloud-native and headless. The other camp said it was foolish to think this is actually what's happening in the industry and depending on where you look microservices are actually abandoned instead of moving towards. By demanding all software to be like this you are limiting what there is on offer. Furthermore the total cost of operation would be higher and connecting everything together in a coherent way is a nightmare. Instead of gaining flexibility, one can actually lose flexibility because changing interfaces could be very hard or even impossible with software not fully under your own control. They argued a lot of the benefits are only slight or even nonexistent and not required in the current age of day.

    They asked what I thought and I had to confess I didn't really have an answer for them. I don't know what the industry is doing and I think whether or not to use microservices is highly dependent on the situation. I don't know if there is a universal answer.

    Do you guys have any good thoughts on this? Are microservices the future, or just a fad which needs to be forgotten ASAP.

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