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Cake day: Jul 13, 2023

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Double standards much? What is your argument for it being better?


My arguments is that is. But, hey, read it whatever way makes you feel better about your own opinion.


It probably wouldn’t. Or you would have to wait a long time.

Try streaming from a site across the world and see how it is today. Then imagine saturating the networks with loads of it.

Would definitely need new infrastructure to cache popular content.


I mean - if the button says “buy” or “purchase” it’s not renting a license, no matter what the fine print in the terms say.

That’s at least how it should be.


The problem isn’t storing it, it’s hosting and delivering content.

YouTube, Netflix, and all the other big streaming platforms have huge amounts of servers around the world delivering content with minimal latency and without saturating the Internet exchanges with gigantic amounts of data traffic.

If we were to do this peer-2-peer people would have to get used to waiting for pages and videos to load again.


I don’t like the DisplayPort connector.

Apparently an unpopular opinion, but hey. It’s mine, and I’ll keep it.


Go to your local electronics store and see if that is true when you want a cable “today”.

There’s a difference between theory and practice.

Different countries and regions may have better markets for DP cables, but I can’t recall having had options other than length.


YMMV, obviously.

Locking DP is a pain in the ass for me. HDMI disconnecting was never an issue either.

I just wish I had a choice, but in practice I don’t as selection of cables is poor.

I never screwed in VGA or DVI connectors either.

Personally I prefer the plug falling out instead of the connector and/or cable getting damaged if you pull on it.


Never said DP wasn’t a better standard. Or that HDMI was better because of being ubiquitous.

It’s certainly not keyed better than HDMI, that’s just ridiculous. If you ever had a laptop with Display Port, or see people interact with one, you would notice that it’s too similar to USB, e-sata (which has become mostly irrelevant, if not even fully), and HDMI.

On top of that it’s difficult to feel if it’s the wrong way round. Easy to see, difficult to feel.

DisplayPort is in practice not available as a non-locking connector, but keying and the locking connector makes it worse.

While, sure, someone makes money off of HDMI, it’s not an argument for popularity.

I never agreed with the facts of your comment, but I think you are using poor arguments to make an invalid point.

I’m not arguing for HDMI either, btw. I’m just attempting to predict the future.


I know, and commented on it (just not explicitly).

The irony is still there though.

And for many years it was an actual limitation of the USB interface as well. Only with USB 3, which didn’t see widespread adoption until 2009-2010 did USB surpass FireWire 400 speeds. And let’s not forget there was FireWire 800 as well.


But (most of that) that’s the display port standard, not the plug.

DisplayPort over USB-C works mostly fine, except that it’s “fine”, not perfect. Daisy chaining tends to make it less fine.

It’s a better standard, but a worse plug. Important distinction.

That doesn’t matter in the long run though. Better doesn’t always win.

Just look at how USB won over FireWire. And FireWire could daisy chain too

My iPhone 13 Pro syncs slower over USB than my second generation iPod did over FireWire.

While I obviously can’t blame that fully on USB, it’s an ironic observation, especially since my OG iPod would be 21 years old now, if it still worked.


You can, but they’re hard to come by where I live at least. I have two, but they’re Mini DP to DP. So haven’t gotten to use them since I was running my 970 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We also have 10-30 cables of each of the usual lengths in the IT supply room at the office, and they all have the same mechanism, no matter what manufacturer was chosen during purchasing.

And then, once in a while, you come across a screen where the port is rotated 180 degrees so the push is between the plug and the back of the screen and you basically need child labor to unplug it in proper manner.


I used to think DisplayPort was the future, about 10-13 years ago.

By now I feel it has come and gone.

HDMI 2.1+ is making its way in everywhere.

  • It’s a better plug.
  • It tends to support enough pixels/Hz for most people.
  • It’s more ubiquitous, being on both TV’s laptops, and monitors.

Pretty sure the PC desktop segment will keep the port alive for a while, but right now it doesn’t seem like a very useful port apart from having a plug that claws itself in place and is often unnecessarily hard to unplug.

With Ultra High Speed HDMI (these names are ridiculous, seriously, look at the standard names) there’s very few, if any, reasons to use DP, apart from compliant HDMI cables costing an arm and a leg.

To be honest I’m struggling a bit to understand why it’s not just all pushed through a CAT6/7 Ethernet cable at this point.


Haven’t run across a laptop that couldn’t since before 2010…


I think you are optimistic about communicating with the worst percentile of drivers, but can’t argue with your reasoning


I mean, that’s an obvious one.

But how much better?

A lot of people will have qualms as long as the chance of dying is higher than zero.

People have very poor understanding of statistics and will cancel holidays because someone in the vicinity of where they’re going got bitten by a shark (the current 10 year average of unprovoked shark bites is 74 per year).

Similarly we can expect people to go “I would never get into a self-driving car” when the news inevitably reports on a deadly accident even if the car was hit by a falling rock.

And then there’s the other question:

Since 50% of drivers are worse than the average - would you feel comfortable with those being replaced by self driving cars that were (proven to be) better than the average?


I saw a video years ago discussing this topic.

How good is “good enough” for self-driving cars?

The bar is much higher than it is for human drivers because we downplay our own shortcomings and think that we have less risk than the average driver.

Humans can be good drivers, sure. But we have serious attention deficits. This means it doesn’t take a big distraction before we blow a red light or fail to observe a pedestrian.

Hell, lot of humans fail to observe and yield to emergency vehicles as well.

But none of that is newsworthy, but an autonomous vehicle failing to yield is.

My personal opinion is that the Cruise vehicles are as ready for operational use as Teslas FSD, ie. should not be allowed.

Obviously corporations will push to be allowed so they can start making money, but this is probably also the biggest threat to a self-driving future.

Regulated so strongly that humans end up being the ones in the driver seat for another few decades - with the cost in human lives which that involves.


You’re pointing out plenty of good problems that wasting CPU cycles and lack of authority doesn’t solve.

Maybe if we actually looked harder for a solution instead of throwing one that doesn’t work on the problem and hyping it up to be everything that it will never be - we could actually get somewhere.

I mean it all sounds fine when people spin it, but take a step back and look at the problems inherit to the “solution”.

Just based on your phrasing and tone I’ll probably never convince you, but don’t trust me. There’s plenty of people out there who’s described the problem way better than I ever will.

And there are solutions to the problems you point out, they just don’t involve useless computing and executing arbitrary code.

But if you really want to get into fixing these problems you need to get involved with policy (ie. politics).

We need to fix politicians being elected thanks to corporate capital, both direct and indirect.

We need to fix tax regulation globally. We need to stop the race to the bottom where companies incorporate where they can funnel money back to the mothership without paying tax.

We need to fix education, so people get a clue and don’t elect corporate puppets or flat out fascists.

We need to fix healthcare.

We need to fix environmental policy, and thanks to the environmental policies for the last 200 years, the environment as well.

Heck, we even need to fix the Internet.

And all the idealism in the world - the idealist blockchain crowd becomes useful idiots because they’re busy with something that won’t work out (instead of pushing the world in a better direction).

I do however highly recommend a few talks with Larry Lessig:

https://youtu.be/mw2z9lV3W1g

https://youtu.be/PJy8vTu66tE

And on DMCA (you may want to start with this):

https://youtu.be/7Q25-S7jzgs?si=RJniq02TSd7vTOPw


Sounds obvious when you read about it.

But changing the name of things is difficult…

At least here there’s a very good argument.


Lot of metaphorical cancer out there, but the article was about real, but arguably mislabeled stages of what could develop into cancer.

Highly worth reading.


The District of Columbia fits fleet of EVs with bogus gadget promising 60% range boost
**The Energy Management Module claims it can "rejuvenate a battery" somehow.** The District of Columbia has signed a $680,000 contract for an impossible-sounding gadget that claims to increase the range of an electric vehicle by 60 percent. The contract was signed in May, but it mostly slipped under the radar until it was picked up by WUSA9 this month. The gadget in question is called an Energy Management Module, and it's made by a company called Mullen, which has recently been acquiring struggling electric vehicle startups like Bollinger and Electric Last Mile Solutions. In April, Mullen published a press release claiming that fitting the EMM gadget to one of the company's prototype cargo vans "showed more than a 75 percent increase in range for the 42-kWh lithium-ion battery pack." DC's Department of Public Works became aware of the EMM device at last year's Washington Auto Show, according to WUSA9. "We have been investigating new technology that would extend their life, make us work more efficiently, and keep our maintenance expenses down," the department told the news channel. The DC government owns more than 100 Chevrolet Bolt EVs as part of its fleet, some of which are used for duties like parking enforcement. It has fitted 40 Bolts with EMM devices at a staggering cost of $14,000 per vehicle, plus an additional $3,000 per EV for "data monitoring." The device's inventor, Lawrence Hardge, claims that it works by "rejuvenating the battery," which sounds as close to a load of nonsense as I've heard in some time, given the relatively advanced nature of the Bolt's battery management system and the ease with which one can check the battery's health. WUSA9 found reason to be skeptical of Hardge's claims—which include allegedly being nominated for a Nobel Prize by the University of Michigan—thanks to a fraud conviction in 2001. There's a pretty long history of bogus gadgets promising ludicrously unrealistic increases in efficiency. From magnets that wrap around your fuel line to a "voltage stabilizer" you plug into a 12 V socket, none have ever actually worked because they invariably defy the laws of physics. Unfortunately, relying on the naïvety of your customers has always been a good way to get paid. In the case of those internal combustion engine-focused frauds, at least they kept their claims somewhat plausible, usually promising efficiency increases of 10–20 percent. But Mullen's EMM simply defies belief with claims of a 60 percent boost. Needless to say, it appears that the DC government has been taken for a ride here. Thankfully, someone somewhere down the line was awake—the contract states that DC will only pay the $680,000 once all 40 units have been shown to be working.
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