Russia has messaging for useful idiots on the right and messaging for useful idiots on the left. To the right they’ll say stuff like “America should stay out of foreign wars”, “we should make Ukraine pay for the assistance”, “the price of oil will go up” blah blah. To the left it’s shit like “Ukraine are Nazis”, “America is perpetuating this war”, “NATO are the aggressors” blah blah

The goal either way is to sow division, doubt, demoralise, create instability, create distrust and sap European & US power’s resolve to support Ukraine. And also to devalue information with false, misleading and contradictory information. It’s not hard on social media to see how this shit spreads around with insincere actors pumping false news and misinfo into the feeds that gets picked up by the useful idiots.

Yes I know. I’ve was there for it too mocking these dinguses. But it only became mainstream with COVID when it sort of metastasized and merged with a bunch of other deranged conspiracy nonsense via MAGA & QAnon.

I certainly am. I also got blocked by Kirstie Alley, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Avenatti for criticizing their cult, grift & grift respectively. I’m sure there are a few others I don’t know about.

The Cybertruck is a fail on so many levels that I wonder why anyone wants one. It’s not a good EV, it’s not a good truck, falls short on price & range, is prone to corrosion, looks stupid, is totally impractical, and lethal to pedestrians & cyclists. The thing violates so many EU regulations that it will NEVER be on sale there and anywhere else that doesn’t like murder machines.

Sounds to me like shareholders should call his bluff and be rid of him. Maybe then the company won’t be wasting money on boneheaded vehicles like the Cybertruck.

I got blocked by him on Twitter (in 2012!) for mocking his whackjob antivax views. He was espousing shit headed antivax nonsense long before it was fashionable.

He’s been saying variations of this shit for years. If you listen to the Knowledge Fight podcast there is scarcely a week when he hasn’t invoked some schtick about how this could be the last broadcast.

Of course, if this dumpster fire has genuinely stopped paying the bills and the creditors are changing the locks then boo hoo for Jones. I’m sure he’ll weave it as a conspiracy but this asshole has had it coming and then some.

This guy seems to be taking safety slightly more seriously with his sub plans than the last guy. Which is unfortunate for people looking forward to more billionaires transforming themselves into paste.

I’ve disabled personalised ads on YouTube and I see this sort of shit all the time. I’ve given up reporting them because 90% of the time the report is rejected. I don’t even understand the rationale for rejecting it because it’s an obvious a scam as a scam can be - ai impersonation, fake endorsement, illegal advertising category. It’s a scam YouTube.

I don’t even get why these ads even appear. YouTube has transcription & voice / music recognition capabilities. How hard would it be to flag a suspicious ad and require a human to review it? Or search for duplicates under other burner accounts and zap them at the same time? Or having some kind of randomized audit based on trust where new accounts get reviewed more frequently by experienced reviewers.

Protectionism only works in the VERY short term. If the USA doesn’t pull its finger out of its ass and make affordable good EVs, then its automotive industry will crash and burn. Because the rest of the world unaffected by tariffs will be buying Chinese (or Korean / European) EVs and not American ones because they’ll be expensive and suck.

I hate local file search in Windows. So many times I’ve wonder why my machine is crawling and I go to the taskbar and discover Windows search indexer is killing my machine.

For the other stuff in Windows 11, I wonder if it knows I’m in Europe because I’ve not seen any egregious advertising - it has the default shit they set up for you like the MSN home page in Edge which is annoying but it can all be changed.

I have Windows 11 on a couple of machines and honestly it’s just Windows 10 with a somewhat slicker taskbar and control panel. Functionally it is almost identical. I’m sure there is a random bunch of changes on the periphery but it’s really not a compelling proposition if someone has Windows 10 and is happy with it.

When you have a narcissistic sociopath for a boss don’t expect job security. All these layoffs and his insane letter will do is cultivate toadying, fear, distrust, cliques and a culture of backstabbing within Tesla.

If they weeded out some of the shittier ideas they’d be one in nine or eight.

I saw the Marquess Brownlee review of this thing last night and I wonder why companies make this crap and who is fool enough to fund it. It’s obviously doomed to fail, as are most “smart” gadgets & devices. The best that can be said for it, is at least there is no subscription to use it and it’s not outrageously expensive but that’s damning it with faint praise.

It doesn’t work like that. UTC goes forward always. Leap seconds are scheduled and known in advance. NTP time services will just smear time advancement a little to account for an additional second. Time never has to go backwards. This is how Google does it.

Leap seconds still make time go forwards, not backwards. NTP clients would also resolve small time discrepancies while still advancing forwards prior to the next time sync.

I didn’t say Unix time, I said UTC. And no it won’t report negative time, not unless somehow the system clock was modified while it was running…

UTC always goes forward regardless of the timezone and local time. That is why you should use it. To take my EPG situation above, I stored program start / end times in UTC so they would render properly even if DST kicked in or not during the middle of the program.

Spotify and other such services almost certainly sound worse because they are compressed. But it’s not really a like for like comparison with vinyl. Spotify is streaming audio for people who want to play music casually in cars, earbuds etc. It offers convenience, not perfect sound fidelity. FLAC / CD on the other hand could be compared to vinyl and would win hands down for better frequency and range. The only reason they wouldn’t is if the CD master sucked and the vinyl master didn’t.

And vinyl is very lossy in its own way. The (digital) master of each side undergoes dynamic range & frequency compression to fit the limitations of the format (e.g. to reduce sibilance, track width). Then the master is cut into a lacquer disc from which a “father” is made, from which “mothers” are made, from which stampers are made and from which the vinyl record is made. So the vinyl in someone’s hand is a copy, of a copy, of a copy, of an altered digital master. The stamper too wears out so if someone is unlucky they get a pressing right the end of its life. And playing the disk can cause wow, flutter, distortion and general wear & tear can cause hiss, pop, dullness and scratches.

So vinyl will never sound better unless it received a better master than other formats.