my_hat_stinks

I made a fair bit of commission upgrading people to much much better hardware and speed for not much more money.

See that’s your entire problem right there, you’re in sales. Your incentive is to drain every penny you can out of customers through useless up-sells and selling hardware to get the service they’re already paying for.

You literally just argued that if your 600mbps router only supplies an 80mbps connection then your 600mbps connection is 80mbps. And speed isn’t divided equally by the number of devices connected either, that’s just ridiculous. The impact of a connected but idle device is minimal. Also, why would you need 600mbps for only 4 devices? You could stream 4k video on all four devices 24/7 and you’re still not using even a quarter of that bandwidth; you’re looking at a recommendation of only 15mbps to 25mbps per user for a 4k-viable internet connection.

Here’s a ping to my stock ISP-supplied router on another floor and three rooms away via wifi:

--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
611 packets transmitted, 611 received, 0% packet loss, time 623436ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.647/0.779/2.105/0.110 ms

It’s obviously impossible to improve a 0% packet loss, switching to a wired connection would be a considerable cost for minimal benefit (though admittedly that ping is unusually good, I’d normally expect slightly over 1ms average). I’m also getting over my advertised speeds according to fast.com and speedtest.net despite being on wifi and running through Mullvad so I suppose the problem might just be that I’m not using whichever scummy ISP you work for.

I have a home office and have work from home (or hybrid) for pretty much my entire career, even before WFH was normalised. I can assure you a wired connection is not a necessity to work from home.

So the ISP isn’t to blame when the cheap ISP-provided hardware fails, and the solution isn’t for the ISP to replace insufficient ISP-owned hardware but for you to buy your own instead?

The “wire everything” approach is a little excessive for most home networks too, outside of exceptional circumstances modern WiFi on modern hardware is more than enough for home users. It’s only worth the time and money to wire everything if you’ve identified specific issues with signal loss or noise, don’t just do it by default.

This means that the decimal representation of pi ends with the digit 9, followed by an infinite sequence of other digits.

I guess? There is a 9 followed by infinitely many other digits. Not sure I’d call that the end of pi, though.

UK is under BST (UTC+1) for half the year but people are usually just taught that the UK is GMT (UTC+0) which is based in the time in Greenwich, withought mentioning DST. I suppose it’s also possible everyone is taught BST and just forgets about it because daylight savings sucks, but either way most people seem to think GMT and UK time are the same thing.

This means you’ll get people asking for GMT times when they want BST or UK local time.

Utter nonsense. Your argument is that because you can imagine a god and spread the idea they are real. The logical conclusion there is that anything you can imagine is equally real. Bigfoot really is wandering around a forest, spaghetti absolutely does grow in trees, and the moon landing was definitely on a sound stage (but they also really landed on the moon because I can picture that too).

I feel like someone not releasing anything but squatting IP rights for 13 years is a poor argument for longer copyright terms.

But ‘cold’ and ‘heated’ are bad. People are weird about temperature.

It’s a little weirder than that.
https://lastplacecomics.com/lasso-man/

And some follow-up comics.
https://lastplacecomics.com/paint-bucket-man/
https://lastplacecomics.com/copy-and-paste/
https://lastplacecomics.com/lasso-man-4/

I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that language models are effective lie detectors, it’s very widely known that LLMs have no concept of truth and hallucinate constantly.

And that’s before we even get into inherent biases and moral judgements required for any form of truth detection.

My gut reaction is that this won’t work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there’s a way to do that there’s a way to detect ads.

Of course, there’s always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they’re used; they’ve done similar before.

I’m not convinced. Most magic systems in fiction have rules, meaning they can be scientifically proven and studied. Magic is simply when something falls outside your understanding of how the world works. It’s all about your perspective.

There’s a part in the Lord of the Rings where Galadriel shows Sam and Frodo a scrying pool. To Galadriel it’s normal, simply the way the world is. To the hobbits it’s magic.

‘And you?’ she said, turning to Sam. ‘For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-magic?’

I still can’t wrap my head around the fact there’s a group who intentionally named themselves “proud boys” which somehow isn’t a group for openly gay men. If they weren’t a neo-fascist terrorist organisation I’d think the whole thing was a joke.

Damn, you must hate cucumber water.

Could be a courgette, that’s a much more common vegetable soup ingredient.

Bicycles more dangerous than cars? I guess I must have missed all the stories about people being run over by bikes.

It might not necessarily be that the instances are stricter, it could also simply be that those instances are targeted more often by hate/trolls so interact with those instances more often. Admins are less likely to defederate from an instance they’ve never seen or heard of. I see a lot of obviously LGBT-related names in this list which likely get more hate than average.

It’s well outside my field so I’m definitely not qualified to answer that, but the trials seem to be building on this study so that might give more insight.

This probably isn’t going to be available to you then, though it is possible it paves the way for a tooth-replacement treatment. This article seems like bad science communication. The video, tweet, and website they link to all state that they’re researching congenital conditions, the inquiry form linked to on the website explicitly states in English they’re not considering people who lost their teeth later in life and specifically calls out articles like this one as misinformation.

We are currently receiving a large number of inquiries that differ from the purpose of this research, which is very troubling.
This research is a study of therapeutic drugs for people who are missing teeth due to congenital (from birth) diseases (diseases, etc.).
This research is not aimed at restoring teeth to people who have lost their teeth due to acquired causes, as some news and social networking sites have reported.Additionally, we are not currently recruiting candidates for　clinical trials (adult males).

People already do, this comic is about a real thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

That link is a 404 so I can’t tell what it says, but here’s a 1996 US act to enforce net neutrality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

And here’s a 2006 Tim Berners-Lee blog post about threats to net neutrality which specifically says net neutrality already exists, you really can’t get much more authoritive than that: https://web.archive.org/web/20060703142912/http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144

Obama may have enacted some legislation around between neutrality (again, your link 404s so I can’t tell what specifically you’re referring to) but it certainly wasn’t created under Obama.

The concept of net neutrality definitely existed long before Obama so it’s a bit questionable to say it was created under him. Did anything specific happen under him to enforce net neutrality more than it already was?

You’re definitely right about Trump though. It seems like he took every opportunity to screw over the US public in favour of corporate interests.