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What’s the Matter with the smart home?
  • Part of what the article overlooks is that they're expensive, and most people aren't likely to replace something that already works fine, unless the replacement offers some unique functionality that they use, but doesn't currently exist.

    For example, a smart light switch (50$) is 10x the price of a regular light switch (5$), even before the added complication of having to pair/connect it, or all the other issues that come with a "smart" home. It's not cost-efficient to put something like that in my home.

  • Fairphone drawbacks?
  • no headphone jack means you may need to purchase wireless headphones or earbuds and wireless earbuds don’t always have replaceable batteries

    They're also more expensive, even if fairphone does offer their own headphones.

    A cheap set of decent wired earphones is $10. $30 if you want something nice, like an IEM.

    Bluetooth headphones don't tend to be quite as cheap, and are usually a good deal more.

  • Fairphone drawbacks?
  • Although you can't both charge the phone/use pripherals, like a keyboard/mouse and use headphones in that case, unless you're using one of the few phones with 2+ USB-C ports, and wireless charging can be cumbersome.

  • Microsoft moving fully to the cloud, does this mean something to us?
  • That sounds like a horrid decision. Imagine having to troubleshoot a relative's computer, which isn't working because their internet is down, or is too slow to support streaming Windows like that.

    It just sounds like a nightmare all-round, both from a Microsoft Standpoint, since they would have to build all the hardware to support it, people who would have to troubleshoot an issue that might show up on either the local or networked version of Windows, but not both, and from a security standpoint, since it seems like it would make it a lot easier to just hijack the whole computer using that kind of mechanism, with the user being none the wiser, for the most part.

  • Founder and primary developer of Moderator Toolbox for Reddit quits both Reddit and the project
  • You can usually get around that with the old compact interface. Clicking links is a bit glitchy after its "retirement" (Reddit "retired" it by stripping .compact from all links, but compact still tries to use them), however, it's still mostly usable, if you put .i at the end of the link.

    https://old.reddit.com/r/creesch/comments/14fxzr4/so_long_and_thanks_for_all_the_fish/.i

  • Reddit's response about the actions they took against the subreddits (note: r/mildly interesting DID NOT encourage nsfw content and their suspensions and removal have been revoked by a diff admin)
  • Given how that's been going, and how that subreddit apparently got caught in the crossfire, it kind of makes you wonder what's going on behind the scenes at Reddit. With a different person revoking it and apologising, it kind of seems like the admins aren't really communicating to each other, and that some are putting out fires that the others are lighting.

    EDIT: No Apology, just an explanation.

  • YSK that you can edit titles on Lemmy, unlike Reddit.
  • Although I'm curious about how they might address the "clickbait" issue of people having a massively upvoted/boosted post, and then changing the post to say something else entirely.

    That seems like it might be a problem if people are allowed to edit titles.

  • Jellyfin, we are moving away from Reddit and we are pleased to announce our new forum!
  • At the same time, it might not fit them. Lemmy is a link aggregator, which seems like extra functionality that they don't really need, not when existing forum software will do what they need, while also being more stable/mature.

  • Star Trek undersells the capabilities of its starships

    I saw this rant/complaint over on Reddit, and it got me thinking a bit.

    We know that at least on paper, Federation starships are insanely fast and agile. Data has stated that the Galaxy-class Enterprise was able to achieve Warp 9 from , and some ships, like the Nebula class, don't seem to use impulse engines at all, favouring the warp engine for sublight speed usage at all.

    Despite that, we also know that impulse engines aren't simple thrusters, and are able to move the ship in a way not directly in line with the output thrust (Relics), and from the same episode, we also know that smaller ships, like the Jenolan, will still run rings around ships like the Enterprise, even though it is nearly a full century out of date.

    However, from what the show itself portrays, the ships tend to be fairly slow and sluggish when in combat, sedately drifting along the battlefield, while weapons fire goes every which way. The most recent and active thing we've seen a big starship do is maybe the fighter run in Picard.

    In my opinion, by trying to keep to the slow and seemingly logical expectations for starships to be slow, hulking metal structures that slowly fly around shooting each other, Star Trek ends up underselling what Federation starships are able to do. They would be more realistically portrayed flitting about the battlefield like dragonflies, instead of being like "real boats" today, that have more of a sense of mass.

    It seems wildly unintuitive, but it would also help show Federation propulsion technology being more advanced than what they are now. Starships can instantly stop and reverse course, or move in ways that would be impossible with modern technology, and the show not showing ships capable of doing just that might be to its detriment.

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    Ah yes, famously apolitical Star Trek
  • It's got a very TOS-style of writing and story to it.

    I remember seeing a fair few people pitch a fit about the Burn, for example, even though "angry man has a tantrum and nearly blows up the universe", and "child with godlike powers" are common TOS plots.

    They tried something new, which I don't mind them for, but I don't think it mixed well with people being used to more TNG-styles plots, and the writing not being that great. Still, it managed to help kickstart the modern revival of Trek, and gave us (non-wheelchair) Captain Pike, so it wasn't all bad.

  • YSK Defibrillators doesn't restart a stopped heart
  • There are certain devices that do do that, but it's not a defibrillator. A defibrillator will stop/prevent an arrhythmia by stopping the heart, and letting it restart on its own (hoping that it goes to a normal rhythm), and delivering further shocks if it gets back into one.

    The device you're looking for to help a heart beat again would be a pacer, or a pacemaker, which will shock the heart to force it to pump, and restore rhythm that way. They're commonly used for conditions like heart failure, if the heartbeat generation systems/internal pacemaker can't generate a heartbeat quickly enough to sustain life.

  • Does anyone think that the Fediverse would make a much better next phase for the web then all of this Metaverse bull?
  • "Metaverse" is mostly dead, anyway. It's basically turned into VR Bitcoin, and a worse version of the already existing VR.

    A.I. seems to be the new shiny thing investors are moving into, and I'd be surprised if Facebook didn't just silently remove references to the metaverse eventually.

    Fediverse, for the slightly cringey "verse" name, does seem to at least be trying something new. Federating multiple completely different sites like Mastodon, Kbin, or Lemmy isn't really something that was done before (that I can remember, feel free to correct if I'm wrong). You had some integrations with things like RSS and APIs before, but you couldn't just go on Twitter and post/reply/read a Reddit thread from within twitter, or you'd have to do it with a complicated network of bots.

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    techno156 @kbin.social
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