Smart meters automatically send usage data to the utility company (electricity, gas, water, etc) so they don’t have to come and read it manually themselves. Are you interest in any particular detail about them?

I agree, but unfortunately it’s a reality of a capitalist society that large private companies have a lot of the wealth, and so people set themselves up for retirement by owning a very tiny part of those companies.

I was going to say that I use Hoarder and like it, but it looks like it’s been renamed to Karakeep. I like the AI-powered tagging functionality.

I can’t see the link you posted. It goes to a Twitter login page.

A lot of people don’t realise that around 40% of the value of the S&P 500, and the majority of the Nasdaq 100 (i.e. QQQM) is big tech companies.

You could always build a portfolio that excludes companies you feel are unethical (for example, exclude oil and gas companies, exclude big tech, etc), but if you were to exclude all companies that have done something unethical then you’d probably end up with the S&P 0 (an empty list)

As much as I hate Facebook, they at least pay people to do moderation there, and regularly update their site

Facebook pays content creators too (https://creators.facebook.com/earn-money ), including for things other than videos (like photo/image posts). Platforms like YouTube do too, but as far as I know, Reddit doesn’t.

Do those code snippets on the Stackoverflow post allow you to capture the entire screen regardless of which app is open, or do they only allow you to capture the app the code is running in?

Capturing the app itself makes sense (for things like bug reports) but does Android really let any app capture whatever is on the screen?

The one time I do connect the TV to the internet is when there’s a firmware update that fixes an issue I’m encountering. That’s rare though.

I still have it on my network so I can control it using Home Assistant (eg have a backlight come on and dim the main lights when the TV is turned on) but it’s on an isolated VLAN.

This is why my TV is on a separate VLAN (with no internet access) and I use an Nvidia Shield for streaming. I haven’t seen any indication that the Shield does anything like this.

I was going to say “that article mostly just seems to debunk the ‘my phone is always listening to me’ conspiracy theory” but then I got to the part about over 50% of analyzed Android apps having permission to take screenshots :/

is free

What is their business model?

Even if they don’t release the data publicly, they’ll likely continue selling it on the black market even if they get the ransom payment. You really can’t expect criminals to be truthful if they have a chance to make even more money.

Never pay a ransom. The entire reason ransomware works is because people/companies pay the ransom. If nobody paid the ransom, ransomware wouldn’t be anywhere near as common as it is now.

It’s the same thing with scalpers of event tickets, GPUs, etc. If people stopped buying scalped stuff, the scalpers wouldn’t have a market and there’d be far fewer of them.

Thanks for the reply!

preliminary NOVA driver code merged for the future Rust-written open-source NVIDIA kernel driver.

Is this based on the existing open-source driver (https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules) or will it be entirely new?

Is this why Business Insider articles are trash? They have so many clickbait headlines (including Buzzfeed-style ones like “we tried five things. You won’t believe which one was the best”) attached to articles that aren’t worth reading. Whenever I click one in Google News, I usually regret increasing their view count.

Web is a bit easier than native since the browsers handle all the platform-specific details across all common platforms, and you mostly just have to follow some guidelines that aren’t overly technical or arcane. Some examples:

• Use ARIA roles where appropriate
• Ensure sufficient contrast between text and background colours. Should at least meet the WCAG level AA which is a 4.5:1 contrast ratio, but ideally meet AAA which is a 7:1 ratio for body text and a 4.5:1 ratio for headings.
• Ensure you use <label> tags to label for all your <input>s, alt attributes on all images, title attributes where appropriate (e.g. on <table>s to describe the data contained inside the table), etc.

If you use Firefox, its developer tools have an “Accessibility” tab that can audit for common issues - things like missing labels on checkboxes and radio buttons, colours that don’t meet WCAG contrast ratio requirements, etc.

It’s a good time to learn more about building accessible sites and apps given it’s becoming a legal requirement in some jurisdictions. For example, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) goes into effect later this year, and it mandates that sites and mobile apps for various industries (like ecommerce, airlines and other transport, media streaming, social media, banks, and some others) meet accessibility guidelines.

I’m on an all Linux machine and the only accessibility software I know of is Orca and it’s so and so last time I tried it.

It’s probably worth spinning up a Windows VM to test in NVDA. It’s one of the most popular screen readers and probably the most popular open-source one, but only works on Windows since it deeply hooks into the Microsoft Speech API, accessibility APIs, and and other Windows APIs.

This is a really well written article. It’s unfortunate that this person has to deal with all these issues.

I suspect the reason that both MATE and the Debian installer have good accessibility support is because their codebases are quite old. In general, it seems like older software is more likely to have better accessibility support than newer software.

Accessibility should be something that’s built into software from the very beginning, but I totally understand that not all developers have time for it or properly understand it. It’s unfortunate.

Edit: I forgot to mention that accessibility is going to be mandated for some types of sites and apps in the EU thanks to the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into effect later this year, which should help somewhat. Won’t really help with Linux itself though.

It turns out that burning carcinogens in your living area isn’t the greatest idea. Who would have thought??

Gas is expensive in California too though.

I installed solar panels on my house. Given how expensive electricity is in California, I estimated it’d only take me around 5-6 years to break even, and that number keeps going down as they increase electricity prices higher and higher. Electricity prices doubled from 2022 to 2024.

Electricity is significantly cheaper in areas that have municipal electricity, ran by the city itself. In PG&E’s area, it’s 62 cents per kWh during summer peak. On the other hand, I used to live in Palo Alto where electricity is around 18 cents per kWh, flat rate (no peak and off-peak rates).

Same with industrial automation. There’s some robotic arms, assembly lines, etc in use today that still use PCs with ISA slots - the predecessor to PCI, which was the predecessor to PCIe. Old 16-bit bus with a max speed of around 5Mbps. That’s why you’ll occasionally see newish “industrial” motherboards that have ISA slots and parallel ports.

They also often have a lot of the hardware in stock and ready to deploy, to handle replacements.

A project I worked on at university (way back in 2010) was for one of the largest providers of air traffic control systems. Our project was interesting - overlaying eye tracking data from Tobii eye trackers they provided (thousands of dollars each at the time) on top of screen recordings taken via VNC, to aid in training of air traffic controllers.

It was even more interesting to learn about some of their processes, though. Whenever they built an ATC computer system for a client, they’d build one or two spares at the same time, with exactly identical hardware. They did this for two reasons:

1. If the hardware breaks down, they can supply a new system that exactly matches the hardware that was verified.
2. If a client has an issue with their system, they can try and replicate the issue on a clone of that client’s system.

We got to see a storage room with a large number of these systems. Lots of different PCs anywhere from a month to maybe 15 years old. :)