addy34 (u/addy34) - Readit News

addy34 commented on KDE onboarding is good now rabbitictranslator.com/kd... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

sho_hn · a month ago

(Plasma dev here.) I don't think it's something the user is "doing". A crash is never the user's fault.

I will say it's atypical though. We measure session uptimes in months. There is probably a very specific cause that can be addressed or mitigated.

addy34 · a month ago

I'm guessing this doesn't capture manual restarts? I have the same experience as the commenter below: Plasma requires a restart a few times per day for me, as the panels disappear and one monitor's (of two) desktop goes black - usually after wake from sleep. This occurs on both machines that I run it on (only common component is Radeon graphics).

That said, it's a single command and not a big deal, and it's a great DE, so thanks for your work.

addy34 commented on Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board cnbc.com/2025/11/19/larry... · Posted by u/koolba

etc-hosts · 3 months ago

A nice list of Summers' many crimes from over 10 years ago:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/why-larry-summers-sh...

addy34 · 3 months ago

Let's not forget this gem in a memo from Summers:

>Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons...

...I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that...

...I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo

addy34 commented on Create personal illustrated storybooks in the Gemini app blog.google/products/gemi... · Posted by u/xnx

addy34 · 6 months ago

>Try it today in the Gemini app. Available globally on desktop and mobile

Not quite. Gemini isn't available in Hong Kong. Unfortunately instead of telling Pixel users that, they updated their phones to use Gemini instead of the functional assistant, and then whenever the assistant is accessed, it just spins forever with a "just a moment" prompt.

It's not even clear why it's disabled, since it works just fine if you pay them for workspace subscription.

addy34 commented on Solitaire localthunk.com/blog/solit... · Posted by u/goles

bbkane · a year ago

I love Solitaire - it's such a nice way to kill a few minutes while waiting for something else.

Unfortunately, many solitaire phone apps are filled with ads, slow, or have clunky controls.

A few years ago, however, I found https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.tobiasbielefeld.solitaire... . Its free and open source, and quite fast with nice shortcuts to move the cards.

I love this app and have played multiple Klondike/Spider Solitaire games a day using it. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you want a simple game of Solitaire in the same spirit as the post.

addy34 · a year ago

I wrote a cat-themed web version a little while ago for fun.

It's not overly configurable, but there are zero ads, trackers etc. and it's very lightweight with hopefully no (significant) bugs.

https://www.solitairecat.com/

addy34 commented on Australia proposes ban on social media for those under 16 reuters.com/technology/cy... · Posted by u/robbiet480

AlexeyBrin · a year ago

I wonder how can you implement such a law without forcing people to identify online ? Will they enforce a digital ID that you need to use to access the web or social media ?

addy34 · a year ago

The government currently tendering for providers of different systems. See here [1] and here [2]:

Tender documents released on Monday show the technical trial is slated to begin “on or around 28 October”, with the provider also expected to assess the “effectiveness, maturity, and readiness” of technologies in Australia.

Biometric age estimation, email verification processes, account confirmation processes, device or operating-level interventions are among the technologies that will be assessed for social media (13-16 years age band).

In the context of age-restricted online content (18 years or over), the Communication department has asked that double-blind tokenised attribution exchange models, as per the age verification roadmap, and hard identifiers such as credit cards be considered.

[1] https://www.innovationaus.com/govt-readies-age-verification-...

[2] https://www.biometricupdate.com/202409/australia-launches-te...

addy34 commented on Defibrillation devices save lives using 1k times less electricity phys.org/news/2024-11-def... · Posted by u/wglb

addy34 · a year ago

Less than low energy antitachycardia pacing (LEAP), which is itself a lower-energy alternative to the typical 1-shock defibrillation. Their "1000 times less" means three orders of magnitude. From the abstract of the paper:

We find that, rather counter-intuitively, a single, properly timed, biphasic pulse can be more effective in defibrillating the tissue than low energy antitachycardia pacing (LEAP), which employs a sequence of such pulses, succeeding where the latter approach fails. Furthermore, we show that, with the help of adjoint optimization, it is possible to reduce the energy required for defibrillation even further, making it three orders of magnitude lower than that required by LEAP

Important to note that the study uses:

"an electrophysiological computer model of the heart's electrical circuits "

and

"a simple two-dimensional model of cardiac tissue"

addy34 commented on Character amnesia in China globalchinapulse.net/char... · Posted by u/nabla9

defen · a year ago

Even with the misspellings it's obvious what words you meant. If someone forgets how to write "嚔" are they just missing a few strokes but it's obvious what they actually meant? Or do they have zero clue what it's supposed to look like?

addy34 · a year ago

It depends, but it's not uncommon to completely forget the entire character. If you sort of remember it, then the muscle memory in your hands often helps to finish the character correctly once you start, at least that's what I've found and heard from others.

addy34 commented on Character amnesia in China globalchinapulse.net/char... · Posted by u/nabla9

metacritic12 · a year ago

The sneeze example is contrived because in English, sneeze is both phonetic and a word with common occurence.

A better example might involve a common English word with a wierd, non-phonetic spelling. A word that you might imagine it forgivable for even someone who recieved an English PhD to misspell. After all Chinese is a seperate language from English and it is neccessary for it to be evaluated in its own context.

If you think this definetly couldn't happen in English, take a look again at this post -- for it contains eight outright, unambiguous, misspellings of common English words that I would not be surprised if even an English PhD from Harvard made on occassion, especially if your choice of three students were unlucky and they were having embarassingly bad days. (After all, English PhDs isn't the study of spelling, it's the study of literature).

addy34 · a year ago

It may be contrived, but it still highlights the key difference.

Even if sneeze was a word that you were taught once in school and hadn't used for 30 years, you would still likely get close to the correct spelling from the sound (sneaze, snease, sneeze), and seeing the misspelling also helps with recall and to self correct.

This is the "virtual circle" of speaking/listening -> reading -> writing -> referred to by the author, which is not possible with Chinese.

It's true that there are some weird non-phonetic English words that PhDs would likely misspell, but it's not 100% of the language and you still could at least make an attempt.

It's possible to just write Chinese in phonetic form (e.g. pinyin), which bypasses this issue, but you have a secondary problem, which is the extremely narrow range of syllables (~400 * 4/5 tones = 1600-2000), resulting in quite ambiguous text.

addy34 commented on The history of the barcode bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/belter

rvba · a year ago

The Firefox CEOs earn something like 7M dollars per year while the browser is losing market share and in my opinion one bad decision is made after another (killing extensions, not signing extensions, claiming browser is safe but then updating via some strange mechanism, investments in random projects, not maintaining the core which is the browser).

So 2x more than CEO of the QR company.

addy34 · a year ago

Sure, but noone is forcing you to use Firefox. Getting a barcode from GS1 is mandatory if you want your product to exist in the modern retail world.