makomk (u/makomk) - Readit News

makomk commented on EU Energy labelling will apply to phones and tablets from June 2025 energy-efficient-products... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

wiz21c · 10 months ago

In the shop in my town, they sell televisions. Led ones, oled ones, big screen, the usual stuff. They have about 50 models. All have energy labels C or worse. No A, no A+, no B... Once there was an A one but the picture quality was horrible.

I'm happy to be more conscious, but someone is working against the scheme: I don't have a real choice...

makomk · 10 months ago

In addition to the laws of physics and the engineering required to build TVs working against this, the EU deliberately changed the energy efficiency scale for things like TVs a few years back to specifically make an A hard to get and something that wouldn't be achieved by products currently on the market. They were probably too optimistic about future improvements too - a lot of TVs had to add special eco modes that aren't really designed to be used to meet the minimum efficiency now required by EU rules.

makomk commented on The Importance of Fact-Checking lithub.com/on-the-episode... · Posted by u/NaOH

jfengel · 10 months ago

And the story is in fact largely true. Daisey is a storyteller, not a journalist, and TAL is not a news program.

The lesson for journalists is that this isn't journalism, and the first clue is that it didn't come from a journalistic source. Listeners should have found that suspicious from the get-go... and so should Glass.

TAL screwed up. And the worst part is it fits a narrative in which NPR is a propaganda source, which is eagerly gobbled up by people who themselves are being uncritical.

makomk · 10 months ago

It's certainly not the only evidence of problems at NPR. For example, they managed to basically accuse Trump Jr of lying to Congress in a story that should not have survived basic fact checking: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/npr-issues-correction-after...

That Fox News piece actually understates how big of a screw-up this was. The key quote that supposedly showed Trump Jr claiming his dad's possible real estate deal in Russia had faded away by 2016, the one that was supposedly contradicted by Cohen's court testimony about ongoing negotiations, was in response to questioning about any possible deals other than the one Cohen was involved in - and in particular one specific potential deal with a different group of people. It's not just that it was brought up elsewhere in other answers that NPR missed. Merely looking at the immediate context of that key quote, the most basic thing we should expect of old-fashioned fact checking, should've been enough to flag the problem. The fact those other negotiations had in fact been brought up was literally the whole basis for that line of questioning.

makomk commented on Britain is building one of the world’s most expensive railways cnn.com/travel/hs2-britai... · Posted by u/peutetre

physicsguy · a year ago

The bits that have really cost have been going through the Cotswolds where local opposition has meant insane planning applications and eventually a decision to bury the lines in tunnels. It was totally unnecessary and could have gone above ground if we had a more sane planning system, something the new government has promised to at least try and change (I suspect they will fail…)

makomk · a year ago

The Chilterns, I think, and burying the line in tunnels was more or less necessary anyway. Some of the tunnels could technically probably have been replaced with cuttings, but apparently it would've cost more. The existing line used them mostly because tunneling was a lot harder back then. Mostly, the NIMBYs seem to have forced the existing tunnels to be longer than they need to be, which is expensive but not making building infrastructure in the country entirely non-viable levels of expensive.

makomk commented on Relativty: An open-source VR headset for $200 relativty.com/... · Posted by u/LorenDB

jsheard · a year ago

From the GitHub this is only capable of 3DoF tracking, which puts it in the same category as the defunct Oculus Go headset, or Google Cardboard. 6DoF is really the bare minimum to qualify as proper VR nowadays.

For the uninitiated 3DoF means the headset only tracks the rotation of your head, not your heads absolute position as you move around, while 6DoF tracking does both. 6DoF is also much harder to implement.

makomk · a year ago

Homebrew 6DoF tracking is definitely possible. I've had a janky and undocumented setup for a while that uses a standard smartphone as a display, paper and cardboard AprilTag markers with a computer and webcam for outside-in tracking, and homebuilt controllers. It requires a lot of improvement and is very sensitive to lighting conditions though.

makomk commented on In defense of the washing machine vox.com/future-perfect/37... · Posted by u/lr0

wiether · a year ago

It's funny because on the other side of the pond, Republicans have introduced the "Liberty in Laundry Act" :

> The legislation would prohibit the Secretary of Energy from prescribing or enforcing energy efficiency standards for clothes washers that are not technologically feasible and economically justified, that are likely to result in additional net costs to consumers, or that are not likely to result in a significant conservation of energy.

https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/118th-congress...

I think both proposals are silly. But you do you.

makomk · a year ago

I'm not sure it is. The EU has increasingly strict energy efficiency requirements for washing machines that are frankly stupid - they're pretty efficient already, so the way that manufacturers have improved efficiency through ludicrously long multi-hour wash cycles that keep on getting longer (there's apparently a direct relationship between the length of the wash cycle and how little energy can be used to clean clothes). The efficiency gains make washing less useful and consume more of people's limited time to the point that the cycles those numbers are based on don't really seem to be intended to be used.

makomk commented on Dockworkers at ports from Maine to Texas go on strike apnews.com/article/port-s... · Posted by u/mikeocool

lifeisstillgood · a year ago

Please stop seeing this as some “unions are hurting us all” lens - this is bigger.

The biggest and most important global economic act was during Covid worldwide governments printed trillions with a T of dollars, euros and yens which ended up in the pockets of those with wealth.

And the end result is that there is trillions more money hanging around trying to buy the same amount of goods / real estate / labour. That’s inflation and it has been mega high - I mean since 2018 UK CPI has been nearly 40% - and I have basically had a 40% pay cut

So has everyone.

And unions are doing the right thing - giving their members a fair share of the increased amount of dollars

Finally MMT suggests of course what governments should do is tax back the increased trillions but without that point of view there is just a lot of pain in the system

Edit: clarity

makomk · a year ago

That money has already gone out to people though. The reason that people's pay has bought less than before is that a large chunk of the economy was shut down and those goods and services were not produced. This means that there is simply no way for people to be able to purchase as much as they did before because it's just not there to buy in the first place. Shutting down the ports makes this worse by preventing US-based factories from getting the inputs to operate and non-US-based factories shipping their products to Americans. This is effectively making the whole country poorer in real terms as leverage to try and get a bigger share of what's left.

makomk commented on Dockworkers at ports from Maine to Texas go on strike apnews.com/article/port-s... · Posted by u/mikeocool

Epa095 · a year ago

Economy is a prime example of a field where a bit of knowledge is worse than no knowledge, and nothing is more deranged than someone who has completed Econ 101, and thinking they now understand the world.

makomk · a year ago

The basic reason this happens is that people's wages are only worth what they can buy, and in order for them to be able to buy those things they need to be produced and shipped. Sure, you could argue that this doesn't actually matter in practice because the corporations will always have enough excess profit to just pay people higher wages and employ more people to do less when the unions demand it, and that they'll have to do so rather than increasing prices, and that these cuts in profits will somehow always come out of the pockets of unsympathetic billionaires rather than ordinary workers' pension funds. That requires a lot more about the world to work out just right compared to the economics 101 version though.

makomk commented on Who is Marcellus Williams: Execution in Missouri despite evidence of innocence innocenceproject.org/who-... · Posted by u/bjourne

diogenes_atx · a year ago

As stated in the article written by the legal scholars at the Innocence Project:

> "There is no reliable evidence proving that Marcellus Williams committed the crime for which he is scheduled to be executed on Sept. 24. The State destroyed or corrupted the evidence that could conclusively prove his innocence and the available DNA and other forensic crime-scene evidence does not match him."

DNA evidence is based on proven science, and the DNA evidence that was not destroyed by the state is exculpatory.

makomk · a year ago

As far as I can tell, this isn't actually true: "the DNA evidence that was not destroyed by the state is exculpatory". The Innocence Project are being very careful with their wording here. Initially, they relied on trace DNA on the knife that didn't match the accused murderer, but that ended up being from someone in the prosecutor's office handling it after it had been processed for forensic evidence. Then they tried to argue that this showed the state had destroyed evidence which would've proved his innocence, but the courts didn't buy it because all available evidence suggests the killer's DNA was simply never on the knife. (Which isn't that surprising - DNA evidence isn't perfect and gloves exist.) The other "forensic crime scene evidence" seems to be hothingburgers like a few non-matching hairs in a house that'd had a large number of people going in and out in the recent past.

makomk commented on Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon reuters.com/world/middle-... · Posted by u/logicchains

csmpltn · a year ago

There's absolutely no reason for uninvolved, random and peaceful civilians to be carrying a classified wartime-ready pager issued by a paramilitary terrorist organization. If you were carrying the device you're either Hezbollah, or cooperating with them - which makes you a legitimate military target.

Israel has given Lebanon and Hezbollah enough ultimatums to stop the aggressions. This is what happens when diplomacy fails.

makomk · a year ago

All available evidence suggests there's nothing "classified" or "wartime ready" about these - they were your basic, cheap, totally unencrypted POCSAG/Flex pager. The same as any other pager carried by doctors and all the other people who use them - aside from the hidden explosives, of course.

makomk commented on A Time Consuming Pitfall for 32-Bit Applications on AArch64 sigma-star.at/blog/2024/0... · Posted by u/st_goliath

o11c · a year ago

It's worth noting that even on x86, -m32 isn't as complete as a real i?86 build of gcc. It's "complete enough" for the kernel and many other things, but, say, I found it very difficult to build a 32-bit program that didn't rely on SSE since the 64-bit version assumes it.

makomk · a year ago

In theory you should just be able to set -march to the lowest common denominator kind of CPU you expect your code to run on and it'll avoid relying on SSE if appropriate.