menybuvico (u/menybuvico)

menybuvico commented on 120k-year-old footprints offer early evidence for humans in Arabia sciencemag.org/news/2020/... · Posted by u/diodorus

Quarrel · 5 years ago

Very cool.

This tracks pretty well with the earliest times talked about now for people in Australia. Somewhere in that ballpark people needed to be walking out of Africa so they could end up in Australia.

menybuvico · 5 years ago

Yep. There most likely were multiple waves of emigration from Africa. It's just that the most recent one is the one that made the largest impression in the gene pool.

menybuvico commented on Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB github.com/raspberrypi/rp... · Posted by u/ethanpil

systemvoltage · 5 years ago

Not a fan of Raspberry Pi. It hides behind proprietary Broadcom chip, no DSI/MIPI support and you're at the mercy of Raspberry PI for any sort of commercial implementation (RPi Zero and independent module). They do guarantee upto 2026 availability for their DIMM modules which is nice. We wanted to build commercial device using RPi but its a no go due to its blackbox nature.

What they should do is to leverage their position in the market and convince Broadcom to open source the bootloader and drivers. There are a bunch of binary blobs from Broadcom that are a mystery as to what they do. No docs, no anything. HAL layer is completely at the mercy of Raspbery Pi.

Raspberry Pi is an ecosystem which is based on proprietary technologies and masquerading as an open source friendly thing.

If you want to support proper open source development (I understand, at some point things get proprietary the closer you get to the hardware, but with RPi, there isn't even a datasheet for the processor that you can get your hands on), buy Beagle board and other alternatives.

menybuvico · 5 years ago

It's made for tinkering and learning. It's used for a lot more due to it being so easily replaceable.

After all, I don't care if there are binary blobs from a trusted vendor for the device playing retro video games -- the TV is bound to have more spyware anyway...

menybuvico commented on Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB github.com/raspberrypi/rp... · Posted by u/ethanpil

bane · 5 years ago

Does anybody know of something that will serve up tracker and game music files (e.g. .mod, .xm, .it, and .spc, .nsf, etc.)? I'd really love to be able to use one of my Pis as a compact music server with a web interface that will on-the-fly transcode and stream these old formats. I have literally tens of thousands of these sorts of files and outside of converting them all to TBs of mp3s wouldn't mind at all to serve these up from their smaller original formats.

menybuvico · 5 years ago

MOC will play mods as well as other audio, and since it can be controlled over the console, you can probably hook it up to a web page too, if you're prepared to tinker with it.

menybuvico commented on How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web more energy efficient? cmhb.de/web-design-and-ca... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

crazygringo · 5 years ago

Exactly. This is a perfect example of missing the forest for the trees.

All of us only have a finite amount of time/attention we can spend on things like the environment. It we truly care, then it's our obligation to spend that time on the changes that have the biggest impact.

Let's discuss energy usage of the web once it makes its way into the top 100 areas of potential impactful improvement. Until then, let's put our effort into pressuring our politicians into enacting meaningful change where it matters.

menybuvico · 5 years ago

The one thing that could be done is to keep bloat to a minimum. It makes the web faster and less energy use is merely a bonus.

menybuvico commented on DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian joh.cam.ac.uk/worlds-larg... · Posted by u/gmays

throrthaway · 5 years ago

If people freak out that the Vikings weren't pure-bred Scandinavians, wait until they learn about the identical ancestor point [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point

menybuvico · 5 years ago

People from the Nordics had trade relations with Southern Europe and Asia all the way back in the bronze age. Alas, records are vague at best, but there's definitely reason to believe there was an influx of people and ideas from the Black Sea area before and during the migration period, just a few hundred years before the viking raids and Norse settlements all over Europe.

And as if that wasn't enough, the Norse were quite infamous for taking captured women as wives and they also took slaves from the peoples they raided. Those people didn't just dissapear from the gene record.

menybuvico commented on Red Dead Redemption 2 DRM still has not been cracked (316 days) crackwatch.com/game/red-d... · Posted by u/tetris11

p1necone · 5 years ago

This is just one piece of anecdata, but I'm perfectly capable of pirating games yet haven't in years. I buy everything on steam or gog because it's so convenient. The last time I pirated any video games was suprise surprise when I wasn't making enough income to buy them.

TV series on the other hand I still pirate to this day (if they aren't on the couple of streaming services I sub to), because buying them is way too complicated (even impossible with a large portion of shows that aren't current, and a fair number of current shows too).

Movies are a mixed bag - grabbing cheap dvds or blu rays of pretty much anything is easy online so I usually do that, but I imagine if I preferred digital media or watched enough movies for my physical collection to be unwieldy I'd resort to piracy because buying digital copies of movies is just as complicated as TV.

Give me "Steam for Movies and TV" or a streaming service that aggregates licenses from everyone, and doesn't only host the content that they think will be most popular and I'll probably stop pirating those too.

menybuvico · 5 years ago

Adding my voice to this argument: Xbox live stopped my pirating simply by providing a more easily accessible alternative and with prices that are competitive enough for me to prefer to pay for games rather than getting through the hassle of pirating.

This included RDR2. Totally worth it.

menybuvico commented on Fintech in Chains johnhcochrane.blogspot.co... · Posted by u/avoidboringppl

war1025 · 5 years ago

Off topic, but for the longest time I thought "Fintech" referred to tech companies based in Finland or Scandinavia more broadly.

Those have a word, don't they?

menybuvico · 5 years ago

"Finntech"

menybuvico commented on Signs of Life discovered on Venus and atmosphere twitter.com/brianroemmele... · Posted by u/mromanuk

pvaldes · 5 years ago

(Ok. Can somebody explain what is all this fuss about filters?)

menybuvico · 5 years ago

Life, as we know it, only exists in one single known location in the Universe: Earth.

If we assume life is abundant in the Universe, then we should be able to pick up signs of others, such as radio signals, or bio-indicators in other planets' atmospheres, and so, we ask where the aliens are.

Since we don't find any, we then assume that there is something preventing this abundance of life from developing into something we can detect, and something's called the Great Filter.

As of yet, we only have a single point of data, and since we're still here there's some speculation that we've allready passed through the filter. Another data point would mess up the math a bit and we could, statistically speaking, end up with a scenario meaning we still haven't passed the filter, and that we might still have an apocalyptic event wiping us out.

Life on Venus would give us a better idea of what to look for in other places, and that might help us narrow down the search a bit and find other places with life.

Intelligent life is a different matter. We don't know how common it is for

1) a planet to have formed around a star with the right composition of materials 2) have the exact right conditions for life to form early 3) for that life to survive for billions of years while 4) building up large reserves of substances that can 5) be used as fuel by a tool using bunch of talking apes 6) propel their civilization's technology far enough to match ours 7) send a signal that can reach our specific little dot 8) for that signal to be reach us during the miniscule time-frame that we've been able to pick it up.

I mean, what if the glory days of the Milky Way was 500 million years ago and we're developed just a little to late to be able to see the last remnants of galactic civilization crumble to dust? What if we just happen to be the first, and we develop past such technology before anyone else develops it?

menybuvico commented on Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation bbc.com/news/business-541... · Posted by u/kristianpaul

HeWhoLurksLate · 5 years ago

I'm sure that some wouldn't mind other's cultural suicide, however.

menybuvico · 5 years ago

Definitely not. There's probably no shortage of people promiting their own culture's demise either.

menybuvico commented on Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation bbc.com/news/business-541... · Posted by u/kristianpaul

0xfaded · 5 years ago

I disagree, I live in Denmark where the majority speaks very good English. There's no shortage of Danish media.

On the other hand, economic suicide is assured by insisting on a high standard of living while doing everything possible to prevent innovation.

menybuvico · 5 years ago

As a Swedish-speaking Finn, I can confirm that a culture can end up on the decline even if there's powerful legal backing to preserving it (including forcing the remaining ~90% of the population to learning Swedish in school). Incidentally, I'd say there's a large correlation with English being more and more accepted in Finnish society, but I suspect the actual root cause simply is that cultural production is mainly taking place in the first language (Finnish) and that it leaves less for the others.

The same would happen if you managed to get the entire EU to agree to switch to one single language (remember, it's likely that it would be French or German instead of English). As a result of pushing adoption of the new first language, it would mean increased cultural output in that language, and a reduced output for the others. After a while, the differences will start showing.

I've lived in Denmark for quite a few years and I agree that people in Copenhagen and the other larger cities wouldn't notice that much of a difference to begin with, but remember that this would mean a cultural shift that will take multiple generations. Ask the German speakers in southern Jutland in another 24 years, and compare how their culture thrives compared to how they did before the war and you will probably have a pretty decent view on how the situation would be for many, many of EU's minorities 100 years after the switch to a single European first language.