For any change, AI or no, why would you take out part of your existing company before confirming that the new thing works for the new role?

Undocumented cellular radios also found in Chinese batteries

Ugh. This is going to become an increasing problem with electronic devices. It’s too damn easy to link systems to the Internet now without users knowing about it.

You can. You can get evaporative coolers (in the US, sometimes called swamp coolers). I have one. They use much less power per unit of cooling than air conditioners, but come with some drawbacks:

• You can only cool so far (well, you can build multi-stage systems to cool further, but then power efficiency drops off). Air conditioners don’t have such a limitation — throw more power at them, and they’ll make air colder.

• You must have low humidity, so that the water can evaporate. At 100% relative humidity, they’re totally inoperative. Air conditioners don’t have this requirement.

• If using them indoors, you have to ventilate to the outside, usually by keeping some windows open, or you’ll just drive humidity up to the Max and then they’ll stop functioning. This does have the benefit of keeping air fresh, having a high turnover, but caps how cool they can make a structure. Air conditions don’t require this.

• More maintenance. You occasionally need to replace the membrane and put something in the water to kill algae, same as a swimming pool. Don’t do that, and algae will build up and it’ll get a dank smell. Air conditioners just require cleaning or replacing an air filter occasionally, and if you don’t do that, just become less efficient.

• An evaporative cooler requires a water feed and for forced air, power. Air conditioners only require power.

• They will exacerbate any humidity problems, like mold.

There are also some benefits:

• For direct systems (the simplest and cheapest), where the humidified air blows at you, you get the benefits of a humidifier, like not getting chapped lips or becoming dehydrated easily. In arid and semi-arid environments where evaporative coolers work well, this is pleasant.

• You can reasonably use them outdoors and in non-sealed environments like a garage. Air conditioners would be really inefficient for this.

• You can easily throw essential oils in the water to get a scent diffuser.

• They actually cool the air, rather then just dumping the heat somewhere else, as air conditioners do (which in cities, heats up the area around buildings).

I understand that there are also some hybrid “evaporative-assisted” air conditioners that have the air conditioner dumping heat into what amounts to an evaporative cooler. That’d get some of the efficiency benefits of an evaporative cooler without the humidity constraints.

You can find them in the hot, arid American West, where the conditions work well for them.

https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/evaporative-coolers-work-best-dry-areas-us-area-a

I dunno, but it looks like they’ve been selling it on Steam for years, so I assume that Valve is fine with them.

EDIT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mesa_(video_game)

Black Mesa is a 2020 first-person shooter video game developed and published by Crowbar Collective. It is a fan-made remake of Half-Life (1998) made in the Source game engine. Originally published as a free mod in September 2012, Black Mesa was approved for commercial release by Valve, the developers of Half-Life. The first commercial version was published as an early-access release in May 2015, followed by a full release in March 2020, for Windows and Linux.

Yeah, came to some sort of arrangement.

but as I said it’s all browser 2D animations

Right, but there are different ways that it could display it.

I don’t do much Web dev, but looking at that page in Firefox’s Inspector, it looks like a canvas element is covering the whole thing, so I expect that it’s using HTML5 Canvas.

Just visually, without benchmarking, it seems smooth to me on Firefox 128.10.0esr at 2560x1440 at 165 Hz (AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, 7950X3D CPU).

considers

When I go to about:support in Firefox, “ACCELERATED_CANVAS2D” is listed as" default" and “available”, which from some skimming online, seems to indicate whether hardware acceleration is available for HTML Canvas. Do you see the same?

EDIT: Based on:

https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/dlknks/why_is_firefoxs_gpuhardware_acceleration_still/

It sounds like WebRender is disabled by default on Firefox on Linux. Some user there is saying that it works fine for him if he switches it on. It sounds like it relates to some sort of 2D hardware acceleration, though I’ve no prior experience with it.

For me, if I go to about:config in Firefox, gfx.webrender.all is false. It’s smooth here with it false, but maybe I’m just throwing a lot of hardware at the thing. I haven’t read deeply into it, but it might be worth toggling it and reopening Firefox and seeing if the problem disappears for you, as I doubt that it’d cause much harm if it doesn’t work (well, I guess it might crash Firefox or something…) Might also do nothing, as it sounds like all platforms have been using it for some time, and so maybe it’s active regardless of whether this setting is on. <shrugs>

Do you have a test case game and resolution that you’re running it at? I mean, it’s kind of hard to say much or do comparisons without any idea of what the thing is using. HTML5 Canvas?

You could definitely sell those for more than $0. The batteries alone aren’t cheap.

AI voice synth is pretty solidly-useful in comparison to, say, video generation from scratch. I think that there are good uses for voice synth — e.g. filling in for an aging actor/actress who can’t do a voice any more, video game mods, procedurally-generated speech, etc — but audiobooks don’t really play to those strengths. I’m a little skeptical that in 2025, it’s at the point where it’s a good drop-in replacement for audiobooks. What I’ve heard still doesn’t have emphasis on par with a human.

I don’t know what it costs to have a human read an audiobook, but I can’t imagine that it’s that expensive; I doubt that there’s all that much editing involved.

kagis

https://www.reddit.com/r/litrpg/comments/1426xav/whats_the_average_narrator_cost/

So I produced my own audiobooks for my Nova Roma series so I know the exact numbers for you:

$250 per finished hour for the narrator. Books ranged from about 200k words-270k words, which came out to 22 hours, 20 hours, and 25 hours.

So books 1-3 cost me $5,500, $5,000, and $6,250. I’m contracted for two more books with my narrator, so I expect to spend another 5k-6k for each of those.

So for a five book series, each one 200k+ words, the total cost out of pocket for me will be about $27,000 give or take to make the series into audiobooks.

That’s actually lower than I expected. Like, if a book sells at any kind of volume, it can’t be that hard to make that back.

EDIT: I can believe that it’s possible to build a speech synth system that does do better, mind — I certainly don’t think that there are any fundamental limitations on this. It’d guess that there’s also room for human-assisted stuff, where you have some system that annotates the text with emphasis markers, and the annotated text gets fed into a speech synth engine trained to convert annotated text to voice. There, someone listens to the output and just tweaks the annotated text where the annotation system doesn’t get it quite right. But I don’t think that we’re really there today yet.

The article says that they outperformed expectations, and that they’d decided that they didn’t need some layers of management. I don’t think that that’s intrinsically crazy; there are tech companies that have emphasized having a relatively flat structure, like Google.

https://www.cfholbert.com/blog/bigfoot-sightings/

Based on this graph of sightings over time, he’s spending less time in the Pacific Northwest and increasing time in Florida.

https://www.core-wm.com/2024/07/02/navigating-floridas-unique-tax-environment-for-high-net-worth-individuals/

Florida has long been a magnet for high-net-worth individuals, thanks in large part to its favorable tax climate.

Florida’s most attractive tax feature is the absence of a state income tax. This applies to both earned income and income from investments, making it particularly appealing for high-income earners and retirees alike.

Florida does not impose estate or inheritance taxes, providing a substantial advantage for wealth preservation and transfer.

I figure he’s probably using legal methods to shelter assets from taxes, rather than trying to illegally evade 'em.

Goes to whatever the top result is without an extra click.

Initially, stores tried to manage demand by blocking tax-free purchases, hoping to discourage tourists, mainly from China, from buying cards.

For many, it still makes financial sense to fly to Japan, pick up a 5090, and either resell it or use it for.

Chinese board partners have long been suspected of selling GPUs directly to cryptocurrency miners, bypassing the consumer market entirely. Now, with the AI boom, these companies are shifting even more stock to AI server manufacturers, who are willing to pay a premium. That leaves even fewer GPUs available for regular gamers, making GPU-buying tourism a surprisingly viable option.

It does kind of illustrate how hard it is to restrict the flow of goods.

Imagine a World without Russia. No Arson Attacks

Well, fewer arson attacks. Russia’s only responsible for some of them.

but I also like the 108 keyboards and not the small ones (daddy needs his numpad).

Man, I was glad to drop my numpad. That forces my mouse further off to the right and causes my keyboard not to be centered with my monitor.

I do have a very few prices of software that use it, and I didn’t want to give those up.

What I wound up doing was to get a separate, dedicated numpad for the very few pieces of software that I use that require it. Basically, I care about a handful of older roguelike games. I can put it in front of myself just for those rare occasions.

The numpad was a standby for people who did serious numeric data entry work and spent time to train themselves on the thing. Like, plonking data from paper into a computer. But that isn’t a field that most people need to deal with these days — most data can already be gotten in computer-readable form.

I do type numbers on some occasions — I write software and do use some statistical software — but it’s invariably mixed with other data, and the time cost of switching between the home row and the numpad is the dominant cost there.

The fact that a high proportion of PC users today use a laptop, and many of those have no numpad, creates a lot of pressure on software not to rely on it as well.

I could maybe see a left-handed person who uses a mouse with their left hand not caring as much, since the mouse isn’t a factor.

I mean, you hear about the people who do something. You don’t hear about the ones who don’t.

EDIT: Also, hermit crab smuggling and the CIA? What?

This gift is more for his dad than him

I’d get him something aimed at three-year-olds, and just get his dad a puzzle box:

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

https://kubiyagames.com/collections/puzzle-boxes

Ahh, you’re right, thanks. I’d tried creating another account, and just assumed that deleting the active one would work and then switch me to another extant account. Doesn’t display a message or anything, just doesn’t let you do the deletion.

But if you switch first, it does work.

It looks to me like it supports multiple. In fact, it has a default to anonymous kbin.earth setting that I don’t think that you can remove even if you add accounts on other instances.

Yeah, I needed to do that to get it installed, trying it out right now.

It feels more-responsive then Eternity, and the dev appears to be more active, but I did notice that it doesn’t appear to yet support monospaced blockquotes — just colorizes them differently at the moment. Probably some other stuff. Definitely usable, though.

EDIT: Note that I’ve only used it on a lemmy instance, not mbin or piefed, so I can’t speak as to the support there.

Apparently so.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/woman-who-got-trump-tattoo-on-forehead-now-wants-to-erase-it-asks-strangers-for-help-removing-controversial-ink-101725499788568.html