Western Europe had an “advantage” in that, for whatever reason, many of their factories were rebuilt in the 1950s or later. So a lot of the tooling was closer to Japan (who ALSO weirdly had to rebuild a lot of factories in the back half of the 20th…) and China (who were more or less industrializing during that period). But all the jokes about the electrical system in (Western) European cars being a mess is “truth in television” due to having a lot of the tooling but not the expertise.

Much of it goes back to the 60s-80s when Western factories were largely outdated and realizing that East Asian factories were rapidly outpacing them and able to offer better products for MUCH cheaper. Rather than acknowledge they had become complacent and didn’t want to train their worekrs they instead focused on “made in America” bullshit and insisting that that new vacuum was no longer repairable. And… mostly that boils down to the idea that if you have vacuum tube transistors you can replace them easily whereas you can’t replace a transistor on a single chip.

But, as we have learned in the intervening decades, you can… just replace the board. And many of those evil computers in cars actually drastically increased repairability/maintainability because you can actually tune many aspects with a computer and get VERY useful data out of the sensors.

Because the reality is that you can make an SOC device that is INCREDIBLY repairable by focusing on how you do chip layout and what modules can be repaired. And you can make a multi-board setup that is immensely unrepairable by locking down parts with effectively DRM. And… there are also times where it actually does make sense to lock down/register those parts just like there are times it actually does make sense to glue the fuck out of that assembly.

But that is nuance. And nuance is for women and The Gays™. So buy American and purchase a radio that you can repair until the day you die! And then buy a new radio next year.

To be clear:

EVERYONE should have a cheap set of electronics screwdriver bits (and the ifixit kit is really nice. So are the much cheaper knockoffs from the same factories. Up to you if you care). And having basic soldering skills and knowing when you can get away with heat shrink connectors is a really useful skill. You’ll be repairing the headphones the dog ripped off your desk in no time and save yourself a lot of money.

But when you are listening to people tlak about how this cell phone needs to be repairable or how you NEED to have the DAC be a separate board so it can be removed and replaced? Same with demanding chip diagrams for that SOC in your laptop. Ask yourself: How likely is it that you will EVER do a repair like that? How often do you actually hold onto hardware? And how much do you trust the guy with a shop in the mall to not scam you on this?

I am generally a strong supporter of Right To Repair, even when it is something I, as a consumer, am never going to even consider doing. But it is also worth remembering that a lot of the “this is horrible because it is all computers” is still rooted in racism and xenophobia. And it is always worth looking at what a repair actually will cost versus buying a new one.

For example. Last year my dishwasher failed. I did some diagnostics, did some very deep cleans, and even opened it up. And I mostly narrowed it down to a failure in one of three parts. I looked up the price of those parts and… they were all most of the cost of a dishwasher on their own. And if I paid a professional to replace them, it would be well over the price of a new dishwasher. So… I could try and get lucky and replace the right one, by myself, on the first try… or I could just buy a new dishwasher during a holiday sale. And… damn I love my new dishwasher.

… This is somehow going to be a ridiculously strong argument for requiring signed deploys because users are idiots, huh?

Yeah. Believe it or not but the sex pest who actively didn’t warn his contemporaries about the impact of the honey plugin and who now advertises on kiwi farms might be kind of a piece of shit who will say anything for a buck?

And now for a word from d-brand!

Apalrd has done some great “popular computer science” videos on the various remote KVM devices that is well worth looking up. One of them specifically goes into the ridiculously sketchy methods that are used to fetch and execute unsigned code in random buckets to handle firmware updates.

But as for the mic? Honestly, if you open up a LOT of consumer devices you are going to find random microphones. Not because they are all secretly spying on you. But because they use “off the shelf” chips and boards that already have those embedded. Especially since microphones and speakers are kind of the same hardware in most cases and we ALL love a good beep.

I 100% agree the software stack shouldn’t be on there. But, as the blog post points out, there is a LOT of developmental code and packages in that image that shouldn’t be. It is likely just a case of not removing unnecessary packages from the base image.

Because… the entire point of a device like this is that you plug it in somewhere you aren’t. MAYBE JetKVM corp can hear me muttering profanity or wondering where I left that USB c splitter when I am trying to assemble it the first time. The rest of the time? It is plugged into the back of a server that I am booting up so that I can install proxmox without having to drag a monitor over. And while you can potentially get some juicy info out of that? It is not at all worth the hassle to set up fake companies and market a fake (moderately high demand in the right circles) device.

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There are still handshake issues with that.

There IS a workaround consumers can do. It involves flashing a REALLY sketchy firmware to one of the mainstream dongles. And it still isn’t true HDMI 2.1. It just gets you VRR and enough HDR that I don’t know the difference.

But probably not something a company like Valve wants to actively sell. Expect hundreds of variants on aliexpress but your country may vary as to whether that is cost effective to purchase.

De facto, no.

Yes, there are still some services where there are absolutely zero questions asked and all you need is a prepaid card that doesn’t need to be activated at all. Those are quite rare and have a very limited number of phone numbers allocated to them and pretty much are all flagged as spam/bots by every single system out there.

The next tier up are services where you technically don’t need to provide any ID to use a prepaid card… but the store you purchased it from needs your ID/credit card to activate the card when you buy it. Those ALSO tend to have the same problems with burned numbers.

What most people have as burners these days are just the same phone service as anyone else. They just pay a rebranded t-mobile at the start of the month rather than the end of the month. And those have all the same restrictions, and capabilities, as “real” phone plans.

Eh.

Robots capable of melee combat are pretty much pointless. Melee is what you resort to when someone gets too close and you can’t point your gun at them because your reflexes are too slow or you are not strong enough to overpower them pushing it out of the way. Robots will always have faster reflex times, can physically attach the gun to their bodies, and are going to be stronger than a human trying to push their arm out of the way.

This is just the cultural dance aspects of martial arts. It shows that the robot has dexterity and coordination and is capable of elaborate choreography.

This kind of robot is genuinely a good invention for the purposes of elder care (something China is going to have massive problems with because of their one child policy fundamentally breaking multiple generations). For the purpose of slaughtering those pesky non-Hans?

https://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/T-1 is a MUCH more effective design. Guns on a heavily armored weapons platform.

I had a Kobra Neo for like 4 years? And it drove me bonkers. It was somehow MORE jank than the random kit I got off aliexpress like a decade ago and I constantly had to retighten/tension everything and it somehow burned through three different nozzles.

On the one hand? Enclosures and core xy solve like 90% of the problems 3d printers have by controlling environment and minimizing stress on the parts. On the other hand? You need quality parts and construction to begin with

And if you are spending that much on a printer+multiple material system (that I will always argue home users don’t need and are just buying to subsidize it for print farms)? Check out the Qidi Q2. Even cheaper and it is telling that the vast majority of complaints about the Qidis are just “the exterior case is plastic and feels cheap”. Which is a death sentence for youtubers who can’t run a tool for a thousand hours during the one week review window but is also a hallmark of ACTUAL prosumer devices. Why use expensive aluminum for a part that has no functionality?

https://www.google.com/search?q=svg+to+dxf+command+line yields

inkscape --export-type="dxf" input.svg --export-filename=output.dxf

At which point it is just bash scripting, for loops, and printf/awk. Which… is a Thing but it is also a Thing you only have to solve once (and actually is great fodder for LLMs).

To be clear: I don’t give a fuck if someone identifies as communist. I disagree (more in the vicinity of demsoc, personally) but people have had more impractical ideologies.

The issue is that dessalines et al are very much tankies. People who will say and do whatever it takes to say that china and russia are correct because both of those countries used to identify as communist (how long either actually was is up for debate). And that tends to manifest as actively supporting the invasion of Ukraine and the state sponsored ethnic cleansing by, among other horrors, rape of (among multiple ethnic groups) the Uyghurs

Yes. I bought one of those cheap sunlu filament joiners (I think CNC Kitchen did a video on it?).

Basically, when a spool is at the point where I start caring how much filament is left on it? I put it off to the side. And two or three times a year I just listen to a podcast while I fuse all those spools (with the same material). Makes for some fun multicolor prints when one color ends and the next begins and basically means I have all the “infinite filament” benefits of a multi-filament system without costing hundreds of dollars.

I don’t do much PETG but the sunlu has a setting for it (185C).

How different are the devs? Is it just a fork where they regularly pull the upstream lemmy? Or ground up?

This account is getting pretty old and about due for a nuking and dessalines seems to be speedrunning being the tankie musk (right down to surrounding himself with bot-friends). Lemmy is still good enough software but looking for an offramp if you catch my drift.

In fairness, that is a different situation than this.

This is google basically providing a mechanism for employers and parents to pull text messages on devices on their plans. That wouldn’t impact BYOD as that is still not on their plan.

But all the management software and spyware already have those capabilities. Which… is the other aspect of this karma-bate post.

Considering I have to deal with these kinds of security concerns on the regular as part of my professional life… kind of.

But you are just switching to ad hominem because your non sequitor “gimme updoots” response to a thread title is nonsense and you can’t admit that. So… I strongly encourage you to wipe your work phone and install graphene with an isolated partition for google/work android and see what happens.

Ah. So graphene DOES have a system where it takes your entire existing OS, shrinks all the partitions on disk, installs itself around that, AND prevents the monitoring software from reporting that your 512 GB device is now actually a 128 GB one?

Well color me surprised.

Or, you know, more likely you end up wiping the existing OS by effectively factory resetting it. And then you ping the management software server saying “I need to reinstall your spyware” which triggers a flag that IT may or may not care about. Similarly, said spyware now wonders why your phone’s storage shrunk so massively and raises another flag.

Yeah… having to reprovision a phone because it just got reformatted is going to raise a red flag. And if you are installing a rogue OS on your work phone to prevent your employer from seeing what you are doing… I actually side with them when they fire your ass.

Your nonsense makes sense if it is a personal device that you are using for work purposes. Which… I strongly oppose for a range of reasons. If your work wants you “on call” then they can provide a device. Otherwise you can never be off call.

And legit creditors just need your SSN, address, and maybe an old address. They run a credit check (hence why you freeze that shit) and then you are driving away in your 4k a month pickup truck.

And less legit creditors… don’t ask too many questions other than where you live and where your loved ones love.

But hey. Feel free to throw a hissy fit rather than think through why that plastic card actually doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as you thought it did. I mean, it would be nicer if you could actually sit and think and learn. But this is the 2020s. Ain’t nobody doing introspection.