Dave.

There’s a lot to be said for “http://yourISP.com/~username” being available 24/7 at no particular effort to you.

I don’t think there’s anything commercially available that can do it.

However, as an experiment, you could:

• Get a group of photos from a burst shot
• Encode them as individual frames using a modern video codec using, eg VLC.
• See what kind of file size you get with the resulting video output.
• See what artifacts are introduced when you play with encoder settings.

You could probably/eventually script this kind of operation if you have software that can automatically identify and group images.

Most times what I get when asking it coding questions is a half-baked response that has a logic error or five in it.

Once I query it about one of those errors it replies with, “You’re right, X should be Y because of (technical reason Z). Here’s the updated code that fixes it”.

It will then give me some code that does actually work, but does dumb things, like recalculating complex but static values inside a loop. When I ask if there’s any performance improvements it can do, suddenly it’s full of helpful ways to improve the code that can make it run 10 to 100 times faster and fix those issues. Apparently if I want performant code, I have to explicitly ask for it.

For some things it will offer solutions that don’t solve the issue that I raise, no matter how many different ways I phrase the issue and try and coax it towards a solution. At that point, it basically can’t, and it gets bogged down to minor alterations that don’t really achieve anything.

Sometimes when it hits that point I can say “start again, and use (this methodology)” and it will suddenly hit upon a solution that’s workable.

So basically, right now it’s good for regurgitating some statistically plausible information that can be further refined with a couple of good questions from your side.

Of course, for that to work you have to know the domain you’re working in fairly well already otherwise you’re shit out of luck.

If you’re interested in the systems behind Apollo, go find and read “Digital Apollo”.

It goes all the way through the project and describes in good detail everything, how they developed the control systems, the computer hardware, how the software was designed, how they implemented one of the first real computer systems project management, all the interactions between astronauts/test pilots who still wanted to “manually fly the lander”, the political back and forth between competing teams, the whole thing.

It’s a great read if you have a technical mindset.

They also came from a time when hard drives could draw several amps while in use and much more on spin-up. There was a good reason why SCSI drive arrays used to spin each disk up one-by-one.

Molex connectors are good for 10 amps or so, SATA connectors couldn’t have handled that amount of current.

“Have you tried formatting your PC and completely reinstalling Windows? That often fixes icon misalignment on the desktop. Please upvote if this helps you!” - every “volunteer Microsoft Support Forum” representative ever.

Me: “This binary file is merely an approximate mathematical and statistical transform of the complainant’s “Deadpool 3”, your honour. If you care to glance through a few A4 pages of the binary representation of both items, you can clearly see that there is no direct copying involved, thus, no copyright claim can be upheld.”

Result: $250k fine, two years community service in anti piracy groups.

NVIDIA: “Each copyrighted work was ingested and a statistical model was generated that leverages that information for our own profit. We have no intention of compensating copyright owners for their information.”

Result: Oh you! Get out of here, you scamp! Ruffles hair

in which case I will go one level down, to the calculateExtraCommissions() method.

In which case you will discover that the calculateExtraCommissions() function also has the same nested functions and you eventually find six subfunctions that each calculate some fraction of the extra commission, all of which could have been condensed into three lines of code in the parent function.

Following the author’s idea of clean code to the letter results in a thick and incomprehensible function soup.

The US system is broken. I have a tax file number in Australia, which is the broad equivalent of a US SSN, and you know what someone can do with it if they also have my name and DOB? Fuck-all, except file my taxes for me, because you can’t use it as an identifier anywhere else than the Australian tax office.

If I want a loan or a credit card or to open a bank account or any number of things , I need enough verifiable documents including photo ID to satisfy the other party that I am really them. Basically it’s a points system where any form of government photo ID gives you about 80 points and any other item of identifiable data gives you 10-20 points and usually you have to clear 100 points to be “identified”.

So my passport plus my driver’s licence is enough. My driver’s licence plus my non photo ID government Medicare card or my official original copy of my birth certificate is enough. My driver’s licence and two bank or credit cards is enough. About 5 or 6 things like my birth certificate, electricity bills in my name or local government rates notices and bank cards is sometimes enough, although photo ID from somewhere is usually required, or you need a statutory declaration from someone in good standing saying that you are who you say you are.

This kind of thing, while slightly more inconvenient, requires a number of physical items that can’t be easily stolen en-masse. I carry enough of them in my wallet that I can do anything I need to do, as my driver’s licence provides photo ID. People who don’t drive or have a passport can scrape together enough bits and pieces to usually get by.

So it’s time for a change. But it doesn’t have to involve technology or a huge shift in the way of doing things. It just requires a points system similar to what I describe. Whether the US can effect that change now with the millions of systems that rely on a SSN for a trivial key in a database in some small retailer somewhere, I don’t know.

Do we need a dataismanipulated community? I think we need a dataismanipulated community. 🤔

Edit: we could have challenges like, presenting a mundane dataset and saying, “display this data in a way that gives a clear advantage to this particular group even though they have no particular advantage in any obvious metric”. The most obscure way to elevate that group with provided and/or inferred data wins.

This is the hard part. Modern techniques can detect just about anything in anything, down to parts per billion or less.

So we all have measurable quantities of PFAS , radioactive materials, arsenic, plastics, endocrine disrupters and so on and so forth, but there are very few actual hard numbers as to what levels are distinctly harmful and what levels are just “something else will kill you long before this does”.

Yeah , it’s really a little strange in OPs case, I can’t really recall changing a CMOS battery in ages, like decades of computer use.

1. Replace CMOS battery.
2. Get small UPS.
3. Discover that small UPS’s fail regularly, usually with cooked batteries.
4. Add maintenance routine for UPS battery.
5. Begin to wonder if this is really worth it when the rest of the house has no power during an outage.
6. Get small generator.
7. Discover that small generators also need maintenance and exercise.
8. Decide to get a whole house battery backup a-la Tesla Powerwall topped off by solar and a dedicated generator.
9. Spend 15 years paying this off while wondering if the payback was really worth it, because you can count on one hand the number of extended power outages in that time.
10. In the end times a roving band of thugs comes around and kills you and strips your house of valuable technology, leaving your homelab setup behind and - sadly - without power. Your dream of unlimited availability has all been for nought.

Conclusion: just replace the CMOS battery on a yearly basis during planned system downtime.

There’s plenty of custom ROMs for cars from all major manufacturers, you just don’t know where to look.Google “ECU remap” or “dpf delete” for an idea. ECU remapping has been done by bold individuals ever since there were programmable ECUs, around 1985.

Apart from engine/drive line tinkering, there are also plenty of third party software that can tinker with body computers for “lifestyle” adjustments.

Is it easy and accessible? No. Because of environmental laws - and vendor lock in - you can’t generally and easily dick around with the control software in your car. But it does exist.

Directly from the nginx home page:

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, a mail proxy server, and a generic TCP/UDP proxy server, originally written by Igor Sysoev.

As an Australian I find the name Freddy quite apt then.

There is an old saying in Aus that runs along the lines of, “even Blind Freddy could see that…”, indicating that the solution is so obvious that even a blind person could see it.

Having your Freddy be Blind Freddy makes its useless answers completely expected. Maybe that was the devs internal name for it and it escaped to marketing haha.

Maybe a large fries ,and we could all have one… or even two fries each!

Your rods and cones in your eye and the nerves that transmit the information to your brain have signalling limits, they can only fire so fast and they have a time to reset. It depends on lighting and what you’re focused on as well.

Which is why film can get away with 24 frames per second because in a dark theatre and a bright screen 24 fps is enough to blur that signalling so that it looks like decent motion. Only thing cinematographers had to watch out for is large panning shots as our peripheral vision is tuned for more rapid response and we can see the juddering out of the corner of our eyes.

I could see the 60Hz flicker of crt monitors back in the day if I had a larger monitor or was working next to someone with 60Hz. Not when I was directly looking at it, but when it was in my peripheral vision. The relatively tiny jump to 72Hz made things so much nicer for me.

Yeah basically you can only signal “on-off” so many times a second in a vga cable before the ons and offs get blurry and unusable. So you can trade lower resolution for a higher frame rate as long as you keep the total number of on-offs below the limits.

You’re never going to live in a world where you’re allowed to fly without photo id amigo

Move to a different country.

Eg in Australia I can book a domestic ticket and have two interactions after that:

• x-ray/security where they scan my carry on
• boarding at the gate where they scan my pass.

No photo ID - or any ID really - needed. Now there’s enough dribs and drabs of information when I book the ticket and etc etc that they can identify me, but there’s nothing stopping someone from booking a ticket for someone else under their name.