• 0 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle
  • DVI and HDMI are actually the same video signal. Which is why adapters are so cheap.
    DP can carry an HDMI encoded signal (and thus a DVI signal), which is why DP->HDMI and DP->DVI adapters are so cheap. It’s called DP Dual Mode or Multi Mode or something like that.
    I haven’t encountered a device that outputs DisplayPort that cannot output the Dual Mode HDMI encoded signal as well.

    HDMI/DVI->DP is an active conversion - ie it is re-encoding it. Which is why the converters are significantly more expensive.

    However, it’s all digital. If the signal quality degrades, it will be very obvious because it stops working (sparkles on a black screen, lines, flashes, all sorts).



  • I will say that a good scammer will circumvent a lot of the “earning trust” stage.
    Through social engineering or just sheer luck, they will catch you at a time when your guard is down and they will manipulate a sense of urgency.

    “Hi mom, my phone fell in the toilet and I really need it for work tomorrow. I’m using a friends phone right now, all my bank access was on that phone. I’m so stressed. Can you send me $800 via (dodgy website) so I can buy a new phone and get to work”.

    Instantly hits on an emotional pressure point. Adds a huge sense of urgency, with good reasons for an untrusted number and a dodgy payment method, and makes it seem difficult to corroborate with the mom’s kid.

    “Hello, this is your real estate agent. Unfortunately there has been a complication with the purchase of your new house. Due to extra fees, $10,000 needs to be transferred to X by midnight, otherwise the banks will reject the purchase/mortgage/whatever. Sorry for the out-of-hours contacts, I’m currently in (city) on other business and not in the office”

    Another hugely stressful scenario. Massive sense of urgency with a disastrous deadline.
    People don’t buy houses every day, and may not be fully aware of the process. They might take this as an unexpected but legit part of the process.
    Obviously, this requires significant social engineering to set the scam up in the first place (knowing someone is buying a house and roughly when). But the payout can be significant.

    The biggest piece of advice I can give is:
    If someone is applying a sense of urgency on any decision: STOP.
    Take a breather, think about the scenario. And then contact “the person/company” via another way through means you research yourself.

    If it’s on the phone, ask for a case number, Google the company and phone them directly. By text or email, same thing. Find their phone number via Google.
    If it is legitimate, an extra 30m isn’t going to harm anything. Especially if you say “sorry about that, I wasn’t sure if it was a scam or not”.



  • I can tell you that big data centers likely have a 4 year hardware cycle, where it is all under warranty and service contract.
    After which, it gets sold to refurbishers who refurb it and resell it. Or the datacenter may repurpose it for labs, OOB hardware, or donate it to schools.

    A lot of smaller companies don’t need the latest and greatest, and are quite happy running old 2nd hand hardware.

    Even after they are done with it, there are plenty of hobbyists that will buy it. I have a couple 8 year old servers that run absolutely fine for what I need.

    Old servers are also kept around as parts for companies that refuse to update old hardware (and will just keep buying spares, or like-for-like replacements).
    The last step is ewaste, where the good stuff gets boiled in acid to extract the gold, or whatever they do.

    The only things that are generally destroyed during hardware cycles are the storage, and that’s normally for compliance reasons.





  • Never mind flaky internet, what about people that do events?

    Things like PowerPoint presentation machines, VJ systems, video servers (for massive multiscreen playback).
    You can’t go into a field for a festival and expect reliable internet.
    You can’t go into a theatre and expect reliable internet, especially when 3k+ people turn up.
    There are a few systems that run OSX, but Apple’s hardware doesn’t give you as much control as something like an Nvidia Quadro with sync cards. 99% of the big shows will be ran from Windows OS




  • Which is awesome.
    I actually have no idea where Blockchain tech could exist.
    A reputation could be an excellent example. But if it can be manipulated or gamed, it kinda makes it pointless.
    At which point a centralised registry makes sense.
    As long as the central registrar can be trusted.
    But I don’t think Blockchain solves that point of trust.

    So, once again, turns out Blockchain tech is pretty useless.








  • I certainly feel like the protests have gone beyond the API charges.
    They were certainly the instigator.
    However, the continued protests came around because of Reddits attitude towards the 3rd party developers, internal Reddit memos dismissing the protests, an AMA that doubled down on these disliked opinions, further interviews that lots of redditors think showed that Reddit doesn’t understand what they have/are doing (or don’t like what Reddit are doing), trying to forcefully reopen subreddits to dismiss users opinion.

    It’s a culmination of Reddit doing strange things (video streaming, chat, NFTs) that nobody really wants, in order to try and be something they are not, then finally trying to forcefully monetize their users.

    I think these further protests show that Reddit isn’t as smart as it thinks it is, and has no idea what it is doing, what its market is, what its core users are…

    They could have required 3rd party app access to require Reddit Premium, with enterprise access plans for AI companies.
    This covers everything.
    Allows the same monetisation as 1st party premium subscribers (albeit with less extra user meta data).
    Age verification for NSFW API access.
    Premium subscription could even be tiered to separate the modest users from the heavy users. And enterprise plans that can pay for the heavy data usage.


  • This is how mixr - or whatever it was called - died out.
    They bought in a couple big streamers expecting the rest to follow.
    But what makes twitch so good are the smaller communities.
    They often play niche games, have their own fantastic history, raiding each other, nice people, nice streamer interactions.

    Some streamers I know have talked about kick. Apparently they are offering a 95% split.
    I know twitch is probably extremely inefficient, but if twitch is struggling with a 50/50 split, how the fuck can kick maintain a 95/5 split? And if you move your entire community to another platform, just for that platform to die?

    YouTube is probably in the best position to rival Twitch.
    But their live stream system and discovery is severely lacking