• 34 Posts
  • 640 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • I already tried to swap circuit boards in identical Seagate ide drives and not only it worked to recover the data but technically that windows 98 PC still boots today (I turn it on once a year because I have a very old SCSI film scanner that doesn’t work with newer stuff)

    You should try the experience, I used ddrescue to create an image




  • Why the fuck are they using a cloud tts on an Android device??? Can’t they use on device tts?? Seems extremely stupid for no reason

    1. It’s expensive. They are paying a fee to the third party tts provider each single time someone needs a response. They boast “no subscriptions” - that means those fees are paid only by new customer purchases. Ponzi 2.0

    2. It’s fucking expensive. Elevenlabs tts voices costs thousands of dollars per month plus $0.18 per 1000 characters. Ask the history of a monument and the verbose result that the LLM regurgitated costs them $0.15. Are they banking on the fact that most customers would just shelf the device after a day?

    3. It’s slower. Each time the device needs to reply, it needs to stream an audio file instead of a few bytes of compressed text

    4. For the more realistic voices it’s only cheaper in the short term. I get it - they don’t like the robotic free voices and licensing a good closed source one costs money. But then you don’t need to pay the “cloud” forever. Did they plan to shut down shortly after the launch? Where the money for running each user in a VM is coming out? (I saw from a YouTube video that it looked like they were using a browser automation tool in a VM)

    At this point since everything is run on the cloud (=somebody else’s computer) this could not only be a smartphone app, but a smartwatch app.

    I wonder if they will just fold and do a rug pull now blaming the hackers or fix the problem.

    Fixing the problem seems difficult for them - need to fully rewrite the app and having everything proxied through their authenticated server, increasing their expenses (and a rushed fix isn’t secure/tested). But their money comes only from new investors and new customers, and at this point I doubt that they can sell more units or scam more investors.











  • I feel maybe that’s a dovecot issue? Or a spamassassin issue?

    In my setup it seems “normal” that spam sent to aliases gets in the “catch all” instead of the mailbox of the user that has that alias. Very infuriating as I had to tune down the spam filter to block only the most obvious spam as false positives get “lost”

    Although since 3-4 months ago I didn’t receive any misdirected spam in the catch-all mailbox, so it might be that’s now it has been fixed (I’m one of those guys that run updates automatically unattended because my hobby is fixing problems when there’s a breaking feature after update)



  • so:

    • car dealers don’t want to sell EVs, you need to push them otherwise they’ll try to sell an ICE model
    • car makers have collectively decided that EV = luxury vehicle that must be sold at least for 45k
    • car makers don’t really want to make EVs - when the government they introduce a tax subsidy, they increase the price by that exact amount (VW Up for example, they decided that it could be never to sold 5k over the ICE model - when the government increased the subsidy, VW increased the price, and when the subsidy rose to 13k they discontinued the model as it would cannibalize sales of other models)
    • charge point operators just want to get the european funds to install chargers, but then they’re going to neglect any kind of maintenance, to the point that for enelx fast chargers it’s the norm to find them broken or out of service and the exception when they work as intended.
    • charge point operators also don’t really want to sell electricity, so they set a 2000% markup. Paying electricity for 1 euro per kwh it’s like paying gas at 3 euro per liter
    • charge point operators have collectively decided that in order to pay for the charge, customers must use the most user-unfriendly process as possible. Can’t just accept credit card at the POS with lower fees, no, must register on the proprietary app, search for the charger on the map that almost always requires google play services, find it, guess which of the 8 pins on the map is the right one, hope that unlocks, and so on.

    it’s almost a miracle that you can see people driving an EV in italy