Technology

The goal of this paper: This paper was written to help people understand current wifi technology, so that YOU can make an educated 'router' upgrade decision -- because there is WAY too much hype out there (especially about wifi speeds) -- and router manufacturers' are directly to blame.

This site is a great resource if you want to understand WiFi and make informed decisions on which WiFi router to buy. It is very old school presentation, but wowsers the detail.

via Snuupy at Hacker News

From the article: OLED and MicroLED are the future

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/628792

From the article:

"Beehaw is relatively new and relatively small at the moment, but it's one of the closest approximations of what Reddit is that you're going to find, and well worth investigating as a Reddit replacement. The interface even looks a lot like Reddit, albeit without a lot of the on-screen features and furniture that build up over almost two decades of operation.

Have a read of the Beehaw mission statement and you'll see the platform is committed to avoiding the "hate speech" and "disinformation" that's prevalent elsewhere. The communities available right now cover everything from neurodivergence and people of color to literature and gardening, so you're sure to find something of interest here."

tl;dr:

FCC chair to investigate exactly how much everyone hates data caps ISPs clearly have technical ability to offer unlimited data, chair's office says.

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel wants the FCC to open a formal inquiry into how data caps harm Internet users and why broadband providers still impose the caps.

The inquiry could eventually lead to the FCC regulating how Internet service providers such as Comcast impose limits on data usage.

"As we emerge from the pandemic, there are many lessons to learn about what worked and what didn't work, especially around what it takes to keep us all connected. When we need access to the Internet, we aren't thinking about how much data it takes to complete a task, we just know it needs to get done. It's time the FCC take a fresh look at how data caps impact consumers and competition."

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/127188

Have you ever heard of “net metering”?

It means that if your electric company gives you net metering, you can connect a generator or solar panels to your house and sell excess electricity back to the utility at the same price that they bill you for.

Sounds great right?

No, actually its a major problem for the utility.

The reason is that power plants take a significant amount of time to throttle up or down. If everyone in the area has solar power feeding back into the power grid, sudden changes in sunlight can cause major fluctuations and destabilize the power grid.

So what is the solution?

Dynamic pricing. Some areas already do this. How it works is that the price you pay (or receive) for electricity depends on the conditions on the power grid at the moment, updating as fast as possible.

When the grid has a deficit of power at the moment (maybe a power plant is struggling to throttle up to meet demand) the price goes way up.

If the grid has a surplus power at the moment, the price goes down, even going negative.(meaning you must pay to dump your power into the grid, or be paid for consuming excess power)

What this does is create an economic incentive for people to invest in equipment that actually stabilizes and supports the power grid.

For example if you have an electric car charging in your garage, it knows the price of power, and it can start charging faster when the price drops, or it can dump its battery power back into the grid when the price is high. The battery in your car is actually earning money as it sits idle!

Same with solar panels. Even if the installation doesn’t have batteries, the system can choose to stop selling power to the grid when it isn’t wanted.

Likewise, your heated pool can choose to absorb electricity when the price is low.

This is the future of the renewable energy economy in my opinion.

Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.

The writing is on the wall. Those who are staying on Reddit despite everything u/spez said recently are literally asking to be shit on and will fully deserve it.

EDIT: Maybe a false alert after all, my thread is now visible to all. Still weird that it stayed "deleted" for hours though.

I believe Reddit is now automatically deleting threads about Lemmy (or containing links to Lemmy instances)? A thread I made on r/Save3rdPartyApps got deleted with no explanation within seconds of me creating it and I don't believe it's the sub's mods who did that.

(However, I can see it while logged in. So it's a kind of shadow-deletion)

Can anyone confirm whether referencing Lemmy and/or an instance gets your thread insta-removed?

he seems really on defensive

I switched away from Twitter for all the problems since Musk took over and there is no end in sight as their revenues continue to crumble, moderation and infrastructure breaks down and so on.

Mastodon feels very mature on the provided functionality level, but lacks in many areas.

When to expect a proper inclusion of algorithms? For example I like some accounts, but they flood my timeline into unusability due to high post frequency.

I was trying to search for more news with the #reddit hashtag and get mostly shown irrelevant gonewild posts.

I prefer the Elk UI for various reasons as it seems to be more mature. However trends, hashtags, especially clustered by countries or language is inaccessible on it and the popularities what the hot topics are never feel right, missing out on usable information.

There is a lack of focus on the like button, leaving a lot of engagement and interesting stuff on the table. I do not quite understand why reposts only function as a boost instead of a possible accompanied comment.

As Twitter has still the primary status, many official accounts of companies simply do not exist on Mastodon. Sometimes entire communities are still strongly tied to Twitter and one can only hope to catch crossposts from the birdsite on it.

But I do not see myself on Twitter anymore, because the content is overall quality wise up there and just about broad enough to feel informed about random happenings in the world.

What is your future outlook for Mastodon?

"It's time we grow up," says former moderator of jailbait subreddit.

TL;DR: LLMs are just mimicking natural language and conversation. Fact checking and healthy skepticism is not part of their model. For example they can be easily tricked into advocating conspiracy theories, like a fake moon landing. Google Bard is even stating arithmetic falsehoods like 5*6 != 30

Bionic Reading is a new way of reading text that uses a patented algorithm to highlight the most important parts of words, making it easier and faster to read. The method was developed by a German software developer named Renato Cukar, who was inspired by the way the human eye reads text.

Bionic Reading works by highlighting the most important parts of words, which helps the eye to follow the text more smoothly and efficiently. This makes it easier to read longer passages of text, and can also help to improve comprehension.

Bionic Reading is available as a free Chrome extension, as well as a mobile app for iOS and Android. It can also be used on websites and in PDFs.

See https://www.howtogeek.com/882688/why-you-should-use-bionic-reading-in-chrome-or-any-browser/

EDIT: Although some individuals claim to see improvement, it may be that results do vary as one test shows no real improvement across the board - https://blog.readwise.io/bionic-reading-results/

#technology #bionicreading #reading