Steve Hill 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺

https://mastodon.nexusuk.org/@steve

|🦆| Climber, windsurfer, Welsh speaker, Technical Director of Opendium (npub1ku3…qguk) |🐱| Dringwr, hwylfyrddwr, siaradwr Cymraeg, Cyfarwyddwr Technegol Opendium (npub1ku3…qguk) |🦆|

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NexusUKOrg
Blog: https://blog.nexusuk.org
Work: https://opendium.com

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Last Notes

2024-09-10 14:31:07

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"Humans don't hoover up terabytes of data and then calculate the probability of e.g. words occurring together"
Don't they? We learn natural language, which is certainly about learning which words occur together, we hoover up lots of data over the course of our lives to learn how to do stuff.
"have teams of workers endlessly curating data intake"
Parents and teachers do exactly this.

2024-09-10 13:41:02

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How do you prove that a human is "intelligent" or "concious" or has any kind of internal thought, rather than simply *appearing* to do so to an external observer?

2024-09-10 11:48:07

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I have no particular opinion on whether an AI is in any way intelligent or concious, but it always strikes me that arguments for why it can't be concious always seem to revolve around "because I understand that it works by doing X, Y and Z"... but we don't understand how humans work so how do you know that they don't also work by doing X, Y and Z?

2024-09-06 12:19:16

Utterly bonkers.
#EV #Hydrogen
https://mastodon.nexusuk.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/090/567/411/220/714/original/019271228b0a8ecd.png

2024-08-19 16:14:47

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I bet exercising those statutory protections is basically impossible though - first you'd have to convince Vinted / Ebay / whoever to release the address of the seller so that you could send them court documents... So I guess you'd first have to sue Vinted/Ebay to have the court order them to release that data (which ordinarily GDPR would prevent them from releasing)?

2024-08-19 16:08:27

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Ah, ok - so their income is entirely from the "buyer protection fee" that buyers are charged instead?

2024-08-19 15:34:16

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Actually, I've recently bought some stuff off Vinted: they present you with a price of the item, and then when you click pay it adds on a "buyer protection fee" which (as far as I know) you have to pay. So more or less the same thing - you pay an explicit fee for a dispute resolution service. I hate it - should just be covered by the seller's fees :)

2024-08-19 15:25:47

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At the end of the day, its just another cost of doing business and I don't think there's any reason to single it out other than any other cost you might not particularly agree with being required to pay. All cost increases either lead to increased bills for the customers, or a decreased profit margin for the business.

2024-08-19 15:10:34

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That said, I'm deeply suspicious of "industry funded regulators" - I mean, look at the ICO, who are utterly pointless.

2024-08-19 15:08:46

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We need *something* to keep unreasonable ISPs from being unreasonable, and it needs to have a low barrier for the customer. But I'm not sure the one-sided nature of ADR is a good idea at all. Maybe better to have an ombudsman (could be funded by the industry, but a flat fee rather than a per-claim fee that ends up being a way to threaten an ISP who has done nothing wrong).
Not limited to just ISPs, of course - all types of service providers are guilty of abusing their customers!

2024-08-19 15:00:56

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To be clear: I don't think a one sided thing like ADR is a good thing, although I have advised someone to threaten ADR when the service provider was being patently unreasonable.
(Person had FTTC on a POTS line. Terminated their POTS + internet by emailing ISP + asking BT to cease POTS. 6 months later, ISP demanded to be paid for 6 months of service because "we don't allow cancellation by email". Despite them not having provided any service since the line had been ceased...)

2024-08-19 14:50:54

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TBH I thought the whole point of ADR was to give the customer a thing to beat the service provider with, because it doesn't matter who wins or loses, the service provider still has to pay.

2024-07-03 21:53:43

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this is why I hate "everyone must vote" narratives (especially the idea of passing a law requiring everyone to vote). No - if you don't care enough to look at the policies then I don't want you to dilute the vote of those who do care.

2024-07-03 16:48:26

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Farage, like Johnson and Trump, says whatever he thinks the people listening to him want him to say.

2024-07-03 16:45:02

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There's a Radio 4 interview I heard many years ago. Someone was going on a big rant about how Labour's policies were terrible and the Tories had much better ideas, etc. At the end, the interviewer asked "so who will you vote for?" and the reply was "well, I'm from the North and I've always voted Labour, so I'll vote Labour".
And *this* is the problem with democracy - people vote for the party with their preferred party name rather than their preferred policies.

2024-07-03 16:33:09

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This is why no parties bother investing in the safe seats - enough people have unchangeably made up their minds that it doesn't matter how much money you spend convincing them to change, so why spend anything.

2024-07-03 15:57:48

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The problem with conspiracy rabbit holes is that once someone gets past a certain point, anyone who tries to convince them otherwise is "one of them" and is therefore immediately discounted as reliable.
Remember: you can't reason someone out of a position that they never reasoned themselves into in the first place.

2024-04-09 11:32:49

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suspect the current government would not defer EV VED, hopefully the next government will be saner. Don't understand why they don't apply the same banding to all diesels, regardless of their age though.
OTOH, I'm not a fan of "fixed cost" taxes like this - we drive an EV almost all the time, but also run a 20 year old diesel van, which only does about 1000 miles / year to the beach and back, but the VED is eyewatering. Replacing it wouldn't be environmentally sound.

2024-04-09 11:32:49

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2024-04-07 08:56:56

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to be clear, SIP over TCP only used TCP for signalling (which does make some sense). The media is always UDP.

2024-04-07 08:55:16

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I've said ot before, but although the PSTN is unencrypted, I don't think there are so many people in a position to remotely snoop. E.g. since we support customer firewalls, we can snoop on their phone calls using just tcpdump and wireshark, as can the ISP and every hop up to the VoIP provider (in many cases, also applies to internal calls!). None of us would be in a position to do if the customer was using ISDN to carry the calls.

2024-04-03 16:05:34

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I would presume that even trying to charge you is fraud though, since you didn't accept the T&Cs...

2024-04-03 07:22:08

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the others usually hold your package hostage, so you have to pay even though they have no right to charge

2024-03-24 19:47:20

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I'd prefer zigbee. However, my Tuya zigbee temperature sensors were bought on the recommendation of a blog article where a bunch of sensors had been tested and that one produced frequent updates and good range. So either the article was wrong, or the hardware/firmware has changed. So pretty difficult to figure out which sensors are good if the manufacturer is going to update them to be worse without notice :(

2024-03-24 19:47:20

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2024-03-24 18:52:34

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on the heating front, my office room thermostat died so I decided to try using Home Assistant to run the heating (zigbee temperature sensor and a zigbee relay to turn the boiler on/off). Pretty happy with the result - just need to find a more reliable temperature sensor because the Tuya one I have is crap (updates less frequent than I would like, occasionally stops sending updates, and seems to have poor zigbee range)

2024-03-24 18:48:41

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But, my car relies on VW's servers and a non-changable eSIM. EV charger relies on Ohme's servers and a non-changable eSIM - would love an entirely local EV charger, but I think Intelligent Octopus Go compatibility precludes that.
I have a wifi connected Bresser weather station and was disappointed to find no local API. It sends (limited) data to Weather Underground and you have to get Home Assistant to pull it from there instead of getting complete data directly from the unit.

2024-03-24 18:48:41

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2024-03-24 18:43:07

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I try to avoid IoT stuff that relies on someone running cloud services (not always successfully). Buying Zigbee instead of wifi stuff seems a good bet - a quick Google tells me whether Zigbee2MQTT supports the device, then I can guarantee it can all be handled locally with Home Assistant. Bought a DECT based baby monitor for the same reason - it's guaranteed to all be local. In many ways a wifi baby monitor would have been more useful, but so hard to know if it will be local or cloud based.

2024-03-24 18:43:07

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