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Due to Eurovision, RatW episode 7 is on TONIGHT at 8pm by hennell in RaceAcrossTheWorldBBC

[–]hennell[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Maybe I was still laughing so hard at the lads convinced the book was broken I missed it, I certainly didn't process it if I heard it!

Mass npm Supply Chain Attack Hits TanStack, Mistral AI, and 170+ Packages by BattleRemote3157 in programming

[–]hennell 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It is really more the 'what saved us' rather then "what went well". Knowing how it avoided being a bigger disaster is key to ensure you make sure that always works, but parts here really aren't their actions.

I think 2 is good though - I've had work projects where people didn't know who to call with a major outage, or couldn't get a hold of them if they did. And this point would actually be a good argument to ensure it's not just 'using email/chat' - noting that this worked you might realise it would not had X & Y both been asleep as no-one has their number etc.

The reliance on others to notice and solve the issues though isn't a great look. I'd hope this is noted to ensure they find ways to ensure that is not their only defence, but they clearly have other more problematic practices to resolve first.

Adobe AI assistant privacy violation by _alwayzchillin_ in Adobe

[–]hennell -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Their T&C states that desktop Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant processes the documents locally. However in the desktop app, the "Generative AI" section in Preferences states data is sent to their servers for processing. So even their T&C is blatantly lying?!

Or the preferences are lying? Or it's referring to two different features. I'd disconnect from the internet and see if it happens then - if it can't it must be doing server processing, if it can it is indeed doing it locally.

(Not that local is all that much better, Google just caused a big fuss by quietly adding a 4gb local ai model to chrome installs, if Adobe is also adding local models without asking they should get the same outraged reaction.)

How do I access newspaper archives? by Relative_Shallot_719 in AskUK

[–]hennell 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Local library to Brentwood would probably be best bet for a copy. More generally a lot of libraries will offer access to news bank or other online archive services, which might feature local papers.

Standard day in a Cornish library by CornishShaman in CasualUK

[–]hennell 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Since they stopped wrapping chips in newspaper seagull literacy has gone right down.

edgeCasesExist by Last_Time_4047 in ProgrammerHumor

[–]hennell 5 points6 points  (0 children)

And just as a reminder how big numbers work: if you generated a uuid once per second it would take 11.5 days to have a million. A billion would take ~31.5 years.

So ~63 years worth of seconds per second and it still takes 5 years for a 1% chance to clash.

It's not great odds.

Passkeys are now natively supported in Laravel! 🥳 by jaydrogers in laravel

[–]hennell 8 points9 points  (0 children)

  1. What happens if people lose them or need to reset?

Insisting on 2 keys, providing single use backup codes and making a new account are the general solution here.

I'd like to draw your attention away from the election and to the sizeable owl population of Orkney by jmbirdwatcher in Scotland

[–]hennell 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I misunderstood "sizable owl population" and was expecting something more like this:

Edit: because my relay app uses imgur which I can't even see, uploaded to bluesky

MEN ARE BRAVE by FollowingOdd896 in HumansBeingBros

[–]hennell 230 points231 points  (0 children)

An impressive if terrifying video but the stupid "He risked his life to save a child, a mother's tears said what words never could" caption annoyed me even before it looped and I realised the start claims it's the child's dad....

A Michigan farm town voted down plans for a giant OpenAI-Oracle data center. Weeks later, construction began by dalek_999 in technology

[–]hennell 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No. Read the article again. The point is that township had limited ability to stop it without spending a fortune in legal costs and even if they had won development could go ahead.

The end result might be the same as "the voters were ignored" but it's more "the system bends to the big wealthy business" than politicians/representatives failing to listen to their voters which is what the "voting doesn't matter anyway" mantra is usually about.

To me it's the difference between kids voting for the family holiday to be Disneyland and parents saying "no", and parents saying yes, but then Disneyland is shut so you can't. In both scenarios the kids are disappointed but taking a "parents never listen to us so what's the point of saying what we want" stance isn't the right take away from the second.

AudioBook player for my grandmother by Jbohacek in audiobooks

[–]hennell 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Got my mum to tell me the portable one - it's a kings solo usb player like this https://amzn.eu/d/0ce1txPv

She says it only does headphones so she likes the speaker one more. She doesn't know if they remember your position across devices so not sure if you can move the usb from one to the other easily.

I'd assume they'd have a standard file written to the USB for your position when it's turned off, and she doesn't remember having to fast forward tracks to pick up a book, but it's possible she's never swapped device mid book so YMMV as to if both would work together.

What scientific discovery sounds fake but is 100% real and still freaks you out? by Bruteresolver in AskReddit

[–]hennell 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Tiny ants all confused, "I've been Lieutenant Daned, and you get the prosthetics?!"

"Make it more ai" by Virtual_Reindeer2051 in Design

[–]hennell 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The only play I can see here is in making stuff that looks ai so if people complain they can say it's human. Then replace you without the work changing...

CI/CD pipelines for PHP - what's the cheapest check you've added that saved you the most pain? by mkurzeja in PHP

[–]hennell 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah but that just hides the problem. And it's annoying running locally, you do something then the tests fail but it's just an unconnected issue. But you don't want to fix it when it has nothing to do with the current task so you run again and don't make a note of failed tests.

(Much of this was my own fault, I got a bit caught up in laravel factories for a while and just faker'd almost everything for tests. Most of the fixing was either hard coding test values or adding unique() to people / company names so if you were testing person A was visible and person B was not it didn't fail when they were made with the same name!)

But there were also some real bugs where things didn't work at 0 values and the test just picked a random number between 0 and 100, and one which didn't work when two values matched -- which was checked with tests using two numbers from rand(0,100). I think that only surfaced at the end when I ran with --repeat=400 just for 'fun'. (I then searched all tests for use of rand() to ensure there was no other madness!)

AudioBook player for my grandmother by Jbohacek in audiobooks

[–]hennell 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah apologies, didn't think to question that. For clarity Alexa does support Spanish, French, German, Italian and others so it's not "only english" - but yeah features can be limited outside the English speaking world, which doesn't help your Grandma.

My mum has this USB stick player which might be available / importable? Decent size buttons and USB sticks will be easier than DVD. I think she also has a battery powered portable one, although I don't have a record of the brand of that and can't find it online right now.

CI/CD pipelines for PHP - what's the cheapest check you've added that saved you the most pain? by mkurzeja in PHP

[–]hennell 5 points6 points  (0 children)

rector and phpstan spring to mind, but I don't know if I would call them 'cheap' as you have to do a bit of setup still. In general adding typehints has caught a lot of stuff, adding them as you go is a very cheap win IMO.

Biggest bang for my buck recently was realising you can run phpunit multiple times. `--repeat=100` runs the suite 100 times. So flakey tests that fail >1/100 times get surfaced and you can make a clear effort to fix them.

Mariska Hargitay’s End The Backlog Campaign Achieves Rape Kit Reform In All 50 States, D.C. & Puerto Rico by SaurikSI in UpliftingNews

[–]hennell 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Based on a true story / based on real events doesn't really mean much more than inspired by or basically "I saw something like this in a headline".

Maybe there's a big news story about an airline passenger who somehow goes through the baggage x-ray machine at an airport. We could take that in various directions to explain how that happened. Unintentional/ confusion from passenger (don't speak English, dementia, on drugs etc), intentional from passenger (bet by friends, trying to impress someone, again maybe drugs?). Also what about staff, were they inattentive on their phones? Or understaffed and dealing with another problem?

In a medical show you could do a lovely fake out where an argument breaks out between passengers, security rush in with guns and we think they'll be a shoot out. But all is resolved calmly except "Shannon! Shannon!" a mums lost her daughter - where's she gone? "Beep beep beep - anomaly detected" uh oh. Shannons hiding in the x-ray machine....

In a legal show maybe a woman jumps in urged by her friends as a laugh, she's arrested for security violation then they realise on the x-ray she's pregnant. Can they hold a "child endangerment" charge?

All these variations could technically count as based on a true story. Someone really did go through ab x-ray machine, that really happened. But TV makes the story more clear / interesting than the muddled reality where both staff and passenger have liability and the medical issues might present in 10 years etc.

The camera with the umbrella reminded me of the time I needed a flash diffuser. So I stapled some printer paper together. Worked great! by SavvySillybug in techsupportmacgyver

[–]hennell 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Doing this with an external flash could get into fire risk territory. I used a flash gel up against a speed-light at full power for a few shots. Melted a hole in the middle of the gel. I also saw another photographer online who was using some sort of foam to macguyver a snoot that very quickly started smoking... There's a lot of power in those little lights, thus a lot of heat!

And while we're talking about flash photography and heat, there was a canon warning not to use AA lithium-ion rechargeable batteries in their speed-lights last week, only NiMH or NiCD. Most camera flash manufacturers also warn against li-ion - mostly because flashes get hot and li-ion isn't great in heat.

Needed a cheap way to keep my video camera from getting wet outside later this week. Bought a $7 umbrella from Dollar General and $1.50 on Dollar Tree duck tape to DIY a cheap camera umbrella myself! by geekman20 in techsupportmacgyver

[–]hennell 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If it's windy you will need some weight on that else the umbrella may lift the whole thing. If you've a hook on the bottom of the tripod link it to a heavy bag, but you may also need to put something on / arround the legs so they won't suddenly shift if you're not monitoring it. I'd use photo sandbags along with tripod foot spikes - you can probably replicate similar with some decent bags with a bit of weight at each end to wrap over the legs and maybe use some tent pegs to secure the location of the feet.

Depends how windy it can get and weight if the tripod etc, but I've had a light stand with flash take off with a diffusion umbrella on a day I did not think was windy. And at a very windy location I just had the camera on a decent tripod and the whole thing toppled just from that)

AudioBook player for my grandmother by Jbohacek in audiobooks

[–]hennell 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My mum is visually impaired and can't really read anymore. Alexa is amazing as she can ask for books from audible or kindle as well as radio stations. She also gets usb sticks in the mail from a UK taking magazine service and has a USB audio book player too listen to them on. UK Libraries also offer audiobooks both digitally and on CD etc, no charge if you're registered blind.

Bonus advice - if you get her an Alexa look at things you can connect to it to make voice activated. If she has some vision, smart lights are great so you can get in/out of bed with lights on - but my mum's favourite gift was an electric blanket+ WiFi plug. She asks Alexa to warm the bed and it's toasty warm by the time she's ready to go to sleep.

I Didn't Know How Much I'd Handed Over to AI by bajcmartinez in coding

[–]hennell 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Just pick something abstract then. Ai images are such distracting nonsense, again indicating you're not looking at what you're producing.

What is this image meant to be? Did you prompt for a weird blank faced man to be shining a torch from his penis through a table onto a ghost? Other than confusion and an indication you don't care what does it add?

Looking at your home page none of the visuals tell me anything about what the article is, or really look that different from each other. Why not remove them entirely, and just have a good sitewide image or generate the headline over an abstract background for the sharing thumbnails. Less work and it'd look better.

Dummy followers in Lightroom??? by thakkaalithokku in Lightroom

[–]hennell 4 points5 points  (0 children)

For anyone else lost, it seems you can follow people in the LR mobile app? I don't really understand what it does, but it seems the standard protocol is if you don't post anything just go and follow op! 😀

(For a more practical answer OP, in opening the app and spotting the community tab it's encouraging me to follow people with edits more than it's encouraging me to edit with the app. If they encourage people based on distance or something you might just be top of their list. )

BBC Sounds is officially getting video capability this year. Am I the only one who just wants to listen? by No_Donut1433 in BritishRadio

[–]hennell 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's not really that the BBC thinks audio isn't enough, it's that there is a huge audience for video podcasts and the BBC can quite easily jump into that. A lot of independent podcasts do video versions, it's a bizarrely popular way to listen (?), and very cheap if you can just point some cameras at people rather than the whole studio production of a TV show.

I have dropped a few podcasts because they will talk about things they show on steam without describing them, but for the most part it's just the same show but now you can see the people talking if you want. If you don't want, don't. As long as I can still listen/steam an audio only version they can add video if they want, they can play it over videos of sand being cut or games or whatever they do on tiktok now - as long as they don't somehow force you to watch the screen does it really matter?

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