I doubt they’d have to retire the phone - digital radio power levels are normally pretty easy to change in the radio firmware. Which also means it’s pretty easy to change, intentionally or unintentionally, in a later OS version.

Perhaps Apple chose to cheat to improve reception after mandatory testing was complete and the phone was available to buy, figuring they’d never get caught out. Perhaps Apple didn’t retest with later OS versions and it was unintentional. We will probably never know.

The last syllable is usually pretty subtle, like the br- in bread, but very quietly voiced. I’d say I hear it maybe 75% of the time I hear the word. Currently in Yorkshire, via SW England, London and NW England. The syllable is a lot less subtle in a West Yorks accent!

Did you learn French at GCSE level? Possibly there’s a relationship between that and pronouncing the re like that in French-derived words. Cadre is another example. If it is related to learning French, then it’s probably on the decline as French teaching is on the decline and foreign languages are no longer compulsory at GCSE.

In some of the accents around here, blood, wood and food do rhyme, more or less.

British English voices those letters in most accents. I think the two silent letters is just a North American thing.

Similar to herb.

If you’re on-call 24/7/365 without a break, and it’s not because you have equity in the company, then find a new job.

If you don’t, then your health (physical and mental) will eventually force you to leave anyway. I did it at a startup where I was employee #1 (no equity for me), just me and the founders, and I nearly had a nervous breakdown from it, and ended up quitting from stress. Afterwards I decided I would do no more than 1 week in 3, and life got better after that.

What? Tech companies the world over have people on 24/7 on-call rotas, and it’s usually voluntary.

Depending on the company, you might typically do 1 week in 4 on-call, get a nice little retainer bonus for having to have not much of a social life for 1 week in 4, and then get an additional payment for each call you take, plus time worked at x1.5 or x2 the usual rate, plus time off in lieu during the normal workday if the call out takes a long time. If you do on-call for tech and the conditions are worse than this, then your company’s on-call policies suck.

I used to do it regularly. Over the years, it paid for the deposit on my first house, plus some nice trips abroad. I enjoyed it - I get a buzz out of being in the middle of a crisis and fixing it. But eventually my family got bored of it, and I got more senior jobs where it wasn’t considered a good use of my energies.

Your internet connection, the websites and apps you use, your utilities - they don’t fix themselves when they break at 0300.

If TSMC’s approach to on-call is bad, then yeah, screw that. I don’t see anything in the article that says that one way or the other. But doing an on-call rota at all is a perfectly normal thing to do in tech.

Do we have to bring this up again? It’s just boring.

systemd is here and it isn’t going anywhere soon. It’s an improvement over SysV, but the core init system is arguably less well-designed than some of the other options that were on the table 10 years ago when its adoption started. The systemd userspace ecosystem has significantly stifled development of alternatives that provide equivalent functionality, which has led to less experimentation and innovation in those areas. In many cases those systemd add-on services provide less functionality than what they have replaced, but are adopted simply because they are part of the systemd ecosystem. The core unit file format is verbose and somewhat awkward, and the *ctl utilities are messy and sometimes unfriendly.

Like most Red Hat-originated software written in the last 15 years, it valiantly attempts to solve real problems with Linux, and mostly achieves that, but there are enough corner cases and short-sighted design decisions that it ends up being mediocre and somewhat annoying.

Personally I hope that someone comes along and takes the lessons learned and rewrites it, much like Pulseaudio has been replaced by Pipewire. Perhaps if someone decides it needs rewriting in Rust?

The WiFi card is probably a Realtek 8852AE, which has become very common in laptops since 2021. Unfortunately Realtek driver support tends to lag quite a bit.

If you want to run Ubuntu Desktop 22.04, then you’re probably best off waiting a few weeks for the Ubuntu Desktop 22.04.4 point release. It’s due sometime this month. It will boot and install an “HWE” (Hardware Enablement) kernel and drivers, that are based on the kernel from Ubuntu 23.04, and therefore should work out of the box with your WiFi card.

While it’s possible to upgrade an existing Ubuntu 22.04 installation with the latest HWE kernel, doing it by downloading the relevant packages on another machine and moving them across using a USB stick is going to be somewhat frustrating if you’ve not done it before. You’ll certainly learn a few things, but it may not be an enjoyable experience. I’m a grizzled Linux veteran, and I’m pretty sure I’d end up forgetting to download one or more packages and having to swap back and forth between machines.

In the meantime, I would just continue to use Ubuntu 23.04. In fact, if it was me, I would probably just stick with 23.04, upgrade to 23.10 and then subsequently 24.04 when they become available. What you do once you’re on the 24.04 LTS release is up to you. By that time, other distros will probably also work out of the box too.

Russians in positions of power have frequently said that Ukraine is an aberration, and doesn’t actually exist at all as a national identity. So any Ukrainian symbol is an act of resistance to that.

Why use that particular flag? Well, why does anyone do any trolling? Because it feels good getting an emotional reaction out of other people. Because it feels good sticking it to those people who want you dead, or assimilated.

But also because it helps to figure out who isn’t a fan of the concept of Ukrainian statehood. If the initial reaction towards a Ukrainian nationalist flag is that it’s “Nazi” then that’s a pretty strong signal.

It’s worked though, hasn’t it? No one with half a gram of understanding of modern Ukraine thinks it’s Nazi - nationalist, yes, but not Nazi - and yet there are several accounts on the thread who have taken that bait.

Finding Nazis everywhere is paranoia, and demeans the experience of the millions who suffered and died because of actual Nazis.

I’m a big fan of Kubernetes, and for larger projects the flexibility and power it brings is unrivalled. But for smaller projects, assuming equal levels of competence, delivery teams using managed Kubernetes are almost universally later and have more issues than teams that use simpler solutions. Container-as-a-service solutions like GCP CloudRun or AWS FarGate help somewhat, but are not cheap for a given amount of compute time.

Terraform (or IaC in general) absolutely has a place, because even if you use Kubernetes, most projects have more infrastructure to manage than just the cluster - at the very least, lemmy.world has a CloudFlare proxy to manage - and clicking buttons in a management portal is not a repeatable way of deploying that, or deploying the Kubernetes clusters themselves.

Ansible also has a place, particularly if you’re deploying onto bare metal. I wouldn’t use it for new deployments unless I had bare metal to configure and maintain, but lemmy.world is deployed onto a bare metal server as I understand it. Plus, the most effective tooling is generally the one your team understands.

“V for Victory” is Nazi too, right? Think about how the occupied French must have felt when they heard that on the BBC, after all the Frenchmen killed by those English longbow archers.

Meanings evolve.

Sure. I’m sure Trinidad and Tobago, and Albania, are definitely Nazis. And those anarchists with their black and red flags, they’re definitely Nazis too, right?

Seriously though, in this case, it’s the unofficial war flag of Ukraine.

It was originally associated with the WWII nationalist Banderite movement, which has some dubious history but is important in the 20th century story of Ukrainian nationalism. However its usage has evolved and is used widely, albeit unofficially, in modern Ukraine, by lots of military-associated groups who have nothing to do with Nazis or fascism.

One of the main selling points of it is that it trolls people who uncritically believe that Ukraine is run by Nazis.

I can only imagine they’re shutting it down to replace it with something with different branding, based on an LLM. Microsoft has gone all-in on LLMs and I’m sure they’d love some of that virtual assistant action if they were able to differentiate themselves.

Nice to see Google doing the responsible thing here, because Apple certainly didn’t when AirTags were launched.

I still think having cheap, socially acceptable, easily-accessible, highly effective tracking devices with months or more of battery life is something out of dystopian fiction though. It’s not good for society in the long run.

At least for me, there is a big difference between naming things at home and naming things for work.

Work “pet” machines get systematic names based on function, location, ownership and/or serial/asset numbers. There aren’t very many of them these days. If they are “cattle” then they get random names, and their build is ephemeral. If they go wrong or need an upgrade, they get rebuilt and their replacement build gets a new random name. Whether they are pets or cattle, the hostnames are secondary to tags and other metadata, and in most cases the tags are used to identify the machines in the first instance, because tags are far more flexible and descriptive than a hostname.

At home, where the number of machines is limited, I know all of them like the back of my hand, and it’s mostly just me touching them, whimsical names are where it’s at.

Ungulates. Because who doesn’t like a hoofed animal?

My client machines are even-toed ungulates (order Artiodactyla) and my servers/IoT machines are odd-toed (order Perissodactyla). I’m typing this on Gazelle. My router is called Quagga, both after the extinct zebra subspecies and the routing protocol software (I don’t use it any more but hey, it’s a router).

Biological taxonomy is a great source of a huge number of systematic (and colloquial) names.

I wouldn’t say the Pixel line’s hardware is rubbish, more that Google is focused on having a polished “it just works” experience rather than trying to differentiate themselves by having the fastest, biggest, newest hardware in the Android market.

The mobile market hit the “diminishing returns” point quite a while ago and for a lot of people - probably the majority - the only reasons to upgrade are security updates ending, or because a non-replaceable battery is getting to the end of its life.

I used to upgrade every 12-18 months religiously, but now my Pixel 5 is coming up on 3 years old and I’d happily keep it another few years with a battery replacement, if the updates weren’t going to end shortly.

I could well be wrong about the AAC passthrough, and I should have hedged that statement with “allegedly” as I’ve not tested it myself.

To your other point though, I disagree - there are plenty of ways you could pass through an unchanged AAC bitstream, but still mix in other sounds when required. For example, having the sender duck the original bitstream out temporarily and send a mixed replacement bitstream while the other sound is playing. Or (and this would only work if you control the firmware on the receiver, but if you’re using Apple headphones with an Apple device, that’s not a problem) sending multiple bitstreams to the receiver and letting the receiver mix them.

I can only comment on my experience with my own equipment and ears, but in my experience, 990Kbps LDAC is noticeably more transparent than 256Kbps AAC for Bluetooth audio.

I can fairly reliably guess whether or not I remembered to switch my Sony XM4s out of multipoint mode the last time I used them (when in multipoint pairing mode LDAC is not supported and 256Kbps AAC is usually what gets negotiated). The difference is small, but over a few minutes of listening, the sonic signature when it’s using AAC is just a little bit “off” and my ears don’t like it as much.

Could I ABX the difference using the usual ABX setup with short samples of music I’m not familiar with? Probably not. Can I tell the difference over an extended period using music I know well, and that I often listen to uncompressed? Yes, pretty easily.

LDAC is not a particularly sophisticated codec, but it doesn’t have to be when it has a 990Kbps bitrate. It’s also possible that the FDK-AAC codec that I think both Pipewire and Android use for real-time AAC encoding is not the best tuned for 256Kbps CBR. AIUI in 256Kbps CBR mode, FDK-AAC has a hard low-pass filter at 17KHz, and I can still hear above 17KHz.