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Hackers can infect network-connected wrenches to install ransomware
  • Changes the torque and the application of said torque for each bolt. As in "tool head has 5° of give until in place, then in ramps torque to 5nM over half a second, and holds for 1 second and then ramps to zero over .1 seconds", and then something different for the next bolt. Then it logs that it did this for each bolt.
    The tool can also be used to measure and correct the bolts as part of an inspection phase, and log the results of that inspection.
    Finally, it tracks usage of the tool and can log that it needs maintenance or isn't working correctly even if it's just a subtle failure.

  • Why Roman concrete is still stronger than RAAC (and other modern concretes)
  • Oh, it's definitely interesting.
    I think people here just got rubbed the wrong way because these articles often make it seem like Roman concrete is better than ours, rather than "look what they accidentally did occasionally".

    We can make self healing concrete today, we just usually opt not to, because the downsides or unpredictable nature makes it unsuitable for the significant cost increase.
    The phrase "the bridge is infested with bacterial spore colonies" isn't one that makes engineers happy.

  • Why Roman concrete is still stronger than RAAC (and other modern concretes)
  • We mostly know how they made theirs, and could make our own version of it, but we optimize for different things.
    The Romans optimized for "that's cement and it works well", because they didn't have anything close to the level of chemical understanding we do now.
    We optimize for strength and predictability. Ours can hold a higher load and will likely need repairing about when we predict.

    Roman concrete can sometimes, in certain circumstances and with variable effectiveness, repair certain types of damage by chemically interacting with the environment. So maybe it crumbles in a decade or maybe it lasts a millennium.

    Article basically points at some researchers who are looking to see if they can bring that healing capability to modern concrete in a predictable and more versatile fashion.

  • People of Lemmy, I dare you to name ONE billionaire that's done anything good.
  • Hell, I'll take someone who wants to be a billionaire, as long as they do it without exploitation. It's just that that's nearly impossible to do, since very few people actually individually create a billion dollars worth of value.

  • how often do you encounter doublespeak?
  • Look at their actions, not their words specifically.

    It's a culture where being unkind is particularly unacceptable, not specifically where you're not allowed to be honest or forthright.

    You're allowed to not like someone, but telling someone you dislike them is needlessly unkind, so you just politely decline to interact with them.
    You'd "hate to intrude", or "be a bother". If it's pushed, you'll "consider it and let them know".

    Negative things just have to be conveyed in the kindest way possible, not that they can't be conveyed.

  • People of Lemmy, I dare you to name ONE billionaire that's done anything good.
  • Brian Acton is the only billionaire I can think of that hasn't been a net negative.

    Co-founded WhatsApp, which became popular with few employees. Sold the service at a reasonable rate.
    Sold the business for a stupid large sum of money, and generously compensated employees as part of the buyout.
    Left the buying company, Facebook, rather than do actions he considered unethical, at great personal expense ($800M).

    Proceeded to cofound signal, which is an open, and privacy focused messaging system which he has basically bankrolled while it finds financial stability.

    He also has been steadily giving away most of his money to charitable causes.

    Billionaires are bad because they get that way by exploiting some combination of workers, customers or society.
    In the extremely unlikely circumstance where a handful of people make something fairly priced that nearly everybody wants, and then uses the wealth for good, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with being that person.
    Selling messaging to a few billion people for $1 a lifetime is a way to do that.

  • Doctors Remove Woman’s Brain Implant Against Her Will
  • I guess I don't see how a surgeon being unwilling to do maintenance on a non-FDA approved medical device is fucked up.
    If it fails to meet the criteria for being safely used in a medical context, it's irresponsible to try to maintain it.

  • Doctors Remove Woman’s Brain Implant Against Her Will
  • FDA approval is contingent on so many factors that even if it was entirely open source, including all hardware design and the instructions for assembly, maintenance, and manufature it would be entirely plausible for it to lose approval if the company responsible for continued development went bankrupt.

    Without approval, no reputable surgeon will do anything beyond remove it.

    A device not having a clear and unambiguously documented path for addressing defects found in the future is more than sufficient reason to lose approval.

  • What's a skill that's taken for granted where you live, but is often missing in people moving there from abroad?
  • That might just be a growing up near water thing. I think that on average, Canadians live closer to larger bodies of water than Americans do, since more than half are within day trip distance of the great lakes waterway, and then there's Halifax and Vancouver.

    Growing up in a place with water, basically everyone I know also has at least a passing knowledge of recreational small watercraft.

  • What's a skill that's taken for granted where you live, but is often missing in people moving there from abroad?
  • Where I live basically every location is some combination of "French, native American, English, Scandinavian", "pronounced natively or not", and "spelled like it's pronounced or not".

    The fun ones are the English pronunciation of the French transliteration of the native word.

  • Removed Deleted
    *Permanently Deleted*
  • Yes, but that's the case regardless. My message going through has always depended on someone else's cell towers, all the random routers and switches in between, and the other person's device.
    My server likely has worse uptime, and if I'm hosting from home it probably has more hops to transit through it.

  • A decentralized, blockchain-based messaging network for safer communications
  • I believe their point was that even encrypted messages convey data. So if you have a record of all the encrypted messages, you can still tell who was talking, when they were talking, and approximately how much they said, even if you can't read the messages.

    If you wait until someone is gone and then loudly raid their house, you don't need to read their messages to guess the content of what they send to people as soon as they find out. Now you know who else you want to target, despite not being able to read a single message.

    This type of metadata analysis is able to reveal a lot about what's being communicated. It's why private communication should be ephemeral, so that only what's directly intercepted can be scrutinized.

  • AI Weirdness: AI vs a giraffe with no spots
  • In this case however, Janelle Shane is actually quite well aware of how different types of AI works. She writes about them, how they work and their various limitations.

    Her blog is just focused on cases of them acting oddly, or not how you would expect , or just "funny".

  • Zoom CEO says workers can't build trust or unite... on Zoom
  • If you have an unutilized asset, there's pressure to get rid of it for the cost savings.
    If you sell your asset at a loss, it looks bad for you and the company. Same for paying cancelation fees.

    If you legitimately think that you're going to need that space in the future, for example because you think that we'll find an equilibrium between "everyone work from office" and where we are now, and that we're trending towards an organic level of office need/desire higher than we're at now, you might see selling now as the first step to needing to buy again later, likely for higher than you sold for. So you try to "mandate" the equilibrium that you expect so you're not in a position to have to explain why you're holding onto a dead and losing value property.

    Executives spend a lot of time talking to people and having meetings. The job selects for people who thrive on and value face to face communication. Naturally, they overestimate how much that social aspect of the job is true for everyone else, so they estimate that the equilibrium will have a lot more office time than other people would.
    To make it worse, the more power you have to influence that decision, the more likely you are to have a similar bias.

    This isn't an excuse of course, since you can overcome that bias simply by telling teams to discuss what their ideal working arrangement would be, and then running a survey. Now you have data, and you can use it to try to scale offices to what you actually want.

  • 5 years ago Valve released Proton forever changing Linux gaming
  • The results were fine, but the work to get there was quite bad quite often.

    UX polish is one of those things that just isn't as fun to do, and isn't as rewarding either. So pumping a bunch of money into it is going to go a long way towards making all the other hard work come out better.

  • ULTRARAM will allow you to close your laptop, come back a thousand years later and pick up where you left off
  • This is already a thing we need to deal with, security wise. An application making use of encryption doesn't know the condition of what it views as ram, and it could very well be transferred to a durable medium due to memory pressure. Same thing with hibernation as opposed to suspension.

    Depending on your application and how sensitive it is, there are different steps you can take to deal with stuff like that.

  • Doing things in games because it simple felt good.
  • With the spiderman games, I almost always swing around instead of using fast travel. I'll do the little tricks and stuff too.

    They did such a good job making the basic traversal mechanism satisfying that it's almost weird they included fast travel.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)RI
    ricecake @beehaw.org
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