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Cake day: January 29th, 2025

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  • Tbh I don’t think Microsoft’s fault-rate has actually gotten noticeably higher post-AI.

    They were already putting out bad patches causing widespread issues with regularity for well over a decade. They slowly transitioned from “customer experience is key” under Ballmer to “move fast and break things” under Nadella.

    I do love what Microsoft has been doing for Linux adoption though - more slop, please!




  • The fries are vegan in Australia ever since they stopped cooking them in beef tallow - around early 2000s iirc.

    However, their own website says they offer no menu options certified as vegan or vegetarian, due to cross-contamination being something they don’t wish to deal with.

    Understandable as additional prep areas would be quite expensive, but also it’s a pretty weak copout when they could go to the effort of labelling their vegan/vegetarian items (with the asterisked proviso that they may have cross-contam)… I suspect it’s really to allow them to change up menu item suppliers to cheaper alternatives whenever they like, because they also do not bother to label any menu items with allergen info - and that’s very standard across even small cafes nowadays. To find allegen info you have to dig through a PDF that they update every few months.












  • pulsewidth@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldSpotify vs. Anna's Archive
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    29 days ago

    Spotify streams all music at 160kbps OGG for free users by default, so that’s what this archive is dumped at - the original Spotify content, no transcode. The only difference is they re-encoded all the songs with a ‘popularity’ of zero at a lower bitrate, because that saved an enormous amount of data for all the AI crap pumped into Spotify that nobody listens to.

    Side note - it would probably not be possible to do a dump as a paid used (as they would notice a user account is being abused, and ban it), but paid accounts go up to 320kbps OGG and some content is also available lossless (as FLAC).

    Anyway, 99%+ of people can’t consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that ‘swear they can tell’ are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There’s tests you can run yourself too, eg here: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html




  • For sure. IKEA is a great place to start (or stay), as it’s a cheap ecosystem and their app/implementation doesnt require permanent internet access - functions fine during an internet outrage, and quite privacy-respecting.

    HomeAssistant is not anywhere near as hard to set up as it used to be. If you have an old mini-PC retired from work sitting around there are HA images for PCs now, and it’s pretty simple to set up to use your IKEA hub (or whatever you have already), while adding a huge swath of optional features.

    I agree it’s still not something your average Joe will set up, but the continual lowering of barriers will get more people into running a self-hosted local config is a great thing for privacy and expanding the hobby.


  • There’s an xkcd for everything, isn’t there.

    Its not wrong, but the major attraction to Matter is it must allow devices to operate locally (not tying them to cloud services that die every internet outrage, or permanently when the service retires), and it’s an application-layer protocol. Meaning it can operate over WiFi, Ethernet, or Thread.

    Many existing smart home hubs have been able to program support for Matter and simply send out an OTA update to add certified Matter support.