I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • There’s a certbot addon which uses nginx directly to renew the certificate (so you don’t need to stop the web server to renew). If you install the addon you just use the same certbot commands but with --nginx instead and it will perform the actions without interfering with web server operation.

    You just then make sure the cron job to renew also includes --nginx and you’re done.





  • I mean for advert breaks, there are projects to do this to recorded tv automatically (with varying degrees of success depending on the config and the channel).

    That is, you record the TV from either a TV receiver card, or streamed live channels to disk, then run this process on the mkv/mp4/ts, and it will either create a set of chapters marking the ads (so you can skip them), or it will just remove them entirely.

    I don’t think it would transfer to “live” TV quite so readily though. Because it does scan the whole program to find things like logos etc to help work out where the adverts are. But, I mean a lot of the work has been done.

    For removing all product logos. I mean, I bet we’re not far from the processing power to make it possible. But, probably a fair bit of effort needed.

    I can imagine the “AI” chips being neutered for these kind of tasks, like the “low hash rate” Nividia cards.





  • I mean, while they can block most things, to give people a usable experience they’re going to allow http and https traffic through, and they can’t really proxy https because of the TLS layer.

    So for universal chance of success, running openvpn tcp over port 443 is the most likely to get past this level of bad. I guess they could block suspicious traffic in the session before TLS is established (in order to block certain domains). OpenVPN does support traversing a proxy, but it might only work if you specify it. If their network sets a proxy via DHCP, maybe you could see that and work around it.

    I did have fun working around an ex gf’s university network many years ago to get a VPN running over it. They were very, very serious about blocking non-standard services. A similar “through” the proxy method was the last resort they didn’t seem to bother trying to stop.




  • Well, I would say it SHOULD bring overall prices down. If the cost to build the top of the line model comes down to say the same as the mid-range model AND more people are say buying up. It means that competition would push overall prices down.

    But of course not, it benefits the companies most, and given the choice of lower prices or more profit, they’ll choose the profit every time.

    If they go subscription only (because recurring revenue is the current business buzzword, so of course they will go subscription only) then overall cost for the life of the car will definitely be higher yet “feel” more affordable.



  • Now, I can “kinda” see the rationale behind optional features on a car being either enabled via software or subscription. I believe the permanent enable price should be the same as if you added the hardware to the car as an option.

    As to why this might make sense for a carmaker. In my work I’ve visited car manufacturers before, and from what I could see it’s quite expensive and adds time to support the various options when building a car. You see they have the main production line, and units are pulled off the main line to fit the options at various points and then reinserted and this causes problems for efficiency and price per unit I think.

    So, there’s probably a cost saving to making the base car have all the options fitted and having a completely standardized production line. However, the expense is likely going to mean if they sold the base car at the usual base car price they would either lose money, or at the very least, the profit margin wouldn’t be worthwhile.

    However, if you know a certain percentage of people will want the options, and you can enable it with software later, it’s possible building the hardware into every car as standard would work out overall cheaper. They might also be able to upsell to more people by making a subscription option, perhaps with maybe a free trial for the first say 3 months of ownership. That is, they turn everything on for 6 months for free, then revert you to the package you paid for. Hoping that you liked some of the features and will pay or subscribe to keep them.

    What I don’t like is when this stuff might become ONLY available as a subscription, the overall move toward subscription models for everything irks me a lot. I’d much prefer we still get to choose a package, and have the ability to upgrade later.

    So I think my point is, the argument “the hardware is there anyway” doesn’t really work, because they are likely going to install the hardware at a loss, on the assumption (backed up by their own numbers) they will sell enough to make a bigger profit overall.

    They also likely bake into the numbers that a very small number of people will hack the car and enable the features anyway. The vast majority will not do this, though.



  • I would say older than that (well maybe not elite), as much as the tech could handle it you should include:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Esprit

    Here you had several town maps, including dual carriageways, main roads, side roads, one way streets. And you could just drive down any of them. They were all nondescript, but the amount of memory really limited what could be done.

    There was also the games using the freescape engine. Driller, Darkside and Total Eclipse. These were all about as open world as you could achieve on the hardware of the time.

    In terms of “open world” the definition is open to interpretation. I’d argue that text based adventures were open world too in their own way. So it really depends on what features people agree makes an “open world” game as to what the first game that contains all those features was.