Aggregator

More than 2,000 Finnish people including volunteers and students are taking part in the biggest civil defence exercise in Europe since the end of World War II.

For more than 20 years, Clare and Matt Kennedy-Smith (pictured) and their two daughters have marked every special occasion with a family walk along the Glendorgal Headland.

Last month, the public was shocked by images of a huge inflatable packed with 230 migrants arriving in Britain overnight.

They had more access than the average Joe, and IT didn't track what needed to be cut off

"Enshittification of car controls [is] rapidly accelerating," writes longtime Slashdot reader sinij, pointing to a new report from Car and Driver. From the report: Remember when iPhones used to come with free headphones and a phone charger (including the wall plug)? It didn't feel so much like Apple giving you free goodies as it did that the company was providing you with the relevant hardware to use the device. Apple stopped including headphones and charging blocks in 2020. Now, Hyundai is pulling some of its standard hardware from the box, at least for two models. Hyundai is charging customers extra for a driver's display in the new Elantra generation (more specifically, the Korea-market Avante), as well as the Ioniq 3, Motor1 reported. Both models feature Pleos Connect, Hyundai's new infotainment setup that pairs a center touchscreen with a slim 9.9-inch instrument cluster mounted above the dashboard -- except where it doesn't. In its domestic market, the instrument cluster screen is offered as a 350,000 won ($255) option for the base trim. Not the most expensive optional extra in the world, but still kind of a slap in the face for a feature traditionally viewed as standard fare. Things are more expensive for the electric Ioniq 3. In the EV's case, the base trim gives customers the full Tesla-screen experience, meaning if customers want the driver's display, they'll need to fork over the additional $5000 necessary to move up to the next-level trim. [...] Hyundai plans to have the setup equipped in 20 million cars globally by the end of the decade.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today's cruise ships are creating exclusive enclaves where passengers can enjoy private pools, restaurants and butlers.

The British society bible's Schools Guide 2027 is packed with world-class educational institutions for children aged four to 18 - and unsurprisingly, many come with eye-watering fees.

In a major intervention, the Conservative leader set out plans to raise defence spending to three per cent of GDP by the end of the decade

Sandboxes, permissions, and VMs aren't enough to keep frontier models at bay. "Data diodes" might do the job

Give your home an autumn refresh with these 7 H&M HOME buys, from sculptural lighting to chic decorative details that look far more expensive.

A common option for retrofitting heating and cooling into older homes is a mini-split, frequently tied to a heat pump. They're (relatively) cheap to install, energy efficient, and can be added without substantial modifications to the home. They also, annoyingly, are mostly controlled via IR remotes, making them challenging to wire up to home automation or even a household thermostat.

People have made solutions, and today's code comes from one of those solutions. Which, I want to stress, this code comes from an open source project for home automation, so it's not the code that's wrong, here. At first I thought it was, and had a moment of, "I'm not going to pick on some hobby project," but then I realised the hobby project points at a deeper issue.

// temperature helper these are direct mappings based on the remote float toFahrenheit(float fromCelsius) { // Lookup table for specific mappings const std::map<float, int> lookupTable = { {16.0, 61}, {16.5, 62}, {17.0, 63}, {17.5, 64}, {18.0, 65}, {18.5, 66}, {19.0, 67}, {20.0, 68}, {21.0, 69}, {21.5, 70}, {22.0, 71}, {22.5, 72}, {23.0, 73}, {23.5, 74}, {24.0, 75}, {24.5, 76}, {25.0, 77}, {25.5, 78}, {26.0, 79}, {26.5, 80}, {27.0, 81}, {27.5, 82}, {28.0, 83}, {28.5, 84}, {29.0, 85}, {29.5, 86}, {30.0, 87}, {30.5, 88} }; // Check if the input is in the lookup table auto it = lookupTable.find(fromCelsius); if (it != lookupTable.end()) { return it->second; } // Default conversion and rounding to nearest integer return roundf(fromCelsius * 1.8 + 32.0); }

Okay, I am going to pick on their code a little bit; using float as a key in a map is asking for trouble, because rounding errors are going to surprise you. But honestly, failing to find the key you're looking for is better than the opposite, since that actually does the correct thing. Because if you look carefully at the table, you'll see that it's wrong.

18C, for example, should be 64F. Well, 64.4F, but we're rounding to an integer. The choice here is to roughly map every 0.5C increase to a 1F increase, which is not the conversion factor. They try and correct- note how the table mostly steps by 0.5C, but skips 19.5C.

The opposite direction is similarly bad:

// temperature helper these are direct mappings based on the remote float toCelsius(float fromFahrenheit) { // Lookup table for specific mappings const std::map<int, float> lookupTable = { {61, 16.0}, {62, 16.5}, {63, 17.0}, {64, 17.5}, {65, 18.0}, {66, 18.5}, {67, 19.0}, {68, 20.0}, {69, 21.0}, {70, 21.5}, {71, 22.0}, {72, 22.5}, {73, 23.0}, {74, 23.5}, {75, 24.0}, {76, 24.5}, {77, 25.0}, {78, 25.5}, {79, 26.0}, {80, 26.5}, {81, 27.0}, {82, 27.5}, {83, 28.0}, {84, 28.5}, {85, 29.0}, {86, 29.5}, {87, 30.0}, {88, 30.5} }; // Check if the input is in the lookup table auto it = lookupTable.find(static_cast<int>(fromFahrenheit)); if (it != lookupTable.end()) { return it->second; } // Default conversion and rounding to nearest 0.5 return roundf((fromFahrenheit - 32.0) / 1.8 * 2) / 2.0; }

Here, we can be off by as much as a 1C, which is certainly a noticeable feeling.

At first glance, I thought this was just a misguided attempt at optimizing the lookup. For common values, do a lookup instead of calculating because it's faster. Seems like the kind of mistake a hobby project might make, and definitely not a WTF. But it's the comment which corrects me: these are direct mappings based on the remote.

These remotes usually have a display. So when you see on the remote that you're trying to set the temperature to a comfortable 72F, the remote is actually sending 22.5C to the unit. That's the actual temperature being sent.

Now, why on Earth does the remote behave this way? Well, I haven't cracked one open to read off the part numbers, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the microcontoller in the remote doesn't handle floating point operations all that well. So it almost certainly does use a lookup table to decide what signal to send, and the lookup table is populated by "good enough" approximations of temperature conversions. There aren't a lot of places that use Fahrenheit, so being "close enough" is a reasonable solution. If you want accurate temperatures, use SI units, not "freedom units".

In the end, I'd say that neither the hobby project, nor the remote control are the WTF here; locales that insist on using weird ass units are.

.comment { border: none } [Advertisement] ProGet’s got you covered with security and access controls on your NuGet feeds. Learn more.

Tim Curry's cause of death has been revealed just over a week after the beloved actor passed away on August 25.

The pencil skirt is making a comeback for autumn 2026. Here are the best ways to style the controversial trend, from leather jackets to bright colours.

The battle of the rodents was caught on camera on the Central Line platform at Oxford Circus on Saturday.

TV presenters Stacey Solomon and Joe Swash have shared a video on Instagram, telling fans about their new venture.

TV presenters Stacey Solomon and Joe Swash have shared a video on Instagram, telling fans about their new venture.

Drivers have to take a long diversion

The 57-year-old actress and 17-year-old child she shares with ex-fiance Liev Schreiber appeared in snapshots shared by Simkhai on Tuesday.

After almost two years of worsening stomach pain, Sam Launder was told he had irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Then aged 27, he thought it was something he simply had to learn to live with.

The most common belief is that individual contributions add the most value to a pension over a working life, finds a survey by Standard Life.