No reason it can’t be done on 120v (from a technical level). In fact, most solar inverters in the US could do this at a technical level as they basically do the same thing, just on a larger scale (higher current and therefore are wired in to electrical panels rather than through outlet as outlets have lower current limits). All you need is the inverter to synchronize its AC output to match grid. If you had a smaller inverter, you could just connect it to an outlet (ignoring building codes, insurance, and other non technical reasons). So the choice is then to have centralized larger inverters or smaller inverters per panel or 2. If you live in a very densely populated area where you can only pit a panel or 2 on a balcony or you don’t have control of your electrical panel, then the small inverter method makes sense.

I think you’re on to something, but sort of accidentally. A couple replies to you are saying it’s not possible, but I think they’re making an assumption that is not correct in many cases.

The replies is saying it’s not possible because the layers are flattened before passed to the compression, thus the uncensored/unredacted data is not part of the input to the compression and therefore cannot have any impact on its output. This is true assuming you are starting with an uncompressed image.

Here’s a scenario where the uncensored/unredacted parts of the image could influence the image: someone takes a photo of their ID, credit card, etc. It’s saved in a lossy compressed format (e.g. JPEG), specifically not a lossless format. They open it in an image editing tool to 100% black out some portion, then save it again (doesn’t actually matter the format). I feel lile someone is going to think I’m misunderstanding if I don’t explain the different output scenarios.

First is the trivial case: amultilayer output with the uncensored/unredacted data as its own layer. In this case, its trivial to get the uncensored/unredacted data as it is simply present and visible of you use a tool that can show the individual layers, but the general assumption is that this is not the case – that the output is a single layer image, in which we have 2 scenarios.

Second case: lossy compressed original, lossless censored. Consider that this censored/redacted image is flattened and saved as a lossless format such as PNG. Certainly there will be no compression artifacts of the uncensored/redacted data both because it is lossless (no artifacts added by PNG) and that it was flatted prior to being passed to PNG. However, the uncensored/unredacted artifacts remain in the uncensored/unredacted portions of the image. These were introduced by the compression that was applied prior to the censoring (e.g. the JPEG compression that contained the pre censored image). I suspect this is actually a common case.

Third case: lossy compressed original, lossy compressed censored: same as second case, except now you have additional artifacts, in particular you bow have artifacts from the censored portion, and the artifacts of the previous lossy compression are also adding additional artifacts. This is probably more difficult, but the point is that the original uncensored/unredacted artifacts are still present.

Basically what Nintendo did on one of their schemes to prevent unauthorized software (Famicom Disk System, which was a floppy disk drive for the Japanese version of the NES). This was the physical Nintendo logo embossed on to floppy disk and with a flat disk instead, the disk can’t be physically loaded (sort of, you can add extra cut outs). Other game systems required a logo or similar other brand/trademark/IP to be present in the game code in order to boot, so if you wanted to make your own game without Nintendo’s blessing, you had to invlude their IP in your physical disk or in the game code just to get it to boot. This BMW patent seems to be in the spirit of those hard and software protections that prevent people from doing what they want with the hardware (car) they bought.

Yeah and it’d be cool if they threw in a couple other games to show its versatility. HL3 of course, but a multiplayer game and maybe a unique puzzle game would be a good mix of game types.

I think you’re mixing up ME and 2000. ME (consumer) came after 98 (consumer) and 2000 (business) was the NT (business) version. I ran 2000 for a few years. Huge step up from 98/ME in stability and less eye candy bloat than XP.

Slackware was my first and I didn’t know that package managers existed (or maybe they didn’t at the time) to resolve dependencies and even if they did, they probably lagged on versions. I learned true dependency hell when trying to build my own apache, sendmail, etc from source while missing a ton of dependency libraries (or I needed newer versions) and then keeping things relatively up to date. Masochistic? Definitely for me, but idk how much of that was self inflicted by not using the package tool. Amazing learning at the time. This would have been mainly Slackware 3.x and 4.x. I switched to Debian (not arch BTW).

I think this was mostly answered in the other comments, so I’ll mention another category of people: felons although perhaps they fall in to the desperate people category because many employers do simple background checks on people and purposefully avoid hiring felons, thus the job prospects of felons is limited.

Why don’t companies hire them? I assume due to perception from that company’s customers, current/potential employees who wouldn’t want to work with felons, and associated risks (depending on the nature of the crime and the business of course).

I know of a company that specifically advertises that they hire felons and that they’re absecind chance employer to help people get their life back together. As far as I understand it’s mostly manual labor and factory type work and I assume they pay less than their competitors, so would have less operating costs. If this is the case, wouldn’t more businesses want to do so?

It may not be overall beneficial. They may attract some customers as they advertise how they’re helping people and by using their services, you’re helping people get their life on track, but they may also lose some customers. For some positions, hiring can be difficult for any company and this may make filling those positions even more difficult/costly such that savings aren’t worth it.

Generally if there’s an easy way to make money/more profit, it would be prevalent, so there’s probably down sides (thst are not necessarily apparent) that out weigh the benefits or people are not trying to maximize profit for some reason (possibly due to bias resulting in incorrect assessments).

I like forums, but maybe I’m part of the problem. I’ve read a forum obsessively for years without registering an account. Even when I have an account, I rarely post/comment. I’ve been reading Lemmy almost daily for over a year before registering an account and don’t reply much even with an account. Decentralization starts with individuals, so I’m going to try to add signal to the fediverse.

I generally prefer the traditional flat forum UI with oldest first, but that’s mostly a client issue. The problem though is if others are using a different UI the conversation may flow differently (think threaded vs flat forums).

RE karma, a lot of forums show post counts and like counts next to their forum profile, which is often included in every reply, so in some ways, the likes (karma) was a little more in your face. I think there was less astro turfing due to scope of benefit. What I mean is that while traditional forums were decentralized, so was the account and its reputation, so karma (like/post count) farming was isolated to that specific forum/community and if you were astro turfing, you’d get banned and lose that and could not transsfer that to other forums. Services like reddit effectively make this transferrable between forums. I’m concerned about how this will play out as decentralized platforms grow. It could be worse than reddit. I’ve been trying to come up with ways to handle this, but I can find flaws in every idea I’ve had so far.

Do you play any games with kernel anti cheat? I assumed a lot of anti cheat systems would have dropped support for win 7 by now. I stayed on win 7 as long as I could (I had non gaming compatibility issues). I feel like it was peak windows. Had they put the win 10 performance improvements in to win 7, it would have been perfection.

Idk if this covers your needs, but Home Assistant is non-cloud and supports voice commands. They’re selling a voice hardware now (preview edition):

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/

While I’ve used HA for years, I’ve never tried any of the voice command methods, so can’t really comment on it. I had just recently came across their voice hardware and am probably going to give it a try.