HakFoo
@HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on 3 days ago:
I’m amused that it was also worth individually weiging and pricing them. Couldn’t possibly sell a 14p banana for 13, eh?
- Comment on HDMI 2 weeks ago:
It’s clearly DisplayPort.
- Comment on My writing laptop just died 3 weeks ago:
Can I be a minor character gesturing rudely at the anthromorphic prophylactic and declaring “Arlong did nothing wrong”?
- Comment on AI Is A Money Trap 5 weeks ago:
The Internet boom didn’t have the weird you’re-holding-it-wrong vibe too. Legit “It doesn’t help with my use case concerns” seem to all too often get answered with choruses of “but have you tried this week’s model? Have you spent enough time trying to play with it and tweak it to get something more like you want?” Don’t admit limits to the tech, just keep hitting the gacha.
I’ve had people say I’m not approaching AI in “good faith”. I say that you didn’t need “good faith” to see that Lotus 1-2-3 was more flexible and faster than tallying up inventory on paper, or that AltaVista was faster than browsing a card catalog.
- Comment on AI Is A Money Trap 5 weeks ago:
I have to think that most people won’t want to do local training.
It’s like Gentoo Linux. Yeah, you can compile everything with the exact optimal set of options for your kit, but at huge inefficiency when most use cases might be mostly served by two or three pre built options.
If you’re just running pre-made models, plenty of them will run on a 6900XT or whatever.
- Comment on GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it. 5 weeks ago:
It’s a quick way to say that the emperor still has no clothes.
We’re boiling the oceans to train the models, and these are well-publicised failure modes. If they haven’t fixed it, it seems to suggest they CAN’T fix it with the tools and architecture they have. So what other problems is it whiffing on that aren’t trivially checkable?
If marketing boxed in the product and said “it does these ten things well”, we might be willing to forgive limitations when we leave its wheelhouse. Nobody kvetches that Microsoft Word is an awful IDE, after all. But that would require a retreat from a public that’s been promised Lt. Cmdr. Data in your pocket, and investors that have priced it as such.
- Comment on Political Views 5 weeks ago:
How about pseudoscorpions? One landed on my arm a few weeks ago (probably fell out of the AC ducts) and it was charmingly silly proportioned for a tiny little thing waving pincers.
- Comment on heaven 1 month ago:
I know that Grok went Nazi but Gemini going fundie wasn’t on my bingo card.
- Comment on Why abc, xyz, etc.? 1 month ago:
I believe the IJK convention comes from an early programming language where those variables defaulted to a decimal type so thry were sane choices for loop counters.
- Comment on [Gamers Nexus] The ASUS Dumpster Fire 1 month ago:
I never got why Asus is so beloved. The RoG branding is cringe even by motherboard branding standards, and the one Asus board I had (a M3A78) had a surprise showstopper incompatibility (hard crashes with a specific PCI-e card that worked fine on a LGA775 board and a Gigabyte 790X board) that their support refused to take responsibility for.
It’s like they’re still coasting on the goodwill from when they did a dual-Celeron board.
- Comment on THIS describes too many people today 2 months ago:
Let me stop at the Sunoco and pick up eught gallons of CHIN.
- Comment on Welcome to the Labour police state 2 months ago:
Even if they were trying to use this sort of rule with wholesome intentions, I’m not sure how targeting groups by name instead of deed makes sense. It’s like doing a healthy diet by giving up Coca-Cola by name even though Pepsi and RC have the same nutritional profile and availability. Enjoy the Whack-a-mole game!
Taken to its logical conclusion, someone should start a pro-Palestinian squad and call it the Reform Party.
- Comment on yeey 2 months ago:
Cobalt 60 has a half life of 5.27 years.
If the 7-1-63 is a date stamp of original manufacture, it’s gone through over 11 half-lives. There’s less than .05% of the original flavour.
I don’t know about the decay products, but I’d wonder how far we are from legitimately edible.
- Comment on I feel attacked 3 months ago:
I sort of wonder if the next generation will still romanticize Japan in quite the same way. We’re past the peak trendy-products era of Weird Sony and the Toyota MR2, anime is no longer a secret exotic thing, and it feels like if you want “15 years ahead of us optimistic techno future”, you could easily slide in Chongqing or Seoul instead of Tokyo.
- Comment on His name is Carcin and he loves toes 🤗 3 months ago:
Have you tried Johnson’s Spray Crab?
- Comment on Don't worry 4 months ago:
Once an egg sac hatched at our communal postbox and it was magical, all these tiny yellow spot sprite things bumbling around and setting off. Put a good narrator on and people would have watched for hours.
- Comment on I can't believe it 5 months ago:
I think it’s more the £50 notes. Much like using a USD100 note in the States, it’s a bit big for most daily purchases.
I ended up dumping most of mine on a couple expensive souvenirs in shops expensive enough that they’d deal with it or breaking them in banks.
- Comment on lab equipment 5 months ago:
I bought a '60s VTVM recently. It needs mains voltage, uses two vaccuum tubes, and does less than my $15 Aliexpress digital meter while taking 48 times the space, but golly it’s nifty.
- Comment on Friendly reminder 5 months ago:
Who are the skeletons fighting? Do we need to do well intentioned symbolic support gestures on social media?
- Comment on Re: Delete, Delete, Delete - FCC Initiates Broad Inquiry on Rules to Delete or Amend 5 months ago:
I’d wonder if the existing amateur presence would make the bands hard to sell for “pollution risk”. There’s a lot of kit in circulation, and getting it off the market, including secondhand, would be difficult.
Yeah, they could blow a lot of time and money on FCC enforcement, but it feels like trying to unring a bell. As a telecom, would you be willing to pay for (for example) 148MHz on just the promise the existing users were displaced on paper? That doesn’t mean much when some untrained/curious person finds kit at the Goodwill and tries it out in the middle of your service range.
Of course, obviously fight for every nanometre of spectrum, but that’s probably a legit argument against reclassification: all they’d get is damaged goods of low resale value.
- Comment on What Can We Do to Get Youth into Ham Radio? 5 months ago:
I wonder if the way to go is to start with the premise of “It’s a way to communicate” and work backwards. Better tooling could make it more amenable to new users, and also help make specific use cases more compelling. Once users have he reason you want to be in the ecosystem-- which I suspect, for many people, might look more like a community than a bag of one-off contacts-- then it justfies going deeper into better equipment and technique.
Discoverability is a huge thing. For example, a cheap SDR, even receive-only, is a magical thing, but you end up getting a waterfall full of “what’s this weird burst” and jumping around the dial trying to chase where the action is. I suspect better software could really help there-- a UI that decodes digital modes and CW in the right place, and archive received signals might make it easier to track the activity and reduce the problem of “I tuned elsewhere and missed something interesting”
If you start with one of the cheap 2m/70cm HTs, you might be able to find a local repeater, and once you work your way through the fidgety UI, even send a transmission. but are you just going to find empty air much of the time. Again, it’s hard to find the action, and make sure you’re actually being a positive contributor. I think this has been a problem for me; I got licensed, got my little HT, but now I have the choice of either listening to static, or waiting for a conversation and hoping I have everything configured right enough not to be an annoyance. Maybe better guide websites and scheduled events can help minimize “listening to static” disappointment times.
I could see a fun community project being an autoresponder bot-- in idle times, it would listen to an advertised frequency, detect speech and CW signals and respond with signal quality reports quickly and conveniently to make it easy for a new user to make sure they’ve got their equipment set up right without barging into a conversation. I know there are ways to test propagation, but a lot of it is “go find a second device and pull up a tracking website”
I admit some of this could be seen as “dumbing down” or steering towards specific narrow paradigms, but that doesn’t have to be the entire universe. It could be the equivalent of AOL or Compuserve to the open internet-- making sure that you can get value out of the experience early on, so people can transition to the broader open platform as their needs and skills grow.
- Comment on What's wrong with a technocracy? 5 months ago:
We’ve seen decentralized education and it tends to have problems with resourcing and economies of scale, and content policies get easily hijacked by loud people with personal vendettas.
- Comment on Hypothetically, if you were a billionaire that suddently had a change of heart and wanted to go against trump, how dangerous would it be to resist? 6 months ago:
That’s what baffles me with the DOGE fracas. How long will solidarity hold when there are some very clear winners and losers within their own class?
There are a lot of billionaires who have fat revenue streams coming out of the federal budget, and I don’t think they’re all eager to trigger some sort of Mad Max/Medieval social collapse just so they can be the Archduke of San Jose after America implodes. I doubt they all bought the Network State story.
A fair number of them, expecting to live for more than 10 years and wanting to remain rich, probably invested aggressively into “skate where the puck is going” businesses that are now being slaughtered in the name of doubling down on fossil fuels and uncompetitive domestic manufacturers. Will Elon eat their losses? Of course, he’s committing financial seppuku too.
- Comment on How is the Stock Market keeping it's value after *points to everything*? 6 months ago:
Our new defacto president is the avatar of bubble economics.
Even the other oligarchs, thry made something at dramatic scale to justify their wealth. Microsoft did sell a lot of software. Facebook got 176 billion people on board to blast adverts at. They’re trillion dollar firms that do correspondingly large run rates.
Tesla is still a minor player in its space, and SpaceX is inherently a narrow business. Even PayPal, where the horrors all came from, isn’t a major value add, it’s a thin mask atop the clunkiness of American payment rails that should have been replaced by something like FedNow by 2003.
But he’s taken these tiny fundamentals and convinced Wall Street to puff more air into them than a fresh bag of Lay’s.
- Comment on Amateur Radio Emergency Preparedness Act Re-Introduced 7 months ago:
There’s some shared delusion that without a HOA to block it, everyone is just champing at the bit to leave a rusted out Pontiac on blocks in their front yard, which will totally cause their neighbour’s property value to fall.
Personally, the next model-home exhibit I visit, I’m asking up front if they mind my plans for a 1:3 scale reconstruction of the Westward Ho
- Comment on Romance scammers are now in the fediverse 7 months ago:
I never seem to get appropriately coded romance scams.
I guess the RFI from my computer is jamming the gaydar.
- Comment on Elon Reeve Musk 7 months ago:
Are you using a shell replacement for the XP style titlebars and taskbar?
Calmira was pretty impressive for a taskbar-based shell, but I don’t recall doing a titlebar swap.
- Comment on Perfectly clear instructions HP 7 months ago:
I read about this. They make the printer WITH a perfectly good USB port and then stick a “no USB” label over it and attempt to force you to use their wireless setup.
post.lurk.org/@yaxu/110833261398955782 for more.
- Comment on Wasn't the future of tech much more interesting in the 90s? LGR comments on '93 CES 7 months ago:
There’s also the Ploopy, which is modern-oriented but a competent DIY trackball.
- Comment on what was the last game you played in 2024? 8 months ago:
Vampire’s Dawn 3. I suspect I’m exhausting my opportunities to powerlevel through the content, being that my party reached level 86 and never having seen any zone tagged at a level over 85. I might have to use gasp strategy to finish it.
