jj4211

@jj4211@lemmy.world

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Heh, recently I was looking up things about terminal graphics and came upon: github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/8389

And DHowett’s reply was pretty dismissive. Guess that was the tip of the iceberg.

But this anecdote is a good ‘corp’ versus ‘open source’ anecdote. There’s simply no way a business with project management would even think about optimizing performance of a terminal emulator that seems to vaguely work according to the marketing requirements. What a waste of time, right? My experience with a software development organization is 99% of management work is to rationalize away doing anything.

Meanwhile, open source someone says “screw it, this is crap, I can fix it”.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I don’t know, I mean I’ve seen a fair amount of IDE capability out of VSCode after some invested effort to try to get it there, but at it’s best I haven’t seen it as comprehensive as what I’ve seen in a Jetbrains IDE. That said, in my use case the IDE capabilities don’t apply very well anyway, so it’s moot for me and I’m happy with Kate with LSP.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I think this speaks to the potential strengths and weaknesses of open versus commercial.

It boils down to amount of resources and how they are invested.

In terms of amount of resources, open source has a rather organic pool of software developers. So if you have a use case that impacts every software developer in the world, well the open source has a lot of free labor that can produce impressive results that a commercial player would have a hard time out-spending. Conversely, if the use case is relatively more niche and the users are either not programmers or too busy using the software to do other things they couldn’t spend any on software, a commercial player can force the issue by paying some developers to work on it. Now the quality of that work may be reduced by the developers doing it for the pay without necessarily an inherent passion for the task at hand, but it can be pretty compelling and people can tend to get invested in their work even if they don’t care to start with. Incidentally it’s why at my company when they lucked into someone with actual passion for the work comes along I advocate strongly for retention, but those folks tend to be neglected and leave while some passionless sycophant gets the retention and promotion.

Then there’s how that resource is invested. Here we have professional software versus the more prolific general consumer software. In the general consumer case, the commercial interest takes the user as a given, and goes straight into how to gouge that customer relationship as hard as possible without regard for a good user experience. Stuff them with ads. Implement telemetry with rights to sell it off for marketing data. Nag them at every corner to buy some other offering at increased price. Have a confusing set of tiers and actively screw with the bottom tier. Actually making the software fit for purpose is so far below those others. With software for business, well, you still get the ‘must subscribe and confusing portfolio’, but some of the other stuff tones down. The target market is smaller, and the potential for marketing data and advertising revenue isn’t as attractive. The target market is frequently companies that take their confidentiality seriously and will readily get a lawyer to pursue issues, so the telemetry is both less valuable and a bit of a grenade waiting to go off if something screws up. So OSS tends to cover the ‘general consumer’ cases surprisingly well because the commercial interests are so much more invested in making things worse, while business to business can actually have a chance still.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Eh, I prefer KDE. It’s fairly uncluttered unless you actively mess with it and want it, whole Gnome is pretty ruthlessly “our way is the right way”.

Once upon a time they only allowed virtual desktops to be in a column. Someone decided that columns weren’t for everyone so obviously make it only be in a row. Despite ages of most implementations supporting a grid layout.

Window title search. This is fantastic for managing a lot of windows. I wish KDE could get better by using screen reader facilities to let you search window contents as well, but having the facility in show windows view at all is great.

Their window tiling is less capable even than Microsoft windows.

Any attempt to customize means extensions, and they seem to break the interfaces the extensions need constantly, and I had to face the reality that every update had me searching for a replacement extension because they broke one that want maintained anymore.

But either way, the open desktop shells are better than the proprietary ones.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
It’s also a good example of how an open source project manages to outmaneuver big company offerings.

Home assistant just wants to make the stuff work. Whatever the stuff is, whoever makes it, do whatever it takes to make it work so long as there are users. Also to warn users when someone is difficult to support due to cloud lock in.

All the proprietary stuff wants to force people to pay subscription and pay for their product or products that licensed the right to play with the ecosystem. So they needlessly make stuff cloud based, because that’s the way to take away user control. They won’t work with the device you want because that vendor didn’t pay up to work with that.

Commercial solutions may have more resources to work with and that may be critical for some software, but they divert more of those resources toward self enrichment at the expense of the user.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
And by extension, terminal emulators. Pretty much any open source one is miles better than the closed source ones.

Microsoft recognized this and has dramatically improved theirs as Microsoft terminal, an open source replacement. But it still isn’t as good as a lot of other terminals.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If these mother fuckers are trying to make me pay for Healthcare to talk to fucking ChatGPT I swear to god ChatGPT is going to write me so many scripts for opioids its won't be funny.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Which is like one of the few jobs they could do just fine. Spew a bunch of nonsense and pretend it’s insightful.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marc Rober shows why Tesla's camera-only self-driving system is dangerous⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Autopilot is not FSD, but these scenarios are supposed to be within the capabilities of autopilot to react. There’s no indication that FSD is better equipped to handle these sorts of scenarios than autopilot. Many of the autopilot scenarios are the car plowing into a static obstacle head on. Yes the drivers should have been paying attention, but again, the point is autopilot even with all the updates simply fails to accurately model the environment even for what is should be considering easy.

In terms of comparative systems, I frankly don’t know. No one has a launched offering, and we only know Tesla’s as well as we do because they opt to use random drivers on public roads as guinea pigs, which isn’t great. But again, this video demonstrated “easy mode” scenarios where the Tesla failed and another car succeeded. But all that’s beside the point, it’s not like radar and lidar would preclude fsd either way. The video makes clear the theory and reality of better sensing technology and it can only improve the safety of a system. FSD with added radar and lidar would have greater capacity for safety than FSD with just cameras. The lidar might be forgiven for cheap cars historically, but the radar is bonkers to remove as those are put on some pretty low end cars. No one else wants to risk FSD like capability without lidar because they see it as too risky. It’s not that take knows some magic to make cameras safe, they just are willing to inflict bigger risk, and willing to try to argue “humans are deadly too” whereas competition doesn’t even want to try that debate.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marc Rober shows why Tesla's camera-only self-driving system is dangerous⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
One, I don’t know if ‘autonomous no matter what’ is an important enough goal versus ADAS, but for another, the gold standard in the industry except Tesla is vehicle mounted LIDAR, with investments to bring down the tech price.

Merging data from different sources was never claimed by anyone to be too hard a problem, again, even Tesla used to and decided to downgrade their capabilities for cost. “It’s just not worth it” is a strange take on a video demonstrating quite clearly the better data from LIDAR than you can possibly get from cameras and the benefit of avoiding collisions, collisions that kill thousands a year. Even the relatively “won’t turn on unless things are perfect” autopilot has killed quite a few people, and incurred hundreds of accidents beyond that.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marc Rober shows why Tesla's camera-only self-driving system is dangerous⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Somehow other car companies are managing to merge data from multiple sources fine. Tesla even used to do it, but stopped to shave a few dollars in their costs.

In terms of assuming there would be safety concerns, well this video clearly demonstrates that adding lidar avoids three scenarios, at least two of them realistic. As I said my standard is not “human driver” but safest options as demonstrated.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marc Rober shows why Tesla's camera-only self-driving system is dangerous⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Lets assume that a human driver would fall for it, for sale of argument.

Would that make it a good idea to potentially run over a kid just because a human would have to, when we have a decent option to do better than human senses?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is 33 cents a small amount of money?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
True, though if we are talking about tax bracket going over 30 percent, that would be at nearly 200k, so well above those thresholds too. Of course the numbers aren’t 28 and 33, but that is the closest threshold to the example.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is 33 cents a small amount of money?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
If getting specific, there’s no 28 percent or 33 percent bracket, so these are all examples rather than real figures. I did make a comment using real numbers, same general magnitude but just more specific about the brackets.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is 33 cents a small amount of money?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
But your tax bill doesn’t go up 5%.

Ok, let’s get this close to real numbers. The cited tax brackets don’t exist, so I’ll go with the 24% to 32%. So if your earnings are 1 dollar into the 32% tax bracket, you are going from AGI $191,950 to $191,951. Your tax bill at $191,950 would be:
```
$11,600 * 0.10 +
$35,550 * 0.12 +
$53,375  * 0.22 +
$91,425 * 0.24 
---------------------------------
$39,110.74
```
And your tax bill at $191,951 would be:
```
$11,600 * 0.10 +
$35,550 * 0.12 +
$53,375  * 0.22 +
$91,425 * 0.24 +
$1 * 0.32
--------------------------------------
$39,111.06
```
Your tax bill goes up by a whopping $0.32 or 0.01% by earning that extra dollar, meaning you still got to keep $0.68 of that dollar. When they say that dollar would cause their tax bill to go up a lot, that’s pretty much exclusively owing to the misconception that people assume their tax bill would have gone to $61,424, so in the misconception that dollar would have cost them $22,313.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is 33 cents a small amount of money?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Would have to be mandated by workplace regulations, no company is going to voluntarily educate their employees that more money has no downside.

I’ll also say this doesn’t help, it strangely avoids the actual numbers. It should state explicitly that his total taxes would be $1,600+$4,266+$2,827=$8692, and not $13200. Needs to include the scenarios specific results and contrasted with what the viewer would have assumed otherwise.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is 33 cents a small amount of money?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
The whole notion of “kicked up a tax bracket” is also a misleading thing. Only a piece of your income goes into the “new bracket”, all pay under the new bracket is taxed as they would have been used to.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is 33 cents a small amount of money?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Most of the likely credits tend to phase out gracefully. So it’s true that we can’t be certain, based on my experience of when people are afraid of making too much money, it’s almost always because they think a higher tax bracket applies flatly across their income not due to nuanced understanding of tax credit and welfare benefits.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is 33 cents a small amount of money?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
This all boils down to a common misconception about ‘tax brackets’.

To simplify, pretend there’s a 28% tax bracket up to 100,000 dollars, and a 33% tax bracket when you hit 100k. The first 100k is always taxed at 28%, no matter what you make, and it’s only the incremental amount that gets taxed heavier. So here in this example, that would mean tax burden would be 28,000.33 instead of 28,000.28. These are not the exact brackets or percentages, but it’s at least showing the right magnitude of increase versus total amount.

However, many people are “afraid” of bumping a higher tax bracket. They think the tax bill would go from 28,000.28 to 33,000.33. That the tax bracket bumps up all your liability. I remember growing up people saying “I have to watch out and not hit the bigger tax bracket, if I’m close then I need a big raise to make it worth it, or else the raise is going to cost me more than it would make me”. This a big driver of antipathy toward democrat tax policies, a belief that mild success will punish them, despite it only increasing on the incremental amount.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hexadecimal⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
The LLM doesn’t have to innately implement filtering. You can use a more traditional and concrete filtering strategy on top. So you sneak something problematic by in the prompt and it’s too clever to be caught by the input filter, but then on the output the filter can catch that the prompt tricked the LLM into generating something undesired. Another comment specified they tried this and it started to work but then suddenly it seemingly shut out the reply in the middle, presumably the minute the LLM spit something at a more traditional filter and that shut it down.

I think I’ve seen this sort of approach has been applied to largely mask embarassing answers that become memes, or to detect input known not to work, and to shut it down or redirect it to a better facility (e.g. redirecting math to wolfram alpha).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thinkpad for the win⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Some context…

For one, it wasn’t spyware, it was UEFI that, if a user had admin/root privilege, they could modify the firmware despite signinging procedures that should have prevented that. There was no spyware, there was no root kit, there was a vulnerability.

For another:

IdeaPads, Legion gaming devices, and both Flex and Yoga laptops.

Technically it never touched the ThinkPads. Despite some areas where things blur, ThinkPad is still relatively independent of the rest of the product line. While I may not think Lenovo is trying to actively spy on their consumer brands, they do screw up enough that I wouldn’t want to touch them (not just security, they cut too many corners in general).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨modern psychiatry be like⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Hell, I’d even go so far as to say it might not be worth a specific categorization, that everyone is a bit different and we don’t need to pigeonhole every state of reasonably normal into little categories. Ever since Asperger’s was popularized, we had a big chunk of people that are not especially far from normal latching onto this.

If it doesn’t need particularly special treatment/accommodation, then it’s not really worth a category. If someone feels like not dealing with people, needing a bit of a break from it, then that shouldn’t need to be correlated to a condition. By the same token, it can’t be an excuse for being unreasonable to others when you are perfectly capable of being reasonable, you just don’t like doing so. If you misread someone’s non-verbal cues, whether or not you have a “condition”, people should understand that’s just a possibility of everyday life.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨modern psychiatry be like⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah, that’s the thing, I’ve seen the gamut (and people will say “of course it’s a spectrum”) and a non-trivial amount are people almost treating it as “trendy”, and self-diagnosing or shopping professionals seeking a diagnosis.

I remember at the time they were announcing removal of Asperger’s from the DSM that there was some thought that the high functioning “condition” did more harm than good. It seems the ship has sailed and anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable in social situations and also wants to use it as evidence of their intelligence will go for an Autistic diagnosis. I’ve dealt with a few people who got mad at their mental health professional for telling them they are within the realm of “normal” and everyone finds a challenge in dealing with other people to an extent.

Meanwhile, the people who would have been diagnosed as autistic whether today or 40 years ago suffer some dilution of accommodation, as it seems everyone asserts they are neourodivergent/spicy/autistic online and it ceases to mean much in the popular perception.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Facepalm on multiple levels⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Image
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A balanced diet is important⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

agggggggggggggggg

He must have died while typing …
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What keeps Americans from being mad about the state of their country?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Bread and circuses
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Note that it being only part of a key is a technology choice that does not require the reality map to it. It may seem like overkill, but someone may not trust the political process to preserve that promise and so they add the birthdate, just in case something goes sideway in the future. Los of technical choices are made anticipating likely changes and problems and designing things to be extra robust in the face of those
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Frankly the whole exchange sounds like Hollywood tech jargon.vaguely relevant words used in a not quite sensible way…
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Making noise about a relatively sudden midday midweek protest effort overall may lead to underwhelming optics. After all the noise and outage, this is all that shows up? Clearly people agent all that engaged…
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How did a simple phone call become so problematic?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
This creates a generational disconnect. Like when my phone rings unexpectedly at work, it’s 95% this one colleague in his 70s who is nice enough, but it instinctively feels rude because I feel like I need to answer. From his perspective, if I just don’t answer that’s fine and that’s the etiquette he was used to, try to call and no biggie if it doesn’t connect.

Going the other way, I know someone dealing with a person in their 80s over urgent important stuff and that person just will be utterly unreachable so much of the time. For them, there’s no such thing as “urgent enough to need immediate attention” because that was just not possible for them and society developed around the norm of folks just not being available as much.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How did a simple phone call become so problematic?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Easy, back in the day all we had was phone call for instant communication, so not much to compare to.

Also, you didn’t call a person, you called a house or place of work. This meant it was used more sparingly (need to keep the line open/share with the test of the house) and of you were away, then that phone call couldn’t bother you. This also meant people were used to not being able to reach who they wanted to talk to, so of you felt like letting the answering machine get it, no one would think anything of it. You were either on the phone or present in the moment, not trying to talk with a number of people who don’t know each other.

Now everyone has a phone at their hip. You can call someone and if that someone sends it to voicemail, you know they did and it can become a point of drama depending on the circumstance. Now I can be in the middle of text conversations with a half dozen people across half the world and so when my phone unexpectedly rings then I won’t who is this asshole who thinks they deserve my full attention over these other folks, even though the other person has no way of knowing about those conversations. We are expected to juggle concurrent conversations and a phone call derails that.