GamingChairModel

@GamingChairModel@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Shouldn’t the system be storing timestamps in UTC anyway, and then displaying them in whatever localization settings you have?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨School of hard knocks⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  On the flip side, I’m a former sysadmin and I only stick around for 5 years because I had the educational credentials to move onto another field (and then another field). I’m glad I did the IT thing in my 20’s, and still like to tinker with homelab stuff 20 years later, but in the end it was a stepping stone towards something else (that does require formal schooling). The degree is a tool that can be used to control on a few more things in your life, in the hopes that you can go where you want to end up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Confirms to Marxist theories regarding the proletariat.⁩ ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Doordash puts the tip in the order so that drivers can view them as bids for service, and they generally snatch up the highest tipping orders immediately. Low/no tip orders with long distances or a lower rated customer might languish, unclaimed, because drivers won’t want to take them for insufficient pay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨oh and it's also a crime⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Arch’s package management is actually the ideal, in my opinion. Official repositories for the stuff the distro maintainers want to officially support, a user-maintained AUR for other common packages, and the ability to build your own software with the Arch Build System, and letting pacman know where everything is. In a sense, the stuff in the official repositories have a privileged position, and you should be aware of the difference between the AUR and the official repositories, but you’re still always in control of what software is installed.

  The AUR packages and user-specific builds can be thought of as side loading, and the distinction can matter in some circumstances. So I’m ok with having another name for different installation/upgrade/update methods.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do YOU consider Kanji difficult?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Is it that much harder than remembering that some emojis now map onto secondary meanings, like 🍆 meaning penis and 💀 meaning “I find this to be very funny”? Or even the primary meanings of emojis, where you’d totally understand what someone is saying when they type ✈️🇯🇵🍣🍜?

  The difficulty comes from the sheer number of them, but human communication is full of things where meaning comes from non-alphabetical symbols.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It turns out that Juggalo makeup blocks facial recognition technology⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Will they actually devote the resources to try to pierce the anonymity of those handful of people? Everything we’ve seen about how tech companies operate is that they reach a threshold of “good enough for most cases” and don’t bother trying to optimize the edge cases. Collecting the billions of data points to try to use dozens of analysis techniques, and then having some kind of meta analysis on how to resolve disagreements between models, would be resource intensive beyond their own profit motives.

  Someone who wants to defeat gait analysis with a different pair of shoes (heel height and sole thickness and back support affect how people walk), and wears a mask might lose the arms race if the tech companies choose to continue to improve the tech even after it’s already good enough.

  I think it’s possible but not inevitable. Especially if there’s a financial reckoning for AI companies soon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dumb glasses⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m with you.

  GoPro obviously found a really interesting niche that they dominated for about 10 years, and POV videos can still be cool for sports and things like that where the videographer tends not to have hands available for actually holding a camera. I think that’s still pretty cool, and glasses can be a useful form factor for that general use. I’m all for making camera ergonomics better.

  But the AI assistant stuff and the attempts to make them part of the actual day to day (both by attempting to making them fashionable and socially normalizing a camera pointing at everything all the time) is obviously a bad development. Even if we implement countermeasures (re-normalizing masks in public, making lighting terrible for digital cameras, etc.) it wouldn’t be a symmetrical effort.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Good article for pointing out that specific rocket math. The optimistic tone of that article, though, is very much a product of its publication date of February 2020. The space programs have suffered major technical, financial, and political setbacks since then, and the geopolitical moment doesn’t really lend itself to megaprojects like moon missions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon makes a wish⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also fiddly controls.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon makes a wish⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I tried reading a book once, but the controls were too fiddly and my progress through the main quest was too slow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  and every forum had rules against bumping, typically only once in 24 hours, and only like once or twice.

  You’re talking about pure bumping where someone has a zero-content comment like “bump” and nothing else. I’m talking about the entire spectrum of low to high quality content, from “bump” to the general phenomenon of reviving old threads to soft bumps like adding additional useless information to an unanswered request.

  Other examples include stupid arguments that needed moderation to be shut down (a phpBB or vBulletin post that spanned 50+ pages in a forum where 3-4 was the norm, all because 2 users wouldn’t shut the fuck up), always occupying the top of the chronological sort.

  The point is that any active forum with more than 1000 comments per day needed to be heavily moderated. User votes allowed forums to scale beyond that limited size. Chronological sort was terrible and didn’t scale beyond a group of 100-200 users (not coincidentally similar to Dunbar’s number), which is why any decent forum today doesn’t do it by default, including any totally free and open source forums, like the fediverse forum platforms of Lemmy and Piefed and Mbin. And even choosing to put these platforms on pure chronological sort reduces the quality of the overall experience.

  Honestly, I dont know how anyone can say that the days before gamification, before adpocalypse, before billionaire hijacking of the internet for their own personal ends, is worse than what we have today. It borders on either lunacy, or propaganda.

  I’m talking about the use of user voting, which undoubtedly improved the quality of forums (along with comment threading so that each comment could branch off into its own collapsible side discussion) when slashdot and a bunch of copycats started doing similar things (see HN, Reddit). You can’t look at Reddit in 2026 and complain that the sorting algorithms they implemented in 2005 or 2007 made things worse. No, things got worse around 2015-2020 when the front page algorithm stopped prioritizing quality over engagement bait.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam :: About the New York Attorney General lawsuit against Valve⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The targeted court cases are to argue that the previously passed legislation already covers these particular facts.

  If the legislature passes a law that says “making false statements to another in order to obtain something of value is fraud,” you can expect litigation about the actual contours of what is or isn’t fraud.

  Same with legislation against driving at an unsafe speed, causing a nuisance to your neighbors, discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, etc. Court cases decide the edge cases.

  If the legislature passes a law banning gambling outside of licensed institutions, and banning gambling for minors, you can expect litigation about what actually is or isn’t gambling.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon misses flash⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Plus those of us on Linux desktops didn’t love the workarounds we had to do with gnash or whatever. The rise of the mobile device cemented the need to have open web standards not tied to proprietary formats and proprietary software.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The internet was so much better before that shit.

  No, you’re looking at it through rose colored glasses. Pure chronological sorting purely awarded the most active commenters regardless of quality, and led people to submit lots of low quality comments. Plus there was the “bump” phenomenon where a useless comment was made simply to manipulate the sorting.

  Forums before slashdot just weren’t that great without heavy moderation. By outsourcing some portion of moderation to the users, it made for higher quality discussion in the forums that allowed threading and voting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Every radio band is subject to their own rules.

  Wi-Fi and Bluetooth transmit on frequencies that are “license by rule,” where the FCC license to transmit is granted to everyone who follows the Part 15 rules about the technical details. So nobody needs a separate license to use wifi or Bluetooth, and the devices themselves are only subject to certain technical restrictions, like maximum transmit power and the like.

  Ham radios transmit on bands that allow for a license for anyone who can pass the test and pay the fee.

  Cell phones operate on frequencies and bands that have much stricter licensing rules, and the devices are certified to follow the technical rules under pretty much all circumstances. They go through much more thorough testing than the radios capable of transmitting on amateur bands or license by rule bands.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Website⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, but very cheap and sometimes free tools help a complete beginner do both, without any real technical knowledge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Real Struggle 😔⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I liken it to a professional basketball player with a low free throw percentage. If they’re still on the team and in the league despite missing 3 free throws a game, they must be really good at the other stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lightbulbs⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I would think that accurate color representation would’ve generally required the bright lights and broad spectrum coverage of sunlight, so I imagine people just…painted during the day, by daylight.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fahrenheit today is literally defined through Celsius

  The same as pretty much every unit they use

  At this point, that’s basically every unit other than the seven fundamental units. Degrees Celsius is defined from the fundamental unit Kelvin.

  Plus the actual definitions of those fundamental units were defined based on historical measurements tied to former definitions. Today the second is defined around the frequency of the cesium-133 atom, but it was traditionally measured as 1/(60 x 60 x 24) of the time of a single rotation of the earth, which stopped serving us when we realized the rotations had too much variation between days. The meter is currently defined around the speed of light and the second, but was previously defined in terms of what they thought the Earth’s circumference was, and then a metal bar they kept in Paris, then based on the wavelength of light emitted from a transition in krypton-86. Same with the kilogram, currently kept at Planck’s constant but previously based on a particular chunk of metal that was mysteriously losing mass over time, and before that defined from the density of 4°C water and the definition of the meter.

  Conventions are important. The history of how we got to particular conventions can often be messy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon makes an announcement⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The only solution is to train LLMs on more 4chan content, surely there will be no side effects from that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Starlink Alternative that can't be blocked⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not feasible for a mass market consumer product like Starlink.

  Why not? That’s a service designed to serve millions of simultaneous users from nearly 10,000 satellites. These systems have to be designed to be at least somewhat resistant to unintentional interference, which means it is usually quite resistant to intentional jamming.

  Any modern RF protocol is going to use multiple frequencies, timing slots, and physical locations in three dimensional space.

  And so the reports out of Iran is that Starlink service is degraded in places but not fully blocked. It’s a cat and mouse game out there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Starlink Alternative that can't be blocked⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d think that there are practical limits to jamming. After all, jamming doesn’t just make radio impossible, it just makes the transmitter and receiver need to get closer together (so that their signal strength in that shorter distance is strong enough to overcome the jamming from further away). Most receivers filter out the frequencies they’re not looking for, so any jammer will need to actually be hitting that receiver with that specific frequency. And many modern antenna arrays rely on beamforming techniques less susceptible to unintentional interference or intentional jamming that is coming from a different direction than where it’s looking. Even less modern antennas can be heavily directional based on the physical design.

  If you’re trying to jam a city block, with a 100m radius, of any and all frequencies that radios use, that’s gonna take some serious power. Which will require cooling equipment if you want to keep it on continuously.

  If you’re trying to jam an entire city, though, that just might not be practical to hit literally every frequency that a satellite might be using.

  I don’t know enough about the actual power and equipment requirements, but it seems like blocking satellite communications between satellites you don’t control and transceivers scattered throughout a large territory is more difficult than you’re making it sound.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why in hospitals, is 'gun shot wound' appreciated as "GSW"-⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Joke’s on him, I’m putting my website at 305.domain.tld.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why in hospitals, is 'gun shot wound' appreciated as "GSW"-⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  While we’re at it, I never understood why the convention for domain name wasn’t left to right tld, domain, subdomain. Most significant on left is how we do almost everything else, including numbers and ISO 8601 dates.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When the AI bubble bursts..⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Specifically, desktop RAM is slabs of silicon, placed into little packages, soldered onto circuit boards in DIMM form or similar, to be plugged into a motherboard slot for RAM.

  The AI demand is for the silicon itself, using advanced packaging techniques to put them on the same package as the complex GPUs with very high bandwidth. So these same pieces of silicon are not even being put into DIMMs, so that if they fall out of use they’ll be pretty much intertwined with chips in form factors that a consumer can’t easily make use of.

  There’s not really an easy way to bring that memory back into the consumer market, even after the AI bubble bursts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seems legit⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Plenty of the AI functions on phones are on-device. I know the iPhone is capable of several text-based processing (summarizing, translating) offline, and they have an API for third party developers to use on-device models. And the Pixels have Gemini Nano on-device for certain offline functions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  AI drives 48% increase in Google emissions

  That’s not even supported by the underlying study.

  Google’s emissions went up 48% between 2019 and 2023, but a lot of things changed in 2020 generally, especially in video chat and cloud collaboration, dramatically expanding demand for data centers for storage and processing. Even without AI, we could have expected data center electricity use to go up dramatically between 2019 and 2023.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨do what you love⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I was a dual major Electrical Engineering/Philosophy. The rigorous logic in some branches of philosophy was very helpful for programming principles. And the the philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of mind has overlaps with and supplements modern AI theory pretty well.

  I’m out of the tech world now but if I were hiring entry level software developers, I’d consider a philosophy degree to be a plus, at least for people who have the threshold competency in actual programming.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shit like this is why we need open source printers!⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To be precise, the “lossless” compression is still a compression algorithm. They just didn’t implement the steps that actually make the compression algorithm lossless.

  From the write up:

  JBIG2, the image format used in the affected PDFs, usually has lossless and lossy operation modes. Pattern Matching & Substitution„ (PM&S) is one of the standard operation modes for lossy JBIG2, and „Soft Pattern Matching“ (SPM) for lossless JBIG2 (Read here or read the papery by Paul Howard et al.1)). In the JBIG2 standard, the named techniques are called „Symbol Matching“.

  PM&S works lossy, SPM lossless. Both operation modes have the basics in common: Images are cut into small segments, which are grouped by similarity. For every group only a representative segment is is saved that gets reused instead of other group members, which may cause character substitution. Different to PM&S, SPM corrects such errors by additionally saving difference images containing the differences of the reused symbols in comparison to the original image. This correction step seems to have been left out by Xerox.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shit like this is why we need open source printers!⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s written up his findings in English, for anyone who prefers English over German or text over video.

  But basically the JBIG2 image compression algorithm used in those scanners looked for certain repeating patterns, and incorrectly compressed certain portions of the image into “close enough” blocks of pixels. Unfortunately, that meant that scanned number data wasn’t guaranteed to be accurate, even when the decoded output clearly looked like a number with no distortion or noise.

  It’s worth the full read.