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BehindTheBarrier

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BehindTheBarrier ,

I kinda get where he is coming for though. AI is being crammed into everything, and especially in things where they are not currently suited to be.

After learning about Machine learning, you kind realize that unlike “regular programs” that ML gives you “roughly what you want” answers. Approximations really. This is all fine and good for generating images for example, because minor details being off of what you wanted probably isn’t too bad. A chat bot itself isn’t wrong here, because there are many ways to say the same thing. The important thing is that there is a definite step after that where you evaluate the result. In simpler ML you can even figure out the specifics of the process, but for the most part we evaluate what the LLM said or if the image is accurate to our expectations. But we can’t control or constrain the output to exactly our needs, because our restrictions largely are just input in a almost finished approximation engine.

The problem is, that companies take these approximation engines, put them in their product and consider their output fact. Like Ai chatbots doing customer support, and make up facts like the user that was told about rules that didn’t exist for an airline, or the search engines that parrot jokes or harmful advice. Sure you and I might realize that these things come from a machine that doesn’t actually think about it’s answers, but others don’t. And throwing a “*this might be wrong because its AI” on it is not an acceptable waiver of accountability.

Despite this, I use chatgpt and gemini a lot to help me program, they get a lot of things wrong but also do great. It’s a great tool, exactly because I step in after the approximation step, review and decide. I’m aware of the limits. But putting these things in front of “users” without a review step means you are advertising that you are either unaware of this flaw, or just see the cost-benefit analysis and see that if noting else it’ll generate interest during the hype.

There is a huge potential, but throwing AI into a situation where facts are needed when it’s only making rough guesses, is the wrong way about it.

Am I the only one preferring low quality media over high quality one?

I have a very slow Internet connection (5 Mbps down, and even less for upload). Given that, I always download movies at 720p, since they have low file size, which means I can download them more quickly. Also, I don’t notice much of a difference between 1080p and 720p. As for 4K, because I don’t have a screen that can display...

BehindTheBarrier ,

Completely true, but also compression can make anything bad. I’ve seen 480p better 1080p simply because the 480p was using more bitrate, where the 1080p is encoded without enough relatively speaking.

BehindTheBarrier ,

It is not a defense of the manufacturers, but EVs are still damn expensive to make. And they are completely at fault for that too, because everyone except Tesla dragged their feet about making the EV transition.

BehindTheBarrier ,

Easily achievable if you only take calls in working hours. Then all working hours will have more than average calls per hour for a day.

BehindTheBarrier ,

I use phone every day at office so I don’t need to get the wallet out of my jacket when going to the canteen to buy lunch. It’s literally the reason I started using my phone to pay. Too many times I forgot my card…

Can I refuse MS Authenticator?

So my company decided to migrate office suite and email etc to Microsoft365. Whatever. But for 2FA login they decided to disable the option to choose “any authenticator” and force Microsoft Authenticator on the (private) phones of both employees and volunteers. Is there any valid reason why they would do this, like it’s...

BehindTheBarrier ,

It’s worth adding I greatly prefer MS Auth style authentication, since I don’t have to find the right entry to read the Auth code and then write it on the other computer. Instead MS pops a notification and you either type or select the right number, verify with fingerprint and done. Much more convenient.

It often tells you what you login into and where you are attempt to log in from, so it’s a few extra layers of security for those that have that awareness to check those details.

BehindTheBarrier ,

Played a lot of rainbow six siege, where you have to shoot those 360° security cameras when you are attacking. So, now I’m trained to spot those on instinct.

Have you ever bough an external hardrive only to take the disk out of it?

Hiya, so am looking to buy more storage and while browsing am seeing some external harddisks, such as Western Digital My Book and Seagate Expansion Desktop for cheaper than the internal harddisks themselves. Have seen this one video from KTZ Systems where he bought up multiple of these external ones just to open them up and use...

BehindTheBarrier ,

A lot of external drives are just internal devices with another controller and casing around. I had a 4TB I used with my laptop, and tore apart the casing and just plugged it into my desktop when I built one. Unless you start hammering the external case around, the drive will be fine.

BehindTheBarrier ,

Pretty much anything in katakana in Japan is loanwords.

Very interesting about flew markets though, Norway is the same as Sweden here.

BehindTheBarrier ,

The simplicity of Google Photos has me still rolling with that.

But for all my music, syncthing is the best. In my case it’s synced to my phone though, and also backuped up from that to the cloud.

BehindTheBarrier ,

I’m in the MPC-HC gang on Windows. Just so much more practical than other players. The main selling point was that full-screen the controls go away once you move the cursor off them, it was amazing. And no waiting for subs to be processed like VLC had to back then, never turned back so don’t know if that is still a thing.

BehindTheBarrier ,

Not to completely spring to IKEAs defense here, but I heard they really were affected by production and shipping problems during covid. It’s reasonable prices would go up, and at least good that they are going down again.

BehindTheBarrier ,

Reminds me of folding cardboard boxes. If you are taking a flat piece and make a box of it, are you folding a box or unfolding the cardboard. Or both. And when you do the reverse, you do the same, do you not?

BehindTheBarrier ,

Every time you open anything in office applications you get these small pop-ups

  • See what changes others did?
  • We added a new feature, do you want to see it?
BehindTheBarrier ,

I don’t think shorts are bad, but they aren’t the reason I go to YouTube at all. They are just in the way.

I am the Rust programmer, I will rewrite everything in Rust. (youtu.be)

I am the Rust programmer, I will rewrite the world in Rust. I will rewrite the world in Rust because the world is unsafe. As I am the Rust programmer I will keep writing rust until the world is safe. After the world is safe, I will not rewrite it in Rust. Because I am the Rust programmer I will retire from programmer in Rust....

BehindTheBarrier ,

It would kinda go along to “do not go gentle into the good night” like it was presented in Interstellar.

Star Citizen's first-person shooting is getting backpack-reloading, dynamic crosshairs, procedural recoil, and other improvements to 'bring the FPS combat to AAA standard' (www.pcgamer.com)

Well, I mean, I would have launched it first (as an AAA game), but I’m no game developer. 🤷 And neither are they, from the looks of it. Good at perpetually raking in money for himself and his family, though!

BehindTheBarrier ,

So you say, but it does make me flinch when it suddenly hits.

BehindTheBarrier ,

I made do with my IDE, even after getting a developer job. Outside shenanigans involving a committed password, and the occasional empty commit to trigger a build job on GitHub without requiring a new review to be approved, I still don’t use the commandline a lot.

But it’s true, if you managed to commit and push, you are OK. Even the IDE will make fixing most merges simple.

BehindTheBarrier ,

It’s probably more common that scientific notation is used. So 3.2 *10^4 or simply 3.2e4. From the little physics I had, you often used kilometers instead of something like megameters. Or used just lightyears when you got on a big enough scale.

No, electric vehicle sales aren’t dropping. Here’s what’s really going on (www.cnn.com)

No, electric vehicle sales aren’t dropping. Here’s what’s really going on::Tesla has been slashing prices. Ford just cut the price of its Mustang Mach-E, too, plus it cut back production of its electric pickup. And General Motors is thinking about bringing back plug-in hybrids, arguably a step back from EVs.

BehindTheBarrier ,

I got a Peugeot 208. It’s small, and ok in all aspects except the software. Typical bad car UI. It works with cabled Android Auto, so for long drives that’s more than fine. But touch screen is still old, and the app/site hasn’t let me log in for a few weeks now… So I can’t remote start heating.

But it’s a great car that I bought used, for driving to and from work. Looks good, yellow color, parking sensors and rear camera for my blind ass. But is also probably not available in America for all I know, I live in Europe.

Why aren't more releases x265?

Nearing the filling of my 14.5TB hard drive and wanting to wait a bit longer before shelling out for a 60TB raid array, I’ve been trying to replace as many x264 releases in my collection with x265 releases of equivalent quality. While popular movies are usually available in x265, less popular ones and TV shows usually have...

BehindTheBarrier , (edited )

Already been explained a few times, but GPU encoders are hardware with fixed options, with some leeway in presets and such. They are specialized to handle a set of profiles.

They use methods which work well in the specialized hardware. They do not have the memory that a software encoder can use for example to comb through a large amount of frames, but they can specialize the encoding flow and hardware to the calculations. Hardware encoded can not do everything software encoders do, nor can they be as thorough because of constraints.

Even the decoders are like that, for example my player will crash trying to hardware decode AV1 encoded with super resolution frames, frames that have a lower resolution that are supposed to be upscale by the decoder. (a feature in AV1, that hardware decoder profiles do not support, afaik.)

BehindTheBarrier ,

Our company did a thing like this, focusing on the manager and above. They got password and authenticator codes out of them and admin access to the slack…

Good method to have users learn about critical thinking.

BehindTheBarrier ,

I don’t know what’s required for KLWP support in a launcher, but KLWP is a live wallpaper with touch interaction. Don’t know if stock support that on my phone. But some cool setup like media player functionality, time and such, in the font and size I want. And some other disguised shortcuts.

But for me in actual Nova, it being able to style app icons individually, swipe actions on app icons, and the dock at the bottom being able to slide to have more apps. And pretty standard now, but swipe up for app drawer and down for notifications. It works especially well with OnePlus gestures that I’m still holding on to.

BehindTheBarrier ,

There’s ongoing work to use AI Gen to introduce “new” details during upscaling. But I assume many will not be interested in something that doesn’t recreate real details.

BehindTheBarrier ,

I love discord for small communities, not that I have that many I’m in though. But friend groups, and niche topics. Places where the chat generally is a single discussion or two at a single point in time. And the voice chat is superb. Just drop in and out is convenient.

But it sure as fuck doesn’t compete with what reddit and Lemmy is doing.

BehindTheBarrier ,

I remember it being used at the “roast me” sub so the person verified they were actually the person in the image asking to be roasted.

BehindTheBarrier ,

Well. Assuming the cost of splitting water is lower than the energy produced from the same amount of hydrogen.

BehindTheBarrier ,

After using it, coming to python and not having a super easy way to work with dates is a pain.

But DateTime in dotNet have horrible timezone support. It’s essentially either local timezone, not timezone or utc. And the utc part is somewhat rough. There’s some datetimeoffset and the like, but they too just don’t let working with timezones be easy.

BehindTheBarrier ,

We avoid that, because just at a glance you might not see the function flow change when returns are at the end of lines. It’s a minor thing of course.

BehindTheBarrier ,

Been a while since I used the new thing, immediately hated it. All on mobile.

First of a, the bottom scroll thing on my phone to select a server or whatever it was just ain’t it. I didn’t use it much, but it seemed extremely annoying to move between dm and servers, especially if they weren’t the top ones. You can get lists and such by swiping.

Second was that server channels turned into a huge mess. Showing the last message makes absolutely no sense on any server I use. Especially on bigger game server like destiny group finding one’s already long lists turned into miles long lists. Absolutely unusable. I need things compact and clean personally, having the channels big and wide wastes so much space, and again long lists.

Being in a server hides any notifications and dms too.

Everything that was close at hand before is now far away. And that sucks for me.

BehindTheBarrier ,

It’s fairly common, you’ll see plenty of Tesla in Norway at least.

I could have ended up with Tesla if I could earn a car before Elon ruined his public persona. Now I’m definitely not getting one. But I do think anyone will get much negative feedback. I’d probably advice them to avoid one, but they are still better then it comes to software, most cars are shit at that.

I do hope a potential strike helps change their image more though.

BehindTheBarrier , (edited )

Here’s my view:

Efuel is less efficient, simply because engines that use it are. We waste at least 50% of the energy put into it. Google also says most common cars waste between 60-80% of the energy. This means while Efuel is net zero in terms of production, assuming the energy put into creating it is all clean and 100% efficient. If we view the production and use of efuel as a cycle, you’re wasting half the energy every time. Every time the tank is fueled.

Electric engines generally waste roughly 20%. There’s some additional loss across the charging of a battery, but it’s still far better than a gas engines efficency.

The problem is the energy and waste from battery production, which makes them worse than gas car manufacturing. But they pass gas cars as long as they are used long enough. And here’s the important part, we can improve and change batteries and their production process. We are seeing massive research into this and especially into batteries not involving rare materials. We can also improve recycling of batteries. These are all things we can do to avoid oil and gas. Because gas engines are less efficient, and even with Efuel as net zero, the process of production and loss in use is just worse than electricity based use.

And electricity can be clean energy. If we just find better batteries, we can move to a much cleaner process. But a long as we remain on inefficient gas engines, we will always have co2 pollution, along with other pollution. Eg. If Norway with 98% clean electricity swapped to all electric, and battery with the car got on the same level of gas engine in terms of production waste/pollution, we’d be saving so much energy and waste because of the much higher efficiency of electric engines, and reduction in gas use. Efuel can never do that, it will need green energy for production, and waste more energy in use. Thus I see no reason to push this over electric vehicles.

There’s other downsides, such as heavier cars cause more road tear and air pollution. So ideally we’ll also move away from cars as much as possible. But trains, busses trams and so on can also be all electric and thus more environmentally friendly.

BehindTheBarrier ,

It’s simple. We can go that way and effectively spend double the energy to drive a distance. I don’t think it’s exactly double but from 40% efficiency to 80% is the engine efficiency. So the number is just a simplification.

Reducing energy use by 50% would mean less energy having to come from other sources. Which aren’t necessarily green today.

Both solutions are improvements, but again, why go for the less efficient one when electricity is better?

BehindTheBarrier ,

I don’t have this issue, except once when I got my first desktop connected with wired internet. Turns out, yeah the wired internet (or the adapter/driver) can actually wake the computer… Turned it off and been mostly problem free from wakeups.

BehindTheBarrier ,

It gets less effective, down to running at 100% and not moving heat. Heat pumps work by expanding a gas, which cools it. Since it’s cold, the “heat” outside was the gas. Then the gas is taken inside and compressed, the gas heats up from the compression (since all the energy is squeezed into a smaller space, effectively speaking). Now that heat can be transferred to the colder air inside. So long as the expanded gas turns colder than the outside, it can absorb heat.

From a Google, common ones can go as low as - 25C, which means they are able to cool a gas to lower temps than that when expanded. There is still heat to get, even in -25C.

BehindTheBarrier ,

Except global warming, even if we went net zero today, is still gonna have temps rise for a long time. We’ll have to go net negative by a ton before we can reverse the effect.

Not to mention, cheap to make doesn’t imply full on adoption. Oil, gas and coal will still be in use around then. I’d love to be wrong here, but it costs more to change than to stick with what’s working.

BehindTheBarrier ,

Can’t possibly be any of those reconnaissance tours held the days before. /s

BehindTheBarrier ,

All of them are OK, except mkv is less a file type and more a container. What should be specified is the code for video, which for most things I’d say AV1, but high res movies might not be the most suitable. Throw in opus for the audio track, and you can use mkv, but might as well use webm anyways since it’s more clear what’s behind it. (though can still be other things)

I’d also add that jxl should be the standard for lossy images. Better than jpg. And you want something other than png for massive images because that quickly gets costly in terms of size due to png being lossless.

BehindTheBarrier ,

Here’s a little article which highlights jxl well. chipsandcheese.com/…/modern-data-compression-in-2…

I do not think it’s mentioned there, but I think webp and also it’s indirect successor avif afaik, both lack progressive loading which is not optimal for website loading. It’s has incremental loading which I think is akin the the old dial up time of loading top to bottom row for row. They proclaim progressive decoding is costly on memory and cpu, but progressive gives the best user experience imo.

Lastly a fringe issue, re-encooding multiple times. The good old reason why jpgs turn into trash over time because people encode instead of save images. Or because sites re-encode when uploading. Jxl wins here. It also is very easy to see why jpg turns into what it does rather quickly.

reddit.com/…/generation_loss_comparing_jpeg_webp_…

BehindTheBarrier ,

Probably not your problem, but my completely different phone (oneplus 7 pro)has been pretty solid. But, lint and dust gathered into the port, making some of the plugs extremely loose to the point it would fall out from the weight of the cable… I took a needle and scraped out the compacted lint at the bottom. (avoiding touching the middle thing in the port. Good as new afterwards, even the one cable I’ve been using with the phone since 2019 which is pretty loose after use now, still sits without problems when moving the phone around.

But I’d definitely suggest cleaning it out if you haven’t. Even the small specs you get out makes a big difference. My powerbank came wouldn’t stay in, after cleaning it’s more well behaved. But there’s a clear difference in USB-c plugs and how they fit phones.

BehindTheBarrier ,

I guess it depends on country, but failure to pay is it something you can easily sue for or win in legal courts? I can only assume there exists a contract saying when payments are made, and you can easily prove how failure to pay is costing your company. They should be on the hook for more than just interest here, no?

BehindTheBarrier ,

On the 7 Pro, stuck on the oneplus navigation gestures, pop up front facing cam. Fully working phone, still no other phone to replace it when it comes to having a screen without a bump. And I can get a free phone through work, but there isn’t one I want yet…

BehindTheBarrier ,

Not sure if it was security, but one can of soda/alcohol went missing from each of our luggage traveling back from Hawaii. I assumed it was for drug tests, but we got our stuff back broken into with the zippers bent open to circumvent the locks, along with scratch marks on the locks. TSA should have had a key for the universal unlock. But they only took a single can, one out of 5 for me. Only happened traveling through the US with checked in baggage, that got lost on the way.

BehindTheBarrier ,

This is also the reason I’m all open source. Not just games, but seeing someone abandon a program hurts. Or just wanting to make a change on your own to suit your needs. I don’t have any big fancy programs, but I at least put my code openly on github.com for that reason. Both my “big” ones are just me using another program and realizing I could make something that worked better for me. At like 100x the time investment, but programming is fun.

BehindTheBarrier ,

I do this on my 7 pro. It’s a slight annoyance, but for my phone the trick is to condition myself to press on the volume switch above the power button instead, when I want to adjust the volume.

BehindTheBarrier ,

I just mean, when you hold the phone you instinctively have your finger on the power button and audio button. That amount of force won’t press any down. But when you want change volume, you also press power button by accident. Instead, to avoid this i try to place my finger on the audio slider(ring, vibrate, silent slide, so not actually a button you press) that is above the power button. As that also forms a natural place to place your finger. At least with the case I’m using.

It doesn’t exactly prevent pressing volume when going for the power button though, so you have to be a bit aware of if you have the finger on the audio buttons. But for me, it most happens when I change volume, and not when using the power button.

BehindTheBarrier ,

How about clicking a document link, and they fucking put Word as a tab inside Teams, just so Teams can be even more bloated and make viewing documents a pain. Teams have come a long way from when I started my job, now it’s not a dysfunctional mess, but things like that still annoy me.

BehindTheBarrier ,

It’s fun with screenshots, you save it and realize, you didn’t check what path it saved to because you (read: me) always puts downloads in the Downloads folder by default. It’s the last place you saved an image, shouldn’t be too hard? Just gotta find an IMG_something either in user photos or documents usually. And then fail to do so, and do a walk of shame back and try save again just to see where it actually ended up…

I do love Everything though, it’s amazing and I constantly use it for looking for things. I know names at least partially, and that does it 99% of the time. Sorting by Path also makes it very easy to navigate when you get a lot of hits. Just a pro-tip to those yet to learn of that power.

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