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GenderNeutralBro

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GenderNeutralBro ,

Okay. Good for China?

This seems like a really weird way to say “EU countries aren’t investing enough into green tech”.

TIL about Roko's Basilisk, a thought experiment considered by some to be an "information hazard" - a concept or idea that can cause you harm by you simply knowing/understanding it (en.wikipedia.org)

Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment which states that an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future would be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Everything old is new again. Sounds a lot like certain sects of Christianity. They say you need to accept Jesus to go to heaven, otherwise you go to hell, for all eternity. But what about all the people who had no opportunity to even learn who Jesus is? “Oh, they get a pass”, the evangelists say when confronted with this obvious injustice. So then aren’t you condemning entire countries and cultures to hell by spreading “the word”?

Both are ridiculous.

Are you embracing AI? (viewber.co.uk)

There’s something of a misunderstanding in the UK property industry that agents are luddites, clinging to fax machines and Rolodexes, but quite the opposite is true. Sales and letting agents like nothing more than finding new efficiencies – whether through careful outsourcing, digital signatures or virtual tours, begging the...

GenderNeutralBro ,

For all the talk of regulating AI, I think the only meaningful regulation is very simple: hold the people implementing it accountable.

You want to use AI instead of a real certified professional? Go nuts. Let it write your legal contracts, file your taxes, diagnose your patients. But be prepared to get sued into oblivion when it makes a mistake that real professionals spend years of expensive training learning to avoid. Let the insurance industry do the risk assessment and see how unviable it is to replace human experts when there’s human accountability.

GenderNeutralBro ,

BTRFS also supports deduplication, but not automatically. duperemove will do it and you can set it up on a cron task if you want.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Depends on the specifics. My high-end MacBook Pro uses active cooling, but in practice it almost never comes on. It’s wayyyyy more efficient than the previous Intel gen.

A week or two ago, I accidentally left a Python process running using 100% of a single core. I didn’t even notice for several hours, until it ate up all my RAM. On on Intel laptop the fan would’ve let me know in like two minutes.

I don’t think Qualcomm’s actually caught up to Apple yet, but it’s getting close. It’s good to see more competition.

GenderNeutralBro ,

The problem I had with that scene (and the whole series, really, especially season 3) was that it framed human culture of the future as being generally oppressive and backwards. Acceptance shouldn’t be portrayed as radical or exceptional. It should be normal and taken for granted among humans in the future. Like in TOS, Uhura’s role was a big deal for viewers specifically because it was not a big deal for the characters. They just showed us a better future, where a black woman in a respected professional position was normal.

Discovery didn’t show us a better future. It showed us a shitty future with a handful of decent people in it. This is just one example, but it’s one that stuck in my mind as well.

GenderNeutralBro , (edited )

It was presented as exceptional in-universe, from Adira’s perspective. The fact that Adira felt weird about it at all paints the culture they grew up in as backwards.

GenderNeutralBro ,

How so? Perhaps I’m misremembering, but they were born on Earth and raised among humans, right? Does that not say something about the human culture of their time?

GenderNeutralBro ,

Anyone know what charging protocol they use for 80W? This article and the official web site do not specify. Is it USB-PD? SuperVOOC? I’m not really familiar with Vivo specifically.

If it’s USB-PD then that means you could use a typical laptop charger. If it’s VOOC, then it’s unlikely you’ll have any compatible chargers.

GenderNeutralBro ,

That would be a somewhat valid argument if Snaps “just worked” any better than Flatpaks. That has not been my experience.

Given the choice between an open standard and a proprietary one, the proprietary one damn well better have meaningful technological advantages. I don’t see that with Snaps. All I see is a company pouring effort into a system whose only value is that they are pouring effort into it. They should put that effort into something better.

Granted, it’s been a few years since I used Ubuntu and Snaps. Perhaps things have improved. It was nothing but headaches for me. A curse upon whoever decided to package apps that obviously require full file system access as Snaps. “User-friendly”, indeed.

From an enterprise/server perspective, when what you’re really paying for is first-party support, I guess Snaps make more sense. But again, that effort could be put toward something more useful.

GenderNeutralBro ,

This chart on Wikipedia sums it up neatly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption#/media/File:Global_Energy_Consumption.svg

You can see that from 2000 to 2021, renewable energy usage grew faster than any other type. However, coal, oil, and gas usage still grew, by a lot (with a couple recent dips that don’t appear to constitute a trend yet). Overall energy usage is increasing and that is unlikely to change. For now we’re merely slowing the growth of fossil fuel usage. Slowing down is not the same as reversing course.

So yeah, it’s true that “more is being done now than ever before”, but we’re operating from a baseline of nearly zero from 40 years ago. It’s easy to grow in proportional terms when you’re tiny to begin with.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. Deflecting the blame to consumers is a misinformation tactic by corporations and governments. That doesn’t mean consumers can’t or shouldn’t take action on their own, of course – just that we also need to hold corporations and governments accountable. There are things that need to be done at a personal level and things that need to be done at an institutional level. Individual behavior influences institutional behavior, and vice-versa.

Take bottled water, for example. We ship fucking water across the country in plastic bottles when it is verifiably no better than the tap water in any reasonably-maintained system. Is it the consumers’ fault for buying it, the corporations’ fault for being completely amoral, or the government’s fault for allowing these ass-backwards incentives to exist and persist in the first place, and failing to provide sufficient alternatives? My choice to avoid bottled water whenever humanly possible in no way absolves these instutions of their failures and corruption that have made it a global problem.

Maybe the issue isn’t how people get to work but how they’re entirely reliant one getting the things they need to survive being supplied through unsustainable means.

That is unquestionably the bigger problem, yes.

We really do need to reduce car usage, but that’s not something that’s easily done by individuals when the cities they live in were designed to be unsustainably car-centric. We’ve spent about a century accumulating infrastructure debt and there’s no quick fix there. For me personally, I would not want to in a city that wasn’t walkable and bikeable, and I don’t ever want to drive if I can avoid it, but there aren’t enough cities like that in the world for everyone to do that. I do what I can in the hope that I will contribute to reaching critical mass. And this strategy is working to a degree – there’s a lot more attention given to city infrastructure today than there was even 10 years ago. There is political pressure locally to redesign cities to be more sustainable, driven by passionate grass-roots efforts. I always promote and vote for transportation alternatives in local elections, which is always a highly divisive topic because oil addiction is pervasive, deep-rooted, and in some places even lionized.

The same argument can be made for a lot of eco-friendly lifestyle choices, like vegetarianism. I’m not a strict vegetarian, but it’s really not hard to cut the vast majority of meat out of my diet. I understand that for some people that’s not viable, and we don’t have the infrastructure for everyone to go veg overnight anyway. So no judgment. It’s a drop in the bucket, to be sure, but hey, a drop is better than nothing.

On a larger scale, we have a huge problem with our economic structure. We’ve chased efficiency year after year, decade after decade, and now we’re so gosh-darned efficient that we have little redundancy or resiliency, wealth is hyper-concentrated, and local economies just bleed resources into the void. What would it take to feed a major city without importing food by truck and ship? It’s hard to imagine. It would require change at many levels of society, from the personal to the global.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Regarding lemmy.ml: yes, you should avoid it. It does not make sense to create politically-neutral communities on a politically-oriented instance.

Regarding Dessalines: The great thing about Lemmy is that I don’t need to give a shit about the lead developer’s politics, because he’s not in control of how Lemmy is used, and if he ever tried some kind of heinous cross-instance power grab, it would get shut down before it got started.

Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦

GenderNeutralBro ,

Am I out of touch with Qualcomm’s increasingly confusing naming schemes, or is that awfully expensive for a 7sG2?

GenderNeutralBro ,

What’s this? A software app store?

It’s ironic how on Linux, my distro’s app repository is always my first stop when looking for software, while on Mac or Windows it’s my last resort.

Commercialized app stores are full of spam, and Microsoft and Apple both decided that app store apps should not have the full capabilities of normal apps. It’s the exact opposite on Linux.

GenderNeutralBro ,

This is the great thing about open source. It benefits everyone. Any good idea that does not have significant drawbacks should get broad adoption. And that’s generally how it plays out.

Reputations live on for many years (decades, even) after they are justified.

GenderNeutralBro ,

If you’re only testing on one set of hardware, it isn’t going to tell the whole story. The results might be very different on an AMD vs Nvidia GPU, or even on a brand-new vs 1-3 generation old GPU.

Probably the most important thing for gaming is driver support and ease of installation. This sometimes runs directly counter to other general-purpose needs.

I’m still on the hunt for a distro where everything I need is easy to install. I don’t think any exist, primarily because GPU drivers suuuuuuuck, especially when you need CUDA or ROCm to work.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Thanks for the recommendation! I was looking at the Fedora family since AMD officially supports RHEL 9. Hadn’t gotten as far as to figure out how well that transfers to Fedora and its derivatives. Good to hear that it works.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Emulation.

Definitely going to incur a performance hit relative to native code, but in principle it could be perfectly good. It’s not like the GPU is running x86 code in the first place. On macOS, Apple provides Rosetta to run x86 Mac apps, and it’s very, very good. Not sure how FEX compares.

GenderNeutralBro ,

When MacBooks are plugged in, they get their power from the charger. They are not simultaneously draining and charging the battery in general, unless they need more power than the charger can provide (unlikely unless you are using a charger with lower wattage than the official charger that came with your laptop).

I was not able to find an official source on this from a quick search, but if I remember correctly, this should be true for any moderately recent MacBook. Maybe any MacBook at all, since they only started making “MacBooks” in 2006 and then tech hasn’t changed much since then.

Personally, I leave my MBP plugged in during use whenever possible, and I typically unplug it at the end of the day. You don’t need to unplug it, but hey, it’s a good idea to unplug anything that doesn’t need to be plugged in, just to save power.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Correct.

Batteries will still lose charge very slowly, so at some point the battery controller will top itself back up. This is nothing to worry about, and I’m not sure macOS (or Linux) will every display the true charge level of a battery. I believe there is some wiggle room built in at the firmware level.

GenderNeutralBro ,

This is my plan A. I’ll only go to plan B if something goes wrong — which has happened to me a couple times. I tried to upgrade Ubuntu (LTS, I forget which version) years ago, but it failed hard. I still don’t know why. It wasn’t something I could figure out in half an hour, and it wasn’t worth investing more time than that.

Come to think of it, it’s possible all my upgrade woes came down to Nvidia drivers. It was a common problem on Suse (TW), to the point where I pinned my kernel version to avoid the frequent headaches. I’ll try a rolling distro again when I switch to AMD, maybe.

GenderNeutralBro ,

OP must have it set to the lowest compression level. All levels are lossless, but higher compression levels are smaller, at the expense of increased encoding time. Should be half the size or less in general.

Dr. Pulaski Appreciation Post (startrek.website)

I don’t know whether it’s a popular opinion or not, but I think Dr. Pulaski was a great character and I found her much more interesting than Dr. Crusher. I don’t know if it was down to the writing or the performance but Pulaski is one of the best parts of season 2 and I would have been happy to see her character continue....

GenderNeutralBro ,

Pulaski had interesting dynamics with almost every other character. I think she was written very well, especially for such a short tenure. Crusher was largely neglected by the writers.

GenderNeutralBro ,

LLM summary:

  • Clear-air turbulence, which is invisible and unpredictable, is becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change.
  • Studies have found a 55% increase in severe clear-air turbulence over the North Atlantic since 1979, with similar increases over the continental USA.
  • The warming climate is strengthening wind shear in the jet streams, which is a major driver of increased clear-air turbulence.
  • Convection caused by rising heat, particularly over oceans, is disrupting the fast-moving jet streams and leading to more turbulence.
  • Climate models project a doubling or tripling of severe turbulence in the jet streams in the coming decades if climate change continues as expected.
  • The increase in turbulence poses safety risks, as demonstrated by a 2024 Singapore Airlines incident that injured 83 passengers and resulted in one fatality.
  • Passengers are advised to keep their seatbelts fastened even when the seatbelt sign is off, as turbulence can strike suddenly and unexpectedly.
  • The FAA has documented 163 serious turbulence injuries to passengers and crew between 2009 and 2022.
  • The jet streams, which commercial airliners fly through, can both help and hinder flights by pushing them across the Atlantic or slowing them down.
  • Rising greenhouse gas levels, which are the highest in at least 800,000 years, are the primary driver behind the warming climate and resulting increase in turbulence.
GenderNeutralBro ,

There will be more diversity in software and distros

I wish, but I doubt it. If we get to the point where there is a mass migration from Windows to Linux, it will almost certainly be concentrated into one or maybe two big distros. Probably Ubuntu.

Today, most proprietary software vendors only support Ubuntu and RHEL. Look at AMD. The ROCm installer supports Ubuntu 22.04, RHEL 9, and SLES. That’s it. Not even modern versions of Ubuntu. And it’s extremely ornery about dependencies. Python 3.8 or 3.10 required! No 3.9! No 3.11! Trying to get it to install on any modern Debian-based distro is the ninth circle of Dependency Hell.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Obligatory xkcd: xkcd.com/243/

GenderNeutralBro ,

AI does not mean artificial brain or anything similar. It’s a very broad term that’s been in use for about 70 years now.

Pac Man has AI.

GenderNeutralBro ,

1mbps is awfully low for 1080. Or did you mean megabyte rather than megabit?

GenderNeutralBro ,

Gotcha. Typically lowercase b=bit and uppercase B=Byte, but it’s hard to tell what people mean sometimes, especially in casual posts.

Come to think of it, I messed up the capitalization too. Should be a capital M for mega.

GenderNeutralBro ,

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Cat_fall_150x300_6fps.gif

4 months durability for an $800 phone!

My old $200 Motorola G9 Power phone lasted almost 4 years with only very minor scratches. Obviously in that period I have dropped it a few times getting out of the car, where the phone sometimes work itself out of my pant pocket while I drive, and then it slips out when I get out of the car. But no problem on my previous phones,...

GenderNeutralBro ,

I feel you. It’s not practical to buy a phone that doesn’t have some aspects that I hate (like a notch or punch hole, glass back, or an absurd overabundance of cameras).

Same deal with small phones. There hasn’t been a viable option in close to a decade. So yeah, I’ve bought some stupidly large phones. What’s the alternative? A “compact” phone that’s still too big to comfortably use one-handed? Not much of a choice.

Reminds me of the tiny or non-existent pockets that are so common in women’s clothing. Yes, there are some options, but they are few and far between, and it’s not like pocket size is the one and only priority.

‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services (www.theguardian.com)

*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Even if they were trustworthy, nothing lasts forever.

Does anyone seriously think Google Play Movies or whatever they call it is going to be around in 50 years? Audible? Spotify?

Unlikely.

I grew up with access to books that were printed before my parents were even born. I doubt your grandkids will be able to say the same. Not if you buy into DRM-infected ecosystems and vendor lock-in, anyway.

The only consolation is that pirates are always one step ahead. But I wouldn’t want to count on that remaining true in 50 years either.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Nobody tell her about daemons.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I came here with exactly this episode in mind. I think it is representative in a few ways:

  1. It involves an alien of the week.
  2. The alien species is culturally similar to human societies we, as viewers, are familiar with.
  3. It demonstrates what the Federation is all about, including the Prime Directive, respectfully dealing with less developed civilizations, and solving problems without violence (especially when the problems are your own fault).
  4. It’s more or less self-contained. Whether this is “representative” is debatable, I guess. I think it’s a big part of Star Trek even though there’s a larger focus on season-long storylines in later series.
GenderNeutralBro ,

Much like a cat can stretch out and somehow occupy an entire queen-sized bed, Linux will happily cache your file system as long as there is available memory.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I had some CD-Rs that rotted within a few years. I was devastated, because at the time CD-Rs were hyped up as the most durable of any consumer media, and storage was expensive. I had tons of stuff that was ONLY on CD or DVD. That’s how I archived everything.

There was an old site that did a comprehensive analysis and ranked different brands of CD-R and DVD-R discs into tiers. My main takeaway at the time was Verbatim or bust. There were some other brands that got discs from the same manufacturer, but not consistently so it was something of a gamble. IIRC Sony was one of the better ones, but Verbatim was the safest choice.

I can’t say I’ve tested any of my old discs in the past 10 or maybe even 15 years. I copied my most important data into newer media, but I still have a ton of discs I should probably clone to my NAS. One of these years…

Then came M-discs, which as far as I know are still considered legit. They never really caught on, and production has either halted entirely or is at least limited. I never used them myself.

GenderNeutralBro ,

It’s nutty that we haven’t had a proper offline mode in like 20, maybe 25 years. This was something every browser had in the 90s. Loading from cache was the default, even. Now it’s like, I’m not sure why Firefox even has a cache folder. They bend over backwards to prevent you from using it.

Before you tell me that Firefox has an offline mode, yeah, I know. It’s basically useless.

I would love a way to have my browser automatically store a local, static copy of everything I view.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Sometimes it’s the other way around. You keep a list until it gets long enough (or you get old enough) that you don’t care anymore.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I remember a lot of KDE hate up until Gnome 3, which was controversial, to say the least. It mirrored old-school Mac hate, with a lot of invalid arguments parroted by people who never took time to learn it (or more to the point, to unlearn what they came from).

I’ve swapped between Gnome and KDE a bunch of times, and it hasn’t really made a difference to me in many years. There was a time when running apps built for one on the other was a painful experience either way. Nowadays my DE choice doesn’t really influence my application choices.

GenderNeutralBro ,

This is the part that confused me most. At the first mention of web apps, I just thought, okay, if you have a web server you can have it run under a service account that can do what it needs to do. Sure. Kind of beside the point, but sure.

Then this came at the end and and I did a double-take. He’s really suggesting a web app as a substitute for sudo in general? Two questions:

  1. Wat?
  2. Wut?
GenderNeutralBro ,

other shells like sh, csh, tcsh, zsh, etc. are the same

Zsh has some important differences in how it handles whitespace and quoting, which affects OP’s exact example.

Consider this:


<span style="color:#323232;">touch a b c 'd e f' 'g h i'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">for f in *; do ls -la $f; done
</span>

In zsh, this works. In bash, it will give you six errors saying d, e, f, g, h, and i do not exist.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Yeah, Apple moved to Zsh as default some years back, which is the main reason I’m familiar with its differences in terms of parameter expansion. They still ship Bash 3.2 with macOS, but they can’t ship newer versions due to GPLv3 licensing, or something like that. So they had the motivation to switch.

In the Linux world, there’s no great motivation to change the default, because Bash 5.x is already comparable to zsh in terms of features, and it’s what everyone is already familiar with.

Perhaps I misunderstood OP’s question. I figured they meant using variables. Otherwise I don’t know how to make sense of it.

GenderNeutralBro ,

That will work in either zsh or bash, yes. It’s a good habit to use quotes, but I am pointing out that quoting and expansion behavior is not the same across all shells.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I imagine his eyes turned into dollar signs and popped out of his head with a “cha-ching” sound when he saw it.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Everything old is new again. As long as there have been bars, there have been sleezy men lying to impress women in bars.

GenderNeutralBro ,

It’s a music player, in case anyone’s wondering. More info at apps.kde.org/amarok/

In five paragraphs of text there is no description of what the program does in the blog post . Pretty common for open-source blogs and release notes, but I always find it funny. At least this one has a screenshot.

ChatGPT provides false information about people, and OpenAI can’t correct it (noyb.eu)

It’s clear that companies are currently unable to make chatbots like ChatGPT comply with EU law, when processing data about individuals. If a system cannot produce accurate and transparent results, it cannot be used to generate data about individuals. The technology has to follow the legal requirements, not the other way...

GenderNeutralBro ,

To clarify, I mean to say that users should not consider it an information repository, because it does not function as one, by design. Whether it should be classified as such under the law is another matter, one on which I do not have enough knowledge to comment. I do think OpenAI is presenting ChatGPT inappropriately, and I hope they will be held accountable for that.

I’m sure in the future we will see true databases built on the same technology (and they will be awesome, if implemented properly). But that’s not what ChatGPT is (or, as far as I know, any other existing LLM-based application). Any information it is able to “recall” is almost a coincidence of how it was trained. You can sort of think of it like lossy compression. The LLM gets all of its information from its training set, but it is not designed to retain any specific information from the training set in full. In cases where it does, that usually means one of two things:

  1. The information appeared many times in the training set, enough prevent it from being washed out.
  2. The model is far bigger than it should be, and is overfitted to its training data.
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