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btaf45

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

[rant] I want computers to become personal again

There was a golden age when computers were something you owned, not like before when they were big machines your employer or university would give out access to, nor like after when they went to the cloud, you bought what was essentially a thin client and every software became a service....

btaf45 ,

We’re never going to get the old days back.

Nothing is stopping you from using a computer as a standalone machine not connected to the internet. Then you have a machine just like the ones in the 1970’s and 1980’s except for having much more memory/processor/diskspace etc. I would say you have a better OS also, except that Linux is basically the same OS as my SCO Xenix 386 I had in the 1980’s.

btaf45 ,

and even more susceptible than Reddit to power hungry mods and echo chambers.

It’s not, because you can easily get around bans. You can go to a different instance and resubscribe to all the same communities.

btaf45 ,

In time, the Fediverse will also be easily accessible. And where there are normies, you’ll find corporate enshittification.

No, because corporations cannot buy the Fediverse.

btaf45 ,

Couldn’t they “convince” instance admins to include ads?

Yes. One at a time. But the cannot “buy Lemmy” which is what a CEO would want to do.

btaf45 ,

That doesn’t prevent power hungry mods from modding hundreds of communities, or mods or admins from enshittifying the most popular communities (or whole instances) with absurd rules or misinformation bots,

Then you jump to a similar community on another instance. In the long term the less restrictive place will win out. When the mods on the lemmy.world politics group nuked one of my highly upvoted submissions many months ago, I stopped submitting there and now all my submissions on that topic go to [email protected] instead. I carefully researched which instance/community has the most reasonable rules. Bottom line is users have much more power on Fediverse than Reddit.

btaf45 ,

Trump’s assassins probably heard him say “You’ll never take back your country with weakness” and thought “He’s right”.

btaf45 ,

Would be great if some of them ended up in the Russian Gulag

btaf45 ,

And if you don’t like Kursk there are free accommodations at the Gulags.

btaf45 ,

Julian Assange is a bootlicker and Kremlin stooge who sold us out to the American and Russian billionaires. The Mueller Report proved he was explicitly trying to get Treason Trump elected and working with Putin to push disinformation to that end.

btaf45 OP ,

I use to be able to ask google the distance in kilometers of anything in space and get an accurate answer. So I first asked this same question in google but it only gave the answer in light years for some reason. That’s when I went to bing and got their ridiculous answer.

btaf45 OP ,

And they seem to have forgotten that to do that, they actually need a database of facts.

This is the main reason why AI cannot be trusted to answer science questions. They absolutely need a database of facts.

btaf45 OP ,

Space is small.

The diameter of the entire observable universe is not even a full ronnameter.

btaf45 OP ,

That’s what I think too. AI is mainly useful for things that don’t have right or wrong answers.

Although this incorrect answers is obvious, what about all the times where an incorrect answer from AI is not obvious?

btaf45 OP ,

41.5 petameters.

…wordpress.com/thinking-in-metric-for-astronomy/

Nobody using the metric system says “trillion kilometers”!

Unfortunately way too many people do even though it is not the correct SI unit for the scale, simply because ‘kilometer’ is the metric distance unit used for Earth distances. I have astronomy distances memorized as metric SI distances and I only care about the km distance so I can convert that to the SI distance. e.g. When I see “trillion kilometers” I convert that in my head to “quadrillion meters” which I then convert to “petameters”.

I would rather see the base unit ‘meters’ than km so I can skip a step. My own preference for astronomy distance units is:

metric SI units > meters > kilometers > non metric units

btaf45 OP ,

Close. The distance to Alpha Centauri is 41.5 petameters (trillion kilometers) and the distance to Proxima Centauri is 40.2 petameters.

btaf45 OP ,

One football field is about a hectometer and there are 10 hectometers per kilometer. So 415 trillion.

btaf45 OP ,

It’s in the quote that they scaled it.

Yes but they supposedly scaled it to “one meter per meter”. A “scale where the distance from the Sun to Earth is 150 million km” is the actual distance.

btaf45 OP ,

AIs are definitely not “good enough” to give correct answers to science questions. I’ve seen lots of other incorrect answers before seeing this one. While it was easy to spot that this answer is incorrect, how many incorrect answers are not obvious?

btaf45 OP ,

I still play Civ 2 more than any other Civ.

btaf45 OP ,

According to the website Space, the distance is 37.8 trillion km.

This is not correct, and is probably the result of rounding the light year distance to 4 ly before converting to km. The google answer is pretty close.

The correct answer is the distance to Alpha Centauri is 41.5 petameters (trillion km) and the distance to Proxima Centauri is 40.2 petameters.

btaf45 OP ,

AI doesn’t seem to be good at anything in which there is a right answer and a wrong answer. It works best for things where there are no right/wrong answers.

btaf45 OP ,

I imagine if you were 13.6 km from a star you would either burn up or fall into the star’s gravity well.

btaf45 ,

I hope they do that. Another brick in the wall for reddit’s demise.

btaf45 ,

Yes. More than a little. It was a huge event for lemmy. Did you think the entire reddit userbase was going to switch in one week? Reddit didn’t get their userbase in one week. It’s a process. Now there is a well known alternative to reddit. Everything in reddit looks shittier than it was before the exodus. It’s nearly impossible to become a ‘new user’ on reddit and with the rando-bans they keep giving out they are just going to keep shrinking.

btaf45 ,

Don’t protest-edit your content because you’re just helping them separate wheat from chaff.

How about just replace some of your content with this stuff from time to time.

loremipsum.io

Does everyone hate Google now? | Google's story over the last two decades has been a tale as old as time: enshittification for growth (arstechnica.com)

Google’s story over the last two decades has been a tale as old as time: enshittification for growth. The once-beloved startup—with its unofficial “Don’t Be Evil” motto—has instead become a major Internet monopolist, as a federal judge ruled on Monday, dominating the market for online search. Google is also...

btaf45 ,

Now, Reddit is charging Google for priority access to its posts

If the idiots at Google hadn’t shut down DejaNews they would have already owned a discussion forum more popular than reddit.

btaf45 ,

You can get randomly banned on reddit.

btaf45 ,

The real liberal slogan would be KAG - Keep America Great (by defeating the neofascist movement trying to take us down)

btaf45 ,

So about 1 megameter.

btaf45 ,

I was shopping for a new clothes washer, and was strongly considering an LG until I saw it had “AI wash”. I can see relevance for AI in some places, but washing clothes is NOT one of them.

I might be thinking the same. But I actually purchased an LG washer a couple months ago and finally got around to finding and reading the manual, and realized that I should have been doing “AI wash” instead of the “normal wash” that I always did.

The manual says that this is what “AI wash” actually is for:

“This cycle automatically adjusts wash and rinse patterns based on load size”.

btaf45 OP ,

Geez I can’t believe a major group was nuked just like that. I never noticed anything about it being unmoderated but thank you for providing the explanation.

btaf45 OP ,

Geez even with decentralization we still have people making bone headed decisions. What is the best/strongest politics group that is not lemmy.ml nor lemmy.world?

btaf45 OP ,

We need large “sibling” instances rather than monoliths like .world, which is to say nothing of the politics of the instance.

Absolutely 1000%

This also highlights the destructiveness of toxic moderation. There is plenty of it here too

I can’t believe that lemmy mods/admins still think they have the luxury of making bone headed moves in a decentralized network. I am determined to get around this and it is the entire reason I am on a decentralized system. We vote with our feet and in the long term it will all work out. I am looking for suggestions for a politics group that is not lemmy.world and not lemmy.ml.

btaf45 OP ,

You just make an announcement on the community, or on !newcommunities if you are splitting from a power tripping mod.

How does this work? Are you just talking about starting a new group on the same server?

btaf45 OP ,

Or are you just saying its too big?

It’s too big. And it has dumb restrictions like no video content. But also, I had a very popular posting just completely nuked by the mod of [email protected] and the entire advanced discussion was suddenly lost, forcing me to recreate the discussion on [email protected]. Ever since I’ve been posting content to lemmy.ml instead of lemmy.world. Mainly important things missing from [email protected] or that they took down.

But aside from all that, we absolutely need redundancy on lemmy for major stuff like news and politics. Mods will abuse their power because they all want to “control the experience” instead of just do the basics. I’ve also had content nuked for no reason on [email protected] also and as a result I mostly use [email protected] instead although I’m open for alternate news site suggestions too.

btaf45 OP , (edited )

It doesn’t matter where your account is. If someone kills your account you can quickly switch to another lemmy instance and resub to all your communities.

I have had content nuked first from [email protected] and then from [email protected] and as a result I rarely use them to submit content. I specifically went to [email protected] because [email protected] was censoring my content.

btaf45 OP ,

Thanks for the list!

I’ve heard bad things about hexbear and beehaw. But I looked at these other two.

!politics – unfortunately too many dumb restrictions.

Rule: Title must match the article headline <-- definitely a deal killer because often journalists use dumb headlines or leave the most important things out of the headline.

Rule Recent (Past 30 Days) <-- also a deal killer. Relevant is more important the recent. They are not the same things. “Recent” is only an imperfect proxy for “relevant”.

[email protected] – We have a winner!

Rule: Be respectful and civil. No racism/bigotry/hateful speech. <-- perfect

I would also welcome suggestions for “news” groups outside of lemmy.world and lemmy.ml. [email protected] is okay so far but I’m always looking for possible alternatives.

btaf45 OP ,

Curious, coming from a LW account

Why are you curious. On a decentralized platform, It matters where you post TO, not where you post FROM. Anybody can easily switch to posting from another platform.

btaf45 ,

Yep. Ohio is full of Union troops. Although so are the other 49 states.

btaf45 ,

In five years it’ll all be a different story again.

You don’t know that. Maybe it will take 124 years to make the next major breakthru and until then all that will happen is people will tinker around and find that improving one thing makes another thing worse.

btaf45 ,

I recently learned that this is the same company that gave us the bs Russia Gate.

WTF you mean the US Senate?

theguardian.com/…/donald-trump-us-senate-report-r…

btaf45 ,

theguardian.com/…/donald-trump-us-senate-report-r…

A report by the Senate intelligence committee… runs to nearly 1,000 pages and goes further than last year’s investigation into Russian election interference by special prosecutor Robert Mueller… identifies Konstantin Kilimnik as a Russian intelligence officer employed by the GRU, the military intelligence agency behind the 2018 poisoning of the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal. It cites evidence – some of it redacted – linking Kilimnik to the GRU’s hacking and dumping of Democratic party emails.

Windows 3.1 saves the day during CrowdStrike outage — Southwest Airlines scrapes by with archaic OS (www.tomshardware.com)

Southwest Airlines, the fourth largest airline in the US, is seemingly unaffected by the problematic CrowdStrike update that caused millions of computers to BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) because it used Windows 3.1. The CrowdStrike issue disrupted operations globally after a faulty update caused newer computers to freeze and stop...

btaf45 ,

Sure I’ve got lots of evidence.

www.security.org/antivirus/chromebooks/

[There’s no question that, when it comes to viruses and other forms of malware, Chromebooks are safe. How safe? Well, the website CVE Details1 lists just 55 vulnerabilities for Chrome OS. Compare that to 1,111 vulnerabilities for Windows 10, and a whopping 2,212 for Mac’s OS X; with five percent as many vulnerabilities as its closest competitor, it’s a pretty simple matter to declare Chromebook the safest option…there’s no question that Chromebooks are among the most secure computers you can buy]

55 vulnerabiilites for Chrome OS vs 1111 vulnerabilities for Windows. Huge difference.

Rather the file the module reads was updated and replaced with a corrupted version that causes the module to crash when it tries to read it.

Yes it was a ridiculous system to have kernel mode code on the filesystem. Even if a bad pointer didn’t crash the system a hacker could have put in their own code. And yes such a terrible security system would have affected Linux too. But with ChromeOS, the system is already secure. No need to use a terrible security system like Cloudstrike in the first place.

btaf45 ,

ChromeOS though isn’t actually suitable for running servers like Windows and Linux are. It can’t do nearly the same number of things

ChromeOS literally is Linux so obviously it can do everything that Linux can. It is effectively a SUPERSET of Linux

Second all kernel mode code lives on the filesystem.

Now you are being ridiculous. We are talking about code than runs in the kernel but is not part of any official kernel module including device drivers.

How did you think it worked?

What I thought is that you had common sense.

You keep showing me again and again that you don’t understand the world of computers and modern IT infrastructure. Do you even have any qualifications or work experience in IT?

Dude you are the person who thinks that the cloudstrike code running in the kernel that is neither part of the kernel nor part of any official kernel device driver code is somehow equivelent to the actual kernel. You are also the person who made the completely nonsensical claim that ChromeOS Linux “can’t do nearly the same things” of Linux. So GTFO with the snarky shit, because I’m the one wondering how you can be so confused about basic stuff.

Do you even have any qualifications or work experience in IT?

I’ve been using the internet since 1983. How bout you? LMFAO.

There is also none of this VMs inside VMs stuff you were talking about.

Because you didn’t do enough research. My Chrome OS comes with an outer VM, an inner VM, the heavily locked down user mode, and the kernel mode. My Linux programs run in the outer VM by default. I would have to turn on developer mode just to get to the actual user mode.

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