sudoreboot

sudoreboot , 8 days ago

Obligatory sinophobia. Every thread.

sudoreboot , 13 days ago

I asked for a refund when they kept delaying shipment of my Librem 5. I was simply denied and that was it. They told me I could still choose to receive the phone, but I don’t want it since it’s a bad, practically useless product now.

I reported them in my country for it.

sudoreboot , 13 days ago

I think that’s an american thing. Besides, that money is long gone since I made the purchase several years ago.

sudoreboot , 12 days ago

You managed to get your money back?! How?

sudoreboot , 12 days ago

Well I upvoted the post so that people will see the comments!

sudoreboot , 18 days ago

If it is dry due to climate change I don’t see how there is an eco-system built around the drought worth preserving.

sudoreboot , 22 days ago

it was done on a case-by-case basis. Each person has their own therapy tailored for them. This does not appear to be a mass-solution.

I’m not sure what you are expecting for something to be considered a cure? What they are describing is a treatment procedure which uses the patient’s own tissue. How does that make it case-by-case?

sudoreboot , 22 days ago

That’s not what case-by-case means. Wiktionary:

Separate and distinct from others of the same kind; treated individually.

Case-by-case implies that each treatment is different and is not generalisable; but the fact that they use a patient’s own tissue does not make each individual treatment different. If you want to extend the logic, you might call vaccination a case-by-case treatment as well, since they use different needles for each person.

sudoreboot , 22 days ago

I reply to people on lemmy on a case-by-case basis. I decide how to eat food on a case-by-case basis. But if you give me a deck of cards and tell me to shuffle them, I generally do not decide how to shuffle on a case-by-case basis; it doesn’t matter whose cards they are.

sudoreboot , 23 days ago

If this works, it’s noteworthy. I don’t know if similar results have been achieved before because I don’t follow developments that closely, but I expect that biological computing is going to catch a lot more attention in the near-to-mid-term future. Because of the efficiency and increasingly tight constraints imposed on humans due to environmental pressure, I foresee it eventually eclipse silicon-based computing.

FinalSpark says its Neuroplatform is capable of learning and processing information

They sneak that in there as if it’s just a cool little fact, but this should be the real headline. I can’t believe they just left it at that. Deep learning can not be the future of AI, because it doesn’t facilitate continuous learning. Active inference is a term that will probably be thrown about a lot more in the coming months and years, and as evidenced by all kinds of living things around us, wetware architectures are highly suitable for the purpose of instantiating agents doing active inference.

sudoreboot , 23 days ago

It can at least get one unstuck, past an indecision paralysis, or give an outline of an idea. It can also be useful for searching though data.

sudoreboot , 23 days ago

It’s a bit disheartening that VR is still not a good experience on Linux. I was wrestling with my Vive several years ago now, but I just got sick of dealing with it (literally and figuratively) due to the jitter, randomly breaking features (even mid-session), crashes, and other random things. It was a coin toss every time whether it was going to even launch at all.

It just wasn’t worth it, so it has been collecting dust now for a few years. Was hoping that one day I’d be able to just plug it in and have an ok time.

sudoreboot , 23 days ago

I’ve got an NVIDIA card, yeah. I’m guessing it’s a better experience with AMD cards.

sudoreboot , 25 days ago (edited 25 days ago)

Maybe I can share some insight into why one might want to.

I hate searching the internet. It’s a massive mental drain for me to try figure out how I should put my problem into words that others with similar ideas will have done before me - it’s my mental processing power wasted on purely linguistic overhead instead of trying to understand and learn about the problem.

I hate the (dis-/mis-)informational assault I open myself to by skimming through the results, because the majority of them will be so laughably irrelevant, if not actively malicious, that I become a slightly worse person every time I expose myself.

And I hate visiting websites. Not only because of all the reasons modern websites suck, but because even if they are a delight in UX, they are distracting me from what I really want, which is (most of the time) information, not to experience someone’s idiosyncratic, artistic ideas for how to organise and present data, or how to keep me ‘engaged’.

So yes, I prefer stupid a language model that will lie about facts half the time and bastardise half my prompts if it means I can glance a bit of what the internet has to say about something, because I can more easily spot plausible bullshit and discard it or quickly check its veracity than I can magic my vague problem into a suitable query only to sift through more ignorance, hostility, and implausible bullshit conjured by internet randos instead.

And yes, LLMs really do suck even in their domain of speciality (language - because language serves a purpose, and they do not understand it), and they are all kinds of harmful, dangerous, and misused. Given how genuinely ignorant people are of what an LLM really is and what it is really doing, I think it’s irresponsible to embed one the way google has.

I think it’s probably best to… uhh… sort of gatekeep this tech so that it’s mostly utilised by people who understand the risks. But capitalism is incompatible with niches and bespoke products, so every piece of tech has to be made with absolutely everyone as a target audience.

sudoreboot , 24 days ago (edited 24 days ago)

I don’t know about google because I don’t use it unless I really can’t find what I’m looking for, but here’s a quick ddg search with a very unambiguous and specific question, and from sampling only the top 9 results I see 2 that are at all relevant (2nd and 5th):

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/55cd7ef8-05d2-4f41-b45b-c329750a2c00.webp

In order to answer my question, I need to first mentally filter out 7/9 of the results visible on my screen, then open both of the relevant ones in new tabs and read through lengthy discussions in order to find out if anyone has shared a proper solution.

Here is the same search using perplexity’s default model (not pro, which is a lot better at breaking down queries and including relevant references):

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/44bedd94-9de6-4dbb-85bc-bbfb1be54b67.webp

and I don’t have to verify all the details because even if some of it is wrong, it is immediately more useful information to me.

I want to re-emphasise though that using LLMs for this can be incredibly frustrating too, because they will often insist assertively on falsehoods and generally act really dumb, so I’m not saying there aren’t pros and cons. Sometimes a simple keyword-based search and manual curation of the results is preferred to the nonsense produced by a stupid language model.

Edit: I didn’t answer your question about malicious, but I can give some example of what I consider malicious and you may agree that it happens frequently enough:

• AI generated articles
• irrelevant SEO results
• ads/sponsored results/commercial products or services
• blog spam by people who speak out of ignorance
• flame bait
• deliberate disinformation
• low-quality journalism
• websites designed to exploit people/optimised for purposes other than to contribute to a healthy internet

etc.

sudoreboot , 26 days ago

We’re all living in amerikka

koka kola

santa klaus

sudoreboot , 26 days ago

I don’t remember encountering the particular bug they’re describing. I was hoping it was about the behaviour of drag-and-dropping something into the browser, such as with those “drop a file here to upload”. I am often simply unable to make that work because instead of the thing being dropped into the webpage’s element, it opens the file in the browser instead, which is not really something I ever want to do.

sudoreboot , 1 month ago

That is a different car brand, though?

sudoreboot , 1 month ago

Maybe what they’re trying to describe is a torus

sudoreboot , 1 month ago

Same problem, 1070, NixOS Plasma

sudoreboot , 2 months ago

That argument extends to any realistic recreation of events. It’s not wrong, I’m just not sure what could be done about it.

sudoreboot , 2 months ago

Global population? You say “the”, so you obviously mean the one we have in common.

sudoreboot , 2 months ago

Don’t do that.

sudoreboot , 2 months ago

While it’s possible that this is the case, we don’t actually know that because the people with the right skills aren’t spending a lot of time and resources on experimenting with new ideas and concepts unless there’s profit to be made from it.

Chances of coming up with an idea for a new kind of OS that will bring great return on investment in terms of profit and market share are very low, so entrepreneurs are spending their time thinking about more lucrative ventures.

If we lived in a post-scarcity Communist society where everyone is free to do what they feel is important and fulfilling to them, we’d be more likely to see new and novel ways of interfacing with computers (and technology in general).

But we don’t.

Edit: Also, operating systems are a lot of work.

sudoreboot , 2 months ago

Not well, apparently.

sudoreboot , 2 months ago

Yeah, I don’t know why anyone knowledgeable would expect them to be good at chess. LLMs don’t generalise, reason or spot patterns, so unless they read a chess book where the problems came from…

sudoreboot , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

As soon as it works. A recent update included Plasma 6.0.2 (on NixOS unstable/24.05) which apparently defaults to wayland, but it just exits to login right away. I’m not in a mood to tinker, so for now I plan to simply wait for things to Just Work. When I select “wayland” and things work and look the same (or better) is when I’m happy to rid myself of the horror that is X11, because as horrible as X11 is, it simply isn’t giving me trouble these days - my system is stable and I like keeping it that way.

Edit: perhaps important to mention that I’m using a GTX 1070.

Edit 2: I realise that I’m sort of contradicting myself with how I worded the above. I don’t mean to imply that I’m not willing to sacrifice anything to embrace Wayland; just that as it stands I don’t think the benefits of Wayland outweighs my ability to use this computer the way I need to.

sudoreboot , 2 months ago

I think the Xorg vs Wayland situation is not too dissimilar to that of Windows vs Linux. Lots of people are waiting for all of their games/software work (just as well or better) on Linux before switching. I believe that in most cases, switching to Linux requires that a person goes out of their way to either find alternatives to the software they use or altogether change the way they use their computer. It’s a hard sell for people who only use their computer to get their work done, and that’s why it is almost exclusively developers, tech-curious, idealists, government workers, and grandparents who switch to Linux (thanks to a family member who falls into any subset of the former categories). It may require another generation (of people) for X11 to be fully deprecated, because even amongst Linux users there are those who are not interested in changing their established workflow.

I do think it’s unreasonable to expect everything to work the same when a major component is being replaced. Some applications that are built with X11 in mind will never be ported/adapted to work on Wayland. It’s likely that for some things, no alternatives are ever going to exist.

Good news is that we humans are complex ! Technology is always changing - that’s just the way of it. Sometimes that will lead to perceived loss of functionality, reduction in quality, or impeded workflow in the name of security, resource efficiency, moral/political reasons, or other considerations. Hopefully we can learn to accept such change, because that’ll be a virtue in times to come.

(This isn’t to say that it’s acceptable for userspace to be suddenly broken because contributors thought of a more elegant way to write underlying software. Luckily, X11 isn’t being deprecated anytime soon for just this reason.)

Ok I’m done rambling.

sudoreboot , 2 months ago

Thanks for the suggestion. sudo cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset indeed prints N, so I’ll try adding that to my system config.

sudoreboot , 2 months ago

I finally got around to restarting my system after adding hardware.nvidia.modesetting.enable = true; to my NixOS config and it works perfectly! Thank you for the suggestion. I likely wouldn’t have figured that out on my own any time soon.

sudoreboot , 3 months ago

There’s another thread just like this one posted 2 hours earlier in this same community, fyi.

Just gonna copy my comment from there:

The Isle is honestly pretty bad in many respects. In fact, it’s such a mess that I need to clarify which version I’m even talking about, because there is an OG version and an on-going complete rewrite, prompted by them having fired their only coder and no longer being able to understand their own codebase.

The OG version was special. It was very simple, quite buggy and in a constant, obvious state of plans-and-hopes (being EA), but it had a unique atmosphere - the only true survival-horror to date, as far as I’m concerned/aware (only rivalled by some of my experiences playing DayZ, back when it was still an Arma 2 mod).

Playing a herbivore, resting/hiding in a bush in the pitch-black darkness of night with only limited night-vision letting me see my immediate surroundings and footprints on the ground, the sound of a massive, rumbling carnivore sniffing for traces of food was quite a thrill. Not to mention the moments after when a pair of jaws around my size suddenly emerge out of the darkness.

That kept me playing.

Then they stopped working on that and began their rework from the ground up. The rework (which they call EVRIMA) has (or had) no day-night cycle (always daytime), went from being set in an arboreal environment to tropical jungle, and had two playable dinosaurs (one herb- and one carnivore) of about equal size. No creepy nights, no asymmetric gameplay, no horror elements, different feeling in both how it feels to play and how it looks, and it also ran like crap on any device.

They’re slowly working on it; it has some more dinosaurs now etc, but last I played, it still didn’t feel the same and it was still buggy and severely incomplete. What emergent horror elements one might get out of the reworked version I feel are but shadows of what could have been.

And yet there’s none other like it.

Edit: I believe the current version does have night-time, but it doesn’t (or didn’t until recently) have night-vision and IIRC the nights are not as horrifying.

sudoreboot , 3 months ago

The Isle is honestly pretty bad in many respects. In fact, it’s such a mess that I need to clarify which version I’m even talking about, because there is an OG version and an on-going complete rewrite, prompted by them having fired their only coder and no longer being able to understand their own codebase.

The OG version was special. It was very simple, quite buggy and in a constant, obvious state of plans-and-hopes (being EA), but it had a unique atmosphere - the only true survival-horror to date, as far as I’m concerned/aware (only rivalled by some of my experiences playing DayZ, back when it was still an Arma 2 mod).

Playing a herbivore, resting/hiding in a bush in the pitch-black darkness of night with only limited night-vision letting me see my immediate surroundings and footprints on the ground, the sound of a massive, rumbling carnivore sniffing for traces of food was quite a thrill. Not to mention the moments after when a pair of jaws around my size suddenly emerge out of the darkness.

That kept me playing.

Then they stopped working on that and began their rework from the ground up. The rework (which they call EVRIMA) has (or had) no day-night cycle (always daytime), went from being set in an arboreal environment to tropical jungle, and had two playable dinosaurs (one herb- and one carnivore) of about equal size. No creepy nights, no asymmetric gameplay, no horror elements, different feeling in both how it feels to play and how it looks, and it also ran like crap on any device.

They’re slowly working on it; it has some more dinosaurs now etc, but last I played, it still didn’t feel the same and it was still buggy and severely incomplete. What emergent horror elements one might get out of the reworked version I feel are but shadows of what could have been.

And yet there’s none other like it.

Edit: I believe the current version does have night-time, but it doesn’t (or didn’t until recently) have night-vision and IIRC the nights are not as horrifying.

sudoreboot , 3 months ago

Cool if this is more efficient, but is AntennaPod considered bloated? It’s one of very few apps I feel give me precisely what I need and doesn’t annoy me with fluff.

sudoreboot , 3 months ago

I saw that but that just seems like their preference. I don’t feel anything in particular about the home page. It’s customizable too IIRC. I don’t know what the echo page is.

sudoreboot , 3 months ago

I don’t mind being able to see stats, either. I don’t mean to complain about this project; I fully support the author in modifying it to their preference. Just that I wouldn’t expect a “minimalist fork” out of this particular app. Regardless, it’s not unwelcome in any way!

sudoreboot , 3 months ago

Because they have no basis on which to decide where to go. It’s like buying toothpaste but there are hundreds of options, none of which you know anything about, so you get whichever seems most popular. It minimises the risk of ending up with something which is unpopular for good reasons.

sudoreboot , 3 months ago

While all of it is doable, be aware that it takes time and effort to learn Nix and NixOS. It can be difficult to figure out how to get a particular environment set up properly. There is a lot of documentation, but it doesn’t always give easy answers if you have specific requirements for a particular dev environment and such.

It’s been a few years since I worked with Unity3D professionally, but I did so in NixOS with very little trouble. Rust has very good Nix infrastructure and so do many other languages. I can’t tell you anything about UE5 or the other proprietary tools, but there are FHS-compatibility helpers (steam-run usually works fine when I need to run arbitrary binaries made for ‘normal’ distros).

If you’re willing to figure things out sometimes (and especially in the beginning) and are motivated to take your OS to the next level, NixOS is definitely worth it. Been using it for many years and I can’t imagine ever using a mutable OS again as a daily driver (unless the way I use my computer drastically changes). I configured everything just the way I want it; it’s magical to have almost everything in one place and being able to try different things without fear of breaking something.

sudoreboot , 3 months ago

For that you need a program to judge the quality of output given some input. If we had that, LLMs could just improve themselves directly, bypassing any need for prompt engineering in the first place.

The reason prompt engineering is a thing is that people know what is expected and desired output and what isn’t, and can adapt their interactions with the tool accordingly, a trait uniquely associated with adaptive complex systems.

sudoreboot , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I know LLMs are used to grade LLMs. That isn’t solving the problem, it’s just better than nothing because there are no alternatives. There aren’t enough humans willing to endlessly sit and grade LLM responses.

sudoreboot , 3 months ago

Firstly, I’m willing to bet only a minority of users regularly use those buttons. Secondly, you’re talking about the most popular LLM(s) out there. What about all the other LLMs almost nobody is using but are still being developed/researched? Where do they find humans willing to sit and rate all the garbage their LLM puts out?

sudoreboot , 3 months ago

Could just as well have gone the other way though. Sassy CM telling some loud, annoying, entitled brat to git gud or cry more? Instant cool-dev meme. But if a lot of people feel similarly you get outrage and controversy. Just depends on the local culture on that particular day in that particular place.

It’s cool to be rude as long as you also feel that it’s warranted. It’s cool to offend people you don’t like or deride ideas you think are stupid. Everyone isMost people are always just one wrong audience away from being a horrible person.

Of course CM or PR staff have different expectations, but I can understand why they might make a gamble sometimes trying to be cool and causual.

sudoreboot , 3 months ago

If Linux gaming continues to increase in popularity, I imagine the anti-cheat will start to crawl its way out of the WINE environment and into the native system. But I actually have no clue about how these AC work or is handled by WINE.

sudoreboot , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Yeah a real problem here is how you get an AI which doesn’t understand what it is doing to create something complete and still coherent. These clips are cool and all, and so are the tiny essays put out by LLMs, but what you see is literally all you are getting; there are no thoughts, ideas or abstract concepts underlying any of it. There is no meaning or narrative to be found which connects one scene or paragraph to another. It’s a puzzle laid out by an idiot following generic instructions.

That which created the woman walking down that street doesn’t know what either of those things are, and so it can simply not use those concepts to create a coherent narrative. That job still falls onto the human instructing the AI, and nothing suggests that we are anywhere close to replacing that human glue.

Current AI can not conceptualise – much less realise – ideas, and so they can not be creative or create art by any sensible definition. That isn’t to say that what is produced using AI can’t be posed as, mistaken for, or used to make art. I’d like to see more of that last part and less of the former two, personally.

sudoreboot , 4 months ago

Like a completely mad or autistic artist that is creating interesting imagery but has no clue what it means.

Autists usually have no trouble understanding the world around them. Many are just unable to interface with it the way people normally do.

It’s a reflection of our society in a weird mirror.

Well yes, it’s trained on human output. Cultural biases and shortcomings in our species will be reflected in what such an AI spits out.

When you sit there thinking up or refining prompts you’re basically outsourcing the imaginative visualizing part of your brain. […] So AI generation is at least some portion of the artistic or creative process but not all of it.

We use a lot of devices in our daily lives, whether for creative purposes or practical. Every such device is an extension of ourselves; some supplement our intellectual shortcomings, others physical. That doesn’t make the devices capable of doing any of the things we do. We just don’t attribute actions or agency to our tools the way we do to living things. Current AI possess no more agency than a keyboard does, and since we don’t consider our keyboards to be capable of authoring an essay, I don’t think one can reasonably say that current AI is, either.

A keyboard doesn’t understand the content of our essay, it’s just there to translate physical action into digital signals representing keypresses; likewise, an LLM doesn’t understand the content of our essay, it’s just translating a small body of text into a statistically related (often larger) body of text. An LLM can’t create a story any more than our keyboard can create characters on a screen.

Only once/if ever we observe AI behaviour indicative of agency can we start to use words like “creative” in describing its behaviour. For now (and I suspect for quite some time into the future), all we have is sophisticated statistical random content generators.

sudoreboot , 4 months ago

I didn’t know about this game. I love pirate stuff. The boats and aesthetics of that era, the natural environments of the Caribbean, the relevant sociopolitical developments at the time, and of course the stories and mythologies… but Skull and Bones fails to interest me even the slightest bit.

It appears to be an arcade game where you just press keys to move your ship around, shoot at things until their health bar depletes, and go around playing minigames to collect loot/resources. I don’t know anything about the story content but I’m willing to bet there’s at best some passably written character arc but nothing resembling a deep commentary on the relevant issues of that time (nor our time).

I’m almost laughably far from being a representative of the average gamer but the number of 'A’s assigned to titles (so far) hasn’t been indicative of quality as I perceive it. Budget and effort is mostly orthogonal to the artistic and creative value of a work.

sudoreboot , 5 months ago

It’s not so much the hardware as it is the software and utilisation, and by software I don’t necessarily mean any specific algorithm, because I know they give much thought to optimisation strategies when it comes to implementation and design of machine learning architectures. What I mean by software is the full stack considered as a whole, and by utilisation I mean the way services advertise and make use of ill-suited architectures.

The full stack consists of general purpose computing devices with an unreasonable number of layers of abstraction between the hardware and the languages used in implementations of machine learning. A lot of this stuff is written in Python! While algorithmic complexity is naturally a major factor, how it is compiled and executed matters a lot, too.

Once AI implementations stabilise, the theoretically most energy efficient way to run it would be on custom hardware made to only run that code, and that code would be written in the lowest possible level of abstraction. The closer we get to the metal (or the closer the metal gets to our program), the more efficient we can make it go. I don’t think we take bespoke hardware seriously enough; we’re stuck in this mindset of everything being general-purpose.

As for utilisation: LLMs are not fit or even capable of dealing with logical problems or anything involving reasoning based on knowledge; they can’t even reliably regurgitate knowledge. Yet, as far as I can tell, this constitutes a significant portion of its current use.

If the usage of LLMs was reserved for solving linguistic problems, then we wouldn’t be wasting so much energy generating text and expecting it to contain wisdom. A language model should serve as a surface layer – an interface – on top of bespoke tools, including other domain-specific types of models. I know we’re seeing this idea being iterated on, but I don’t see this being pushed nearly enough.[^1]

When it comes to image generation models, I think it’s wrong to focus on generating derivative art/remixes of existing works instead of on tools to help artists express themselves. All these image generation sites we have now consume so much power just so that artistically wanting people can generate 20 versions (give or take an order of magnitude) of the same generic thing. I would like to see AI technology made specifically for integration into professional workflows and tools, enabling creative people to enhance and iterate on their work through specific instructions.[^2] The AI we have now are made for people who can’t tell (or don’t care about) the difference between remixing and creating and just want to tell the computer to make something nice so they can use it to sell their products.

The end result in all these cases is that fewer people can live off of being creative and/or knowledgeable while energy consumption spikes as computers generate shitty substitutes. After all, capitalism is all about efficient allocation of resources. Just so happens that quality (of life; art; anything) is inefficient and exploiting the planet is cheap.

[^1]: For example, why does OpenAI gate external tool integration behind a payment plan while offering simple text generation for free? That just encourages people to rely on text generation for all kinds of tasks it’s not suitable for. Other examples include companies offering AI “assistants” or even AI “teachers”(!), all of which are incapable of even remembering the topic being discussed 2 minutes into a conversation. [^2]: I get incredibly frustrated when I try to use image generation tools because I go into it with a vision, but since the models are incapable of creating anything new based on actual concepts I only ever end up with something incredibly artistically compromised and derivative. I can generate hundreds of images based on various contortions of the same prompt, reference image, masking, etc and still not get what I want. THAT is inefficient use of resources, and it’s all because the tools are just not made to help me do art.

sudoreboot , 5 months ago

It’s not like corporations are some animal who can’t help but be who they are.

That’s exactly what they are. They are composed of people only to the extent that a car is composed of wheels.

If it’s otherwise in working order, a flat tire will be replaced and the car will be going wherever it’s meant to go. Profit city is where all roads lead to, and a flat tire (or four) can only delay for so long.

If you want to hold corporations to moral standards, you have to change the incentives (destinations) and restructure corporations to be actually owned and controlled by people who are then held to those moral standards (put more of the car into the wheels).

sudoreboot , 5 months ago

Is this going to be available for free? And if so, to what extent? I’m not paying for AI, but would be cool to try it out.

I’ve also been burnt a few times by registering for some “free” AI service only to realise after putting in some actual effort into trying to create something that literally any actual value you might extract from it is gated behind a payment plan. This was the case when I tried generating voices, for example: spend an hour crafting something I like; generating any actual audio with it? Pay up. It’s like trying out a free MMO where you spend a long time creating your character just the way you want it only to be greeted by “trial over - subscribe now!”