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frezik

@frezik@midwest.social

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frezik ,

Their sewing machines are crap, too, from what I've heard. Shouldn't assume their whole product line is worthwhile.

frezik ,

And high volume. Believe it or not, inkjets have lower cost per page than lasers. Especially with the newer tank-based printers, but they were already cheaper before those.

The trick is that you have to use up all the ink before it dries. Printing out a few odd documents per year won't do that. That's most people's use case, and lasers are superior for that because toner doesn't dry out.

There are a few odd niches for inkjets, but he sub-$100 printer market should die in a fire. If you can't afford a somewhat more expensive printer, then you're not going to be able to afford the ink.

frezik ,

Most of those old HP lasers were also office behemoths that, inflation adjusted, cost over $5000. They caused all sorts of problems in an office environment--the printer in Office Space was basically about those--but they work great for small family use.

I only ditched my 5si because Windows stopped shipping drivers. Could have hacked it, but I figured if there weren't drivers, people would slowly get rid of them, and the replacement toner market would disappear.

frezik ,

APPL is second only to MSFT by market cap. So far, the stock market doesn't care.

frezik ,

Not necessarily. Investors also care about dividends. Those tend to be the people who hold on long term. Blue chips, as a class of stock, are all about companies that don't make big moves in price and pay out in dividends. They're older companies that have built their product line, and while they still do R&D on new ones, they only do that to make sure they don't get left behind.

frezik ,

Smartphones have done wonders for amateur production quality. Way less likely to run into out of focus shots with white balance that makes everything yellow.

frezik ,

Do I have to watch the first 23 "Friendly Neighborhood MILF" to understand the plot of "Friendly Neighborhood MILF 24"?

Redditors Vent and Complain When People Mock Their "AI Art" (futurism.com)

Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on...

frezik ,

I like the idea that AI art is for art that wasn't worth having a human create. Does it make sense for a human to create pictures of Godzilla in ridiculous situations? If you're feeling really inspired, then go for it, but nobody should otherwise feel obliged to spend an afternoon on it.

A little while ago, I created a LLM Vogon poetry generator for a Hitchikers themed party. Is it worth having a human create intentionally bad poetry for a party? I would again say no. Even there, though, a lot of people didn't like it. Partially because they were afraid of just how bad Vogon poetry could be, but there was some clear dislike of anything associated to AI, even for this silly use case.

frezik ,

The field of AI would never develop if everything they made along the way had to be thrown away as "not real AI".

At one point, getting computers to understand the rules of chess at all was part of the AI field. So was Conway's Game of Life, which uses a few simple rules to simulate cellular organisms and create some fascinating patterns. Optimizing compilers and virtual machines also came out of AI research.

The "not real AI" meme has no basis in the history of the field.

frezik ,

Alternatively, we could say "money can buy happiness, and that's the problem".

frezik ,

Yes, but when things go wrong, the boom is relatively small and contained.

(Not so)[https://daily.jstor.org/the-tragedy-at-buffalo-creek/].

frezik ,

Also, it's not just which country they are in right now. It's what country they are a citizen of. It's impossible to know that for a random visitor, so the default is to show it to everyone.

frezik ,

Which may be correct, but given that they mangled the argument in that section, we can't exactly trust the rest.

frezik ,

It's the kind of shit you come up with on shrooms. An important part of that is realizing that not all the ideas you come up with on shrooms are worth spouting to the world.

Now i'm definitely cheering for Rulestein (lemmy.ml)

alt text: A "xit" from user @ChrpngBrd in which he responds to another "xit" from @BlueBoxDave that says "If Israel falls then America falls. It's that simple." @ChrpngBrd's response is a thumbs up emoji, and two stills from The Simpsons S02E19 "Lisa's Substitute." In which, the first image is Martin Prince putting up a poster...

frezik ,

With declining importance of oil, the US has less reason to give a shit about the Middle East. We're a ways off from that point, but it's coming.

If you think the Middle East is fucked up now, just wait until there's a power vacuum from nobody caring about oil anymore.

frezik ,

There was a cold war argument that the US needed Israel and the Saudis to counteract the more Russia-aligned Egypt and Iran. We have guns here because they have guns over there.

Now its mostly because oil, which will be important for a lot of products for a long time to come, but not for the one thing that drives American policy in the region: the price at the gas pump.

Oh, and then there's the Christian Zionists who want to kick off the Rapture. That group is vestigial, diseased, and needs to be cut right out.

frezik ,

Which is understandable, but I don't understand his plan. If 1 BTC is unaffordable, then people will buy 0.1 BTC. If that's unaffordable, then people will buy 0.01 BTC. And so on. You have to go down to 0.00000001 BTC before the limit is reached (0.000633158 USD at current prices, which is smaller than a mill). Since every zero there is another order of magnitude, I don't see how a small nation state could make even the smallest BTC unit unaffordable. Maybe the G7 banding together could do it.

frezik ,

This is the sort of person who thinks you need to ground yourself to be safe while working with electricity. Not 100% wrong, but just wrong enough to be very, very dangerous.

frezik ,

Car battery on its own won't kill you, though wiring many in series might. There can also be some effects from DC sparks and welding on even 12V, which might cause other problems.

frezik ,

The 2017 Vegas shootings were like that (which was full automatic in practice if not in legal or technical definition).

Most mass shootings, though, aren't like that. People aren't clumped up like they were in that case. Also, most people tend not to be careful about shooting in bursts, which helps control your aim. Even an AR15 (which has relatively mild recoil) will still walk all over the place if you hold the trigger down.

The NFA had organized crime shootouts in mind. In theory, the mob could do the kind of training as a group where full auto makes sense. Even if they would, that's not really the threat posed these days.

frezik ,

Most guns are patented, and most of those patents have long since expired. There are some newer designs out there, but they tend to be the exception. Everything from the AR15 to the Remington 870 shotgun to the Glock 19 is all public domain. Go to any shooting range or skeet field, and a huge chunk of the firearms you'll see have patents that expired decades ago.

This is how patents are supposed to work.

frezik ,

AR15 is just the base design that comes in several varients. There are slight changes to the receiver to make a full auto control group fit, and it needs a machine shop to do it, but it's not much.

frezik ,

He made the web as we know it. There were a few other projects that were reaching similar goals and were considered part of the "world wide web" at the time but have been largely forgotten. Gopher was the most popular for a time, and there were a few others that were barely more than research projects. Going by peak deployment numbers, Gemini might now be the second most popular web technology ever (maybe; I haven't seen a credible breakdown or anything, just guessing).

In any case, Tim Berners-Lee made HTTP and HTML, and that combination is the basis for the modern web. So much so that we tend to talk about it as the web.

frezik ,

It's also worth reading an open letter from Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf on the issue. While no one person invented the Internet, those two would be towards the top of the list of people who were involved in inventing it.

https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt

tl;dr: Al Gore was among the first policy makers to really understand its importance, and pushed for legislation that got it into people's homes. Technical people tend to scoff at politicians a lot, but good policy making is important. The Internet would not have taken off the same way without Al Gore.

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    frezik ,

    My crab claws can't reach the billionaire crab.

    frezik ,

    Does your ePub file collect data for the LORD?

    frezik ,

    Games are optimized for multiple cores to a much higher degree than they used to. Single core games are uncommon, even on the indie scene.

    They were held back for a long time by console hardware, but that's not a problem anymore.

    frezik ,

    As it happens, overclocking is one of the few reasons to bother with the 14900ks.

    "Hey, guys, you know how our top desktop cpu runs hot, is really expensive, and loses in most gaming benchmarks to an AMD cpu that costs $200 less? Let's fix that by releasing one that's 2% faster, gets even hotter, and is even more expensive." - a daily conversation at Intel.

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    frezik ,

    This is a common thing to say, but I want to push back on it. There's nothing magical about being a private company that means they'll make better decisions. It merely removes one big thing that causes companies to make bad decisions. There's still plenty of private companies run by shitbags.

    frezik ,

    Yup. Epic tossed huge amounts of money into their Steam competitor, and it's still flailing around. Valve's market position is based on customer trust, and it took a long time to get there. There are a couple of other companies that could throw money at it like Epic did, but they can't buy their way into customer trust.

    frezik ,

    I had HL2 loaded up for release day. I don't remember having problems myself, but it was a cluster fuck for a lot of people. Steam was not well liked for a long time.

    frezik ,

    It's mostly learning tricks. The very high end stuff takes great skill, but you can get good results by just knowing enough to water down your paint and do some drybrushing.

    frezik ,

    If it's a legitimate murder, their body has a way of shutting the whole steamroller down.

    frezik ,

    And itself based on VMS, which was released in 1977.

    Almost everything interesting about mass market operating systems was done in the 70s. Tons of academic work out there otherwise, but we'd have to rewrite everything to make good use of a lot of it.

    frezik ,

    Didn't really need an AI for chess to know that. A look at how crazy some grandmasters will show you that. Bobby Fischer is the most obvious one, but there's quite a few where you wish they would stop talking about things that aren't chess.

    frezik ,

    There's speedrunning for Minecraft. It gets pretty crazy, and there's already been cheating scandals. Including ones where key people who uncovered previous cheaters were also involved in cheating.

    frezik ,

    Virtual desktops on X go back a lot further than that. First X11 implementation was in 1990 with vtwm. The Amiga 1000 had it for their systems in 1985.

    frezik ,

    I used to use them a lot when monitors were smaller and I put one full screen window on each desktop. With bigger monitors and multiple windows open on just one, I don't really use them anymore.

    frezik ,

    I'm guessing the original of this was anti-suffragette propaganda? I love that shit. It was always "if women can vote, they'll behave as badly as men".

    frezik ,

    The "problem" with that tax is that if it's applied fairly, it gets very big very fast. The damage to the road goes up with weight, but not linearly. Not a square factor, either. Not even cube. It's to the fourth power.

    Start applying that to long haul trucks and the whole industry will be bankrupt in a month. The implication being that we are all subsidizing that industry with taxes on roads. Including that one trucker with a "who is John Galt?" sticker on the back.

    That said, this is also a very good argument for improving cargo trains to the point where most long haul trucking goes away.

    frezik ,

    And now you starve. None of the stores will stay open long without them.

    frezik ,

    What I'm suggesting is to ramp up the tax on roads over several years in order to pay for the initial outlay on new train infrastructure. Then you don't need 90% of the trucking industry at all.

    Which would be great for many other reasons.

    frezik ,

    If you look down further, I'm just saying you can't deal with the problem in this specific way.

    frezik ,

    They are taxed a lot. Are they taxed to the fourth power of axel weight? Not even close.

    frezik ,

    There's a thing where previously oppressed minorities get their rights, and then they start to forget that there are other oppressed minorities that still need their rights.

    For example, Irish people were often oppressed a century ago in the US, but they're just more white guys. That why Bill O'Reilly could go on Fox News in the early 2000s and say "my Irish ancestors pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, why can't black people?"

    Solidarity cannot be taken for granted.

    frezik ,

    In addition to what others have mentioned, there's also a problem of communication. Inverse square law is a bitch. It was actually assumed at the start that the limit of the Voyager missions would be communicating with the probes, but improvements in radio technology have kept it going longer.

    Information on the heliopause is about the only useful thing we can get from something out that far. It turns out to be a lot more complex than we thought. After that, there's nothing interesting until you can get to the next star, and our radio technology isn't up for that.

    frezik ,

    It'd be hard to justify a mission on that alone. At least for now. Get space based industry going and then there's lots of missions that open up.

    New Horizons will get there eventually, and from a brief search, it sounds like it could still get back useful data once it's out that far. NASA will need to keep the communications line funded, though.

    frezik ,

    The version had such poor casting overall, but Ian McNeice rocked it.

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