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grue

@grue@lemmy.world

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grue ,

Hydrogen from gas fields is anything but GHG-free!

grue ,

Because the more commercial they get, the more they stray from their original purpose as a charity to provide low-cost machines for kids to learn about computer science.

First there was the Dynabook, then OLPC, then Raspberry Pi, and now we've basically got to start over yet again because enshittification is imminent.

grue ,

Guys, is it gay to be strong and be self-reliant by transporting yourself with the power of your muscles?

grue ,

You're confusing transportation with recreation. Real bike-riders wear street clothes.

grue ,

PS: Should I’ve put an /s in my previous post?

Nah, I got it. It's just that even referencing misconceptions (e.g. that cycling is for lycra-clad wannabe-racers) derisively helps spread them, and unlike my previous comment, I couldn't think of a way to rebut this one and be funny at the same time.

In other words, it was really more of a "me" problem: promoting utility cycling is kinda my pet issue. I didn't write it, but this pretty much captures the perspective I'm coming from and how strongly I feel about it.

HP bricks ProBook laptops with bad BIOS delivered via automatic updates — many users face black screen after Windows pushes new firmware (www.tomshardware.com)

On May 26, a user on HP's support forums reported that a forced, automatic BIOS update had bricked their HP ProBook 455 G7 into an unusable state. Subsequently, other users have joined the thread to sound off about experiencing the same issue....

grue ,

after Windows pushes new firmware

If a Linux distro pushed bad HP firmware, people would be blaming the Linux distro. Why does Microsoft get a free pass?

grue ,

https://www.theregister.com/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_communism/

https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/

https://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/

http://www.quickmeme.com/img/d1/d1798e073f5e39245454bf5231a952ca1991add7a0bb703024387ca6038b7089.jpg

grue , (edited )

Yeah, now, and only because they lost and gave up. Some of us don't forgive past misdeeds so easily.

Besides, even to this day, most (if not all) of their "support" for open source is about getting it to play more nicely with Windows or trying to prevent people who insist on using open source from jumping ship to Linux, not supporting it for its own sake.

I'll believe Microsoft actually supports open source when they start porting things like Office or Flight Simulator to Linux, not before.

grue , (edited )

Samsungs don't just fail; they are incredibly precisely engineered to fail on purpose not too long after the warranty ends.

I had a Samsung front-load washing machine that failed after maybe six years or so: the drum quit turning and it started making a terrible banging noise instead. I decided to take it apart to see what went wrong. Every single part in it was pristine and in perfect working order -- electronic parts, mechanical parts, rubber parts, plastic parts, even the stainless-steel parts exposed to the water and detergent all that time -- everything looked brand-new.

That is, except for the "spider arm," which is the large bracket that connects the axle to the drum. That one single part was made out of a completely different kind of metal and had corroded completely through. It was blatantly designed not to stand up to water and detergent. The excellent condition of the metal in the rest of the machine showed that they were perfectly capable of choosing the right material for the job, but deliberately chose not to. It was the most brazen, shameless instance of planned obsolescence I've ever heard of before or since.

(Not my pic, but it looked pretty much like this -- except mine was in three wholly separate pieces! And, as I mentioned, the axle and drum were shiny and brushed, respectively, with zero rust or residue of any kind at all.)

grue , (edited )

Hmm... the Amazon description says "for ages 13+". I guess my search for an RPG suitable for my six-year-old continues.

grue ,

Research papers should be typeset with L^A^TEX.

grue ,

Yes, corporations exist to make profit

Maybe now they do, but that itself is a cancerous perversion of their original purpose.

grue ,

I’m sure the publishers don’t want the bad publicity of “destroying” the Internet Archive

LOL. LMAO, even.

I have little doubt that publishers detest the Internet Archive and the deepest desire of their shriveled, blackened heart is to (figuratively) mount its stuffed corpse as a trophy over their fireplace mantel.

grue ,

Only things that are effective are better than doing nothing. Doing ineffective things only gives a false sense of accomplishment and thus reduces the incentive to try harder to be effective, which means they're actually worse than doing nothing.

Online petitions, "free speech zones," and other easily-ignorable things are like honeypots for activism, designed to neuter it.

grue ,

No, there is no such thing as a labor shortage. There is only employers' unwillingness to pay market wages.

grue ,

That's not a labor shortage, though. Big Ag is just too stingy to pay enough for non-migrants to want to do it.

grue ,

I guarantee that there was some wage that would've kept those employees on the job. It might have been unpalatably high for the people in charge, but it certainly existed.

grue ,

Wanting to automate something because it's better/cheaper is very different from falsely claiming that there's a "labor shortage" because they allegedly can't find anybody to do the job, though. There's no need for them to be fucking self-servingly dishonest about it.

grue ,

Dad's stupid what?

Networking Gear Recommendations? (starting from scratch)

Hi, I hope its appropriate to ask this here, considering this is the most active community closest to this topic (Networking). I am moving places shortly and will need to start from scratch will all networking equipment. Including router and wifi-extenders. Am wondering what the general consencus is around networking gear, what...

grue ,

I really miss the ubiquity from 2020, where it was all local.

I was definitely leery of Ubiquity for that reason since before 2020. Even though back then it could all be local, I feel like pushing people to the cloud was already well-established as being a thing.

My criteria for routers and wi-fi access points up to this point has basically been "can run OpenWRT and is relatively cheap," so I've settled in on TP-Link. I'm still running on an old Archer C7 from a decade(?) ago and would like to have something that fits in my rack for aesthetic purposes, though, so my next router might be a 1U DIY x86 machine running OPNsense instead.

grue ,

No, you're thinking of an orgy. Trains and gangbangs are both many-to-one, with the difference between them being that the former is sequential while the latter is simultaneous.

grue ,

I'm surprised at how much better I like these axes labels.

grue ,

I think the bigger joke is calling LLMs AI

I have to disagree.

Frankly, LLMs (which are based on neural networks) seem a Hell of a lot closer to how actual brains work than "classical AI" (which basically boils down to a gigantic pile of if statements) does.

I guess I could agree that LLMs are undeserving of the term "AI", but only in the sense that nothing we've made so far is deserving of it.

grue ,

This is why (as per usual) Stallman was right: the "GNU/" part matters. Linux is already all over the desktop (or at least, the laptop) in schools, in the form of Chromebooks. That means the entire next generation is going to grow up using Linux.

The only trouble is, it's locked-down Google/Linux that they're using, not GNU/Linux. All the freedom and user empowerment has been neatly excised from it such that it only facilitates consumption, not creativity.

grue ,

I think it's important to note that Linux can be a way to avoid AI, but doesn't have to be. If you flip the headline around it almost implies that people who do want AI would be missing out by using Linux, but that's not true at all: instead, the reality is that Linux is still better for them, too, because you could install all the same kind of functionality if you wanted, but it would be wholly under your control, not Microsoft's.

grue , (edited )

I'm not talking about interacting with it. I'm talking about how it's implemented, from my perspective as a computer scientist.

Let me say it more concretely: if even shitty expert systems, which are literally just flowcharts implemented in procedural code, are considered "AI" -- and historically speaking, they are -- then the bar is really fucking low. LLMs, which at least make an effort to kinda resemble the structure of biological intelligence, are certainly way, way above it.

grue ,

angrily upvotes

grue ,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e49ec3b4-3afe-4853-8638-425b6d3aa3a7.jpeg

grue ,

IIRC, the slot CPU thing was because they wanted to get the cache closer to the processor, but hadn't integrated it on-die yet. AMD did the same thing with the original Athlon.

On a related note, Intel's anticompetitive and anti- consumer tactics are why I've been buying AMD since the K6-2.

grue ,

Between this and the warranty shit, we should all be boycotting Asus products entirely at this point.

grue ,

There are effectively only two web browsers: Chrome and Firefox. Literally everything else, aside from some really niche things that can't render modern webpages, is a fork of one of those two that uses the same rendering engine.

grue ,

I think people just genuinely don't know that firefox (and I suppose Safari) is the only true alternative browser i.e. Not based on chromium.

Safari is only "not based on Chromium" in the sense that the heredity goes in the other direction (Chromium is based on it).

Firefox is the only browser that maintains a rendering engine codebase fully separate from Chrome. That's why using Firefox, and evangelizing it to help keep up its marketshare, is so vitally important for the health of the web.

grue ,

That's a reason to insist on Firefox even harder. Fuck those websites!

grue ,

Nope, it doesn't count. The only reason Safari/WebKit isn’t considered a fork of Chrome/Blink is that Chrome/Blink is a fork of Safari/WebKit instead.

grue ,

I mean, if folks really want something like that, I'd say they shouldn't have let KDE's KHTML (which is what WebKit was forked from) die. But as I've said elsewhere in this thread, KHTML→WebKit→Blink are related and thus fail to combat Google's web hegemony the way that Gecko (Firefox) does.

grue ,

I admit, I haven't really looked into it. It's possible Apple implemented new HTML/CSS/JS standards independently, but it's also possible that Apple continued to backport Google's changes. Unless they had a business goal of being independent (or NIH syndrome) I would guess that they'd do mostly the latter, but you'd have to go read the code to know for sure.

They are definitely still more related to each other than either is to Gecko (which is to say, not related at all), though.

grue ,

Compare a '90s F-150 to a 2024 Ranger. Then compare a '90s Ranger to a 2024 Maverick. Arguably, what Ford really did was that it added a third, bigger-than-full-size truck and shifted the names one notch up.

grue ,

That's a good point.

Google's "Manifest V2" Chrome extension phaseout next month is expected to impact the original uBlock Origin extension, which still uses the V2 framework and has 37 million users (www.theregister.com)

The new MV3 architecture reflects Google's avowed desire to make browser extensions more performant, private, and secure. But the internet giant's attempt to do so has been bitterly contested by makers of privacy-protecting and content-blocking extensions, who have argued that the Chocolate Factory's new software architecture...

grue ,

It is a good point: other platforms [other than iOS] have an easy solution (Firefox), but on Chromebooks you're relatively locked in because you have to jump through hoops installing the Linux environment in order to use it.

grue ,

I mean, if you're intimidated by compiling you probably shouldn't be using Arch to begin with.

(I'm hoping that you didn't understand the "on AUR" part of the comment as well as the "dependencies" part, and actually use a more reasonable distro that isn't subject to the issue @bobs_monkey is complaining about.)

grue ,

  • Arch is a Linux distribution that intentionally requires a bunch of relatively-complicated manual steps to install, so "I use Arch BTW" has become a meme among people who want to brag about how 'l33t' they are.

  • AUR is Arch's package manager.

  • A package manager is a software database that lets you easily install apps with a single command (e.g. [tool-name] install [app-name]) along with all the software libraries they depend on (i.e. their 'dependencies'), such that you only need one copy of each library no matter how many apps use it.

(Without a package manager, there are two other ways installing apps can work: either an app can come with its own copy of all its dependencies, which means it takes up a lot of disk space unnecessarily, or the user can be responsible for installing all the dependencies separately, which is a gigantic pain in the ass. Windows takes the former approach, while Linux, before package managers were invented, tended to do the latter because open-source software was distributed mostly as source code you had to compile and link yourself.)

grue ,

That last panel even works by itself.

grue ,

Netrek?

grue ,

Thanks, I hate it.

grue ,

That's why the only safe software in the long term is Free Software.

grue ,

More community meetings should bribe people to attend by offering food.

grue ,

It is mostly South America, though. The US asserts much more hegemony over it than it does over Africa, for instance.

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