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sailingbythelee

@sailingbythelee@lemmy.world

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sailingbythelee ,

I want to do the same, but I'm on the fence between Nobara and Bazzite.

‘A fine line between humor and flopping’: tech summit’s rap battle is the height of corporate cringe (www.theguardian.com)

The next time you’re sitting through a company-wide meeting, half-listening to a leader drone on about updates or product launches (and hoping they don’t announce layoffs or budget cuts), remember this: at least they’re not rapping....

sailingbythelee ,

I will never understand why these corporations spend big bucks on this cringe. I've been to one such event and I was shocked. What's worse is that long-serving people said you had to act as if you were enjoying it or else you'd hear from your manager afterwards. Imagine a bunch of middle-aged men at a sales conference shaking their hips and pretending to enjoy a cheesy rap battle. What an utterly soul crushing, suicidal-thought-inducing experience. I can't tell if senior management actually believes that this sort of corporate cringe is inspiring, or if they do it purposely to crush your soul and make you into a servile automaton. Are they out of touch or is it an Orwellian power move?

sailingbythelee ,

Sometimes the manager/foreman/supervisor is just the team member who is willing to be that interface between the frontline workers and senior management. The best middle managers are those who can thread that needle to the satisfaction of both groups.

I agree with you thst managers shouldn't consider themselves smarter than anyone else. Quite the opposite. Particularly when managing professionals or others with extensive knowledge, I'm a big believer in the concept of servant leadership. That's where you lead by inspiring the group to come up with ideas and then shaping, coordinating, and supporting those ideas through to a successful outcome.

sailingbythelee ,

We humans have these things called "boats" that have enabled the British Isles to receive regular inputs of new genetic material. Pretty useful things, these boats, and somewhat pivotal in the history of the UK.

sailingbythelee ,

I agree that AI is just a tool, and it excels in areas where an algorithmic approach can yield good results. A human still has to give it the goal and the parameters.

What's fascinating about AI, though, is how far we can push the algorithmic approach in the real world. Fighter pilots will say that a machine can never replace a highly-trained human pilot, and it is true that humans do some things better right now. However, AI opens up new tactics. For example, it is virtually certain that AI-controlled drone swarms will become a favored tactic in many circumstances where we currently use human pilots. We still need a human in the loop to set the goal and the parameters. However, even much of that may become automated and abstracted as humans come to rely on AI for target search and acquisition. The pace of battle will also accelerate and the electronic warfare environment will become more saturated, meaning that we will probably also have to turn over a significant amount of decision-making to semi-autonomous AI that humans do not directly control at all times.

In other words, I think that the line between dumb tool and autonomous machine is very blurry, but the trend is toward more autonomous AI combined with robotics. In the car design example you give, I think that eventually AI will be able to design a better car on its own using an algorithmic approach. Once it can test 4 million hood ornament variations, it can also model body aerodynamics, fuel efficiency, and any other trait that we tell it is desirable. A sufficiently powerful AI will be able to take those initial parameters and automate the process of optimizing them until it eventually spits out an objectively better design. Yes, a human is in the loop initially to design the experiment and provide parameters, but AI uses the output of each experiment to train itself and automate the design of the next experiment, and the next, ad infinitum. Right now we are in the very early stages of AI, and each AI experiment is discrete. We still have to check its output to make sure it is sensible and combine it with other output or tools to yield useable results. We are the mind guiding our discrete AI tools. But over a few more decades, a slow transition to more autonomy is inevitable.

A few decades ago, if you had asked which tasks an AI would NOT be able to perform well in the future, the answers almost certainly would have been human creative endeavors like writing, painting, and music. And yet, those are the very areas where AI is making incredible progress. Already, AI can draw better, write better, and compose better music than the vast, vast majority of people, and we are just at the beginning of this revolution.

sailingbythelee ,

Exactly. And if your ISP or cellular provider wants, or is forced, to gather information about your internet activities, they can almost certainly find a way. The cheap consumer-grade VPN services most of us use just prevent casual or automated observers from easily detecting your device's IP address. For most people that just want to torrent casually or use public wifi, it's enough.

sailingbythelee , (edited )

This comment is so wrong. You are dehumanizing Jews and condemning an entire country as illegitimate.

sailingbythelee ,

Gluetun is the bomb. You don't realize how much automated tracking of the torrent-verse is out there until your VPN connection drops unexpectedly and your torrent client continues merrily downloading in the clear. Gluetun is a fantastic killswitch and has never failed me. All hail the developer.

sailingbythelee ,

I see this in my day job, too. When I'm in a charitable mood, I chalk it up to pandemic trauma. But more realistically, I think it is a real change in our society's ability and willingness to compromise and see the world through the eyes of others. People want what they want and they don't give a fuck who they have to roll over to get what they want. They treat getting what they want as a matter of principle.

sailingbythelee ,

Don't go bothering Korean Jesus. He's busy with Korean shit.

sailingbythelee ,

The duck-duckling model would probably work okay on the highway, but not so well once you arrive in a town or city. You can't reliably get ten semis through a set of lights in traffic without getting split up. I guess they could have a depot outside of town where human drivers would meet the ducklings for the final leg of the journey.

sailingbythelee ,

The tiktok algorithm is good in the same sense that cocaine is good.

sailingbythelee ,

That's ridiculous. Government doesn't move that quickly. They've been thinking about how to deal with foreign interference for years. Also, I hate to break it to you, but the Palestine thing isn't that interesting or important in the grand scheme. At best, the Palestinians, like the Houthis and Hezbollah, are pawns used by Iran to stir up trouble from time to time. This conflict has been going on for 80 years already and the overall trend in the Middle East is toward peace and economic integration with Israel. No one is going to push the Jews into the sea and liberate Palestine for the Palestinians.

sailingbythelee ,

Perhaps I misspoke. I mean to say that the periodic flare-ups with the Palestinians are not that important anymore. They used to be. But nowadays, Israel's neighbours aren't invading with tanks and, as I said, the overall trend is towards peace and economic integration with Israel. I agree with you that Israel is important to the US for many good strategic and political reasons.

sailingbythelee ,

I've been paying attention to the Middle East for almost 40 years, punk. What? Iran, like, literally just sent drones into Israel? Oh no, literally what will we do? Like, oh my god, this is so terrible.

You can't take and hold territory with drones, especially not Iranian drones. Iran is not invading Israel. Grow up and go learn something.

sailingbythelee ,

I agree with you. The CCP classifies recommendation algorithms in a category similar to defense secrets. It isn't just Tiktok that can't be sold to non-Chinese, it is all recommendation algorithms. They know damn well what effect these algorithms have on a population.

sailingbythelee ,

I haven't followed it too closely, but I know this has been years in the making so the company should have a contingency plan. You have to wonder why the company refuses to take steps satisfactory to Congress to ensure that the CCP cannot access user data or influence the content or algorithm. It is economically suicidal to be banned in the US, which makes me think that Bytedance's CCP masters told the company to refuse. Of course, now that the law has been passed, Bytedance will have to separate their interests since I doubt they'll allow the app to be banned. They'd lose most of their advertising revenue if they were banned in the US. Not to mention the fact that a US ban would likely be followed by bans in other countries. I'm sure Bytedance can find a way to have another company manage their data while still making plenty of money. No need to pity a company making billions in revenue on the labour of content creators.

sailingbythelee ,

You make a good point about Bytedance perhaps not being permitted to have a contingency plan. However, the CCP may have one. Whatever Xi says is law in China.

sailingbythelee ,

Why do you say that Congress is making legislation against its own citizens' wishes? A quick Google search shows that polls suggest that twice as many Americans favour the ban as oppose it.

I'm still trying to figure out what the downside of this legislation is. It doesn't ban any specific content or speech, it just bans a particular company from operating a specific platform in the US. Tiktok is still permitted to operate if it is controlled by a company that isn't directly subject to the CCP. If Xi chooses to not let that happen, that is on him. Xi certainly can't cry foul without massive hypocrisy, given that he has already banned virtually all western social media.

sailingbythelee ,

Whoa, take it easy there, friend. That got personal rather quickly. Are you mad? I don't have a horse in this race one way or the other. I don't use Tiktok but I don't have anything against it either. It seems to me that social media apps pop up like dandelions and the main thing that determines whether or not they thrive is the number of people participating. I guess I'm wondering why anyone should care if Tiktok in particular survives or some other social media platform takes its place. They rise, they fall, but there always seems to be a replacement.

sailingbythelee OP ,

That sounds like an interesting possibility. I'll check it out. Thanks!

sailingbythelee OP ,

I didn't realize that the metadata was in such a bad state. But that would explain why I'm having difficulty finding the ebook equivalent of the smooth Jellyseer/Sonarr/Jellyfin ecosystem. Thanks for the insight.

sailingbythelee ,

That's a good one. I once gave an assignment for students to write an original poem. One student submitted The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson and claimed it was his own. These were middle school kids so he didn't realize how famous the poem is. This shit has been happening forever. LLMs are another phase in the never-ending arms race between teachers and students who want to cheat.

sailingbythelee ,

I just bought a new dishwasher and it came with "smart" features like remote start and notifications, which I don't want. Easy solution: I didn't connect it to my wifi.

On the positive side, the manufacturer (Bosch) wasn't pushy about it at all. The only indication that the machine has smart features was a small instruction card, which I promptly tossed in the recycling.

sailingbythelee ,

I spent several hours trying to figure out why the fish shell configuration page (which is a dynamically generated local web page) wouldn't work, including uninstalling the snap version of Firefox and using apt to try to install the normal version of Firefox. Because neither version of Firefox could open the page, I spent hours trying to diagnose why the fish shell wasn't working properly. Eventually, I installed a different browser and it worked. I finally figured out that it was because Canonical tricked me into re-installing the snap version of Firefox via apt even though that is clearly not what I wanted. I'm still a bit salty about it.

sailingbythelee ,

Have you tried setting the nameserver to Google or Cloudflare to see if that works?

sailingbythelee ,

I suppose you have also logged into your Adguard server to verify that it can ping the internet?

In other words, you have successfully pinged Proxmox --> Adguard and Adguard --> Internet?

sailingbythelee ,

Exactly. Many people have an ignorant view of British cuisine, as though only foods grown in the British Isles are British. All kinds of foods and dishes from all over the world have been shipped, used, and adapted in Britain since at least the time of the Roman Empire. Heck, most of what a British, European or North American person would see on the menu of their local Indian restaurant is not traditional Indian food at all, but rather Anglo-Indian.

sailingbythelee ,

That was a very well-crafted and insightful comment, especially that last paragraph.

sailingbythelee ,

I think Americans need to absorb a bit more global context about the left-right spectrum. I see people saying that policies like universal health care, access to abortion, basic worker rights and affordable education are "far left". Most of the proposed policies of the left in the US are centrist in the rest of the Western world. Unless you are advocating for a Communist regime along the lines of the Soviet Union or Maoist China, you aren't really "far left". Similarly, unless someone is advocating for a fascist dictator state, we should probably not call them "far right". Of course, that is what Trumpists advocate for, so they really are far right!

sailingbythelee ,

I've never seen that diagram before. I like it.

sailingbythelee ,

The current bad reputation of the French is mostly because of WW2. They surrendered after only 6 weeks of fighting and then heavily collaborated with the Nazis. French collaboration was so heartfelt that they refused to hand over their navy to the British when requested to do so. They even fired on American ships and troops in North Africa when the Americans arrived to liberate them from German occupation.

The French were also enthusiastic participants in the Final Solution. According to Wikipedia, "the Nazis in France relied to a considerable extent on the co-operation of local authorities to carry out what they called the Final Solution. The government of Vichy France and the French police organized and implemented the roundups of Jews."

After the war, De Gaulle promoted the narrative that the French heroically resisted the Nazis, but this was not at all true. The famous French Resistance was tiny until the last part of the war, and only grew once it became clear that Germany would lose. The French government also denied their role in the Holocaust for over 50 years until 1995 when Jacques Chirac finally admitted that, "[T]hose black hours soiled our history forever. ... [T]he criminal madness of the occupier was assisted by the French people, by the French State. ... France, that day, committed the irreparable."

So, yeah, that's why people dunk on France, particularly when it comes to military matters. They certainly did not live up to the ideals of the Revolution or the martial prowess of Napoleon.

sailingbythelee ,

Not at all. I identified a particular historical event where the French failed badly. Identifying one country's specific mistakes doesn't imply that others are angels. For example, obviously no one would claim that Germany and Japan were "angels" during WW2, but that goes without saying, right?

In fact, I responded to another commenter who called them out for racism and arrogance because that is far too general a claim with no evidence.

sailingbythelee ,

That's most of the internet now. I mean, yay, we're calling bad stuff bad. I do it, too, and I'm also addicted to orange man news like all you other rubber-neckers, but yawn it's all getting a bit repetitious and homogenized. Unfortunately, as we get bored, the more these nutty politicians do crazy shit for the media to report on, all to keep our attention. It feels like a death spiral.

sailingbythelee ,

The two most important things missing from Linux are mass familiarity and certain important professional software suites. It isn't that Linux doesn't have software nearly-equivalent to things like the Adobe suite, MS Office, and AutoCAD. It is that it doesn't have those EXACT applications. Like it or not, in a professional setting, you usually have to use the big proprietary applications because that's what everyone else uses. Using standard software reduces compatibility and training headaches, and eases recruitment. Most technically-oriented professionals wouldn't even take a job that disallowed them from accessing and maintaining their competence with the standard software of their profession.

sailingbythelee ,

CCP-phobia, I think. It is inappropriate to conflate the CCP with the Chinese people.

sailingbythelee ,

That's not a wolf, that's Swiper the Fox. Swiper no swiping, Swiper no swiping, Swiper no swiping!

https://youtu.be/JmpooFefGTU

sailingbythelee ,

I must have seen or heard every episode of Dora the Explorer when my kids were little. The other ear worm I'll never get out of my head is:

https://youtu.be/YJfb4SlhRmY

Linux market share passes 4% for first time (arstechnica.com)

We see the nearly 33-year-old OS’s market share growing 31.3 percent from June 2023, when we last reported on Linux market share, to February. Since June, Linux usage has mostly increased gradually. Overall, there's been a big leap in usage compared to five years ago. In February 2019, Linux was reportedly on 1.58 percent of...

sailingbythelee ,

Same here. After several false starts over the last 30 years, 2023 was the year of the Linux laptop and server cluster for me. I've put in the work now and I am 100% sure that I'm never going back to Windows for those machines. I still have a fancy new Windows gaming machine though. I don't want to switch it to Linux because it's an Intel/Nvidia machine with three screens and a bunch of peripherals. Whoops!

sailingbythelee ,

This is fantastic. Thanks.

sailingbythelee ,

I don't know of any open source printers, but Brother laser printers are good. Brother is a 116-year-old Japanese industrial manufacturer. Their printers are simple, reliable, they support their printers for a very long time, and they make linux drivers. AND as far as I know they haven't tried any HP-style fuckery.

It’s No Surprise That “Skills-Based” Hiring Has Not Worked (www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org)

This article outlines an opinion that organizations either tried skills based hiring and reverted to degree required hiring because it was warranted, or they didn't adapt their process in spite of executive vision....

sailingbythelee ,

I've been in management for about 15 years and have hired many people. My take-away is that standard HR interview practices ("Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a coworker...") are basically a popularity contest that strongly favors extroverts and people with good story-telling and language skills. I suppose these techniques are good if that's primarily what you are looking for. However, if you are hiring for actual technical skills, these interview techniques are worse than useless, they are discriminatory.

Also, HR people, in my experience, are quite under-educated when it comes to interview techniques. I've worked with about dozen different HR people over the years and none of them had any kind of imagination or technical expertise when it came to interviewing. In my organization and in other similar organizations where I have peers, any deviation from the standard HR interview is entirely driven by managers who are sick of the usual HR crap.

sailingbythelee ,

I think the point of the Turing test is to avoid thorny questions about the definition of intelligence. We cant precisely define intelligence, but we know that normally functioning humans are intelligent. Therefore, if we talk to a computer and it is indistinguishable from a human in a conversation, then it is intelligent by definition.

Passkeys might really kill passwords (www.theverge.com)

Passkeys: how do they work? No, like, seriously. It’s clear that the industry is increasingly betting on passkeys as a replacement for passwords, a way to use the internet that is both more secure and more user-friendly. But for all that upside, it’s not always clear how we, the normal human users, are supposed to use...

sailingbythelee ,

I must admit that, despite reading about passkeys a bit, I still don't understand the actual practicalities. I seem to recall that Bitwarden can store keys, but can't generate them. If that's true, who generates the passkey?

sailingbythelee ,

I clicked on the link to "installation instructions" on your home page in a couple of different places and got the error "e.split is not a function".

sailingbythelee ,

Thanks, your link worked for me.

sailingbythelee ,

The current oppressive regime in Iran wasn't installed by the CIA.

Lol, are you serious about your "statute of limitations" claim? If so, I guess you think those damn Romans are responsible for Brexit. Is King George responsible for Trump, too? Get a grip, friend.

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