wizardbeard

wizardbeard , 2 months ago to Memes in (TW: Found on Reddit) Always Found The Similarities Between Some Feminists and Puritanians Interesting

It is, but there are a ton of people pushing for women's issues and other currently hot button social topics who are incredibly aggressive themselves, and pretending those people don't exist, or that it's okay when pointed at the non-marginalized group is a problem.

Let's not pretend that explicit misandry doesn't exist just because it frequently comes from people hiding behind the shield of championing women's rights. Let's not brush off misandry because men aren't marginalized.

Go to town about whether or not it's worse, but I find very often that people want to pretend it simply does not exist.

Most posts like the one you're responding to would get a lot of support if it were flipped to be a woman going off on a guy, but generally when things like thay are brought up you get decried for whataboutism.

wizardbeard , 2 months ago to Memes in (TW: Found on Reddit) Always Found The Similarities Between Some Feminists and Puritanians Interesting

So... you didn't read anything. Not even the comment you just replied to.

For fuck's sake, just block people. You aren't some hero protecting the innocent.

I sincerely hope you find more important things in your life to consider accomplishments and valuable uses of your time.

wizardbeard , 2 months ago to Technology in Boston Dynamics introduces a fully electric humanoid robot that “exceeds human performance”

Lol, not really. I'm rolling my eyes. It's just more doom and gloom reaction to a legitimately useful piece of technology, which could be just as much benefit to humanity as a detriment.

Plus the idea that the people who worked on this might have even been capable of working on something more "useful" to humanity is complete and utter moon shot speculation, along with the idea that this is mutually exclusive to research and development of "useful" things.

I'll reserve my cynicism for when these actually start trending towards replacing human workforce, like how LLMs are being misused. Most of Boston Dynamics's stuff doesn't have massive effects on the world, it's more specialized use cases.

wizardbeard , 2 months ago to Technology in Boston Dynamics introduces a fully electric humanoid robot that “exceeds human performance”

Because that level of environmental collapse is many lifetimes away, if it's coming at all.

One of the benefits of humans dying out, which everyone seems so sure about, is that as humanity dwindles, so too will the continued damage to the ecosystem.

May not stop it, but would certainly hamper the acceleration of things.

wizardbeard , 2 months ago to Technology in Breakthrough promises secure and private quantum computing at home

It's still not your hardware, so you can't rely on the data being private to you even if the connection is secure.

Then there's going to be all the politics present with the location of whatever endpoint you connect to, issues of uptime and availability, etc.

It's a matter of the threat model you're concerned about, but this does not fill me with confidence if this is considered a "breakthrough solution". There's nothing quite like a half assed solution to kneecap work on a "proper" one.

wizardbeard , 2 months ago to Selfhosted in OpenWRT on a Raspberry Pi, is this enough?

Depends on if you're allowed to bring the Pi in at all. Might be safer to just buy what you need "on site". There's a lot more to this than just the technical side.

Whatever you do, just be careful. A lot of places don't play easy with foreigners breaking the law. It can be easy to hide what you're specifically doing over a network, but they don't need to know what you're spefically doing to say "bypassing the filter at all is illegal", "using tor gives us probable cause".

Depending on your situation and how they check things you bring in, it might be better to just load up a/some big hard drive(s) with enough content to carry you through until your next trip outside the filter. Knew someone who was in a similar situation for a long while that would emulate their way through old console game libraries like that.

May be worth looking into how political dissidents can protect themselves. Hidden encrypted containers. Private vps outside the filter that you connect to, doing all your questionable shit on the remote server outside, so the only data transfer is video feed to/from. If hiding what you're doing is needed, steal notes from the people with lives at stake.

So much of this depends on specifics it may not be safe for you to share. Probably worth asking questions in some of the privacy focused communities.

OpenWRT won't hide what you're doing from the network that handles your internet connection. It's just an option for something you could use as a router/wifi AP.

wizardbeard , 2 months ago to Privacy in As the Internet Gets Scarier, More Parents Keep Their Kids’ Photos Offline

There's plenty of reasons to want to share images of your offspring besides chasing internet clout, and I find that simplification ignores all but the narcisistic fame chasers that will never care anyway.

Not making any judgement on whether any other reason is particularly valid. Just saying that the people who do it for likes are never going to see it as anything negative or exploitative. Better off talking with or working to stop the people oversharing for other reasons. Higher chance of success.

wizardbeard , 2 months ago to Selfhosted in WeatherStar 4000+ Emulator

Toss some CRT shaders over top and this would be very convincing.

wizardbeard , 2 months ago to Technology in US to award Samsung up to $6.6 billion chip subsidy for Texas expansion, sources say

Because they've been grumbling about that forever and it will never happen unless the US government just up and loses its military.

There will never be the political and populace buy in for something like that to ever end as more than a compound of political extremists getting wiped out by the national guard.

wizardbeard , 2 months ago to Technology in Microsoft is blocking Windows Customization Tools

There's a wide gulf between googlers and power users, and between power users and the "truly skilled". I'm a Systems "Engineer" with nearly a decade experience in Tech Support, SysAdmin work, building custom system integrations/interop layers, and building custom automations.

Got no problem doing deep troubleshooting, compiling from source, finding issues in open source code bases, fixing them, submitting pull requests, etc.

Doesn't mean I want to have to do all that regularly when I have other shit to get done.

wizardbeard , 2 months ago to Technology in Microsoft is blocking Windows Customization Tools

I mean, go off about it not competing, that's some BS. But Linux doesn't offer the compatibility and ease of use that Windows has on a day to day basis. There's not really any argument to be made there.

Frustrating antipatterns, poor design decisions, poorly communicated reasons for functionality loss with updates (what this article is about), and settings requiring hoop jumping to touch aren't unique to Windows and magically never present with Linux.

Linux is amazing, neccessary, and I sincerely hope it continues to grow as a valid competitor eventually taking over, but it's still really rough in a lot of areas as a power user.

There are a handful of very user friendly distros for people who just need to do basic stuff on their computer and have it just work. Web browsing, document editing, even playing games that are just semi-popular (instead of only the most popular) all tend to work to a reasonable degree of "it just works" now.

There's also an amazing amount of customizability and power placed in the hands of the user if they're willing to dig into the guts of it. Run your own customized kernel with the specific patches you want, re-code part of a driver to meet your needs. Build an entire distro from source code up, piece by piece, exactly to your wishes. Compatability layers between different desktop environments. Mess with your drivers. It's all open to mess with.

But what often gets left behind are people in the middle. I need a lot more than just basic functionality, and I have no fear about compiling stuff from code or making pull requests. I have the skills to make Linux work. What I don't have is the time in my life to be digging in the guts regularly to get shit working on my computer, which is still far too often a requirement with Linux. Just look at discussions in the Linux communities here to see how absurd it can be to get a RDP or VNC client working, depending on your particular setup and graphics card.

It's like the difference between getting a Honda Civic and working on a project car. You might need to change a tire, brake pads, change the oil on the Civic. You don't need to mess with engine valve timings.

I really enjoy tinkering with Linux when I have the time, but most of my life I need my shit to just reliably work so I can get my shit done. I prefer my computer to be a tool far more than a project, and Linux is still too much of a project for a lot of people.

wizardbeard , 3 months ago to Technology in Elon Musk's X pushed a fake headline about Iran attacking Israel. X's AI chatbot Grok made it up.

Yep. To add on, this is exactly what all the "AI haters" (myself included) are going on about when they say stuff like there isn't any logic or understanding behind LLMs, or when they say they are stochastic parrots.

LLMs are incredibly good at generating text that works grammatically and reads like it was put together by someone knowledgable and confident, but they have no concept of "truth" or reality. They just have a ton of absurdly complicated technical data about how words/phrases/sentences are related to each other on a structural basis. It's all just really complicated math about how text is put together. It's absolutely amazing, but it is also literally and technologically impossible for that to spontaneously coelesce into reason/logic/sentience.

Turns out that if you get enough of that data together, it makes a very convincing appearance of logic and reason. But it's only an appearance.

You can't duct tape enough speak and spells together to rival the mass of the Sun and have it somehow just become something that outputs a believable human voice.

---

For an incredibly long time, ChatGPT would fail questions along the lines of "What's heavier, a pound of feathers or three pounds of steel?" because it had seen the normal variation of the riddle with equal weights so many times. It has no concept of one being smaller than three. It just "knows" the pattern of the "correct" response.

It no longer fails that "trick", but there's significant evidence that OpenAI has set up custom handling for that riddle over top of the actual LLM, as it doesn't take much work to find similar ways to trip it up by using slightly modified versions of classic riddles.

A lot of supporters will counter "Well I just ask it to tell the truth, or tell it that it's wrong, and it corrects itself", but I've seen plenty of anecdotes in the opposite direction, with ChatGPT insisting that it's hallucination was fact. It doesn't have any concept of true or false.

wizardbeard , 3 months ago to Comic Strips in Victory? [elder cactus]

Those 2 things are the polar opposites, and agnostic theist an oxymoron

Expecting people to operate in a purely logic driven manner is a great road to disappointment, and one could argue that it also reveals a deep lack in understanding of your own self. People are not logical beings.

Life is not debate club. You can insist all you want that it's not a logically compatible "belief system" (or however you want to label it). You can argue that there should be a different, more etymologically sound name for it.

But regardless of your objections, agnostic theists do exist, and "correct" or not that is what they are called.

Edit: I'm not even one of them, I just absolutely loathe this sort of behavior online, especially when discussions of theism and belief systems come up.

wizardbeard , 3 months ago to Technology in Admit it: ‘Artificial general intelligence’ may already be obsolete, Expecting OpenAI’s GPT and other large language models to beat humans at thinking like a human might be missing the point.

They also would lack the "desire" and resources to do so.

They can't act of their own volition without input, and they can't access systems they were not designed to interface with and data that they were not trained on or given through the input.

I think it's preferable that way, given the immense overhyping of this technology that is ocurring, and the existing cases of misuse.

wizardbeard , 3 months ago to linuxmemes in That's why we need two ssds for dual boot

Man, when I first messed around with Linux I hosed the MBR more times than I can remember. Either through Windows smashing it with an update, or my dumb ass doing stupid shit in gparted.

Pretty sure I was able to recover the important files somehow, but my parents banished me to the old family desktop for that pretty quick.