MudMan

It's a good argument against trying sleeper/generation ships.

In practice, though, the actual sleepers would be so happy to arrive to find a nice McDonalds and a charming small town instead of shuttling down into the middle of uninhabited Arrakis with a 3D printer and a prayer.

I have a 13 series chip, it had some reproducible crashing issues that so far have subsided by downclocking it. It is in the window they've shared for the oxidation issue. At this point there's no reliable way of knowing to what degree I'm affected, by what type of issue, whether I should wait for the upcoming patch or reach out to see if they'll replace it.

I am not happy about it.

Obviously next time I'd go AMD, just on principle, but this isn't the 90s anymore. I could do a drop-in replacement to another Intel chip, but switching platforms is a very expensive move these days. This isn't just a bad CPU issue, this could lead to having to swap out two multi-hundred dollar componenet, at least on what should have been a solidly future-proof setup for at least five or six years.

I am VERY not happy about it.

"Under the age of 30", huh?

Alright, nerds, just so we're clear, that was more than 15 years ago. Assuming this is current, which it probably isn't, that "53yo" dad was in his late 30s at the time, could very much have been posting about it when it happened. Given the current average age for having kids, "bumblebeebats" was probably wearing diapers by the time the Internet got to the point of entirely abstracting it to shapes. There is a longer period of time between loss.jpg and now than between the first rickroll and loss.jpg.

If it makes you feel any better, all of this is hurting me just as bad as it's hurting you.

I mean, duh.

He should have dropped out when he was found to have raped someone.

Hell, he should have dropped out when the "grab them by the pussy" tape came out. How did that work out?

Go vote for Biden if you can, is my point here.

Gotta say, for a guy they keep presenting as a senile, barely-functional bumbling idiot, orchestrating a trial to throw your own son in jail just to generate a distraction is kinda badass.

Some real "getting captured was my plan all along" energy right there.

You grew up in it and didn't notice.

But after the bans the first thing that stood out is you don't need to bleach every piece of fabric you took outside every day. The first time I went out, woke up the next day and my clothes didn't smell... you know, smoky I was very confused. Up until that point I assumed that was just what happened to dirty clothes, I didn't realize it was all the cigarettes.

Yeah, right? If you have to preemptively warn your elected party members to not do a racism or a sexism maybe you're the party of the racists and sexists.

I'll give it to you, this is the most a Not The Onion post has made me go "wait, is that The Onion"?

Good job. I think.

In fairness, my brain is reporting the exact same thing, so... it's a tie?

For a while I stopped bringing cards to situations where a card would be a thing and instead I put a QR code on a widget on my phone's lock screen and told people to just scan that to add my contact info.

Results were... mixed? For a few people it was a cool conversation starter. Others fumbled a bit with what to do.

One guy, though? He was NOT amused. Apparently he made a big point of collecting all of his connections' cards in binders, and cataloguing them, both as bragging rights and a hobby. I may as well have walked into his house and peed on his stamp collection. It was very awkward.

So I'm the only one having weird posthumanist body horror type feelings at the concept of being given an instruction manual for your artificial body parts, including the equivalent of a void warranty sticker?

Just me? Cool, cool. Quietly unlocking new phobias over here.

This was how all glass bottles used to work during most of the 20th century.

I mean, good for them, but returnable packaging isn't that crazy of an idea. It's not surprising that someone came up with "hey give us back the thing instead of trashing it and we'll use it again" before the year we figured out talking computers.

The rise of Linux in this is absolutely driven by SteamOS and the Steam Deck, let's be honest here. This narrative of people escaping Windows because of W11 changes that pretty much only get reported here is... a bit of wishful thinking.

OK, can I be real about this for a second?

I'm torn about Youtube ad stuff. Genuinely.

On the one hand the ads suck, we have a good way to bypass them and I certainly don't want to watch Youtube videos if the ads are unskippable.

On the other hand, if I'm being honest I watch more Youtube than Netflix or Amazon Prime and I sure give those guys money for a subscription. If I counted the cost per watched minute, Youtube Premium would make way more sense than a bunch of subs I do pay.

But I also don't want to watch a Youtube that is a paid service. That was never the point. The reason I engage with it so much is it's supposed to be UGC, not TV.

So yeah, torn. Youtube is very weird and the relationship we all have with it is super dysfunctional, creators and viewers alike. We made a very strange future and now we have to deal with it.

The tragic irony of the kind of misinformed article this is linking is that the server farms that would be running this stuff are fairly efficient. The water is reused and recycled, the heat is often used for other applications. Because wasting fewer resources is cheaper than wasting more resources.

But all those locally-run models on laptop CPUs and desktop GPUs? That's grid power being turned into heat and vented into a home (probably with air conditioning on).

The weird AI panic, driven by an attempt to repurpose the popular anti-crypto arguments whether they matched the new challenges or not, is going to PR this tech into wasting way more energy than it would otherwise by distributing it over billions of computer devices paid by individual users. And nobody is going to notice or care.

I do hate our media landscape sometimes.

Okay, I'm here to help.

Shave.

Seriously. The amount of pressure put on guys around balding is horrendous, and it can consume your attention if you let it. The moment that superfluous, vestigial hair comes off, it's such a breath of fresh air (no pun intended). No more fussing, worrying or stressing about it. Plus, in many cases it looks pretty good. Give it a couple of weeks and it'll just become your face.

Give it a couple of months and the moment there's a scratchy, annoying milimeter of hair on your head will be a natural call to give it a shave for the comfort alone.

I mean, the lit-up signs are for visibility. In some countries pharmacies are assigned strict working hours by the government, so it's useful to see at a glance if a pharmacy is currently open without having to walk right up to the door (and night shifts may require ringing a bell in some of them, so that's also helpful to convey that they are in fact open).

The fancy animations are just because when signs went from neon-lit to LEDs it turned out not all pharmacists have good design sensibilities. At least as far as I can tell.

So here's the thing about that, the real performance I lose is... not negligible, but somewhere between 0 and 10% in most scenarios, and I went pretty hard keeping the power limits low. Once I set it up this way, realizing just how much power and heat I'm saving for the last few few drops of performance made me angrier than having to do this. The dumb performance race with all the built-in overclocking has led to these insanely power hungry parts that are super sensitive to small defects and require super aggressive cooling solutions.

I would have been fine with a part rated for 150W instead of 250 that worked fine with an air cooler. I could have chosen whether to push it. But instead here we are, with extremely expensive motherboards massaging those electrons into a firehose automatically and turning my computer into a space heater for the sake of bragging about shaving half a milisecond per frame on CounterStrike. It's absurd.

None of which changes that I got sold a bum part, Intel is fairly obviously trying to weasel out of the obviously needed recall and warranty extension and I'm suddenly on the hook for close to a grand in superfluous hardware next time I want to upgrade because my futureproof parts are apparently made of rust and happy thoughts.

That is a way more legit reason to still be mad, in my book, and it predates the Facebook acquisition. Oculus had made all that noise about how their devices would be platform agnostic and they wouldn't try to railroad you into buying games through their platform and the moment there was money buzz around the idea Luckey dropped that stuff like it was red hot and we ended up with the travesty that is the PC Oculus store.

I don't think VR was ever going to be mainstream, but imagine what the software ecosystem would be if techbro Smeagol hadn't gotten greedy for that precious, precious investment money.

That's not how language or communication works. Humans develop language in real time and in small cohorts. You are lucky if you can understand youth slang by the time you hit 40 and you want to force an artificial lingua franca on four billion people?

Plus, who said language uniformity is a positive? Linguistic diversity is a feature, not a bug. Language is tied to culture, identity and a whole bunch of antrhopological elements. Entire ethnicities are defined by their language. It's bad enough that US cultural imperialism has forced half the planet to watch the same movies and TV shows, why would we do the same with language? If you ask me, there's way too much English out there as it is.

I get that immersion tends to normalization...

... but man, 34% is still a LOT. Especially when it's 2x the previous result and the largest bloc.

It'll be good if they are prevented from having easy access to legislative action, but it's still an underpants-threatening result in my book.

AI generated alt-text running locally is actually a fantastic accessibility feature. It's reliable, it provides a service, it can absolutely be deployed securely.

It's fine to be critical of technology, it's not fine to become as irrational about it as the tech bros trying to make a buck.

Okay, this seemed wrong. As the article said, even Win8 didn't go down in usage over time. So I went and checked the methodology for the source data.

Turns out, this number is based on social media and search engine referral data. Also turns out, they warn that while they do track Bing chat referrals when you follow through a link, they don't see chat responses where you only read the AI response but don't click through:

We have no way of measuring the number of queries performed in bing chat. However, we also don't measure the number of queries to regular search engines like bing or google either. Instead we track search engine referrals.

i.e. If you go to a search engine and do a search for anything and you click on a website result, we'll record that click as a search engine referral if that website had the statcounter code installed. It's the click to a website that we measure, not the actual search queries that were performed.

When you do a search using bing chat, and you click on one of the "learn more" websites we can track that as a search referral. So we are monitoring bing chat in the same way we measure the regular bing search engine.

From this data we can see from the statcounter network of webites, that the amount of traffic being sent to websites from bing chat is very, very small. Less than 1/100 of 1 percent.

So from our data we can say that bing chat is not currently translating into enough clicks to our network of websites to change the search share.

Of course you are less likely to click on a source website from bing chat than a regular search, as it is intended to give you the answer rather than have you go visiting websites to find the answer. So that needs to be factored in when using our stats for your analysis.

That is very interesting. That's a likely culprit for Win11 specifically to have gone down a couple of percentage points in the US and EU (the other territories seem to remain flat), but it's hard to prove.

It's also a bit concerning in terms of measuring the effects of AI search in both network traffic and in how search results are consumed. If that's the cause it does suggest that AI chat users are less likely to follow through to the source info, which seems risky, although it's also hard to prove what that does to receiving truthful info.

Lots of counterintutitive, hard to parse implications from this one data point, but I'd be surprised if it was as simple as "people have randomly decided to roll back to Win10 (and Win8, which also grows) for no reason".

Eeeeeh, mixing a lot of apples and oranges on that one. At least in a few of those they have problems way beyond US intervention. Others don't get accused of being wrecked by socialism because that "US backed coup" ended up setting up a fascist government for ages instead, so that kinda muddles the meme as well.

Along with mixing up socialism and socialdemocracy I find sometimes online leftists tend to get overprotective of nominally socialist regimes regardless of what obvious issues they have for unrelated reasons. That seems self-defeating to me, it gives reactionaries fodder to lump all left of centre or progressive governments and only target the worst of them for a cheap rhetorical win.

I hate that the conversation is happening on these terms. I hate that we have a bunch of opinionated online "teams" on this issue.

Hey, you know what we need? All of it. Any sort of energy generation that lowers atmospheric emissions in any way we do need. The concept of "nuclear shills" shouldn't exist, the concept of "solar shills" or "hydrogen shills" or "fossil fuel shills" shouldn't exist. The entire conversation is a PR battle by energy corps to get people to buy into marketing so they can get governments to back popular choices so they can get expensive contracts for large infrastructure work.

I hate that we have online keyboard warriors overrepresenting the challenges of one of the contributors to lowering emissions while underrepresenting the challenges of others. Hey, do you think nighttime generation and storage is an issue? Maybe installation costs for domestic solar generation, the state of the grid or the uneven distribution of solar power yields on different territories? Because I do.

And I do think cost and build times for nuclear generators are a problem (which makes it confusing that some countries are dismantling plants that seem to be working safely and are within their expected lifespan, but I digress).

And I do think the impact of hydroelectric power in nearby areas is a problem.

And I do think the open questions for geothermal are a problem.

And I do think the issues with cost, storage and dirty generation of hydrogen are a problem.

And I do think we should be working on all of that. At once. This isn't kids arguing about which game console is better on the backyard, this is a massive existential issue, and would be even if we weren't dealing with a climate change ticking bomb. This report? It's bad news. Any report that tells us any of the ideas we have for weaning off fossil fuels is not working as well as we expected is bad news. Can we all get with that program?

Not really, no. That she's too old and that Trump isn't mentally fit can both be true at the same time. That's not how logic or reality work.

For context, Meta reported 40 billion in revenue during that period, with 24Bn in expenses and made 13bn for the period. All those numbers are up from the same period last year.

So I'm gonna go with "probably, yeah".

You got it. The moment you surface the idea that there are multiple distros or DEs you've missed the goal the thread is suggesting. Presintalled, customized software built for the hardware is the way to ease people in with zero tweaking, which is crucial for newcomers.

I mean, there are seventy million of them out there, so collectors will be fine for a while, but... man, we really missed a step not embracing the crazy cool 3D display tech in these. I really loved it.

Also, point people at this thread next time Nintendo comes after the emulation scene, because... yeah, this is why.

Photoshop.

And yeah, no, please, don't come over and mention Gimp and Kryta and all the others. I get it, they're cool for the stuff they do. They just aren't the all in one package that Photoshop is or have as powerful tools specifically for photo editing. Photoshop would require a Blender-style major effort to replicate and Gimp just isn't up to it. I wish it were. Photoshop is at the perfect intersection of being uniquely capable and walled off behind the single crappiest ecosystem in software.

Nobody likes Adobe, nobody wants to work with Adobe. Nobody can avoid Photoshop. That's just the world we live in and I don't like it.

Man, the way this channels a mix of "it is the children who are wrong" and sheer impotence is hitting me hard. I mean, it really explains so much about modern activism.

I feel like the real lesson is being missed here:

Do not mess with Mbappé.

Because inflation applies to both the amounts you owe and the ammounts you save. It's kinda baffling to see multiple people here arguing that inflation encourages hoarding or not spending. Specifically it does the opposite. Money you save loses value, so you need to invest in something that returns value faster than inflation rather than sit on a pile of cash. Money you borrow also loses value, so the money you pay back later is less than the amount you borrowed. If you pay the same amount each month for your mortgage for 25 years and inflation is 2% each year the last payment should be half as valuable as the first (edit: about two thirds, actually. Maths!), so you're encouraged to buy on credit.

More importantly, governments have tools to control inflation, so they can intervene and course correct when sudden imbalances happen. The anarchocapitalist fantasy where the market balances itself is extremely dumb, government intervention is absolutely needed, and tools to regulate runaway effects are what keeps all your savings from evaporating every so often.

I am annoyed by most phone trends of the past decade, but... yeah, if you go back to a 2014 phone today there is some readjustment between what you remember phone photo and video looking like versus what they actually look like. That was the Galaxy S5 year. That thing had a single camera you would consider unacceptable as your selfie shooter today.

EDIT: This thread made me go look up reviews, and man, yeah, I remember every single indoors photo on my own S5 looking just like this. What a blast of nostalgia. I didn't realize there is a digital equivalent to 80s pictures having gone all sepia and magenta-y, but here it is.

To be absolutely clear, this is not new. Steam accounts being non-transferrable and not your property has always been how Steam's terms work. It's not even the first time the death situation comes up.

Because digital ownership sucks, and that absolutely, very much includes Steam. If you can't keep an offline copy you don't own it.

But honestly, given the new family groups Steam came up with this gets weirder now. Other accounts that are more closely tied to hardware are one thing, and I do wish we had a more effective and reliable way to hand over passwords and credentials to relatives in case of emergency, but it's so weird that now your mom can have an accident and you slowly see the games she was sharing with you over that system fade away as her account gets shuttered. It's such a grim, sci-fi distopian piece of minutia. This is not a great timeline we landed on.

This image is upsetting me. I mean, that just doesn't seem like a practical axis to get that job done. That guy is gonna start flopping around any minute now and then you're going to go find a vice or whatever to hold him. At that point just tilt him on the side and go lengthwise like a hot dog bun.

Presumably to minimize exposure while they add the announced security band-aids?

So... while I have you guys here, how do we feel about iOS having just announced basically the same feature? We angy about that one too or nah?

I mean, joking aside, I'm genuinely curious about what the reaction is going to be. On paper it's a very similar concept, but it feels like routing it through Siri and not surfacing the stored data will legitimately kill some of the creepy factor even if what's happening behind the scenes is very similar.

The full quote, which people are clearly not reading because everything sucks:

"We deeply value our talented actors who are an important part of the work we do to deliver the incredible entertainment experiences that our players enjoy around the world. We're working very closely; this is not an EA-specific situation, this is an industry-specific situation, and we're working diligently to negotiate at the table. The way it works now in terms of our product specifically is that the strike is limited to games commencing production after September 2023, including live service games. So we don't expect any near-term disruption to any of the games we have in development or any of the live services we're currently running. That being said, we're committed to continuing to bargain in good faith and are hopeful that the parties can expediently resolve our issues at the bargaining table. But we're not anticipating any significant short-term impact at EA."

So an interesting thing about this is that the reasons Gemini sucks are... kind of entirely unrelated to LLM stuff. It's just a terrible assistant.

And I get the overlap there, it's probably hard to keep a LLM reined in enough to let it have access to a bunch of the stuff that Assistant did, maybe. But still, why Gemini is unable to take notes seems entirely unrelated to any AI crap, that's probably the top thing a chatbot should be great at. In fact, in things like those, related to just integrating a set of actions in an app, the LLM should just be the text parser. Assistant was already doing enough machine learning stuff to handle text commands, nothing there is fundamentally different.

So yeah, I'm confused by how much Gemini sucks at things that have nothing to do with its chatbotty stuff, and if Google is going to start phasing out Assistant I sure hope they fix those parts at least. I use Assistant for note taking almost exclusively (because frankly, who cares about interacting with your phone using voice for anything else, barring perhaps a quick search). Gemini has one job and zero reasons why it can't do it. And it still really can't do it.

Beyond anything else, I think we can agree that's a heck of a headline. British press style is extremely annoying, but every now and then something clicks and makes you wonder if it's all worthy (it isn't).