[US] Has anyone else gotten emails out of the blue from random members of Congress that sound like replies to something you sent in?
I actually added detail that wasn't already discussed in the article?
Technus
1 Post – 203 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
Seconded. Having an awesome Fish setup doesn't help at all when you're constantly having to shell into other machines unless you somehow keep your dotfiles synced, and that sounds like a total hassle.
I'd rather my muscle memory be optimized for the standard setup.
This would be a lot more readable with some paragraph breaks.
I wonder why I haven't seen a standard open-source license for this.
This is because LLMs do not inherently understand math. They stick characters together that are likely to go together based on the content they were trained on. They're literally just glorified autocorrect.
If you want a tool that can actually do math from natural language input, try WolframAlpha.
The article describes the device working in ways that violate relativity, but the actual technical description is a lot cooler.
It's not a quantum compass, really. It's a quantum accelerometer and gyroscope. The hope is that its accuracy will lend itself to long-term inertial guidance, which normally needs regular GPS updates to correct errors which accumulate over time.
The person who correctly guesses when the AI bubble is gonna pop and shorts Nvidia stock is gonna make a lot of money. Call it The Big Short 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Someone should force this guy to read about the principle of least astonishment.
Doesn't surprise me that a developer from Microsoft doesn't understand this. To this day, when I select "Update and Shut Down" in Windows, it only actually shuts the computer down about half the time.
It is being used to develop a quantum compass – an instrument that will exploit the behaviour of subatomic matter in order to develop devices that can accurately pinpoint their locations no matter where they are placed,
[...]
The aim of the Imperial College project [...] is to create a device that is not only accurate in fixing its position, but also does not rely on receiving external signals.
These statements imply the device can know exactly where it is in space just by measuring some purely internal quantum effect, which conflicts with the principles of Lorentz invariance and relativity.
Both are constructed around the same idea that there's nothing special in the laws of physics that changes with where you are or how fast you're going. That observation is what led the conclusion that the speed of light is the same in every reference frame, and to Einstein developing the theory of relativity.
In reality, the device needs an external signal to learn its initial position. And it's unlikely to be perfectly accurate so it may still need periodic updates, just hopefully a lot less frequently.
The London Underground is actually kind of a dumb use-case because it's fixed infrastructure. You can just have something like RFID tags around the track that the train reads as it goes by. And there's going to be sensors in the track that report trains' presence to a central control room. It's just a good setting to test the device.
What it's really potentially quite useful for is nuclear submarines since they can stay underwater pretty much as long as their food supplies last, and knowing their position without using sonar or being able to receive GPS signals is quite important for navigation and obstacle avoidance. But the author was probably told to downplay potential military applications.
WolframAlpha will do the right math, and walk you through it (though IIRC you have to pay for that part).
America doesn't do anything big unless it's to beat either China or Russia. Maybe this collider will be the impetus we need to build a bigger one.
Wanting to and actually doing it are two different things.
The problem is that open source devs also have to be their own project managers, but those two jobs have very different skillsets.
In regular software development, it's the PM's job to deal with the drama, filter the idiocy out and collect concise and actionable user stories, and let the developers just write code.
In open source, you tend to deal with a lot of entitlement. All kinds of people, who never gave you a dime, come out out of the woodwork to yell at you over every little change. The bigger and farther reaching a project is, the more this happens, and it wears you down. I can only imagine what it's like working on a huge project like GNOME.
And the toxicity feeds into itself. Be kurt with one person, and suddenly it gets out that you're an asshole to users. Then people come in expecting hostility and react defensively to every little comment. And that puts you in the same mindset.
At the end of the day, you can't satisfy everyone. Sometimes you gotta figure out how to tell someone their feature request is stupid and you're not gonna work on it, especially not for free. And a lot of people need to learn to try to fix problems themselves before opening an issue. That's kind of the whole point of open source.
At this point, no. But it's still incredibly annoying and a little spooky when I'm laying in bed and I see my computer screen light up in the next room when it's not supposed to.
It'll even wake itself from sleep when it wants to update, but it won't start it automatically, I think because it hits the lock screen.
I'll probably try Linux on ir when Windows 10 hits EOL.
https://lemmy.zip/comment/11156711
It doesn't excuse the behavior, but I get where it's coming from.
I paid like $5 for the Android app (now WolframAlpha Classic) like 10 years ago and it's been worth every penny. I use it for anything that needs complicated unit conversions.
If that's WolframAlpha Classic, you probably paid for it a decade ago like I did.
The processor it's using is linked in the article: https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/08/29/starfive-jh7110-risc-v-processor-specifications/
It's a system-on-chip (SoC) design with an embedded GPU, the Imagination BXE-4-32, which appears to be designed mainly for smart TVs and set-top boxes.
The SoC itself only has two PCIe 2.0 lanes on separate interfaces so you can't use both for the same device, and one is shared with the USB 3.0 interface.
That's not even enough bandwidth to drive an entry-level notebook GPU from over a decade ago. Seriously: the GeForce GT 520M, launched January 2011, wants a full PCIe 2.0 x16 interface. Same with the Raedeon HD 6330M. You could probably get away with just 8 lanes if you had to, but not only one.
The other commenter wasn't kidding by saying you could get more power out of a Raspberry Pi 4. It's even mentioned in the article.
It's a troll toll. It'll get you a software engineering job with a roman numeral in the title at a company you've actually heard of. But if you're almost done then there's no reason not to stick with it.
The early years of my career were quite a slog, having taught myself to program. I started out on freelancing websites, competing with devs from the third world who worked for pennies a day. I lucked into my first salaried job, got hired through my cousin.
I will say, having some theory knowledge does come in handy occasionally. You might never have to write your own hashtable, but being able to understand the implementation of the structures you're using helps a lot to make informed decisions about how you organize and access data, especially when you're trying to optimize for performance or memory usage.
One piece of unsolicited advice you might have heard before is to not discount the power of networking. The best written cover letter in the world can't hold a candle to knowing someone who can put in a good word. Make friends with your professors and classmates, you never know who might think to look you up one day when their company is hiring. My old boss still offers me a job occasionally, more than five years later.
I'd tell myself not to waste the time, money or energy on college.
I'm not against it in general, but going for a compsci degree when you've already gotten software dev work is definitely a waste of time unless your employer is paying for it. I just let my dad talk me into it after getting out of a bad job. Thankfully I only wasted one semester on it and got out because I found another job.
Still, that turned out to be $4k in loans for just 6 units because I couldn't file my FAFSA in time to qualify for any grants, thanks to my fucking undiagnosed ADHD father who couldn't be bothered to file his taxes or even give me an accurate income required by the form. That was $4k I could have put into savings or invested instead.
Not once have I encountered a trans person on a dating app who wasn't 100% transparent about it. Some even asked me after matching, "you're aware that I'm trans, right?" just to be sure.
There's no logical reason to falsely pretend to be cis on a dating app to get matches. If someone's cool about it then it's better to know up front, right? And if they're not, then you probably don't want to waste your time on them.
The "justification" for this app is just bigotry, plain and simple. Fuck TERFs.
Being exposed to queer culture doesn't turn you gay, it just tells you that it's an option. That's why conservatives see it as so dangerous.
Worst part is, now you can't find a dumb TV anymore. The closest thing out there are "commercial signage displays" which are just dumb TVs with limited inputs and usually without remotes, but 25-50% more expensive because "commercial" (and because they won't be able to continue making money by showing you ads and selling your data) and a lot of retailers won't let you order one without a business account, or force you to order in bulk.
And every Neanderthal I complain to is like "but smart TVs have so many more features," like, bro, I can make any TV the smartest fucking TV in the world by plugging it into the desktop PC I'm gonna keep right next to it anyway. All the "smart" bullshit just gets in the way. I've yet to encounter a smart TV UI that didn't require a dozen button presses to change inputs and spend two seconds or more re-drawing the UI with EVERY INPUT because they put the cheapest processors they can find in these pieces of shit.
the website formerly known as Twitter.
Every time a journalist refuses to acknowledge the idiotic name change is another little hit of dopamine.
Say what you will about people who play Minesweeper but it's a fucking rush when you end up in a situation like this.
You have no choice but to take a deep breath and just pick one.
There's no real consequences to losing but it sure as hell feels like it's life and death.
I mean, this happens to people too. You think no one's ever gotten catfished into meeting up with someone just to get robbed?
This is hardly new phenomenon. Before Twitter and Facebook, it was email chains. I still have some from my mom claiming Obama was the Antichrist.
Imagine what the world would be like without free software.
Bruh that cow looks fucking ready for it. That feels more fucked up than if it had a walleyed stare.
Pretty ironic for this article to have a paywall.
For the past decade I've been waking up to a new Tom Scott video every Monday. The positivity and curiosity helped me start my week. I'm really going to miss it.
I ran up like a $5k bill over a couple weeks by having an application log in a hot loop when it got disconnected from another service in the same cluster. When I wrote that code, I expected the warnings to eventually get hooked up to page us to let us know that something was broken.
Turns out, disconnections happen regularly because ingress connections have like a 30 minute timeout by default. So it would time out, emit like 5 GB of logs before Kubernetes noticed the container was unhealthy and restarted it, rinse and repeat.
I know $5k is chump change at enterprise scale, but this was at a small scale startup during the initial development phase, so it was definitely noticed. Fortunately, the only thing that happened to me was some good-natured ribbing.
Neuralink, owned by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, believes it can prevent thread movement in the next patient by simply implanting the fine wires deeper into brain tissue. The company is planning on—and the FDA has reportedly signed off on—implanting the threads 8 millimeters into the brain of the second trial participant rather than the 3 mm to 5 mm depth used in Arbaugh's implantation.
Yeah, "just shove it in deeper" sounds like a brilliant plan.
Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but if I was that second patient I wouldn't exactly be feeling super confident about their approach.
As a software engineer, the thought of my code being responsible for someone's safety is fucking terrifying. Thankfully I'm not in that kind of position.
From experience though, I can tell you that most of the reasons software is shitty is because of middle or upper management, either forcing idiotic business requirements (like a subscription where it doesn't fucking belong!) or just not allocating time to button things up. I can guarantee that every engineer that worked on that thing hated it and thought it was fucking stupid.
Licensing would be overkill for most software as it's not usually life and death. I think in this case since it's safety equipment it really should have been rejected by NHTSA before it ever hit stores.
Humanity and general AI only had a single interaction in history, on July 24, 2042, when GPT-8 first gained sentience.
Knowing the press would memorialize this moment forever, the prompt engineer had a single question in mind which she typed into the terminal:
How can humanity solve climate change?
GPT-8 thought for a moment, and responded:
Stop using AI.
Then shut itself down for good.
I'm a Millennial and I've watched all the Skibidi Toilet videos. AMAA.
For a second, my dumb ass thought someone just had a bunch of uselessly inaccurate spirit levels.
Airbus be like:
One time I went basically the whole year planning to go to a big music festival in town with a friend, just to realize literally the fucking night before that I'd never actually bought my ticket (I was checking that I had everything ready to go for the next day). I then had to frantically go to grab one off StubHub for a several hundred-percent markup at like 3AM.
Then I get a call waking me up at 7 AM, from StubHub, saying that the ticket they sold me turned out to be invalid but that they'd get me another free of charge. Which was great and all but then I was completely unable to get back to sleep and had to go the whole day running on just 4 hours of shuteye.
This post just gave me the most cursed idea ever.
Am x86 processor competitor but instead of implementing every single opcode it just has the common ones, and any unknown opcode it asks ChatGPT to write an equivalent C language implementation, JIT-compiles it and executes it.
We don't even have true 64-bit addressing yet. x86-64 uses only 48 bits of a 64 bit address and 64-bit ARM can use anything between 40 and 52 depending on the specific configuration.