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@space@lemmy.dbzer0.com
0 Post – 215 Comments
Joined 11 months ago

Losing the internet archive would be such a huge loss... I really hope they have a backup plan in case things go bad legally.

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I've been using Firefox as my main browser for a long time. Sites that don't work in FF are very rare. If it's something I really need to access, I just use chrome/edge for that particular site. But as I said, it happens rarely, and there's an easy way to work around it.

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With all the recent hype around AI, I feel that a lot of people don't understand how it works and how it is useful. AI is useful at solving certain types of problems that are really difficult using traditional programming, like finding patterns that aren't obvious to us.

For example, object recognition is about finding patterns in images. Our brains are great at this, but writing a computer program capable of taking pixels and figuring out if the pattern is there is very hard.

Even if AI is sometimes going to misclassify objects, it can still be useful. For example, in a factory you can use AI to find defects in the production line. Even if you don't get it perfect, going from 100 defects per 1M products to 10 per million is a huge difference and saves the factory a lot of money.

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You want to expand your business to Europe. Bam, your code is broken, in Europe the week starts on Monday.

Than you want to expand to the middle east. Bam, broken again... Because in arab countries and Israel, the weekend is on Friday and Saturday.

Then you want to expand to Mexico and India. Bam, broken again, their weekend is only on Sunday.

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AI has poisoned the well it was fed from. The only solution to get a good AI moving forward is to train it using curated data. That is going to be a lot of work.

On the other hand, this might be a business opportunity. Selling curated data to companies that want to make AIs.

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Afaik, it's 315k casualties, not deaths, which basically means "unable to serve". This includes dead, injured, captured, deserted etc. Also keep in mind that this is an Ukrainian estimate which might be inflated.

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I think video platforms should be hosted by the government, like public libraries. They are very difficult to run at a profitable rate, and YouTube is basically a monopoly in this space. But it has an incredible value to society.

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Not only that. If you buy an app, you are at the mercy of its creator. If they decide they want to fill it with ads and tracking, or switch to a subscription model, there's nothing you can do. You can't rollback updates, you can't install an older version from the play store. If they decide to remove it from the store, you won't be able to install it any more.

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Fuck up #1: no backups

Fuck up #2: using SD cards for data storage. SD cards and USB drives are ephemeral storage devices, not to be relied on. Most of the time they use file systems like FAT32 which are far less safe than NTFS or ext4. Use reliable storage media, like hard drives.

Fuck up #3: no backups.

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This isn't something new. This is how society has functioned throughout history. Democracy is an ideal, but no country is truly democratic. Show me a country where the parliament or whatever legislative and executive bodies they have is truly made up of common people voted by their peers, and not part of the upper class.

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Self hosting basically means you are running the server application yourself. It doesn't matter if it's at home, on a cloud service or anywhere else.

I wouldn't recommend hosting a social network like lemmy, because you would be legally responsible for all the content served from your servers. That means a lot of moderation work. Also, these types of applications are very demanding in terms of data storage, you end up with an ever growing dataset of posts, pictures etc.

But self hosting is very interesting and empowering. There are a lot of applications you can self host, from media servers (Plex, Jellyfin), personal cloud (like Google Drive) with NextCloud, blocking ads with pihole, sync servers for various apps like Obsidian, password manager BitWarden etc. You can even make your own website by coding it, or using a CMS platform like WordPress.

Check the Awesome Self-hosted list on GitHub, has a ton of great stuff.

And in terms of hardware, any old computer or laptop can be used, just install your favorite server OS (Linux, FreeBSD/OpenBSD, even Windows Server). You can play with virtualization too if you have enough horsepower and memory with ESXI or Proxmox, so you can run multiple severs at once on the same computer.

Let's be real, they did it because they didn't want people training AI models without paying them. They didn't give a shit about 3rd party apps.

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Because your rights have been eroded by decades of deregulation and lobbying. And because publicly traded companies are legally required to maximize profits at all costs.

A dishwasher... For a family, it saves a huge amount of time and water.

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Another reason why copyright should be shortened... Society has changed massively in the last 100 years, but every expression of our modern society is locked behind copyright.

I would just undo all the mergers and acquisitions. In 90% of cases, this just results in the games being worse, and the magic that made the studios great is extinguished.

There are 2 big obstacles we need to overcome. The first is corporate ownership of residential property. This needs to go away.

The second big issue, we need to build higher density housing, and get rid of the enormous parking spaces that take up our downtowns. Not everyone needs a house. And you can absolutely build medium density housing that doesn't feel cramped. Sure, living in an apartment is not perfect, but you are closer to the places you want to go, and public transportation is more feasible. It's a win-win for everyone.

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What are you going to use it for? You have to give us more details, a vague question will lead to generic answers that will probably not be the best choice for you.

Because these are small shops that have limited availability outside North America, and are fairly expensive compared to Thinkpads which are widely used by corporations, and can be found pretty cheaply.

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First couple of minutes would be nice to catch up with world events. I would take some time to find money making strategies, like learning what to invest in, or what about to buy. If the person has any knowledge about some revolutionary technology, it would be nice to learn about it. Maybe we could use the knowledge to advance mankind. I would also want to learn about things to watch out for. Maybe I should move to some other country because the one I'm in goes to shit.

Writing the actual code is the easy part. Thinking about what to write and how to organize it so it doesn't become spaghetti is the hard part and what being a good developer is all about.

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What I think the biggest problem with the traditional package managers is that (1) they don't isolate packages from each other (when you install a program files are placed in many random places, like /usr/bin, /usr/lib etc) and (2) you can't have multiple versions of the same package installed at the same time.

This creates a lot of work for package maintainers who need to constantly keep packages up to date as dependencies are updated.

Also, because of this, every distro is essentially an insane dependency tree where changing even one small core package could break everything.

Because of this, backwards compatibility on Linux is terrible. If you need to run an older application which depends on older packages, your only choice is to download an older distro.

This is what snap and flatpak try to solve. I think they are not great solutions, because they ended up being an extra package manager next to the traditional package managers. Until we see a distro that uses flatpak or something similar exclusively, the problem is not solved.

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Guess who doesn't have to login to a Rockstar account? That's right, pirates.

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I'm guilty of doing this (just reading the headlines) as well. I usually do it for these reasons:

  • I don't care enough to want to read more. For example, news about US politics. I don't live in the US. I feel that reading the headlines is enough to keep me informed about what's happening, but I really don't care any more than that.

  • The details aren't valuable to me. For example, the Apple anti-trust lawsuit... Is it important? Yes. I'm already well aware of the horrible anticonsumer practices of Apple. But do I need to know all the particular details about the lawsuit? Not really. In fact, the only thing that matters is the final verdict, which hasn't happened yet.

  • I care, but I already know enough details.

  • I don't feel like the article would bring a lot of value, especially if the title is click-baity. I've encountered too many articles that are void of content, just the title repeated in 10x more words.

I don't like visiting news sites because, in addition to all of them being obnoxious and ad riddled, I feel like I'm wasting a lot of time reading long articles that could be rewritten as 3 bullet points. On platforms like lemmy, users will highlight the important bits in the comments which saves a lot of time.

It's obvious that autonomous drones are more difficult to create than they seem... I think delivery robots that go on the ground are much safer and more feasible. They can carry heavier packages, they are less dangerous and can travel at less dangerous speeds.

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I use the smell test. If it smells weird in any way, it goes to the wash.

Having worked on a product that actually did this, it's not as easy as it seems. There are many ways of drawing text on the screen.

GDI is the most common, which is part of the windows API. But some applications do their own rendering (including browsers).

Another difficulty, even if you could tap into every draw call, you would also need a way to determine what is visible on the screen and what is covered by something else.

Because Amazon is shitty with the sellers, the good ones can't make profit on the platform. All that's left is the Chinese garbage sold at huge margins, where the seller doesn't care if it gets returned.

It's been 4 fucking years since Trump has left office. A regular person would never get his trial delayed for that long. If a trial can be delayed for 4 fucking years just because the accused is a powerful individual, it means that the rule of law doesn't apply the same to everyone. If powerful people are exempt from the rule of law, democracy is dead.

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Something I wish my employer realized is how much value they would get out of providing their developers with good hardware instead of crappy laptops. When it takes 15 minutes to change a line, compile and run the software I'm working on, I'm not going to be very productive.

For context, I work on 2 separate projects that need separate development environments (because they have some conflicting dependencies). One of them has to be in a VM, which significantly affects performance. The laptop was high end 3 years ago, but now it's beaten even by an Intel i3. It also doesn't help that the compamy has installed 2 anti-virus software that take up like 30-40% cpu while I am running builds.

Another crappy thing they did was move the infrastructure to AWS... And it costs a ton, performance is shit, and copying files from the build servers is a nightmare... we have to remote into some "copy machine" on AWS, copy the files from the build server to the "copy machine" via samba, upload the files to some internal tool (that's like OneDrive but worse in every way), and the tool will sync it to our machine. Oh, and the copy machine has very limited storage, it's win10 on a 40gb drive. It's insane.

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Opera gave up a long time ago when they abandoned Presto. Today it is owned by some Chinese company, and they are just chasing the latest buzzwords, crypto, AI, you name it.

Skill issue of the developer to fix it or skill issue of the submitter?

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A bread machine. Had good reviews. I used it like 3 or 4 times. The mixing things are too small to mix the dough properly, and having to fish them out of the bread after it was done was a huge hassle. The bread was not great... Shell was too hard, and the top side didn't cook properly. Then I realized, I could basically do the same with a planetary mixer that can mix the dough and the normal oven, and the end result was far better.

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63% of workers unable to pay a $500 emergency expense, survey finds. How employers may help change that

They will make it 83%

Why should the c suites have that right. Dump manure on their beach front property and yachts

Oh, you got caught doing some shitty business thing and now you're not making as much money. Here is a government bailout to make it up.

Yes!! I enjoy playing with retro tech and was actually surprised on how much you can do with an ancient Pentium 2 machine, and how responsive the software at the time was.

I really dislike how inefficient modern software is. Like stupid chat apps that use more RAM while sitting in the background than computers had 15-20 years ago...

Australia had a problem with guns too, until the government stepped in. They had a program where people were paid for giving up their guns.

Limiting access to guns is such a simple thing to do, and has such a huge impact... It's not going to solve crime, but it will make crime less deadly.

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It's not just Google. The Internet has been getting worse over the last years. People don't make sites any more. Blogs have moved to closed and centralized social media platforms. Forums are rarely used, most communities moved to platforms like reddit and Discord.

Most of these platforms make finding content very difficult. You won't find articles posted on Facebook, Twitter threads and Discord discussions in search engines. You have to create an account on their platform, then use their shitty search (or be subscribed to the right people) to see it.