dhork

@dhork@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Past Times in Girard OH.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It is very much a children’s museum, so there will be a lot of kids there. They have actual museum displays also with a lot of gaming history and old toys.

  If you are a group of adults you might be able to do all the interesting stuff in a few hours. But if there are any kids at all in your group you should spend the whole day. As fun as playing the old video games was, I got a bigger kick out of watching my kids play them

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Autofocusing Smart Glasses With Eye Tracking Tech Could Make Bifocals Obsolete⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  This is, at least, trying to solve an actual problem. It remains to be seen whether the solution is more cost effective (and durable) as bifocals. As a human of a certain age myself, I would welcome being able to see without having to tilt my head awkwardly.

  But something tells me this tech is not self-contained, and requires an always-on connection to some cloud resource which is guzzling electricity and water. No thanks! Bifocals are cheaper.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Past Times in Girard OH.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  FYI, if you are taking a pilgrimage there from the Northeast you should stop in Rochester, NY along the way, the children’s museum there has a permanent Pinball exhibit

  www.museumofplay.org/exhibit/pinball-playfields/

  They also have a smaller video game exhibit, with a functioning TRON machine…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Console That Wasn’t: How the Commodore 64 Outsold Game Consoles⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For a C64 emulator, sure, but we can do better now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Console That Wasn’t: How the Commodore 64 Outsold Game Consoles⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, this would be awesome, but for the love of all that is holy can it please not be Basic?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your technology mispredictions?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I sold all of my Apple stock because they wanted to make a phone and I thought that would end poorly, so I should take my profits while I could.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Electric Bills⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or is it building the infrastructure to accommodate them the issue?

  It’s this, but that’s only part of the story.

  Datacenter companies are very efficient at building new ones now, once they have all the proper permits and can start building it can go from an empty lot to fully functional in a year or two. Maybe longer for the huge hyperscalar ones.

  Once they are online, their power demand is comparable to a small city, coming online all at once. But the local utility never had this demand in its plan, so they have to build more capacity to service it, and building a new power plant takes much longer. In the meantime, the demand will outstrip their capacity and the utility will have to buy more power on the open market. This drives up costs for all their customers unless the utility is allowed to charge these customers more.

  As a side note, they often get advantages and tax breaks because they promise to bring jobs to the area. And the initial construction jobs usually are significant. But once the place is built, it’s ongoing operations only requires a few dozen positions, many of them low-tech and outsourced like site security. The higher-tech jobs (like the network engineering) is often not on-site anyway. A shopping plaza would generate more jobs than a datacenter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, that’s not quite how it works.

  Calling the newly minted coins a transaction fee “paid from the pool of unmined coins” isn’t really accurate, as those coins didn’t exist until they were mined. The algorithm carefully controls how many new coins are made.

  But miners do not set fees at all. Users set their fee when they make their transactions, and miners pick which transactions they want to attempt to validate. We expect miners will pick the transactions with the highest fee per byte, because they want to increase their reward if they manage to find a block. But they don’t have to, and they may have reasons to pick other transactions.

  The whole point of it being trustless is that no party needs to coordinate. Users create transactions, miners validate them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Bitcoin was extremely successful at making what it set out to do in the first place: make a fully distributed, peer-to-peer, trustless currency. Anyone who has ever been forced to pay bogus transaction fees ought to be able to appreciate paying for things without needing a bank, or any intermediary at all. It’s like cash you can e-mail.

  But, most people into crypto now don’t care about this utility, they just want Number Go Up. So they don’t transact with it anymore, they just hold it (or actively trade with it). Which makes the whole ecosystem not useful for anything except feeding itself.

  I still think that, in theory, there are areas where cryptocutrency can be used for real innovative purposes. But these will never actually be done, because the people on a position to do those things would rather make quick money selling shit tokens to unsuspecting people.

  Do you want to learn how it all works? Feel free to do so, it’s all Open Source. But if your goal is to invest… Well… Read up on it and understand it first. This will help you differentiate the good ideas from the scams. (And there are a lot of scams!)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What free to play games can run smoothly on my old laptop?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nethack

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Slop Is Ruining Reddit for Everyone⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Reddit was one of the most human places on the Internet, until King Steven the Turd decided that it’s human interactions were a valuable resource that he could sell.

  Now, it’s all just bots talking to bots to learn how to sound human.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the US was partitioned, what new states would you want to appear?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t make the graphic, I just stole/hotlinked it. I am very familiar with PA, although it’s main redeeming quality is that it’s not New Jersey.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the US was partitioned, what new states would you want to appear?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  United States of Canada / Jesusland

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does no one in the bible have a last name?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Iscariot

  Judas’s epithet “Iscariot” (Ὶσκάριωθ or Ὶσκαριώτης), which distinguishes him from the other people named “Judas” in the gospels, is usually thought to be a Greek rendering of the Hebrew phrase איש־קריות, (Κ-Qrîyôt), meaning “the man from Kerioth”.[17][9][18][19] This interpretation is supported by the statement in the Gospel of John 6:71 that Judas was “the son of Simon Iscariot”.[9] Nonetheless, this interpretation of the name is not fully accepted by all scholars.[17][9] One of the most popular alternative explanations holds that “Iscariot” (ܣܟܪܝܘܛܐ, ‘Skaryota’ in Syriac Aramaic, per the Peshitta text) may be a corruption of the Latin word sicarius, meaning “dagger man”,[17][9][20][21] which referred to a member of the Sicarii (סיקריים in Aramaic), a group of Jewish rebels who were known for assassinating people in crowds using long knives hidden under their cloaks.[17][9] This interpretation is problematic, however, because there is nothing in the gospels to associate Judas with the Sicarii,[9] and there is no evidence that the cadre existed during the 30s AD when Judas was alive.[22][9]

  A possibility advanced by Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg is that “Iscariot” means “the liar” or “the false one”, from the Hebrew איש-שקרים. C. C. Torrey suggests instead the Aramaic form שְׁקַרְיָא or אִשְׁקַרְיָא, with the same meaning.[23][24] Stanford rejects this, arguing that the gospel writers follow Judas’s name with the statement that he betrayed Jesus, so it would be redundant for them to call him “the false one” before immediately stating that he was a traitor.[9] Some have proposed that the word derives from an Aramaic word meaning “red color”, from the root סקר.[25] Another hypothesis holds that the word derives from one of the Aramaic roots סכר or סגר. This would mean “to deliver”, based on the Septuagint rendering of Isaiah 19:4 (a theory advanced by J. Alfred Morin).[24] The epithet could also be associated with the manner of Judas’s death, hanging. This would mean Iscariot derives from a kind of Greek-Aramaic hybrid: אִסְכַּרְיוּתָא, Iskarioutha, meaning “chokiness” or “constriction”. This might indicate that the epithet was applied posthumously by the remaining disciples, but Joan E. Taylor has argued that it was a descriptive name given to Judas by Jesus, since other disciples such as Simon Peter/Cephas (Kephas “rock”) were also given such names.[24]

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Move Zig, for great justice

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  We’ll all have to go back to having sex with your wife

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the difference between a managed switch and an unmanaged switch?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Unmanaged switches are extremely dumb. They do simple things, and do them well.

  Managed switches have lots of other shiny features, which is why they are more expensive. They also have to be configured to enable those features, which means you have to know how to drive them

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Open Sources Zork I, II And III⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a maze of twisty passages that gets there…

  Infocom was bought by Activision, which later got merged into Activision Blizzard, which Microsoft later bought.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How One Uncaught Rust Exception Took Out Cloudflare⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Just because you’re writing in a shiny new language that never misses an opportunity to crow about how memory safe it is, doesn’t mean that you can skip due diligence on input validation, checking every return value and writing exception handlers for even the most unlikely of situations.

  Lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does American media (and to an extent the American public) seem to only focus on one issue at a time?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you are confusing what the purpose of media is. You think the media exists to keep the public informed. When, in fact, the corporate media in the US exists to sell ad space. You are not the customer, you are the product. Just like a chicken farm doesn’t exist for the benefit of the chickens.

  So, as such, the job of the media (especially TV media) is to grab your attention so thoroughly that you stay for the ads. This creates a fine line between reporting on hyped-up scandals and ignoring larger systemic faults that might make viewers themselves feel targeted. It means that once a particular narrative is seen to grab attention, everyone runs with it. However, that narrative can’t go too far in turning off people on one side of the issue unless the “news” outlet aims to only cater to the other side.

  This also, to some extent, explains the same washing of the President that is currently going on. This President is a thin-skinned crybaby, and will whine about any little thing. And his supporters follow his every word like a new Messiah. News outlets who want to cultivate a broad viewership base (to sell them ads, of course) can only go so far with certain storylines before his followers change the channel. (Of course, the joke is on these news outlets. No matter how they try to comply in advance, the fascists will come for them eventually…)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Major Bitcoin mining firm pivoting to AI, plans to fully abandon crypto mining by 2027 as miners convert to AI en masse — Bitfarm to leverage 341 megawatt capacity for AI following $46 million Q3 loss⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If I read the article property, the real asset is the rackspace and power they are already leasing. They would tear out the existing Bitcoin mining infrastructure and replace it with AI servers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s even dumber, because it’s not about the budget, it’s about the allocation of funds to certain departments and the authorization to spend that money, which comes after the budget. Some other countries separate budgets and appropriations like this, but those other countries put in those safeguards you mention, because they want government agencies to function even if the politicians are having a snit.

  In the US, thanks to “small-government” Republicans, we make it extremely difficult to spend any money without explicit authorization. And since we also have no concept of a no-confidence vote, politicians ca basically hold government funding hostage if they want. The politicians that are doing this right now know they won’t have to face another election until next November at the earliest. (Senators serve six year terms, and it’s telling that all of the Democrats who cotes for cloture on this bill are either retiring or not up for election next year…)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whatever happened to pickup artists? Did they evolve into alpha males or ascend to a higher plane?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My quick take is that all that stuff mattered when people had to go out to find other people: to parties, bars, concerts, and other public places. They had to actively attract people to initiate a conversation. Now all those third places are dying, and most couples meet online, which means they have done all the superficial selection stuff already, which changes the game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨THE FEDIVERSE IS TOO INFECTED WITH REDDITISM!!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT YOUR CAPS LOCK KEY IS STUCK

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Plot twist: this is just corporate shilling, too, trying to convince us it’s only 15%…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How are computer chips designed?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Is there like a programming language of some sort where a compiler converts syntax into circuitry layouts?

  You are looking for something like System Verilog (Or VHDL).

  Both these languages let you describe hardware. They can both go down to the circuit and transistor level, but people won’t write that by hand. Rather, they will write code that is a description of digital hardware (flip-flops and the logic between them), and then let tools synthesize their description down to individual logic cells and simple functions. Often, chip fab houses have “standard cell libraries” that implement the most common logical functions, and the tools stich them together based on the higher level description.

  Then there is all the verification that needs to be done, not just verification that the design is doing what it needs to do at all times, but that every individual chip is make correctly. Defects do happen, and you want to find them as early as possible in the process.

  Lots and lots of expensive tools and specialized knowledge! A good middle ground are FPGAs. These are special chips with lots of generic logic building blocks, and ways to programmatically make connections between them. You can write the same VHDL or Verilog for FPGAs, butt the tools map the logic to the FPGA vendor’s chip instead.These still require tools and specialized knowledge, but much cheaper than a fully custom chip.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would one run faster without arms?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It depends on how big your arms are. I bet you can run around with a pistol but not with heavy guns…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could the internet go offline? Inside the fragile system holding the modern world together⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are two ways to interpret the question.

  If you go with “will the internetworking between independent diverse networks ever go offline”, the answer to that is most definitely “no”. With so many independent entities involved, and so many redundant connections, data will find a way to be routed to where it needs to go. Perhaps a coordinated attack on undersea cables might disconnect continents from each other.

  But if you go with “can the commercial Internet that companies use to sell stuff ever go offline”, I think we’ve seen that the answer to that is “yes”. As more and more commerce moves “to the cloud” I think people are ignorant about how concentrates computing in a few distinct geographical areas and companies. Yes, I am aware that those companies are very good at 24/7 operation and site reliability. Until they fire so many people that they aren’t reliable anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there really no stupid questions?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sea Lioning comic

  Probably not the very first use of the term, but it’s how I came to learn about it

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help figuring out my pressure washer?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Percussive maintenance