nickhammes
@nickhammes@lemmy.world
- Comment on We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent 2 weeks ago:
The field of artificial intelligence has also made incredible strides in the last decade, and the decade before that. The field of artificial general intelligence has been around for something like 70 years, and has made a really modest amount of progress in that time, on the scale of what they’re trying to do.
- Comment on First time setting up a NAS 2 weeks ago:
Agreeing with this, expanding a RAID array is not necessarily impossible, with something like RAID 5, and the right RAID setup, you could theoretically add an identical disk without wiping it all in the rebuild. RAID 1, you’ll 100% need to copy the data somewhere that isn’t the 2/4 disks in the meantime. In an environment where storage is expensive, RAID 1 is not suitable imo.
ZFS makes it so easy though. Throw a mismatched disk in? No big deal, it’s in your pool now. Want double parity for extra peace of mind? You can do that. It self-heals so you don’t need fsck, its maximum limits are too big to realistically matter on human scales, and the documentation on it is pretty good.
- Comment on The end of Windows 10 is approaching, so it's time to consider Linux and LibreOffice 3 weeks ago:
Critically, the people who build these machines don’t typically update drivers to port them to a new OS. You buy a piece of heavy equipment, investing tens, or maybe even a hundred thousand dollars, and there’s an OS it works on, maybe two if you’re lucky. The equipment hopefully works for at least 20 years, and basically no OS is going to maintain that kind of compatibility for that long. Linux might get the closest, but I’ll bet you’re compiling/patching your own kernels before 20 years is up.
This kind of dynamic is unavoidable when equipment vendors sell equipment which has a long usable life (which is good), and don’t invest in software support (which is them being cheap, to an extent), and OSes change enough that these time horizons likely involve compatibility-breaking releases.
- Comment on Friendly reminder that Tailscale is VC-funded and driving towards IPO 4 weeks ago:
What’s the difference with their open-source control server, from headscale? That it’s officially published by the company?
- Comment on Developer Builds Tool That Scrapes YouTube Comments, Uses AI to Predict Where Users Live 1 month ago:
Honestly? Especially if it was only for cops
- Comment on Your help needed: PhD research on why people choose to self-host 1 month ago:
I suspect there’s a tendency of experts in something to think of people who do it narrowly as people doing at least as much as they are.
The people who have a bunch of docker services, or complex multi-machine infrastructure are self-hosted software users, and probably in that 1-2% range. People who heard piholes are useful, so they bought a pi 3 and set it up are self-hosted software users. Somebody using an old desktop they got on Facebook marketplace for running Plex media are self-hosted software users… and so on. So are the people in their houses, some of their friends and family.
Using that inclusive definition, being closer to 10% than 1% makes sense to me.
- Comment on Valve CEO Gabe Newell’s Neuralink competitor is expecting its first brain chip this year 1 month ago:
You don’t get to be a billionaire without some malfeasance.
And even if you don’t assume actively malicious intent like you should with Musk, there’s a lot of potential danger with technology like this, and if you don’t stand a lot to gain, and have reasonable controls against things going wrong, it’s probably not a good idea to be an early adopter. It’s just like a pacemaker, there are a narrow segment of people who should want to test a new model/concept for them.
- Comment on The technology to end traffic deaths exists. Why aren’t we using it? 1 month ago:
Speed cameras are a privacy issue that doesn’t solve the problem of speeding. People are most comfortable driving the speed the road is designed for, and if that speed is too high, the solution is to modify the road for a safer speed. The speeders in your example are right here, for the wrong reason; speed cameras should be rare if they’re allowed to exist at all. They have, at most, a short term benefit, and broad public surveillance is a very serious issue they contribute to.
- Comment on Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College 2 months ago:
I was one of the people who went to college to learn things, but the more I learn, the more I’m saddened by all the people I went to school with who studied things they didn’t enjoy, didn’t particularly care to get better at, all because they saw it as a way to make money. In optimizing for money, they miss out on learning and fulfillment.
This wasn’t that long ago, but I can only imagine how much heavy GenAI use could intensify that effect
- Comment on Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College 2 months ago:
Imagine borrowing $200k for an education, and then doing as little work as you can to actually learn the things you’re paying to know
- Comment on Windows Is Adding AI Agents That Can Change Your Settings 2 months ago:
If a problem exists, and you try to fix it without AI, do you even stand a chance at getting promoted?
- Comment on First Porn, Now Skin Cream? ‘Age Verification’ Bills Are Out of Control. 4 months ago:
There’s an important distinction here: “is a good idea” is not “is the right way to do it”. You can also keep kids off of dating apps by banning dating apps, banning children from the Internet, or even just banning children. All of those are horrible solutions, but they achieve the goal.
The goal should be to balance protecting kids with minimizing collateral damage. Forcing adults to hand over significant amounts of private data to prove their identity has the same basic fault as the hyperbolic examples, that it disregards the collateral damage side of the equation.
- Comment on First Porn, Now Skin Cream? ‘Age Verification’ Bills Are Out of Control. 4 months ago:
It’s all about the implementation. The Washington bill is treating diet products as similar to alcohol (check ID in-store and on delivery), which seems fine to me.
The NY law seems to be suggesting that dating app services need to collect (and possibly retain) sensitive information on people, like identification, location data. That’s troubling to me.
- Comment on I'm Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better 4 months ago:
I think I basically agree with you and the author here. People applying technology have a responsibility to apply it in ways that are constructive, not harmful. Technology is a force multiplier, in that it makes it easy to achieve goals, in a value neutral sense.
But way too many people are applying technology in evil ways, extracting value instead of creating it, making things worse rather than better. It’s an epidemic. Tech can make things better, and theoretically it should, but lately, it’s hard to say it has, on the net.
- Comment on I'm doing my part! 4 months ago:
Fax is commonly used at least in the US because it has regulatory recognition as a secure means of transferring information, it’s highly interoperable, and it doesn’t really have a successor that has caused the network effect to die out entirely.
11% seems slightly higher than I’d expect, but not crazy. Contracts, medical records, interactions with the government are all good reasons to need to send or receive one occasionally. That about 1 in 10 households did last year? Makes some sense.
- Comment on Why do the majority of women still take their partner's last name? 7 months ago:
Having one name (at least in common, using hyphenation) is easier for legal reasons too. If you have kids, and one parent doesn’t share a last name with them, you’ll have headaches at school, maybe crossing a border, unless you brought some extra legal documents with, etc.
- Comment on Why do the majority of women still take their partner's last name? 7 months ago:
I think you’re making a good choice Mr. Beer Belly
- Comment on Bluesky Social surpasses 19 million users as more celebrities leave X 7 months ago:
Or perhaps fucking st*pid
- Comment on Has Fast Food Gotten Worse, or Am I Just Getting Old? 7 months ago:
Cost cutting has made fast food restaurants worse in ways that aren’t essentially shrinkflation. Restaurants like Taco Bell cutting their beef with cheaper ingredients (though apparently it’s only 12% fillers). Chipotle giving you more of the cheap ingredients like rice, and less of the good stuff like guac. Even slower service and longer lines because they don’t want to pay as much staff during peak hours.
Smaller (especially privately-held) chains have been able to buck the trend, but cutting quality has been a popular option as of late.
- Comment on Google creating an AI agent to use your PC on your behalf, says report | Same PR nightmare as Windows Recall 8 months ago:
I’m excited for the fun gopher hole you’re gonna go down
- Comment on Google creating an AI agent to use your PC on your behalf, says report | Same PR nightmare as Windows Recall 8 months ago:
Alright folks, in 2025 we’re bringing Gopher back
- Comment on Eat lead 8 months ago:
We can’t prove that the world we live in wasn’t created last Thursday, with our memories, the growth rings in trees, and so on created by a (near) omnipotent trickster to deceive us. But science and rationality give us tools for determining what’s worth taking seriously, and sorting out the reasonable, but unconfirmed, claims from the unverifiable hogwash.
- Comment on The 1900s 8 months ago:
And even then it’s probably not a hard rule as much as a good heuristic: the older a source is, the more careful you should be citing it as an example of current understanding, especially in a discipline with a lot of ongoing research.
If somebody did good analysis, but had incomplete data years ago, you can extend it with better data today. Maybe the ways some people in a discipline in the past can shed light on current debates. There are definitely potential reasons to cite older materials that generalize well to many subjects.