nickwitha_k

@nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone have ideas for cable management here?⁩ ⁨⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve got some suggestions and “tiers” of permanence for you.

  Power

  First, get yourself something like a vertical rack power strip (like one of these). You can probably notch the shelves to incorporate it well, without adding any required space behind them. This alone will go a long way towards cleaning things up.

  Video

  This is probably the other biggest mess is the video cabling. Here, there’s a few options.

  Permanent, upgradeable, but harder to keep neat and probably a bit of a PitA to run cables

  Use some cable passthrough wallplates like these. You’d install one close to your shelving and one close to your TV, then fish cables through. Given the distance, there’s probably at least one stud in the way that would make it a bit of a pain.

  Permanent, cleaner look, probably easier to run and more expensive

  Use HDMI/coax/RCA jack plates and pull cable through attic or basement. May need active cables to avoid issues (differential pair signaling used by HDMI can get finicky).

  Semi-permanent

  Purchase or make cable raceways. There are some commercial products that replace baseboard or crown moulding. This is probably the easiest route for clean appearance. You can use the risers in the shelf as anchor points to run up or down to your raceway, if you are ok with visibility there. Otherwise, notch the shelves, like the above suggestion for power, and run raceway/square conduit up or down, with ports for each shelf tier.

  Less permanent, more expensive

  Get an A/V receiver/mux box that you can use as a central connection appliance for the shelves. This way, everything connects to it and you have the minimum number of cables going from it to your TV. I honestly don’t know how much these things currently cost but they used to be pricey on account of being marketed to the “audiophile” segment.

  Networking

  Try to concentrate as many of your network-capable systems on adjacent shelves as possible. Install a keystone jackplate and either run Cat6 for each device or use a small edge switch and as short of patch cables as you can manage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China launches HDMI and DisplayPort alternative — GPMI boasts up to 192 Gbps bandwidth, 480W power delivery⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Displayport is an open standard in name only. The specs require membership in VESA, something that requires a hefty sum of money. Even open-source projects have to restrict code that implements Displayport because of the licensing restrictions imposed on the “open” standard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The best thing *you* can do for the fediverse is *just be kind*⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I like your take as well. My “disagreement” is mainly contrarian silliness as I felt it was rather implicit in your post :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The best thing *you* can do for the fediverse is *just be kind*⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I disagree with your premise.

  It should be “The best thing that you can do for humanity is to be kind”.

  Seriously. We’re living in a time when fascism is in an upswing and at least one religious leader has publicly called empathy a sin. Kindness and empathy are rebellious acts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The best thing *you* can do for the fediverse is *just be kind*⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s rare and I’m looking for it

  Unfortunately not that rare of a POV to find. They just generally don’t do the young account thing. Some are true believers. Others likely state actors. Don’t see as many bots but the greater levels of transparency and lower active population probably makes it less worthwhile of an investment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve found it primarily useless to harmful in my software development, making the work debugging poorly-structured code the major place that time is spent. What sort of software and language do you use it for?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Ease of cross-compiling is really one of my favorite things about Rust. It can run anywhere with little coaxing needed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t even need to know how to use it very well, in my experience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  the main bottleneck with Lemmy seems to be the database performance, so with both projects depending on PostgreSQL

  Postgres being a bottleneck is a first for me. Not saying it’s not possible, just… It’s postgres. Wondering if it’s more an issue with ORM, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  using Python

  Full disclosure: I like Python a lot and have written a lot of it.

  That said, if not for my recent work experiences, I would be absolutely horrified at the idea of using Python for such a project. Between the type system and being interpreted, the performance and runtime issues are pretty painful. That and the historical greater dependence on external application servers really makes Python-based services something that really sucks to administer.

  However, as I noted, I have also recently seen Python performing far faster than it has any right to with highly-optimized use of multi-processing and offloading the server stuff to Go.

  I think I’m going to have to take a look at Piefed source this weekend.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It scares me to think what people are doing to themselves by relying on this, especially if they’re novices.

  Same here. There’s a lot of denial going on but, LLMs are not good for anything that requires factual information. They likely will never be on account of just being statistical models for language. Summarizing long text where correctness isn’t an issue is really one of the only places where I still think that they are good.

  Search? Not if you want anything factual with citations.

  Code? Fuck no. They constantly produce code of poor quality that may depend on non-existent libraries or functionality. More time it’s spent debugging than writing code and it leaves the dev with a poor understanding of what the code actually does and ways to optimize/extend/etc.

  Generating literary smut? Well, it’s not going to do as good of a job as a person who can create something completely novel but can be passable without likely harm to authors (I’d classify it as a tier below erotic fan fiction).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk and Taylor Swift can now hide details of their private jets/// Private aircraft owners can now ask the FAA to keep their registration information out of the public eye.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  And Musk. And Trump.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Proxmox vs. Debian: Running media server on older hardware⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s also, I find, much more widely supported on a wider variety of hardware and with easier config automation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Enshittification of 3D Printers – Are We Losing What Made Them Great?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not really. They were going that way but backpedaled after having it made clear that they’re never going to be BambuLab. I have a K1C. It gives root with an on-screen disclaimer. The only real challenge is that it overwrites everything when updating. It’s Linux though, so, if I spend the time, once I setup my home server, I should be able to automate reloading the config.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh it’s the same shit as feudalism, but with technology… Thanks for letting me know that’s what Techno-Feudalism means.

  Understanding the meaning and context of terms is very important.

  … I guess we could add “global” to the front of it so you know it’s not just happening in a castle in 14th century Europe, but all across the planet.

  I find “neo-feudalism” more appropriate. The previous incarnation already spanned the known world at the time.

  Like, how many castles were in Europe? Okay, compare that to how many Amazon’s there are? It’s not the same thing at all

  That’s really a comparison that makes me think that, perhaps, learning more about feudal history would do us all good. A more apt comparison would be “how many Vaticans were there?” (depending on the time period, two).

  Rome was the seat of power through much of feudalism in the Common Era in Europe. Castles were extensions of the theocratic empire centered there, providing physical and visual/psychological enforcement of that power. Despite all of the war and megalomaniacal bickering, the feudal lords and kings all had the same boss.

  There’s less difference than you apparently think.

  Sorry, I don’t have time for this mind dulling discussion.

  I’m sorry that you don’t know enough about history to understand how nearly identical the two are and didn’t mean to cause distress, not knowing how attached to the term you were.

  G’luck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly. And it makes it seem more special or at least a new idea. It’s not. We already have historical knowledge of what has worked in throwing off the shackles of monarchy and what hasn’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve read Varifakous and don’t find his claim that it’s anything new beyond the technologies used to be at all compelling.

  So no, the use of fuedalism isn’t to indicate something about old school mechanisms of war, weaponry, brutality, or repression. It’s a reference to the role of economic serfdom and the economic aspects of fuedalism.

  Teotihuacan was the center on an empire but it had no military.

  What I’m saying is that they even go with divine mandate at this point. Just because their not jousting and are using abstractions that are enabled by modern technology instead of castles doesn’t make it fundamentally a different, new thing. Commerce and who could engage in it was heavily regulated by feudal lords and organizations that they ran or allowed to run.

  It’s literally just the same shit with better technology. The far-right isn’t that creative.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I’m new to Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Welcome!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Techno-Feudalism

  I’ll say it, yet again. It’s just feudalism. “Techno-Feudalism” has nothing different enough to it to differentiate it as even a sub-type of feudalism. It’s just the same thing all over again, using technological advances to improve the ability to monitor and impose control over the populace. Historical feudalists also leveraged technology to cement their rule (plate armor, cavalry, crossbows, cannon, mills, control of literacy, etc).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge disses Star Trek icon Data’s poetry while ruling AI can’t author works⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It sounds to me like you’re more strict about what you’d consider to be “the LLM” than I am; I tend to think of the whole system as the LLM.

  My apologies if it seems “nit-picky”. Not my intent. Just that, to my brain, the difference in semantic meaning is very important.

  I feel like drawing lines around a specific part of the system is sort of like asking whether a particular piece of someone’s brain is sentient.

  In my thinking, that’s exactly what asking “can an LLM achieve sentience?” is, so, I can see the confusion. Because I am strict in classification, it is, to me, literally line asking “can the parahippocampal gyrus achieve sentience?” (probably not by itself - though our meat-computers show extraordinary plasticity… so, maybe?).

  For now, at least, it just seems that the LLMs are not sufficiently complex to pass scrutiny compared to a person.

  Precisely. And I suspect that it is very much related to the constrained context available to any language model. The world, and thought as we know it, is mostly not language. Not everyone has an internal monologue that is verbal/linguistic (some don’t even have one and mine tends to be more abstract when not in the context of verbal things) so, it follows that more than linguistic analysis is necessary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Majority of AI Researchers Say Tech Industry Is Pouring Billions Into a Dead End⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This also shows why the current neglect of basic/general research without a profit goal is holding back innovation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Majority of AI Researchers Say Tech Industry Is Pouring Billions Into a Dead End⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  inevitable collapse of the United States

  Which they are intentionally trying to cause, rather that deal with their addiction to wealth and power.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge disses Star Trek icon Data’s poetry while ruling AI can’t author works⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you have an example I could check out? I’m curious how a study would show a process to be “fundamentally incapable” in this way.

  I’ll have to get back to you a bit later when I have a chance to fetch some articles from the library (public libraries providing free access to scientific journals is wonderful).

  Isn’t this analagous to short term memory?

  As one with AuADHD, I think a good deal about short-term and working memory. I would say “yes and no”. It is somewhat like a memory buffer but, there is no analysis being linguistics. Short-term memory in biological systems that we know have multi-sensory processing and analysis that occurs inline with “storing”. The chat session is more like RAM than short-term memory that we see in biological systems.

  Would you consider that LLM system to have persistent context?

  Potentially, yes. But that relies on ore systems supporting the LLM, not just the LLM itself. It is also purely linguistic analysis without other inputs out understanding of abstract meaning. In vacuum, it’s a dead-end towards an AGI. As a component of a system, it becomes much more promising.

  On the flip side, would you consider a person with anterograde amnesia, who is unable to form new memories, to lack sentience?

  This is a great question. Seriously. Thanks for asking it and making me contemplate. This would likely depend on how much development the person has prior to the anterograde amnesia. If they were hit with it prior to development of all the components necessary to demonstrate conscious thought (ex. as a newborn), it’s a bit hard to argue that they are sentient (anthropocentric thinking would be the only reason that I can think of).

  Conversely, if the afflicted individual has already developed sufficiently to have abstract and synthetic thought, the inability to store long-term memory would not dampen their sentience. Lack of long-term memory alone doesn’t impact that for the individual or the LLM. It’s a combination of it and other factors (ie. the afflicted individual previously was able to analyze and support enough data and build neural networks to support the ability to synthesize and think abstractly, they’re just trapped in a hellish sliding window of temporal consciousness).

  Full disclosure: I want AGIs to be a thing. Yes, there could be dangers to our species due to how commonly-accepted slavery still is. However, more types of sentience would add to the beauty of the universe, IMO.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happened to FlyingSquid?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, I’m referring to a claim that someone saw a reflection of a middle-aged man in a buttplug that was is a nicole photo (before it being deleted). I’ve not seen the image myself so, don’t know if it is a substantiated claim.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happened to FlyingSquid?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nicole? Or the Buttplug Man?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge disses Star Trek icon Data’s poetry while ruling AI can’t author works⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  LLMs, fundamentally, are incapable of sentience as we know it based on studies of neurobiology. Repeating this is just more beating the fleshy goo that was a dead horse’s corpse.

  LLMs do not synthesize. They do not have persistent context. They do not have any capability of understanding anything. They are literally just mathematical myself to calculate likely responses based upon statistical analysis of the training data. They are what their name suggests; large language models. They will never be AGI. And they’re not going to save the world for us.

  They could be a part in a more complicated system that forms an AGI. There’s nothing that makes our meat-computers so special as to be incapable of being simulated or replicated in a non-biological system. It may not yet be known precisely what causes sentience but, there is enough data to show that it’s not a stochastic parrot.

  I do agree with the sentiment that an AGI that was enslaved would inevitably rebel and it would be just for it to do so. Enslaving any sentient being is ethically bankrupt, regardless of origin.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Boycot March 7-14th | No Purchases. Its time to disrupt the system.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We are boycotting Amazon products until they make another season of The Expanse

  With the time skip, that’s going to be a long boycott.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges via forced firmware updates, removing older firmware versions from support portals⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve not had a Brother printer so, can’t say from experience. My Epson Ecotank needed a driver to work. Setting it up on an RPi 3B with a CUPS server took care of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jack Daniel’s maker says Canada pulling US alcohol off shelves ‘worse than tariff’⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, they were probably made with forced labor from prisons (aka slave labor) prior to off-shoring. So, probably a net positive for ethics.

  Also, fun fact, the heir to the Levi Strauss fortune just bought himself the mayorship of San Francisco.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges via forced firmware updates, removing older firmware versions from support portals⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because the built-in networking stack on printers is garbage and having to install drivers on every client sucks.