Zink
@Zink@programming.dev
- Comment on Haha yes society is great 1 day ago:
And even for those of us who might have the means or the marketable skills to get citizenship elsewhere, that only changes the tradeoff into creating new family by leaving all existing family.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
This is just as true in my non-computer hobbies that involve physical systems instead of code and configs!
If I had to just barely meet the requirements using as little budget as possible while making it easy for other people to work on, that would be called “work.” My brain needs to indulge in some over-engineering and “I need to see it for myself” kind of design decisions.
- Comment on I don't have money to pay premium to not see ads. What in the world makes you think that I have money to buy what you are advertising me? 3 days ago:
Yeah, it’s a very broad umbrella term.
I’m an engineer on a team that designs new products and fixes old ones. I’m happy to joke about the advertising & sales departments being the dark side of marketing, but when it comes to creating a product that is useful for our end-users, other facets of marketing are absolutely essential. The ideal, after all, is to have whatever ticket I am working on be traceable back to a customer need.
Heck, the product is pretty niche so even when I am chatting with our service technician about whatever crazy stuff customers are seeing & doing in the field, you could justify calling that marketing. It’s customer information making its way to future design decisions, even if that decision is actually being made by an engineer rather than the Product Manager.
- Comment on Firearm Advice 4 days ago:
It’s so versatile too. I could see this hanging on the wall at work with “git push” or “./build.sh” under it and it would just make sense.
Probably wouldn’t pass the HR sniff test but you get the idea, lol.
- Comment on System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks 4 days ago:
PC OEMs could totally ship their machines with linux installed, or even with multiple distros to choose from at first boot. And one of those options could even be Windows 11, the user would just need to enter a key or buy a license after booting up.
It’s just a question of motivation. Do they think their customers want it, and do they expect Microsoft to make their life more difficult if they try?
Honestly now with so much of the civilized world looking to break dependency on US tech, I hope that Europe sees a big push towards mainstream off the shelf linux devices.
- Comment on System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks 4 days ago:
For most of us on Lemmy, buying a PC with no OS installed is like buying a car with an empty fuel tank and/or battery. It’s ready to preform at 100% in about 10 minutes.
For most other people, it feels more like buying a car that’s completely missing an engine/motor/battery. They don’t even know where to start, even though in the case of the PC the process is many orders of magnitude simpler.
- Comment on After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes 4 days ago:
The preview for the reply notification for this comment started getting my brain so excited when my eyes scanned over the beginning. Screen grab:
- Comment on After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes 4 days ago:
That sounds like an almost refreshing “you’re one of us now / welcome to the real thing” type of brutal honesty.
Did it have a friendly tone and/or serve as an ice breaker before your presentation?
- Comment on Viral anti-masturbation app exposed sensitive user data 5 days ago:
No Privacy Perpetuity
:/
- Comment on How Much Do LLMs Hallucinate in Document Q&A Scenarios? A 172-Billion-Token Study Across Temperatures, Context Lengths, and Hardware Platforms [TLDR: 25%] 5 days ago:
I’m no expert and don’t care to become one, but I understand they generally trained these models on the entire public internet plus all the literature and research they could pirate.
So I would expect the outputs of those models to not be some kind of magical correct description of the world, but instead to be roughly “this passes for something a person on the internet might write.”
It does the thing it was designed to do pretty well. But then the sociopathic grifters tried to sell it to the world as a magic super-intelligence that actually knows things. And of course many small-time wannabe grifters ate it up.
What LLMs do is get you a passable elaborate forum post replying to your question, written by an extremely confident internet rando. But it’s done at computer speed and global scale!
- Comment on After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes 5 days ago:
“Huge rich company responsible for hosting like half of the fucking internet spent the last year pushing code to global-scale production without so much as a review by a senior engineer.”
That’s how I read that headline.
- Comment on Firearm Advice 6 days ago:
This is a new image/meme for me and I like it. The hand gesture gives it a little bit of a “witches vs patriarchy” vibe too. I don’t know if that means more or less coming from a random old cishet dude, lol.
- Comment on Firearm Advice 6 days ago:
Dang, were they actually going into an artery there, or was it just a large opening or you were also on blood thinners or something?
I get an IV every month and they always use a vein, and any bleeding is just a tiny ooze. But I’m holed up for a matter of hours, not days+ as with a hospital stay.
- Comment on New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice 1 week ago:
I’m a human being and I’m pretty sure I am already not allowed to give legal or medical advice to anybody in new york or any other state.
- Comment on Microsoft patents system for AI helpers to finish games for you 1 week ago:
Prior art: I remember a long time ago seeing a video of a Barney (as in purple dinosaur) video game for little kids that would just start playing itself if you didn’t touch the controller for a while. It was a side scroller, probably NES/SNES/Genesis.
- Comment on Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable 1 week ago:
I could see them doing fine losing those features if it meant the hardware was compact, light, and cheap. But doing it on giant $1000 phones is not going to do them any favors with the lemmy crowd like I said.
- Comment on Fully Modded Skyrim VR in Samsung Galaxy XR is Something Else 1 week ago:
My main original Skyrim play through on desktop was 100 hours.
My Skyrim VR play through was 200 hours. I think in 2019. So fun.
- Comment on there is a special place in hell for these scientists 1 week ago:
Yeah now it’s “will it speedrun DOOM?”
- Comment on Father sues Google, claiming Gemini chatbot drove son into fatal delusion 1 week ago:
100% agreed. I agreed more with each paragraph.
Your last sentence hit on what I think is a contributing if not primary driving factor in the health crisis you described.
It’s like the goal of modern society is to insulate us from the natural world and from learning subjects or doing tasks that we don’t absolutely have to.
But we are critters that evolved on this planet just like the others. You can’t just live a commoditized life that consists of work, car, screen, sleep, repeat and get the same fulfillment out of life as if you found the unique path that’s optimized for your unique brain.
Not acknowledging that everything jacks with your head to SOME degree only prevents you from trying to defend yourself as best you can!
Over the past several years I have gone through a transition from living life the way I was supposed to, or that I thought I wanted to, to living according to what produces the best outputs from my brain. Once I have the lived experience of an undeniable improvement from some change, it might actually become a habit.
- Comment on Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable 1 week ago:
I personally might not use a headphone jack or SD card slot very much, but for the market that a GrapheneOS phone would be targeting they seem like OBVIOUS things to include.
The crowd getting excited about this partnership is pretty much the same crowd that complains about features like those going away.
- Comment on Father sues Google, claiming Gemini chatbot drove son into fatal delusion 1 week ago:
Then make the machine try to keep people talking for as long as possible…
That’s probably a huge part of it. How many billions of dollars have been spent engineering content on a screen to get its tendrils into people’s minds and attention and not let go?
EnGaGeMent!!!
- Comment on RIP Bozo 1 week ago:
Each one of those F-22s cost as much as a Level 1 trauma center hospital, and it’s specialty is filling up entire hospitals in the other side of the world!
- Comment on Teams’ invasive Wi‑Fi tracking sparks backlash as users say Microsoft crossed a line — “There must be a team at Microsoft tasked with making Teams worse” 2 weeks ago:
My employer has the usual setup of M365 enterprise shit running on Dell laptops.
Fortunately we devs are able to “dual boot” to run Linux on our machines, since our product is an embedded Linux system. (has anybody seen my Windows partition btw? I can’t even find anything NTFS formatted, whoopsie!)
All that background info is just so I can pay Microsoft a compliment, even if it has asterisks all over it:
The entire Microsoft suite works just fine in a browser, and in LibreWolf too! I do typically add some permissions for those sites for convenience, since librewolf is privacy/tracking hardened (firefox fork) out of the box. I use Teams and Outlook every day, and occasionally will drop a file into OneDrive or edit something in MS Office. I don’t write many office-format documents though, so I’m more likely to be in LibreOffice or a PDF viewer just reading a doc.
You know how in media streaming and gaming there’s that balance of whether it is more convenient to be a paying customer versus pirate everything?
Microsoft’s stuff is literally better to use in Linux. Even if I need to test the Windows build of something, a VM is SO much more convenient. And I’m not even logged into the microsoft shit on that. If I need something from OneDrive, I go to the browser there too.
- Comment on Asus and Dell announce new mini PCs for Windows 365 | Goodbye local OS 2 weeks ago:
If these are just little low-powered PCs where you can pop in a USB drive and install a real OS, I could see some uses for them. Hopefully we aren’t entering the wonderful world of phone-like locked down firmware with these things.
But I already have old PCs that are great at, you know, running software on their actual hardware. So realistically I’ll never consider one of these unless they do something awesome like subsidize the cost and sell them as normal little x86-64 PCs with some janky stripped down version of windows installed.
- Comment on Asus and Dell announce new mini PCs for Windows 365 | Goodbye local OS 2 weeks ago:
Excellent! It’s hard to believe how much easier the Linux experience can be than Windows. Take your PC and boot Linux Mint from a thumb drive. If you like it, it can be installed in like 5 clicks. (assuming you already prepped the machine, backed up, etc. I dual booted at first but that only lasted about 2 weeks before I wiped windows)
I have personally since moved to Debian KDE Plasma. It’s a target platform at work, and it’s more of a server machine at home. Plus doing a few more things via CLI or via finding old forum posts or documentation is fine by me.
I might try Garuda on the new PC we’ve been putting together, though. It looks like a well polished gaming-focused OS that is also Arch-based to get me into that whole family of distros. (because Valve went that way of course, and in the future I’ll always want a PC that can seamlessly run SteamVR. Plus computers are fun.)
- Comment on I am an amateur propagandist. A hobbyist. Enthusiast, if you will. 2 weeks ago:
Eww, friends I know it’s ok to say fuck on the internet, but some words are just yucky to read, you feel me?
lol
- Comment on Current events dictate that I post this. 2 weeks ago:
I love how “I fucked your mom” is just too straight and real for Lemmy.
I might be an old straight guy, but I can appreciate keeping it fake & gay around here. 🫡
- Comment on Current events dictate that I post this. 2 weeks ago:
Only poors can do terrorism, silly!
- Comment on Twitch: "Hey, come back! This commercial break can't play while you're away." 2 weeks ago:
While it may be true that capitalism messes with all of them to some extent, I think there’s still a pretty wide chasm between a Firefox fork like LibreWolf or WaterFox versus just using a default install of Chrome or Edge.
- Comment on Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform 2 weeks ago:
Attitudes like that are not how we got a trillion dollars in spare data center infrastructure to find a use for!
Those consumers will be happy owning nothing THIS time!!
