jj4211

@jj4211@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨doctors⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The environmental causes are availability of options we crave but are still not forced into, so individual responsibility is absolutely a thing.

  I was obese and it sucked but I got down to a healthy weight, and keeping it off kind of still sucks but it doesn’t take a lot of time or money, in fact it’s generally cheaper.

  Fast food is constantly highlighted as an impossibly unhealthy reality, the nicer places cost more and take too much time. Except you can choose passable choices in fast food.

  If you can freely pick, there are fast food places that offer salads with maybe some grilled chicken, which can be healthy unless you opt to drown it in ranch.

  But let’s say you are in a group and they pick a restaurant without an option like salad. Just asking for water instead of a big sugary drink gets you so much closer to healthy. Skip the fries, skip the mayo, get a smaller burger. All these things are cheaper and friendlier to a reasonable caloric budget.

  It sucks because it means eating to feeling “ok” while skipping the most awesome foods and rarely getting to feel just utterly full, but that was just life when people had healthier weight.

  Similarly on activity. It does suck that work has people sedentary, but our idle pursuits are similar. When I was a kid, TV was stuck on a schedule and video games were only so engaging, so we would get bored and want to do something. Maybe it was walk amongst some trees to see if anytime interesting was around. Maybe do something with a ball. Nowadays we can get endless engagement from streaming, video games, and Internet. So tempting to just be on the couch. We can still choose those more active things, but we don’t want to.

  Note all this awesome stuff is still great in moderation. I just went full on gorging at a restaurant a week ago on pretty much whatever I wanted. The thing is this is maybe like once every 2 or 3 weeks, not daily like we really want to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for TikTok clout⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I suppose the question would be the alternative.

  Note the devices actively discouraging offline save is a huge asset to schools, since kids screw up a lot, forget their devices and need loaners to get through a day and such. Extra bonus if the device can’t be too fun, to avoid them being overly used at home and get broken more.So Chromebook is desirable because they suck so much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Judge Accepted AI Video Testimony From a Dead Man⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, a way to play both sides of pushing for a harsh sentence whole you use a puppet to drive empathy…

  Should have been a slam dunk without the video.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Openshift kind of incidentally does virtualization almost begrudgingly. Red hat started to try to be a VMware competitor with ovirt but find VMware customers too stuck in their ways, then abandoned it to chase the cloud buzz word with open stack, but open stack was never that good and also the market for people who want to make their on premise stuff act like a cloud provider is actually not that big anyway. So they hopped on the container buzzword with open shift and stuck libvirt management in there to have an excuse for virtualization customers that there is a migration path for them.

  Meanwhile proxmox scratched their head wondering why everyone was fixated on stacking abstraction layer upon abstraction layer on libvirt and just directly managed the qemu. Which frankly makes their stuff a lot more straightforward technically, and their implementation is a solid realization of the sort of experience that VMware provides. In fact much more straightforward than a typical VMware deployment, and easier to care and feed since it is natively Linux instead of an OS pretending not to be an os like esxi. It also is consistent to manage, unlike VMware where you must at least interact some with esxi but that’s deliberately crippled and then you have to do things a bit differently as you deploy center (which can be weirdly convoluted).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d say that if you tend to like Microsoft products, then hyper v. If you tend to be annoyed by then but like Linux, then proxmox is great. It manages to be a good blend of approachable with a GUI but also having solid API and cli that didn’t overly abstract things away from the underlying implementation

  But if you aren’t really a Linux person, then I’d wager hyper v is the right direction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kawasaki is developing a robot to be ridden like a horse - Asia Times⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That video was pretty janky, I thought for sure it wouldn’t be direct from Kawasaki but yeah…

  Someone fed the concept into an AI video generator, proclaimed a 2050 target date, so absolutely far enough away this will be forgotten by the time everyone realizes that this was zero actual effort towards anything.

  So now AI lets marketing folks make their completely going nowhere idea into a substantial concept video casually…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OMG no please don’t call me.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For me I’ve got to put live recording away toward the end. If I’m doing a recording, I’ve got way too much opportunity to second guess myself in editing and zero indications whether I’m going a useful direction in my talk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everyone knows what first aid is, but what is second aid?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  He says he’s not dead yet …

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google won't bring new Nest Thermostats to Europe⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, the zwave/zigbee options tend to be more barebones on the local display, so I very carfeully looked at the wifi options to find the best of both worlds.

  Of course my opengarage is wifi based too, but that’s fine.

  Nothing against wifi, just it’s so difficult to tell a ‘local wifi’ from a ‘cloud wifi’ device.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google won't bring new Nest Thermostats to Europe⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I got some z wave thermostats for home.

  I got an Emersonl “homekit” thermostat for my in-law and managed to get it on wifi without “cloud”. Unfortunately you have to be careful because the follow on model requires their cloud service for online control.

  It’s a real shame that most every house is well equipped to do standalone hosting for remote access, but most of the investment has gone toward cloud connected to force the recurring revenue opportunity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well you can do that today. Find a tree out in the middle of nowhere and sit under it without any electronic devices. Then you are oblivious to all that stuff. You may be bothered by the fact that the things are still happening, but there are also plenty of horrific things happening in that time period you went to, you just won’t be keeping track of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Philosophy moment⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This may shock you, but guns are banned more often than phones in school, and the bans are more severe as are the consequences.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HP agrees million-dollar settlement over "false advertising" on PCs, keyboards⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I read that. New leadership felt that the eternal sales stuff was bad and changed to “everyday low prices” sort of thing thinking the customers would appreciate the transparency. Nope, the fake “on sale” works.

  It’s all over the place in sales across every industry. I think it is dumb but I am surprised someone actually got a judgement against it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China scientists develop flash memory 10,000× faster than current tech⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Note that this in theory speaks to performance of a non volatile memory. It does not speak to cost.

  We already have a faster than NAND non volatile storage in phase change memory . It failed due to expense.

  If this thing is significantly more expensive even than RAM, then it may fail even if it is everything it says it is. If it is at least as cheap as ram, it’ll be huge since it is faster than RAM and non volatile.

  Swap is indicated by cost, not by non volatile characteristics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is real⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Seems to also be very brazen contempt of the supreme court.

  it undermines their already blatant lie about “facilitating” his return.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is real⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ivanna, not Ivanka.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Heh, recently I was looking up things about terminal graphics and came upon: github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/8389

  And DHowett’s reply was pretty dismissive. Guess that was the tip of the iceberg.

  But this anecdote is a good ‘corp’ versus ‘open source’ anecdote. There’s simply no way a business with project management would even think about optimizing performance of a terminal emulator that seems to vaguely work according to the marketing requirements. What a waste of time, right? My experience with a software development organization is 99% of management work is to rationalize away doing anything.

  Meanwhile, open source someone says “screw it, this is crap, I can fix it”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla odometer uses “predictive algorithms” to void warranty, lawsuit claims⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How silly, it’s obvious that would be an odormeter. An odometer is about something else entirely. Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know, I mean I’ve seen a fair amount of IDE capability out of VSCode after some invested effort to try to get it there, but at it’s best I haven’t seen it as comprehensive as what I’ve seen in a Jetbrains IDE. That said, in my use case the IDE capabilities don’t apply very well anyway, so it’s moot for me and I’m happy with Kate with LSP.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this speaks to the potential strengths and weaknesses of open versus commercial.

  It boils down to amount of resources and how they are invested.

  In terms of amount of resources, open source has a rather organic pool of software developers. So if you have a use case that impacts every software developer in the world, well the open source has a lot of free labor that can produce impressive results that a commercial player would have a hard time out-spending. Conversely, if the use case is relatively more niche and the users are either not programmers or too busy using the software to do other things they couldn’t spend any on software, a commercial player can force the issue by paying some developers to work on it. Now the quality of that work may be reduced by the developers doing it for the pay without necessarily an inherent passion for the task at hand, but it can be pretty compelling and people can tend to get invested in their work even if they don’t care to start with. Incidentally it’s why at my company when they lucked into someone with actual passion for the work comes along I advocate strongly for retention, but those folks tend to be neglected and leave while some passionless sycophant gets the retention and promotion.

  Then there’s how that resource is invested. Here we have professional software versus the more prolific general consumer software. In the general consumer case, the commercial interest takes the user as a given, and goes straight into how to gouge that customer relationship as hard as possible without regard for a good user experience. Stuff them with ads. Implement telemetry with rights to sell it off for marketing data. Nag them at every corner to buy some other offering at increased price. Have a confusing set of tiers and actively screw with the bottom tier. Actually making the software fit for purpose is so far below those others. With software for business, well, you still get the ‘must subscribe and confusing portfolio’, but some of the other stuff tones down. The target market is smaller, and the potential for marketing data and advertising revenue isn’t as attractive. The target market is frequently companies that take their confidentiality seriously and will readily get a lawyer to pursue issues, so the telemetry is both less valuable and a bit of a grenade waiting to go off if something screws up. So OSS tends to cover the ‘general consumer’ cases surprisingly well because the commercial interests are so much more invested in making things worse, while business to business can actually have a chance still.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, I prefer KDE. It’s fairly uncluttered unless you actively mess with it and want it, whole Gnome is pretty ruthlessly “our way is the right way”.

  Once upon a time they only allowed virtual desktops to be in a column. Someone decided that columns weren’t for everyone so obviously make it only be in a row. Despite ages of most implementations supporting a grid layout.

  Window title search. This is fantastic for managing a lot of windows. I wish KDE could get better by using screen reader facilities to let you search window contents as well, but having the facility in show windows view at all is great.

  Their window tiling is less capable even than Microsoft windows.

  Any attempt to customize means extensions, and they seem to break the interfaces the extensions need constantly, and I had to face the reality that every update had me searching for a replacement extension because they broke one that want maintained anymore.

  But either way, the open desktop shells are better than the proprietary ones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s also a good example of how an open source project manages to outmaneuver big company offerings.

  Home assistant just wants to make the stuff work. Whatever the stuff is, whoever makes it, do whatever it takes to make it work so long as there are users. Also to warn users when someone is difficult to support due to cloud lock in.

  All the proprietary stuff wants to force people to pay subscription and pay for their product or products that licensed the right to play with the ecosystem. So they needlessly make stuff cloud based, because that’s the way to take away user control. They won’t work with the device you want because that vendor didn’t pay up to work with that.

  Commercial solutions may have more resources to work with and that may be critical for some software, but they divert more of those resources toward self enrichment at the expense of the user.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And by extension, terminal emulators. Pretty much any open source one is miles better than the closed source ones.

  Microsoft recognized this and has dramatically improved theirs as Microsoft terminal, an open source replacement. But it still isn’t as good as a lot of other terminals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI isn’t ready to replace human coders for debugging, researchers say⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I had been planning to, but being lazy about trying to enable my IDE setup but was giving it the benefit of the doubt. Your feedback resonates with how much I end up fighting auto-complete/auto-correct in normal language and seeing it potentially ruin current code completion (which sometimes I have to fight, but on balance it helps more than it annoys). I suppose I’ll still give it a shot, but with even more skepticism. I suppose maybe it can at least provide an OK draft of API documentation… Maybe sometimes…

  On the ‘vibe coding’, on the cases I’ve seen detailed, it seems they do something that, to them, is a magical outcome from technologies that intimidated them. However, it’s generally pretty entry level stuff for those familiar with the tools of the trade, things you can find already done dozens of time on github almost verbatim, with very light bespoke customization. Of course there is a market for this, think of all the ‘no code’/‘low code’ things striving to make approachable very basic apps that just end up worse than learning to code. As a project manager struggles to make a dashboard out of that sort of sensibility, a dashboard that really has no business being custom but tooling has fostered the concept that everyone has a snowflake dashboard, it’s a pain. But maybe AI can help them generate their dashboard. Of course, to be a human subjected to the workflows those PMs dream up is a nightmare. Bad enough already at my work there are hundreds of custom issue fields, a dozen issue types, and 50 issue states with maddening project to project unique workflows to connect the meaning of all this, don’t like AI emboldening people to customize further.

  The thing about ‘vibe coding’ is when they get stuck and they get confused/frustrated about why the LLM stopped getting them what they want. One story was someone vibe coding up a racing game. He likely marveled as his vision materialized. From typing prose without understanding how to code he got some sort of 3D game with cars and tracks and controls. This struck him as incredibly difficult otherwise, but reachable through ‘vibe coding’. Then he wanted to add tire marks when the player did something, maybe on a hard turn) and it utterly couldn’t do it. After all the super hard stuff, why could the LLM not do this conceptually much simpler thing? Ultimately spitting out that the person needed to develop the logic himself (claiming it was refraining to do it because it would be better for him to learn, but I’m wagering that’s the generated text after repeated attempts to generate code that the LLM just could not do).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Python Performance: Why 'if not list' is 2x Faster Than Using len()⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  else: # not my list, it is ourlist

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Python Performance: Why 'if not list' is 2x Faster Than Using len()⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In context, one can consider it a bool.

  Besides, I see c code all the time that treats pointers as bool for the purposes of an if statement. !pointer is very common and no one thinks that means pointer it’s exclusively a Boolean concept.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI isn’t ready to replace human coders for debugging, researchers say⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I occasionally check what various code generators will do if I don’t immediately know the answer is almost always wrong, but recently it might have been correct, but surprisingly convoluted. It had it broken down into about 6 functions iterating through many steps to walk it through various intermediate forms. It seemed odd to me that such a likely operation was quite so involved, so I did a quick Internet search, ignored the AI generated result and saw the core language built-in designed to handle my use case directly. There was one detail that was not clear in the documentation, so I went back to the LLM to ask that question and it gave the exact wrong answer.

  I am willing to buy that with IDE integration or can probably have much richer function completion for small easy stuff I know to do and save some time, but I just haven’t gotten used to the idea of asking for help on things I already know how to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI isn’t ready to replace human coders for debugging, researchers say⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s been one of the things that has really stumped a team that wanted to go all in on some AI offering. They go to customer evaluations and really there’s just nothing they can do about the problems reported. They can try to train and hope for the best, but that likely won’t work and could also make other things worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That was the job of reader’s digest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In practice, I don’t see how I would even know someone is a pedophile if they didn’t act on their inclinations. I guess they could publicly declare it but that seems unwise.

  I would be concerned if the Internet vigilantes ran with unsubstantiated rumors, like if say Elon musk just called someone a pedophile or of the blue.