Technus
@Technus@lemmy.zip
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 1 week ago:
I’m not saying there’s no people trying it, or that the actual number is negligible. I’m just saying I highly fucking doubt that 780,000 people have actually installed Zorin OS in the last month.
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 1 week ago:
That “780,000 Windows users” number is just made up for the title as clickbait.
That number is never mentioned in the original blog post.
All they said is they have a million downloads and “over 78% of these downloads came from Windows”. At no fucking point did they imply that means 780k unique users. There’s no reason to assume that everyone who downloaded the ISO actually went on to install it.
They also want $48 for their Pro version which comes with a “professional-grade creative suite” consisting of… GIMP, Blender, Inkscape, Kdenlive, and… Audacity (?), going off the screenshots they show:
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They’re shamelessly reselling free software as some sort of comprehensive package, and it’s not even their own distro. They’re just piggybacking on Ubuntu.
And their premium support only covers… installation?
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But hey, they support this edition with updates until 2029!
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Of course, pay no attention to the coincidence that the Ubuntu LTS version it’s based on also hits end-of-life around then:
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So I’m not really sure what you’re actually getting out of this purchase besides some extra themes and some really formulaic desktop wallpapers, and a couple proprietary apps. They say they “contribute to upstream Open Source projects” but offer zero evidence; their site doesn’t even have any Github/Gitlab links.
- Comment on I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels 2 weeks ago:
I know, after I posted that I was looking at their outages and worrying that my 1/month estimate was an exaggeration cause they hadn’t had a big one in a bit.
- Comment on I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels 2 weeks ago:
I wasn’t the original person that replied.
- Comment on I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels 3 weeks ago:
Could start with the fact that they go down about once a month now and take half the Internet with them.
- Comment on No More Robot’s new cruise ship management sim is hella bleak, despite the input of former Overcooked devs 1 month ago:
All that flowery bullshit, and I still have no idea if the game is any good or not. Sure, it didn’t sound fun, but lots of good games sound really boring if you describe them the wrong way.
Games journalism at its best, clearly.
- Comment on As Microsoft lays off thousands and jacks up Game Pass prices, former FTC chair says I told you so: The Activision-Blizzard buyout is 'harming both gamers and developers' 2 months ago:
I’ve been incensed about this since I first heard about the merger over two years ago. The fact that both the US and EU rubber-stamped the deal is easily one of the biggest regulatory failings of the tech sector in the past ten years.
I still can’t believe that the only stipulation was that CoD had to remain available on Playstation.
- Comment on What's the real danger of opening ports? 2 months ago:
If someone’s self-hosting, I’d be willing to bet they don’t have the same hardened config or isolation that a cloud provider would.
- Comment on What's the real danger of opening ports? 2 months ago:
No. Docker containers aren’t a full sandbox. There’s a number of exploits that can break out of a container and gain root access to the host.
- Comment on Could we survive eating only humans? 2 months ago:
Prions and population collapse aside, your cannibal population would eventually succumb to simple nutrient deficiency as the human body can’t synthesize a number of essential vitamins and amino and fatty acids. Without any outside food sources, those nutrients would eventually be completely exhausted.
So if you’re going to start eating people, only eat people who have been a fed a diverse, nutrient-rich diet.
- Comment on Reports: EA set to be sold to private investors for up to $50 billion 2 months ago:
Every time private equity buys out a public company, they saddle it with debt, gut its intellectual properties, turn its products and services to shit then close up shop for good.
Given that EA has already managed 3/4 of those things on its own, I wonder how much this will actually change.
- Comment on OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws 2 months ago:
Beyond proving hallucinations were inevitable, the OpenAI research revealed that industry evaluation methods actively encouraged the problem. Analysis of popular benchmarks, including GPQA, MMLU-Pro, and SWE-bench, found nine out of 10 major evaluations used binary grading that penalized “I don’t know” responses while rewarding incorrect but confident answers.
“We argue that language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty,” the researchers wrote.
I just wanna say I called this out nearly a year ago: lemmy.zip/comment/13916070
- Comment on Vibe coding has turned senior devs into ‘AI babysitters,’ but they say it’s worth it | TechCrunch 2 months ago:
I’m a senior dev and I want nothing to do with AI. By the time I understand what I want well enough to describe it in a complete sentence or paragraph, I can just write the fucking code myself. I figure it out as I go.
The whole point of having devs under you that is to be able to trust them to get the job done and do it right. You want to be able to delegate tasks to them and not have to peek over their shoulder every five fucking minutes to be certain they’re not making a mess of things.
I seriously doubt AI will ever be able to replace that. Not until they figure out how to make it afraid of fucking up.
- Comment on No weirdo's please 3 months ago:
What’s the number, OP
- Comment on 3 months ago:
Futurama s2e5: I Second that Emotion
- Comment on 3 months ago:
“Yeah, right. You’d have to be some kinda genius to count that high.”
“… He’s seven.”
- Comment on 3 months ago:
It’s an old meme, sir, but it checks out.
- Comment on Y tho 3 months ago:
We used to make these all the time as kids. You need a second pair of magnets in push configuration on the back for this to work.
- Comment on On Black Holes... 3 months ago:
I would 100% volunteer to be the first person to cross the event horizon of a spinning supermassive black hole, just to see what’s on the other side.
Like yeah it’s guaranteed to be a one-way trip and probably a horrible death, but there’s also the possibility that it’s actually a gateway to alternate universes, and that’s something I’d give anything to see with my own eyes.
- Comment on SlaveDriver Engine for the Sega Saturn classic shooter PowerSlave gets open sourced 3 months ago:
I played Powerslave: Exhumed but it wasn’t quite the same game I remembered playing. I think it’s more of a “reimagined” version than a remastered one.
I’m hopeful that this means the game could be ported to modern platforms so it doesn’t have to be run in DOSbox.
- Comment on Why it’s a mistake to ask chatbots about their mistakes 3 months ago:
I like how you’ve deliberately ignored the specifically chosen wording of my statement, and completely disregarded the rest of my point, simply because you perceive it as counter-factual in your world-view, thus exhibiting the exact kind of behavior you were talking about. That’s really funny.
- Comment on Political map of the Americas 2025 3 months ago:
Maybe swap California and Canada, US and Florida.
- Comment on Why it’s a mistake to ask chatbots about their mistakes 3 months ago:
A neurotypical human mind, acting rationally, is able to remember the chain of thought that lead to a decision, understand why they reached that decision, find the mistake in their reasoning, and start over from that point to reach the “correct” decision.
Even if they don’t remember everything they were thinking about, they can reason based on their knowledge of themselves and try to reconstruct their mental state at the time.
This is the behavior people are expecting from LLMs but not understanding that it’s something they’re fundamentally incapable of.
One major difference (among many others, obviously) is that AI models as currently implemented don’t have any kind of persistent working memory. All they have for context is the last N tokens they’ve generated, the last N tokens of user input, and any external queries they’ve made. All the intermediate calculations (the “reasoning”) that led to them generating that output is lost.
Any instance of an AI appearing to “correct” their mistake is just the model emitting what it thinks a correction would be, given the current context window.
Humans also learn from their mistakes and generally make efforts to avoid them in the future, which doesn’t happen for LLMs until that data gets incorporated into the training for the next version of the model, which can take months to years. That’s why AI companies are trying to capture and store everything from user interactions, which is a privacy nightmare.
It’s not a compelling argument to compare AI behavior to that of a dysfunctional human brain and go “see, humans do this too, teehee!” Not when the whole selling point of these things is that they supposed to be smarter and less fallible than most humans.
I’m deliberately trying not to be ableist in my wording here, but it’s like saying, “hey, you know what would do wonders for productivity and shareholder value? If we fired half our workforce, then found someone with no experience, short-term memory loss, ADHD and severe untreated schizophrenia, then put them in charge of writing mission-critical code, drafting laws, and making life-changing medical and business decisions.”
I’m not saying LLMs aren’t technically fascinating and a breakthrough in AI development, but the way they have largely been marketed and applied is scammy, misleading, and just plain irresponsible.
- Comment on Wikipedia loses challenge against UK Online Safety Act rules 3 months ago:
Even as an American with everything going on here, this bullshit makes me feel bad for the Brits. How fucked up is that?
- Comment on GitHub folds into Microsoft following CEO resignation — once independent programming site now part of 'CoreAI' team 3 months ago:
All aboard the enshittification train! Choo choo!
I mean, it’s been well underway for a while now but this is certainly a transfer over to an express train.
- Comment on LLMs’ “simulated reasoning” abilities are a “brittle mirage,” researchers find 3 months ago:
I get scoffed at every time I call LLMs “glorified auto-correct” so it’s nice being validated.
Anyone who actually has a grasp of how Large Language Models work should not be surprised by this, but too many people, even engineers who should really know better, have drunk the Kool-aid.
- Comment on Battlefield 6's beta been treating you to infinite loading screens? EA are on the case 3 months ago:
A triumphant return to the series’ roots with the exact same game-breaking bugs as Battlefield 3 had. Nice job, EA.
- Comment on AMD CPU Transient Scheduler Attacks security flaw revealed 4 months ago:
No information on the 9000 series, why? Kinda sus.
- Comment on The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting 5 months ago:
Kinder, the Brookings fellow, said she worries that companies soon will simply eliminate the entire bottom rung of the career ladder.
What the fuck do they think is gonna happen when the current seniors start to retire? Are they just betting that AI is gonna be good enough to replace all of them then?
Cue all these companies in 5-20 years’ time having to completely rewrite their software stacks because they have no fucking clue how any of it works anymore.
- Comment on You can do it. It's an easy one 5 months ago:
i 8 sum apple pi
