tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on I made a way to remotely control my homelab without any internet access required 6 hours ago:
So an internet
The highest data rate it looks like is supported by LoRa in North America is 21900 bits per second, so you’re talking about 21kbps, or 2.6kBps. That’s about half of what an analog telephone system modem could achieve.
It’s going to be pretty bandwidth-constrained limited in terms of routing traffic around.
I think that the idea of a “public access Internet over the air” isn’t totally crazy, but that it’d probably need to use something like laser links and hardware that can identify and auto-align to other links.
- Comment on I made a way to remotely control my homelab without any internet access required 7 hours ago:
These guys appear to have a global visualization of the Meshtastic network nodes that they can see.
- Comment on Package managers keep using git as a database, it never works out 8 hours ago:
GitHub explicitly asked Homebrew to stop using shallow clones. Updating them was “an extremely expensive operation” due to the tree layout and traffic of homebrew-core and homebrew-cask.
I’m not going through the PR to understand what’s breaking, since it’s not immediately apparent from a quick skim. But three possible problems.
The problem is the cost of the shallow clone
Assuming that the workload here is always
–depth=1and they aren’t doing commits at a high rate relative to clones, and that’s an expensive operation for git, I feel like for GitHub, a better solution would be some patch to git that allows it to cache a shallow clone for depth=1 for a given hashref.The problem is the cost of unshallowing the shallow clone
If the actual problem isn’t the shallow clone, that a regular clone would be fine, but that unshallowing is a problem, then a patch to git that allows more-efficient unshallowing should be a better solution. I mean, I’d think that unshallowing should only need a time-ordered index of commits referenced blobs up to a given point. That shouldn’t be that expensive for git to maintain an index of, if it doesn’t already have it.
The problem is that Homebrew has users repeatedly unshallowing a clone off GitHub and then blowing it away and repeating
If the problem is that people keep repeatedly doing a clone off GitHub — that is, a regular, non-shallow clone would also be problematic — I’d think that a better solution would be to have Homebrew do a local bare clone as a cache, and then just do a pull on that cache and then use it as a reference to create the new clone. If Homebrew uses the thing as read-only, then they could use
–referencealone. If it’s not read-only, then add–dissociate. I’d think that that’d lead to better performance anyway. - Comment on Is H9me Assistant recommended? 9 hours ago:
I don’t run a home automation system, but if you want an open solution and are willing to do some configuration, my understanding is that the main contenders are OpenHAB and Home Assistant.
I’d also suggest !homeautomation@lemmy.world as a more-specialized resource than !selfhosted@lemmy.world, though I imagine that there’s overlap.
- Comment on Waymo raises massive $16 billion round at $126 billion valuation, plans expansion to 20+ cities 1 day ago:
Tokyo and London are confirmed as the company’s first international markets
Apparently their software is capable of driving on the left.
- Comment on Intel announced plans to start making GPUs, challenging NVIDIA's dominance 2 days ago:
I donlt know if “GPUs” is the right term, but the only area where we’re seeing large gains in computational capacity now is in parallel compute, so I’d imagine that if Intel intends to be doing high performance computation stuff, they probably want to be doing parallel compute too.
- Comment on The upgrade argument for desktops doesn't stand up anymore 4 days ago:
I’d say that now is one of the strongest arguments for upgradability. Memory is really expensive right now. At some point in something like 1-3 years, it will probably be considerably cheaper. If anything, CPUs and motherboards are expected to be cheaper during this period due to reduced demand for new PCs. If you can tolerate less memory now and want to save money, upgrading then would be a good idea.
- Comment on My thousand dollar iPhone can't do math 4 days ago:
Might be helpful to have a reproducible test case for it.
- Comment on Children taught to use battlefield drones at Russian school in London 4 days ago:
The Russian Embassy School in Notting Hill educates the children of diplomats and spies, as well as a small number of children whose parents are not Russian officials, including those who hold British citizenship.
Other classes taught last term included one on fortifications engineering; two on first aid on the battlefield; and another on how to protect oneself against radiological, biological and chemical weapons.
It also stipulates that children at the school be given instruction in how to fire a weapon accurately, how to build trenches and how to march in formation, as well as provided with practical information as to the differences between conscripted and contracted military service.
I would be a little grouchy about my benefits package if I were a Russian spy and one of my state-provided perks was an education for my kids and it wound up being aimed at peacetime instruction in general infantry skills.
- Comment on GTA: San Andreas's Original PC Version Can Now Be Beaten in Just an Hour Thanks to the Weirdest Skip You've Ever Seen 5 days ago:
YouTube video of someone dong a speedrun using the exploit from the Reddit article linked by the IGN article.
- Comment on Nvidia CEO pushes back against report that his company's $100B OpenAI investment has stalled 6 days ago:
Hey, now, don’t knock it. Tech CEOs — particularly Steve Jobs — choosing to break with fashion trends were an important part of what made it socially acceptable to stop with the suit and tie stuff for everyone.
- Comment on Can workers compete with machines and stay relevant in the AI era? 6 days ago:
Whether you are a “doomer” or a “boomer”
…what?
- Comment on One-Third of U.S. Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off Over the Last Two Years 1 week ago:
The console market is also cyclical. Like, when a new console is released, that’s a huge impact that doesn’t really have an analog in the PC video gaming world.
It looks like both the Xbox Series X and S and the PS5 came out in North America right around the beginning of that surge:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_5
November 12, 2020
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Series_X_and_Series_S
November 10, 2020
- Comment on Microsoft lost $357 billion in market cap as stock plunged most since 2020 1 week ago:
Ehhh…that’s their market capitalization, not their cash in hand.
That’s just what the company is worth, taking into account what investors are currently willing to pay for ownership of shares in the company.
- Comment on One-Third of U.S. Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off Over the Last Two Years 1 week ago:
I was about to say that I knew that COVID-19 caused video game sales to surge, and then crash, and there was over-hiring that had happened in response to those sales, but a third seems like an insanely high number.
Looking at WP, it sounds like the surge was actually that high…but for mobile OS games, not PC, where the surge was much more muted. I also hadn’t realized that mobile OS video game game spending had become that much larger than PC spending.
en.wikipedia.org/…/2022–2025_video_game_industry_…
The first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a sharp increase in revenue for the gaming sector worldwide as people looked for indoor entertainment.[56] According to IDC, in 2020, revenue from mobile games climbed by 32.8% to $99.9 billion, while expenditure on digital PC and Mac games increased by 7.4% to $35.6 billion.[57] The amount spent on home console games increased significantly as well, reaching $42.9 billion, up 33.9%.[58][59]
In the ensuing years, this growing pattern abruptly stopped.[60] Revenue growth from mobile gaming fell by 15% in 2021, and then fell even further in 2022 and 2023, to -3.3% and -3.1%, respectively. Sales of PC and Mac games saw a brief rise of 8.7% in 2021, a drop of 1.4% in 2022, and a rebound of 2.1% in 2023.[61] Similarly, after a surge in 2020, console game spending plateaued in 2021 with growth at 0.7%, followed by a decline of 3.4% in 2022, before returning to growth at 5.9% in 2023.[59][62]
- Comment on Elon Musk says Tesla ending Models S and X production, converting Fremont factory lines to make Optimus robots 1 week ago:
I am personally rather skeptical about the commercial viability of humanoid robots in 2026, but I suppose that we shall see.
- Comment on Trump’s acting cyber chief uploaded sensitive files into a public version of ChatGPT 1 week ago:
If the United States government wants to use ChatGPT on sensitive information, I’m pretty sure that it can come to some kind of contract with OpenAI to set up their own private cloud thing dedicated to that.
I get that maybe this guy just wanted some kind of one-off use, but then arrange to have something set up for that.
- Comment on Number of US-style pickup trucks on UK roads up 92% in a decade, data shows 1 week ago:
Anything they purport to do a van can do better.
There’s towing a fifth wheel trailer. Not sure if they’re a thing in the UK.
searches
Sounds like it:
CCRV: The Best Name in UK 5th Wheels
Whatever your fifth wheel need, we’ve got you covered
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravan_(trailer)#Fifth-whe…
A fifth-wheel is a travel trailer supported by a hitch in the centre of the bed of a pickup truck instead of a hitch at the back of a vehicle. The special hitch used for fifth-wheels is a smaller version of the one used on 18-wheeler trucks and can be connected by simply driving (backing) the tow vehicle under the trailer. Fifth-wheel trailers are popular with full-time recreational vehicle enthusiasts, who often live in them for several months in one place, using their pickup truck tow vehicle for local errands. A fifth-wheel trailer tows more securely than a traditional travel trailer because the hitch weight sits directly over the pickup truck’s rear axle or tires. Since part of a fifth wheel sits in the bed of the pickup, it reduces the overall length of the vehicle-and-trailer combination while allowing the same room as a comparable-length travel trailer. Additionally, the hitch’s location in the pickup’s bed reduces the risk of jackknifing and allows for more maneuverability when backing. Because of the greater room available on the roads in North America, these vehicles are more popular in the United States and Canada than in Europe or other parts of the world. For uneven terrain, a gooseneck hitch is an option for fifth-wheel trailers.[citation needed]
The downside is that the hitch takes up room in the pickup truck’s cargo bed regardless of whether the trailer is hitched or not. The hitch can be unbolted from the bed but this takes a lot more time and effort than the unhitch operation.[citation needed]
The largest fifth-wheel trailers are full-size semi-trailers that range from 14.5 to 17.5 m (48 to 57 ft) in length and require an tractor unit as the towing vehicle due to their weight and the use of air brakes.[citation needed]
- Comment on Meta’s Reality Labs cuts sparked fears of a ‘VR winter’ 1 week ago:
I just am not sold that there’s enough of a market, not with the current games and current prices.
There are several different types of HMDs out there. I haven’t seen anyone really break them up into classes, but if I were to take a stab at it:
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VR gaming googles. These focus on providing an expansive image that fills the peripheral vision, and cut one off from the world. The Valve Index would be an example.
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AR goggles. I personally don’t like the term. It’s not that augmented reality isn’t a real thing, but that we don’t really have the software out there to do AR things, and so while theoretically these could be used for augmented reality, that’s not their actual, 2026 use case. But, since the industry uses it, I will. These tend to display an image covering part of one’s visual field which one can see around and maybe through. Xreal’s offerings are an example.
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HUD glasses. These have a much more limited display, or maybe none at all. These are aimed at letting one record what one is looking at less-obtrusively, maybe throw up notifications from a phone silently, things like the Ray-Ban Meta.
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Movie-viewers. These things are designed around isolation, but don’t need head-tracking. They may be fine with relatively-low resolution or sharpness. A Royole Moon, for example.
For me, the most-exciting prospect for HMDs is the idea of a monitor replacement. That is, I’d be most-interested in something that does basically what my existing displays do, but in a lower-power, more-portable, more-private form. If it can also do VR, that’d be frosting on the cake, but
For me, at least, none of the use cases for the above classes of HMDs are super-compelling.
For movie-viewing. It just isn’t that often that I feel that I need more isolation than I can already get to watch movies. A computer monitor in a dark room is just fine. I can also put things on a TV screen or a projector that I already have sitting around and I generally don’t bother to turn on. If I want to block out outside sound more, I might put on headphones, but I just don’t need more than that. Maybe for someone who is required to be in noisy, bright environments or something, but it just isn’t a real need for me.
For HUD glasses, I don’t really have a need for more notifications in my field of vision — I don’t need to give my phone a HUD.
AR could be interesting if the augmented reality software library actually existed, but in 2026, it really doesn’t. Today, AR glasses are mostly used, as best I can tell, as an attempt at a monitor replacement, but the angular pixel density on them is poor compared to conventional displays. Like, in terms of the actual data that I can shove into my eyeballs in the center my my visual field, which is what matters for things like text, I’m better off with conventional monitors in 2026.
VR gaming could be interesting, but the benefits just aren’t that massive for the games that I play. You get a wider field of view than a traditional display offers, the ability to use your head as an input for camera control. There are some genres that I think that it works well with today, like flight sims. If you were a really serious flight-simmer, I could see it making sense. But most genres just don’t benefit that much from it. Yeah, okay, you can play Tetris Effect: Connected in VR, but it doesn’t really change the game all that much.
A lot of the VR-enabled titles out there are (understandably, given the size of the market) really principally aimed at taking advantage of the goggles. You’re basically getting a port of a game aimed at probably a keyboard and mouse, with some tradeoffs.
And for VR, one has to deal with more setup time, software and hardware issues, and the cost. I’m not terribly price sensitive on gaming compared to most, but if I’m getting a peripheral for, oh, say, $1k, I have to ask how seriously I’m going to play any of the games that I’m buying this hardware for. I have a HOTAS system; it mostly just gathers dust, because I don’t play many WW2 flight sims these days, and the flight sims out there are mostly designed around thumbsticks. And the hardware ages out pretty quickly. I can buy a conventional monitor today and it’ll still be more-or-less competitive for most uses probably ten or twenty years down the line. VR goggles? Not so much.
At least for me, the main things that I think that I’d actually get some good out of VR goggles on:
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Vertical-orientation games. My current monitors are landscape aspect ratio, and don’t support rotating. Some games in the past in arcades had something like a 3:4 portrait mode aspect ratio. If you’re playing one of those, you could maybe get some extra vertical space. But unless I need the resolution or portability, I can likely achieve something like that by just moving my monitor closer while playing such a game.
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Pinball sims, for the same reason.
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There are a couple of VR-only games that I’d probably like to play (none very new).
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Flight sims. I’m not really a super-hardcore flight simmer. But, sure, for WW2 flight sims or something like Elite: Dangerous, it’s probably nice.
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I’d get a little more immersiveness out of some games that are VR-optional.
But…that’s just not that overwhelming a set of benefits to me.
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- Comment on How do I avoid becoming one with the botnet? 1 week ago:
Have a limited attack surface will reduce exposure.
If, say, the only thing that you’re exposing is, oh, say, a Wireguard VPN, then unless there’s a misconfiguration or remotely-exploitable bug in Wireguard, then you’re fine regarding random people running exploit scanners.
I’m not too worried about stuff like (vanilla) Apache, OpenSSH, Wireguard, stuff like that, the “big” stuff that have a lot of eyes on them. I’d be a lot more dubious about niche stuff that some guy just threw together.
To put perspective on this, you gotta remember that most software that people run isn’t run in a sandbox. It can phone home. Games on Steam. If your Web browser has bugs, it’s got a lot of sites that might attack it. Plugins for that Web browser. Some guy’s open-source project. That’s a potential vector too. Sure, some random script kiddy running an exploit scanner is a potential risk, but my bet is that if you look at the actual number of compromises via that route, it’s probably rather lower than plain old malware.
It’s good to be aware of what you’re doing when you expose the Internet to something, but also to keep perspective. A lot of people out there run services exposed to the Internet every day; they need to do so to make things work.
- Comment on Meta’s Reality Labs cuts sparked fears of a ‘VR winter’ 1 week ago:
I was commenting a year or so back on the decline of the titles-released-per-year of VR titles on Steam.
steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=21978
That’s been going on for some time, not looking really healthy.
- Comment on r/Silksong joins lemmy! 1 week ago:
Plus, I mean, unless you’re using a Threadiverse host as your home instance, how often are you typing its name?
Having a hyphen is RFC-conformant:
1. A "name" (Net, Host, Gateway, or Domain name) is a text string up to 24 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z), digits (0-9), minus sign (-), and period (.). Note that periods are only allowed when they serve to delimit components of "domain style names". (See RFC-921, "Domain Name System Implementation Schedule", for background). No blank or space characters are permitted as part of a name. No distinction is made between upper and lower case. The first character must be an alpha character. The last character must not be a minus sign or period. A host which serves as a GATEWAY should have "-GATEWAY" or "-GW" as part of its name. Hosts which do not serve as Internet gateways should not use "-GATEWAY" and "-GW" as part of their names. A host which is a TAC should have "-TAC" as the last part of its host name, if it is a DoD host. Single character names or nicknames are not allowed.
The syntax of a legal Internet host name was specified in RFC-952 [DNS:4]. One aspect of host name syntax is hereby changed: the restriction on the first character is relaxed to allow either a letter or a digit. Host software MUST support this more liberal syntax. Host software MUST handle host names of up to 63 characters and SHOULD handle host names of up to 255 characters.
- Comment on r/Silksong joins lemmy! 1 week ago:
I imagine so. I don’t use Bang, but I posted about the behavior to the Bang community, so hopefully they’ll get it straightened out.
- Comment on AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns 2 weeks ago:
Unless you have some really serious hardware, 24 billion parameters is probably the maximum that would be practical for self-hosting on a reasonable hobbyist set-up.
Eh…I don’t know if you’d call it “really serious hardware”, but when I picked up my 128GB Framework Desktop, it was $2k (without storage), and that box is often described as being aimed at the hobbyist AI market. That’s pricier more than most video cards, but an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU was north of $1k, an NVidia RTX 4090 was about $2k, and it looks like the NVidia RTX 5090 is presently something over $3k (and rising) on EBay, well over MSRP. None of those GPUs are dedicated hardware aimed at doing AI compute, just high-end cards aimed at playing games that people have used to do AI stuff on.
I think that the largest LLM I’ve run on it was a 106 billion parameter GLM model at Q4_K_M quantitization on my Framework Desktop. It was certainly usable, and I wasn’t trying to squeeze as large a model as possible on the thing. I’m sure that one could run substantially-larger models.
- Comment on AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns 2 weeks ago:
That’s why they have the “Copilot PC” hardware requirement, because they’re using an NPU on the local machine.
searches
learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/…/npu-devices/
Copilot+ PCs are a new class of Windows 11 hardware powered by a high-performance Neural Processing Unit (NPU) — a specialized computer chip for AI-intensive processes like real-time translations and image generation—that can perform more than 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
It’s not…terribly beefy. Like, I have a Framework Desktop with an APU and 128GB of memory that schlorps down 120W or something, kind of out of what you’re going to do on a laptop. And that in turn is weaker computationally than something like the big Nvidia hardware going into datacenters.
But it is doing local computation.
- Comment on AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns 2 weeks ago:
I’m kind of more-sympathetic to Microsoft than to some of the other companies involved.
Microsoft is trying to leverage the Windows platform that they control to do local LLM use. I’m not at all sure that there’s actually enough memory out there to do that, or that it’s cost-effective to put a ton of memory and compute capacity in everyone’s home rather than time-sharing hardware in datacenters. Nor am I sold that laptops are a fantastic place to be doing a lot of heavyweight parallel compute.
But…from a privacy standpoint, I kind of would like local LLMs to be at least available, even if they aren’t as affordable as cloud-based stuff. And at least Microsoft is at least supporting that route. A lot of companies are going to be oriented towards just doing AI stuff in the cloud.
- Comment on DRAM shortage fuels fake GPU scams as China-based fraudsters exploit the supply crisis — RTX 4080 GPU sold at cut price was actually an RTX 3060 mobile chip with fake VRAM 2 weeks ago:
You only need one piece of (timeless) advice regarding what to look for, really: if it looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Caveat emptor.
I mean…normally, yes, but because the situation has been changing so radically in such a short period of time, it probably is possible to get some bonkers deals in various niches, because the market hasn’t stabilized yet.
Like, a month and a half back, in early December, when prices had only been going up like crazy for a little while, I was posting some tiny retailers that still had RAM in stock at pre-price-increase rates that I could find on Google Shopping. IIRC the University of Virginia bookstore was one, as they didn’t check that purchasers were actually students. I warned that they’d probably be cleaned out as soon as scalpers got to them, and that if someone wanted memory, they should probably get it ASAP.
That’s not to disagree with the point that @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world is making, that this was awfully sketchy as a source, or your point that scavenging components off even a non-scam piece of secondhand non-functional hardware is risky. But in times of rapid change, it’s not impossible to find deals. In fact, it’s various parties doing so that cause prices to stabilize — anyone selling memory for way below market price is going to have scalpers grab it.
- Comment on Micron to boost DRAM output with $1.8bn chip fab buy 2 weeks ago:
I’m not really a hardware person, but purely in terms of logic gates, making a memory circuit isn’t going to be hard. I mean, a lot of chips contain internal memory. I’m sure that anyone that can fabricate a chip can fabricate someone’s memory design that contains some amount of memory.
But I’m assuming that it’s not trivial to go out and make something competitive with what the PC memory manufacturers are making in price, density, and speed.
- Comment on Micron to boost DRAM output with $1.8bn chip fab buy 2 weeks ago:
One more thought — I don’t think that, even if someone is willing to do so as a stopgap until memory production ramps up adequately, that it’s possible to run Windows 11 on a DDR3-based system. DDR4 came out 12 years ago.
- Comment on Micron to boost DRAM output with $1.8bn chip fab buy 2 weeks ago:
To copy my comment on the beehaw.org post, because they and lemmy.world aren’t federated:
This deal may make matters worse for more buyers, because PSMC used the Tongluo site to make legacy DRAM products – the kind of memory used in less advanced products. With the company now exiting the legacy chip biz, that memory will also become more scarce, giving the laws of supply and demand another moment in which to work their way on markets.
dqindia.com/…/microns-acquisition-of-psmcs-tonglu…
PSMC’s current DRAM capacity mainly relies on 25nm and 38nm nodes, which restricts DDR4 production to lower-density products.
I guess that that’s more DDR4 supply drying up. It’s going to be some very scarce years for memory until enough new production comes online.