tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Common printing questions 1 day ago:
Make a wiki, point people at the wiki, I suppose.
One thing I did like about Reddit was the wiki feature.
- Comment on Splitting Docker between SSD and HDD 5 days ago:
If there’s a better way to configure Docker, I’m open to it, as long as it doesn’t require rebuilding everything from scratch.
You could try using lvmcache (block device level) or bcachefs (filesystem level caching) or something like that, have rotational storage be the primary form of storage but let the system use SSD as a cache. Dunno what kind of performance improvements you might expect, though.
- Comment on The Mac vs. PC war is back on? 5 weeks ago:
I haven’t used either, but there’s apparently an open-source software package named Darktable that’s similar.
- Comment on Slack has been scanning your messages to train its AI models 5 weeks ago:
It will have the potency of a god, and the knowledge of 4Chan.
- Comment on After 7-Year Hiatus, Western Digital Unveils 6TB 2.5-Inch Hard Drives 5 weeks ago:
Why would the USB electronics be particularly likely to fail relative to other electronics on the drive?
- Comment on DeviantArt’s Downfall Is Devastating, Depressing, and Dumb 5 weeks ago:
On the other hand, there are things that a human artist is utterly awful at, that LLM-based generative AIs are amazing at. I mentioned that LLMs are great at producing works in a given style, can switch up virtually effortlessly. I’m gonna do a couple Spiderman renditions in different styles, takes about ten seconds a pop on my system:
Spiderman as done by Neal Adams:
Spiderman as done by Alex Toth:
Spiderman in a noir style done by Darwyn Cooke:
Spiderman as done by Roy Lichtenstein:
That’s something that’s really hard for a human to do, given how a human works, because for a human, the style is a function of the workflow and a whole collection of techniques used to arrive at the final image. Stable Diffusion doesn’t care about techniques, how the image got the way it is – it only looks at the output. So for Stable Diffusion, creating an image in a variety of styles is easy as pie, whereas for a single human artist, it’d be very difficult.
- Comment on DeviantArt’s Downfall Is Devastating, Depressing, and Dumb 5 weeks ago:
I think creating a lora for your character would help in that case.
A LORA is good for replicating a style, where there’s existing stuff, helps add training data for a particular subject. There are problems that existing generative AIs smack into that that’s good at fixing. But it’s not a cure-all for all limitations of such systems. The problems there is kinda fundamental to how the system works today – it’s not a lack of training data, but simply how the system deals with the world.
The problem is that the LLM-based systems today think of the world as a series of largely-decoupled 2D images, linked only by keywords. A human artist thinks of the world as 3D, can visualize something – maybe using a model to help with perspective – and then render it.
So, okay. If you want to create a facial portrait of a kinda novel character, that’s something that you can do pretty well with AI-based generators.
But now try and render that character you just created from ten different angles, in unique scenes. That’s something that a human is pretty good at:
Like, try reproducing that page in Stable Diffusion, with the same views. Even if you can eventually get something even remotely approximating that, a human, traditional comic artist is going to be a lot faster at it than someone sitting in front of a Stable Diffusion box.
Is it possible to make some form of art generator that can do that? Yeah, maybe. But it’s going to have to have a much more-sophisticated “mental” model of the world, a 3D one, and have solid 3D computer vision to be able to reduce scenes to 3D. And while people are working on it, that has its own extensive set of problems. Look at your training set. The human artist slightly stylized stuff or made errors that human viewers can ignore pretty easily, but a computer vision model that doesn’t work exactly like human vision and the mind might go into conniptions over. For example, look at the fifth panel there. The artist screwed up – the ship slightly overlaps the dock, right above the “THWIP”. A human viewer probably wouldn’t notice or care. But if you have some kind of computer vision system that looks for line intersections to determine relative 3d positioning – something that we do ourselves – it can very easily look at that image and have no idea what the hell is going on there.
The proportions aren’t exactly consistent from frame to frame, don’t perfectly reflect reality, and might be more effective at conveying movement or whatever than an actual rendering of a 3d model would be. That works for human viewers. And existing 2D systems can kind of dodge the problem (as long as they’re willing to live with the limitations that intrinsically come with a 2D model) because they’re looking at a bunch of already-stylized images. But now imagine that they’re trying to take images, then reduce them into a coherent 3D world, then learn to re-apply stylization. That may involve creating not just a 3D model, but enough understanding of the objects in that world to understand what stylization is reasonable on, and when. Is it technically possible? Probably. But is it a minor effort to get there from here? No, probably not. You’re going to have to make a system that works wildly differently from the way that the existing systems do. That’s even though what you’re trying to do might seem small from the standpoint of a human observer – just being able to get arbitrary camera angles of the image being rendered.
- Comment on DeviantArt’s Downfall Is Devastating, Depressing, and Dumb 5 weeks ago:
there’s some stuff image generating AI just can’t do yet
There’s a lot.
Some of it doesn’t matter for certain things. And some of it you can work around. But try creating something like a graphic novel with Stable Diffusion, and you’re going to quickly run into difficulties. You probably want to display a consistent character from different angles – that’s pretty important. That’s not something that a fundamentally 2D-based generative AI can do well.
- Comment on Archie, the Internet’s first search engine, is rescued and running 5 weeks ago:
Jughead is apparently still around too, and the source is up on Savannah, just been renamed to “jugtail” to avoid potential copyright issues.
- Comment on Archie, the Internet’s first search engine, is rescued and running 5 weeks ago:
I’m pretty sure that there are some active gopher servers, and I assume that something is indexing them.
googles
Yeah, still there. Here’s a Web gateway if you don’t have a gopher client.
It looks like they have “Veronica-2” running.
gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?=gopher.floodgap.co…
It seems to still be indexing and returning search results for gopherspace. Here’s a search for “linux”:
- Submitted 5 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.world | 12 comments
- Submitted 5 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.world | 10 comments
- Comment on iPhone owners say the latest iOS update is resurfacing deleted nudes 5 weeks ago:
shred
doesn’t even necessarily work at the OS level. If you use something likeext3
and I assumeext4
, normally when you overwrite data in a file, you’re not overwriting data even at the logical level in the block device. Journalling entails that you commit data to somewhere else on the disk, then update the metadata atomically to reference the new data. - Comment on iPhone owners say the latest iOS update is resurfacing deleted nudes 5 weeks ago:
I don’t know what happened, but I put together a PC for the first time in some years, and holy mother of God, everything has RGB LEDs slapped on them now. I had to actively work to find parts that didn’t have RGB LEDs on them (and I still accidentally wound up with it on the motherboard). I mean, yeah, LED case fans have been a thing for a while, and there was always a contingent that put electroluminescent strips on their computers. And it kinda grew into a lot of keyboards and mice. But now it’s a large portion of CPU fans, most cases, RAM sticks have RGB LEDs, motherboards have RGB LEDs. I didn’t have trouble finding non-RGB LED NVMe storage, or non-RGB LED SATA drives, but even there, you can get them. Hell, there are RGB LED cables.
I can only assume that a large portion of the people building PCs these days are doing it to have them physically blinged up.
- Comment on iPhone owners say the latest iOS update is resurfacing deleted nudes 5 weeks ago:
Eh, that’s been a thing for a long time. Decades at least.
I think that the problem is that there isn’t really a great term to clearly refer to the “non-monitor-and-peripherals” part of the “computer”. “Case” would refer to just the case, not what’s in it. “Tower” or “desktop” is overspecific, refers to particular form factors. I have a tower, but some people have under-monitor desktops (though that’s rare today) or various times of small form factor PCs. If I say “computer”, that doesn’t really clearly exclude peripherals.
And honestly, we don’t really use the term “GPU” quite correctly either. I’ll call a whole PCI card a “GPU”, but I suppose that strictly-speaking, that should only be talking about a specific chip on the card.
- Comment on iPhone owners say the latest iOS update is resurfacing deleted nudes 5 weeks ago:
This is a complete digression but do you know if there is a consumer hardware that can be reliably erased?
behave as an affordable HSM
Like, to create a hardware keystore? No, I don’t, sorry. If I wanted one myself, I’d probably just buy an existing one and hope that they did things correctly. :-)
- Comment on iPhone owners say the latest iOS update is resurfacing deleted nudes 5 weeks ago:
Hmm. I don’t know. Like, the actual surface involved in the storage is a lot smaller than the actual phone, and I imagine that you may-or-not destroy it with a given pellet.
I remember '80s movies where a lot of people weren’t all that personally-familiar computers where someone “destroying a computer” consisted of shooting its screen, which might be not that far off what would be happening. here. In fact, I bet that that probably has a TV Tropes entry.
googles
Well, they have a guy punching it, same kind of idea.
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/…/ComputerEqualsMonitor
I will destroy this machine!
Yes! Now the other side will have to spend a whole $100 to replace it!
- Comment on iPhone owners say the latest iOS update is resurfacing deleted nudes 5 weeks ago:
I mean, I read the PDF, the problem was the viewer bogging down.
googles
This sounds like what I expected:
superuser.com/…/triming-as-alternative-to-securel…
If data security is your concern, it should be noted that neither a SECURE_ERASE nor a TRIM actually erase the flash cells. The SSD firmware keeps a list of which cells are allocated and which are not. A TRIM simply marks a cell as unallocated the same way deleting a file causes the filesystem to mark a cluster as unallocated. No attempt is made to actually erase the data. A read request from an unallocated cell simply causes the device to return 0x00 (or some other bit pattern) without actually checking the cell’s contents.
There is no effective way of securely wiping an SSD. Forensics tools that can interface with the firmware directly can see the cells’ contents. Also, there is more storage on the device than what is accessible from user-space. These extra cells are used in garbage collection. Garbage collection can reallocate cells on-the-fly and can still work even on a drive that is 100% full. A SECURE_ERASE may (probably does) TRIM those cells, but a blkdiscard or fstrim certainly wouldn’t, since they use sector numbers to identify the areas to be TRIMmed.
The only way to securely erase an SSD is to destroy it. This is the policy of most companies in health care, banking, and government when surplussing equipment.
- Comment on iPhone owners say the latest iOS update is resurfacing deleted nudes 5 weeks ago:
Ah I see the disconnect, TRIM doesn’t live in the OS outside of the firmware, TRIM is part of the controller firmware and is exposed as an ATA command for the OS to utilize
Yes, I know.
- Comment on iPhone owners say the latest iOS update is resurfacing deleted nudes 5 weeks ago:
TRIM is garbage collection and is a part of the wear leveling system. The whole point of TRIM is to have the SSD only hold the charge it needs too for still in use (i.e. not deleted) data. It’s the charge that damages blocks over time,
I’m pretty sure that that is not correct.
The limiting factor is the number of writes. The reason that TRIM enhances life by facilitating wear leveling is that it lets the firmware know that the block no longer has useful data, so it can be returned to the pool used for wear-leveling. Without that, the firmware doesn’t know whether or not it can switch the physical block used to represent a given logical location and safely overwrite the existing contents of that block.
- Comment on iPhone owners say the latest iOS update is resurfacing deleted nudes 5 weeks ago:
Which means that data is gone, permanently) for that data, there’s no residuals to worry about like with spinny’s and is in fact necessary to ensure decent lifespans.
I doubt that the firmware is doing an overwrite of TRIMmed data. Rather, I expect it’s marking it as having been TRIMmed, and so can report that it’s zeroed to higher layers. But if you can modify the firmware or otherwise bypass it, you may be able to get at the underlying media.
- Comment on OLED monitor momentum expected to continue — analysts expect 1.34 million units shipped by year end 1 month ago:
I suppose you could make software that periodically screenshots the thing, generates an average, and then sets a screensaver image that’s the inverse of that.
- Comment on OLED monitor momentum expected to continue — analysts expect 1.34 million units shipped by year end 1 month ago:
I like the contest of OLEDs, but one caveat – my understanding is that if one uses Freesync/Gsync/variable refresh rate/adaptive sync, they are very prone to brightness flickering.
- Comment on US races to develop AI-powered, GPS-free fighter jets, outpacing China 1 month ago:
In a potential future conflict, high-value GPS satellites risk being hit or interfered with. If this happens, the loss of GPS could have severe consequences for communication, navigation, and banking systems in the United States.
Banking?
- Comment on England gets 27 new bathing sites – but no guarantee they’ll be safe for swimming 1 month ago:
putting pressure on water companies to stop dumping sewage in them.
I mean, it’s a result of using older combined sewers. The sewer and drains go to the same place, so when there’s enough rain, the system gets overwhelmed and dumps some amount without treating it.
I’m sure that if people are willing to pay what it’d cost to upgrade the sewer system, that upgrading it isn’t a problem, but it’s not free, and one has to weigh the cost against that benefit.
I’ve got one relative living in a city in the US that’s in the process of doing that shift away from a combined sewer system, and the total cost of the rebuild is around $5,000 per resident. That’s a fair bit of money to ask the population to pay.
In their case, it wasn’t driven purely by a desire to convert from a combined sewer system, but because the existing system needed to be fixed, and if you’re going to have to do major repairs anyway, then it’s time to bite the bullet and pay for dealing with the combined sewer. I’m thinking that it may be that British cities might do something like that – kick the can down the road until the system really has to be replaced anyway, and then pay what it costs to move away from the combined sewer.
- Comment on Stack Overflow Users Are Revolting Against an OpenAI Deal | WIRED 1 month ago:
He’s punning on the multiple meanings of “revolting”.
Stack Overflow Users Are Revolting Against an OpenAI Deal
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/revolting
Adjective
revolting (comparative more revolting, superlative most revolting)
repulsive, disgusting
The most revolting smell was coming from the drains.
- Comment on 9 years later, I finally played fallout 4 1 month ago:
The legendary system isn’t transplanted from Elder Scrolls, is it?
looks
I thought that Skyrim had legendaries, but apparently I misremembered. It’s got weapons with attributes – like, you can get a weapon that causes additional fire damage – but those apparently are the same as the weapon enchantment system, not distinct from it.
There’s enemies, sure, but they don’t exist past being targets for me to destroy so that I can loot them and whatever structure they’re functionally just guarding. I can’t really influence most of them past killing them and putting the Minutemen there instead.
That’s pretty true of Fallout 3 or New Vegas too, yes? I mean, a deathclaw is a deathclaw.
- Comment on 9 years later, I finally played fallout 4 1 month ago:
For the first time in, shit, any Bethesda game ever I found the animations and feedback of moment to moment combat actually enjoyable
I believe that the animation engine in Fallout 4 is capped at something like 30 or maybe 60 fps, can’t tween. When I’m running on my 165 Hz monitor, Fallout 4 animation definitely feels slightly jerky. Starfield doesn’t have this issue, so somewhere along the line, they upgraded the engine.
- Comment on 9 years later, I finally played fallout 4 1 month ago:
Yeah…I guess I shouldn’t be so negative. I mean, I had fun with it, and I certainly think that it’s a worthwhile purchase, along with the other Fallout 4 DLC. Just that I didn’t want to play through a fair bit of the content, whereas in the base game, I was fine playing any of the “faction” routes.
And, I dunno. If someone does want to play as a raider and enslave settlements, they can do that. I don’t have a moral objection to someone else doing that, and I know that many people do feel like they don’t get to play “evil” routes enough in games. Just wasn’t something that I wanted to do.
- Comment on Patient gamers, what are your favourite city builders? 1 month ago:
I kind of wish that it’d support higher simulation rates and try to multithread at least some of the stuff (like, maybe they can have the pathfinding or temperature propagation span multiple cores or something, which has historically been a drag).