NuXCOM_90Percent

@NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨JSAUX announce a charging-friendly Steam Deck travel case⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
You know linux is going mainstream when the site everyone links to is running copy for shit like this. Yay?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A lot of the laid-off staff from the Washington Post should start a news cooperative. Seriously!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I mean, it is the fundamental problem of art/science/knowledge.

It costs money to create. That money often comes from either the wealthy or the state.The wealthy CAN be good but means you are catering to a specific audience and the problems can range from “We aren’t going to talk about the BDS movement because our fans like xboxes” to “We aren’t going to talk about the multiple wars and genocides facebook have supported because zuckface pays for our electricity”.

As for the state? Under a just government, that is awesome. Moving on.

As for us individually? Probably the biggest thing we, as individuals, can do is to actually permit-list websites that we like/trust on the adblocker. Ads are a genuinely awesome way to generate “passive” income which goes a long way towards keeping said lights on.

But also? If you have the cash, consider actually subscribing to news/media outlets you like. Get a newspaper subscription. Look at the independent media outlets and pay for a month or three every so often. Because the broader the subscriber/patron base, the less temptation/need there is to cater to the whales.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A lot of the laid-off staff from the Washington Post should start a news cooperative. Seriously!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
The former Vice crew (404, Remap, probably others) have talked about this in their various podcasts and blog posts and so forth:

My take is that there are two big, but linked, problems:

The first is… there is a reason all these news media outlets are shuttering. People don’t want to read. They also don’t want to watch a documentary that isn’t over-dramatized trash. And any form of monetization model mostly just antagonizes the audience who were never going to consume it in the first place but will GLADLY derail every single discussion to say how much they hate a paywall. So you become VERY dependent on your hardcore subscribers and that is an incredibly dangerous tightrope to walk. Do you prioritize your coverage based off what your patrons (because that is what they are) would want? Do you NOT cover something because it might make subscriptions go down? What do you drink when you realize you are literally the person who fired you a year back?

And the other is that legal representation costs a lot of money. Last Week Tonight have covered SLAPP Suits a few times over the years but that is also the reality of it. Any form of investigative journalism pretty much guarantees you are getting, at the very least, a C&D. If not a full blown lawsuit. A good lawyer can make the vast majority go away but… a good lawyer costs money.

The former Vice crew were pretty much all in a special case. 404 came out of Motherboard which was pretty much one of the most trusted and respected “tech” news sites out there. Aftermath has some of the Motherboard crew and but also is basically a who’s who of games media as a whole (arguably everyone who was keeping Kotaku alive). And Remap is mostly the people who were at Waypoint until Vice realized they were still getting paid and that audience is one of the most rabid and faithful out there when it comes to subscribing to content we love.

Whereas most outlets actively try to prevent people from getting enough popularity/notoriety that they could get their own funding for a new start. Like… think about who the big names in traditional news are? MAYBE you remember whatsherface’s name from PBS? But it is almost entirely going to be the anchors/commentators like Anderson Cooper because they are the ones you see night after night and they are the ones who present the stories written by the “normal” journalists. And zero shade to Mr Cooper, but that is very much intentional. Because if some third party wanted to pay him to spin up a new outlet? That’s great, but they ALSO need to hire like three or four more journalists to have anything for him to say.

As opposed to a Jason Schreier who, with sufficient lawyers and a contracted editor, can be more or less a one person show.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
…

Yes, the reason multiple people accused you of being gullible is because they are bots.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
And if you don’t think there are backdoors then I have a bridge to sell you.

The best you can hope for in any case is increased friction. Because if you have pissed off a government org to the point they declare you an actual national security threat… you start realizing why israel et al tend to be known to have tools that can crack a few generations back.

Which is why journalists, when they talk about stuff like this, are pretty adamant that they don’t trust those devices at all. One of the more common tactics is to have completely separate devices for sensitive communication that are kept physically isolated from any of their personal devices… and preferably in a place that a trusted associate knows about. If someone gets taken away in a black van? Someone else goes for a walk with a power drill for no apparent reason at all.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thoughts on Mattercad / alternative?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
20 or 30 years ago? Sure

These days? And ESPECIALLY for 3d printing? Fusion 360 IS the intermediary step between TinkerCAD and professional software… and is the professional software too. And OnShape isn’t THAT much of a step if you understand the basics from TinkerCAD et al.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It still blows my mind how ubiquitous communication is now. I just had someone message me instantly from a ship in the Mediterranean, while I'm on a flight in the US.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
It wouldn’t have been rare at all because it wasn’t rare.

Yes, you wouldn’t be video chatting (and still shouldn’t be… it is a plane for crying out loud). But emails were 100% a thing and I had plenty of gchat conversations with colleagues that included the phrase “We are about to land, Ill get back to you when I am at my hotel”.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I built* an Android app to generate OpenPrintTags!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
The issue is that if you accept it, there will be no better option. Once you get out of the evangelists (who rarely actually contribute much code…) you are looking at professionals who are choosing to spend their free time contributing to the community. And having a few users (or, in this case, ad watching customers in the android app…) goes a long way. You don’t get that if everyone has decided the vibe coded slop is “good enough”.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Eh. Some stuff does make sense to centralize.

Like, the concept of a thin client (what these basically are “close enough” to) is a really good one. They drastically simplify security and costs for corporate environments. And, even in the before times, it might genuinely make sense to just pay for a month/hundred hours of GFN if you wanted to play the latest AAA game rather than upgrading your five year old computer that handles everything else you play perfectly.

The bigger issue being that it now increasingly makes sense to pay for years/thousands of hours of GFN because of how broken the everything is. And the vultures (like Amazon and nVidia) smell the decay.

And… I didn’t want to crap on the other person too much but I do think p2p is why so many people think this can’t work. There is a big difference between streaming from your computer over starbucks wifi and connecting to a major data center. And there are also arguments for power and ecological impact but that becomes a MUCH bigger mess full of bad actors and incomplete comparisons.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LLMs are already doing fascists a favor by ensuring that anything that is reasonably eloquently formulated on social media is automatically suspected of having been written by LLMs.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I suspect you think tweets are too many words.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Again, plenty of folk, self included, have no issues with streaming from a datacenter and geforce now is quite successful.

Understand that the codecs make a huge difference. But the actual inputs are literally bytes per minute of data. MAYBE kilobytes if you are particularly good at Starcraft
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LLMs are already doing fascists a favor by ensuring that anything that is reasonably eloquently formulated on social media is automatically suspected of having been written by LLMs.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Sort of.

Yes, the nobility and the royals basically had comparable lifespans to those today.

The average peasant? Wikipedia so grain of salt, but it lines up with much of what I have seen over the years en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.

Life Expectancy at Birth (LEB) in the Bronze age is believed to be around 24. Now, this is going to be skewed because we are generally finding the sites of battles (easier to find 20 corpses than 1…). But, at the same time, LEB in the medieval period (30-33) is going to be skewed by most records caring a lot more about the nobility than some rando on a farm.

LEB has 100% gone up as wars become less common and medicine becomes much more effective and plentiful. And I’ll admit I was exaggerating for comedic effect here. But also… not that much.

Because maybe you DO have good odds of living to your late 50s if you make it to your early 40s… the average is low for a reason and it isn’t JUST infant death. It is working hard to survive day to day and being incredibly vulnerable to crop yields (whether starving or being sent to war because said nobility got hungry/bored). And when you are seeking knowledge from those more experienced around the village… they are gonna skew a lot younger than Lord Farquad’s uncle.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
And a big factor in trying to combat/delay that is to not frame it as “This doesn’t even work”. Because then it is literally one free trial away from being normalized for like 95% of the audience.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Can we not pretend the problem is solely performance based? People keep doing this with generative AI and it keeps resulting in “oh shit, ghibli AI is so awesome”.

Especially since… can you watch a twitch stream? Congrats, you can stream a desktop. Even back with Stadia it was very much viable to play games like AssCreed over streaming and have a very comparable experience to it being local. And stuff like Geforce Now actually work REALLY well.

The issue shouldn’t be “can you make this perform well enough I want to use it”. It should be about ownership and the implication for… everything if all “personal computers” exist solely in a data center and all documents exist solely in The Cloud and so forth. Preservation of anything becomes nigh impossible and you suddenly have to pay a monthly fee to ever see your kid’s pictures again.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LLMs are already doing fascists a favor by ensuring that anything that is reasonably eloquently formulated on social media is automatically suspected of having been written by LLMs.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
No. It really hasn’t.

Much of the historic (so not recent) idolation of the elderly (even when “the elderly” meant folk in their 30s and 40s…) was specifically about the pursuit of knowledge and self betterment. It was knowing how to make your spears fly farther or how to properly rotate the crops in the field and so forth.

Fast forward and The Rich would outright buy philosophers for the prestige of being the patron of someone so intelligent and influential. Which continued on to the arts and so forth.

Hell, not too long ago it was “work hard so you can get into a good school and make something of yourself”.

Now? it is outright vilification of “intellectuals” and people who think “Too long, didn’t read” is an insult rather than a condemnation of their own attention spans.

Or, to roll way back: it is people saying “Fuck you old man. I don’t need your sharp pointy sticks. I am gonna go punch that tiger until it turns into chicken”.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LLMs are already doing fascists a favor by ensuring that anything that is reasonably eloquently formulated on social media is automatically suspected of having been written by LLMs.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Honestly? Yeah.

Like, we consider red flags for something being “ai” to be… punctuation? As an old who actually learned how to fucking write a sentence, I’ve actually taken to just leaving in a lot of the typos from typing too fast as a result. Which sucks because I am actively writing worse to still look “human”.

Although the good news is that we are only a few cycles away from AI slop being the kind of shit that makes you wonder if anyone else smell’s toast. At which point I can go back to writing “normally”.

Still fucking hate that every few weeks there is a new word-a-day calendar word that means “you are AI”. But that at least is no different than “ha ha, you type too much” or “you try too hard” as being just the normal strive for mediocrity that has plagued the world for decades.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rockstar launch official roleplay mods store where you can spend $67 to turn GTA into Euro Truck Simulator 2⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
So… the mods for a massively popular live service game that many of the world’s top streamers play on the regular is charging money for optional/premium content?

Fuck those modders! How dare they want to be compensated for their hard work!!!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Signal' President and VP warn agentic AI is insecure, unreliable, and a surveillance nightmare⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Yes and no.

At its very core? “Agentic AI” is about the idea of having a bunch of different “agents” communicate with one another in a network with defined(-ish) communication pathways. This is an “agent network”. And if that sounds like microservices/task graphs/how every fucking app works then… you win the No-Prize!!

And, in that regard, it isn’t any difficult. This service has access to that database. It always has. Hell, this service might still have zero “AI” in it but count as an “agent” for marketing purposes. If the credentials are checked and passed in an appropriate and authorized way, it is as safe as it ever has been. Which… is a different depressing discussion.

The issue comes into play when you are looking at people rapidly rewriting existing infrastructure just to say they did. And doing so with generative AI that they fundamentally can’t vet (even if they wanted to). THAT is how you break things and THAT is how you introduce new CVEs.

The issue isn’t that you have this data stored in a SQL table that is accessed by that service which was pre-seeded with credentials in a secure way. The issue is that you have no rewritten both that service and the SQL server in a way that “optimized” things by removing that costly security check.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if the Internet Goes Down? - 15 Jan, 7PM CET⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Yes. For true emergency/disaster relief, that is the baseline. I doubt most of the meshtastic repeaters will survive a real storm and you can bet people will be spamming/attacking longfast from the comfort of their homes a county or three over. And there is no good way to communicate proper regional channels ahead of time.

But not every internet outage is a disaster. I live in a region where it is not uncommon for construction crews to cut the fiber line and take out all traffic for the county… sometimes multiple times a month… And I can speak from experience that having a mesh network with locals is incredibly useful for “Yes, it is all of us. And Verizon/Tmobile/Spring is also out” as well as “If you go to the park on 5th and MLK you have line of sight to a working cell tower”. And even just “So… I got all of Frasier on my Plex if anyone wants to hang out for a few hours”.

If you whip out your emergency HAM radios (without a license) during that? You can bet ALL the narcs are gonna tattle on you because “you weren’t prepared”.

But even during the prelude to a disaster it can be an issue. We also have wildfires in the region and get a pretty big scare maybe once a decade. Last time we were in a state of “be ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice” for the better part of a week. And just a bit of gossip that “today is going to be the day” was enough to trigger panic and clog up cell service faster than you can say “9-11”. We even got an emergency push telling us that there were no planned evacuation orders for the day and to go about normal activities.

If you are someone frantically trying to figure out where the school took your kids? Yeah, you have an emergency. If you are someone who doesn’t have a strong support network trying to figure out what is even going on? The narcs are gonna whinge at you. But, like I said, it is very useful to coordinate your evac with that support network. You can plan ahead of time to try to all get hotels/campsites in the town a few hours North. Then you drive through the hell of the evac until you get a few cell towers away, pull over, and use an app to book a hotel/campsite. But if all the people with families have to go South to pick up their kids from the school drop off site? You can only communicate when you are all an hour or three away from town and… ain’t nobody going back through that traffic snarl.

And that is where mesh networks thrive. I am not talking about “I have a repeater in my garden” (which I should get on…). Stuff like the t-deck is what is actually useful. Plug it in, turn it on, and the pseudo-blackberries mesh with each other well enough for coordinating because enough people in town are doing the exact same thing.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if the Internet Goes Down? - 15 Jan, 7PM CET⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Got it. Nobody should consider the need for a license because, in an emergency, you don’t need one. But also get a license so that you can use it in non-emergencies otherwise you’ll get a fine.

Good talk.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if the Internet Goes Down? - 15 Jan, 7PM CET⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
If you are in a situation where you need help, the odds of someone (even the person you have been talking to for weeks on the radio) doing a day or two journey to MAYBE be able to reach you is pretty slim. And such long distance communication has other implications for bad actors.

And in the event of “rebuilding” some kind of community, you aren’t going to be using a handheld device at all. You’ll raid… I don’t even know what at this point (I miss Radio Shack) to install a radio on the tallest building you can find. Oh, a HAM Radio Nerd’s house. That’ll work.

Whereas if you are trying to communicat4e with others and signal for rescue? Whatever you can get from walking up a hill/mountain or climbing the stairs to said tall building with your handheld is probably about what you can expect.

Same with in stuff like hurricanes and the like. If you are in a region that is at all hospitable then the relief teams know to send helicopters/people to that area. And if you are in the kind of situation where even a few hours might mean the difference between life and death… odds are nobody is coming.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if the Internet Goes Down? - 15 Jan, 7PM CET⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Maybe you’d understand more things if you continued to read after the first opportunity you see to spew whatever you want to?

But in a “the internet is out” situation? Or even a “please evacuate in a calm and orderly fashion” for a wildfire or a bad hurricane? That is where meshtastic (et al) shine and it is well worth convincing friends to pick up a t-deck or whatever. Excellent for the “is it out for everyone or just me?” checks. Also useful for letting people know which field can see a cell tower a county or two over for emergency communication or to even coordinate whether you are all gonna head North or South to hang out for (hopefully just) a few days.

I’ll also add on that it is useful to be able to practice and get familiar with a tool without risking a fine.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if the Internet Goes Down? - 15 Jan, 7PM CET⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah… if I am trying to reach people tens of miles away during The Apocalypse, I am already dead.

Anyone who is within range to be helpful (or… not) would generally be within signal range of a handheld.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if the Internet Goes Down? - 15 Jan, 7PM CET⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
In a true emergency? Yes, HAM is the way to go and I need to get around to buying one of those super sketchy Baofengs. In theory you can configure them to use without a license (which is also on the todo list) but it is super easy to tick into the licensed use. How much people will care will mostly depend on whether your local HAM folk are narcs. But, regardless, all bets are off in a true emergency and Baofengs are dirt cheap.

But in a “the internet is out” situation? Or even a “please evacuate in a calm and orderly fashion” for a wildfire or a bad hurricane? That is where meshtastic (et al) shine and it is well worth convincing friends to pick up a t-deck or whatever.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Larian hope to have future companions spend less time jumping straight into your bed, and more time with each other⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I feel like Shart at least kind of felt like you were getting to know her.

Contrast that with Gale who wants to show you a magic spell and immediately rips off his pants. And Lae’zel who, after a conversation where “Lae’zel disapproves” popped up like ten times, asks you to fuck (which… is kind of fitting for her, actually). Let a lone a certain druid who just does not take no for an answer and keeps asking right up until the end of the game if you’ll throw him a bone. It actively made me dislike the (otherwise wonderful) cast of companions a bit.

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for more “adult” relationships where you might just be casual fuck buddies. Pathfinder WOTR was kind of great for that where Miss Live Leaks herself basically says “so all this ritualistic murder of innocents got me hot and bothered. Wanna bang on the floor in a pile of their blood and entrails?”. But most of the “romances” in that game actually felt like you were getting to know your ragtag group of horrible vibes abominations with varying levels of mental and physical trauma.

Rather than “Hey, I know you want the Owlbear to show up but I wanna get nekkid instead”.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Larian will no longer use GenAI for Divinity concept art, and any genAI used for other games will be "trained on data we own"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
There are different levels to “AI”. Generally speaking, people are referring to what is generally called “generative AI” in these cases.

You know all those insane tools in the adobe suite that can do stuff like literally erase a person from a photo or weather a surface or even select only the object you want to delete with a single click of the mouse? Those are, varying levels, of the same underlying algorithms behind “AI” content creation. Hell, most of the good plugins for IDEs for handling stuff like docstring or unit test stub generation are in a similar boat.

By and large, people don’t have major issues with those. Some of the training data gets really messy but they are a fundamental part of most creative workflows and can be argued as being comparable to using a reference book when drawing human anatomy and so forth.

The issue comes when you take that a dozen steps farther and have “generative AI”. Rather than take an existing photo and remove the ex you hope dies in a fire, you just say “hey grok. Make a photo of me on the streets of Osaka by myself. And undress a child while you’re at it”. Rather than create a docstring or unit test stub you just have Cursor write an app for you based off a prompt. And so forth.

At which point it stops being a case of someone using the same reference material to draw a superhero and more that guy who just traces porn for Marvel every month.

And… much like someone who can’t draw their way out of a paper bag, you see the same with generative AI use in content creation. Generative AI is generally great at replacing entry level employees. It can’t replace a skilled senior creative. And if you are wondering how you get people the experience they need to hit that tier… you get it.

But that leads to the other problem. If you are someone who is cutting costs left and right to increase profits and realized you can replace 60% of your staff with a subscription to openai? How long until you decide that if you just lower your standards a bit you can replace 80% instead?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Larian will no longer use GenAI for Divinity concept art, and any genAI used for other games will be "trained on data we own"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Yes and no.

Yes in the sense that they could write a model completely from first principles as it were. The algorithms to train the models are pretty trivial. Providing source material to train the model on to specialize it is also trivial… if you have it (which Larian presumably would).

The (vastly simplifying so anyone who wants to “well ackshually” can go suck Yurgir’s fat one (negative)) initial weights are the problem. Think of it like what is required for the model to even understand what “give me a weathered stone exterior texture” means. THOSE are fundamentally built on stolen IP (and the uncredited work of grad students around the world…).

How much you care about that is up to you. But that is what facebook et al had seedboxes running 24/7 to steal. They might not train “their model” on your favorite author’s work. But they used your favorite author’s work and previous generations of their model to create the initial weights they optimized on.

And a “from scratch” model will not have those. Many are trivially easy to find but those are also very poisoned.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Good FOSS design software for beginners?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Do yourself a favor:

Use Onshape until you are comfortable and confident with your CAD work. Onshape’s design is much more industry standard (I think it is derived from Solidworks?) and pretty much all of the workflows and terminology are similar. Contrast that with FreeCad where a lot of tools have very specific names and some are split out into two.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaTNTUzA5dM is a great video on the subject. Just… watch at like 1.25x-1.5x speed because Deltahedra has a very specific speaking cadence and… yeah. But a great example is the mindset of extrude (positive or negative) versus having to decide if you are padding or pocketing. It isn’t a huge difference once you know what you are doing but it can really trip people up when they are learning the ropes.

FreeCAD is an excellent second (or third) CAD tool. I strongly discourage anyone from making it their first.

The other side is to make actual models in Blender. Blender… I actually like blender a lot. I don’t have enough of a background to know if the workflows are meaningfully diffeernt as my experience is limited to using one tool decades ago (might have been Maya?) for making models for UT before switching to Blender. Just understand that Blender is more for making “art” rather than functional parts.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vienam Bans Unskippable Ads, Requires Skip Button to Appear After 5 Seconds - Saigoneer⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
And, when discussing stuff like this, it is important to understand that “all VPNs” actually means corporate and public VPNs.

If you want to have an actual conversation then context matters. Rather than just fixating on nonsensical overly literal interpretations because you only want to be “technically correct” by attacking a strawman.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vienam Bans Unskippable Ads, Requires Skip Button to Appear After 5 Seconds - Saigoneer⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
If your corporate VPN is routing ALL traffic then your IT department are idiots. And I am pretty sure said company would thank google for blocking youtube from their employees.