Jesus_666
@Jesus_666@lemmy.world
- Comment on What are your favorite Tactical RPGs? 1 week ago:
There’s a reason why oldschool X-Com players kept coming back to the games despite technical issues like the Groundhog Day bug. (Thank all applicable deities for OpenXcom solving those issues, though.)
- Comment on Microsoft accidentally swapped Windows 11’s startup sound with Vista’s 1 week ago:
They’re probably not pivoting but in FY2023 Azure made up 38% of their revenue, followed by Office 365 at 23%. That’s a lot of cloud service revenue.
Is it sustainable? Honestly, it might. They sell a lot of stuff under the Azure umbrella and corporations lap that shit up. (Seriously; my employer is about ready to hire consultants to come up with additional eggs they can put in that particular basket.)
Here’s my source; I couldn’t be arsed to look it up in MSFT’s statements directly.
- Comment on Satisfactory v1.1 Launch Trailer 1 week ago:
My most used features so far are vertical splitters, vertical nudging, and the new placement modes for conveyors and pipes. With an honorable mention going to conveyor wall holes, which also free up a lot of design options.
Honestly, though, just about everything in this update has been a godsend. Priority splitters are the only thing I haven’t really used yet. Even the elevators rock; being able to zoop up to 200 meters up or down in one go can make them useful even as a temporary yardstick for tall structures. (Also, I did end up needing to go 150 meters straight down to get at some resources and can confirm that elevators handle their intended purpose very well.)
- Comment on Who did this 😂😂😂 2 weeks ago:
Apparently we got our floppies for cheap because we just had a whole bunch of pirated floppies.
Admittedly, some did have multiple games on them. That’s what
LOAD"$",8
was for. - Comment on Who did this 😂😂😂 2 weeks ago:
LOAD"*",8,1 SEARCHING FOR * LOADING READY. RUN
- Comment on Correct Grindr Response 2 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t have gotten that far. That utter savage can’t even tell the difference between MT/s and MB/s.
- Comment on If AI was going to advance exponentially I'd of expected it to take off by now. 3 weeks ago:
AI isn’t taking off because it took off in the 60s. Heck, they were even working on neural nets back then. Same as in the 90s when they actually got them to be useful in a production environment.
We got a deep learning craze in the 2010s and then bolted that onto neural nets to get the current wave of “transformers/diffusion models will solve all problems”. They’re really just today’s LISP machines; expected to take over everything but unlikely to actually succeed.
Notably, deep learning assumes that better results come from a bigger dataset but we already trained our existing models on the sum total of all of humanity’s writings. In fact, current training is hampered by the fact that a substantial amount of all new content is already AI-generated.
Despite how much the current approach is hyped by the tech companies, I can’t see it delivering further substantial improvements by just throwing more data (which doesn’t exist) or processing power at the problem.
We need a systemically different approach and while it seems like there’s all the money in the world to fund the necessary research, the same seemed true in the 50s, the 60s, the 80s, the 90s, the 10s… In the end, a new AI winter will come as people realize that the current approach won’t live up to their unrealistic expectations. Ten to fifteen years later some new approach will come out of underfunded basic research.
And it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.
- Comment on Don't Look Up 3 weeks ago:
Fair enough. The dumb ones were just loud enough to sound like 90%. But I sure did talk to some panicked dumbasses online back then.
- Comment on Don't Look Up 3 weeks ago:
I agree with the “nutcase” diagnosis but I think she just can’t tell paragliders and parachutes apart and thought these were paratroopers. Which Hamas somehow has now.
- Comment on Don't Look Up 3 weeks ago:
I remember the early 2000s when basically 90% of all Americans were absolutely certain that jihadists were going to attack their local supermarket any minute now because Power Cable, Nebraska was such a strategic target.
Heck, there was a bomb scare because of an advertisement campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force that involved placing PCBs with LEDs on them that would display characters from the show. Because surely Al Quaeda would put conspicuous LED displays on their bombs.
News media want people to panic so they keep tuning in. Panicked people tend to come up with remarkably stupid scenarios like “Al Quaeda have unlimited resources and can show up anywhere to shoot people at random” or “Hamas want to take Dorcester as a strategic location to strike at Israel from”.
- Comment on Realtek's $10 tiny 10GbE network adapter is coming to motherboards later this year 4 weeks ago:
Ever since the BE200 debacle I don’t know if I can trust Intel to deliver. Sure, the stuff that’s already out there works but who knows if any of their future stuff will?
- Comment on We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. 4 weeks ago:
AI usually got better when people realized it wasn’t going to do all it was hyped up for but was useful for a certain set of tasks.
Then it turned from world-changing hotness to super boring tech your washing machine uses to fine-tune its washing program.
- Comment on Github Discussion: Allow us to block Copilot-generated issues (and PRs) from our own repositories #159749 5 weeks ago:
Why not submit a million vibecoded PRs against various Microsoft repos? At some point they might get it.
- Comment on Bungie appears to have plagarized an artist's work and style in their extraction shooter "Marathon" according to this Bluesky post 5 weeks ago:
My vent core feels retroactively unblasted by this revelation. You really can’t expect anything good from any of the major studios anymore these days.
- Comment on xkcd #3089: Modern 5 weeks ago:
Wasn’t there a Dark Age after Bronze? The one where everyone was scowling the whole time and the stories were so tryhard edgy you could use a typical Youngblood issue as a letter opener?
- Comment on The clueless people are out there among us 1 month ago:
That’s quite how AC outlets work. Line and neutral can intentionally have different potentials relative to ground depending on how the house’s electrical system is designed. This can become relevant in certain situations like very simple devices (think “lamp socket with a power plug”).
A plug that can’t be inverted makes this a non-issue.
- Comment on The clueless people are out there among us 1 month ago:
I think the Swiss have the best Europlug-based system. Their three-conductor plugs have the same footprint as basic Europlugs, which makes for very dense plug arrangements. Unlike e.g. the German Schuko plug they only fit in one orientation so you get no polarity issues.
It’s pretty neat.
- Comment on Ditch the DIY Drama: Why Use Fedify Instead of Building ActivityPub from Scratch? 2 months ago:
Of course you wouldn’t use an existing database engine as the foundation of a new database engine. But you would use an existing database engine as the foundation of an ERP software, which is a vastly different use case even if the software does spend a lot of time dealing with data.
If I want to build an application I don’t want to reimplement everything. That’s what middleware is for. The use case of my application is most likely not to speak a certain protocol; the protocol is just the means to what I actually want to do. There’s no reason for me to roll my own implementation from scratch and keep up with current developments except if I’m unhappy with all current implementations of that protocol.
Of course one can overdo it with middleware (the JS world is rife with this) but implementing a communication protocol is one of the classic cases where it makes sense.
- Comment on Spain public broadcaster calls for 'debate' over Israel's Eurovision participation 2 months ago:
I’m sorry but that’s Germany’s job already.
- Comment on Always explains so much 2 months ago:
Remember that each woman has a different experience. Some women have such a light period that they only notice it because they find spots in their underwear. On the other hand, a woman with endometriosis will probably start being in excruciating pain the day before the period starts and will know exactly how long it lasts.
Source: I know someone with endo. She also has a resistance to at least one OTC painkiller because she used to pop those things like candy. And a female coworker of hers (with a very light period) thinks that most women are exaggerating and that periods aren’t much of a problem…
- Comment on We are so cooked 2 months ago:
Usually, when people talk about bees dying, they mean wild bees. Unlike honey bees they aren’t cultivated by us. They also tend to be better pollinators than honey bees, adapted to local plants that honey bees can’t handle well.
- Comment on With the current state of the news, April's fools aren't fun anymore because they can't be distinguished as easily as before 2 months ago:
It depends. “Donald Trump wants to annex Wisconsin as the 51st state” wouldn’t be funny. Pocketpair launching a Steam store page for the Palworld dating sim (which was last year’s April Fools joke) was.
But yeah, this isn’t the time for political humor.
- Comment on Hamster 2 months ago:
And the name of that hamster? Pikachu.
- Comment on 3's grip looks the most comfy 2 months ago:
Seconded. As far as pens are concerned, Uniball is where it’s at.
- Comment on People say they prefer stories written by humans over AI-generated works, yet new study suggests that’s not quite true 2 months ago:
I find that LLMs also tend to create very placative, kitschy content. Nuance is beyond them.
- Comment on Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O. 3 months ago:
Welp, there goes the neighborhood. If they want to do an IPO they’ll probably enshittify the hell out of the platform and jettison all remotely raunchy communities. Because nothing says “good investment” than a service that just drove out a fair chunk of its user base.
- Comment on Sergey Brin says AGI is within reach if Googlers work 60-hour weeks 3 months ago:
That undersells them slightly.
LLMs are powerful tools for generating text that looks like something. Need something rephrased in a different style? They’re good at that. Need something summarized? They can do that, too. Need a question answered? No can do.
LLMs can’t generate answers to questions. They can only generate text that looks like answers to questions. Often enough that answer is even correct, though usually suboptimal. But they’ll also happily generate complete bullshit answers and to them there’s no difference to a real answer.
They’re text transformers marketed as general problem solvers because a) the market for text transformers isn’t that big and b) general problem solvers is what AI researchers are always trying to create. They have their use cases but certainly not ones worth the kind of spending they get.
- Comment on People never understand the sacrifices I make for them. 3 months ago:
The prep and recovery blocks are also team calls; everyone prepares and recovers together, moderated by the scrum master.
- Comment on New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code. 4 months ago:
Because giving answers is not a LLM’s job. A LLM’s job is to generate text that looks like an answer. And we then try to coax framework that into generating correct answers as often as possible, with mixed results.
- Comment on New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code. 4 months ago:
I remember talking to someone about where LLMs are and aren’t useful. I pointed out that LLMs would be absolutely worthless for me as my work mostly consists of interacting with company-internal APIs, which the LLM obviously hasn’t been trained on.
The other person insisted that that is exactly what LLMs are great at. They wouldn’t explain how exactly the LLM was supposed to know how my company’s internal software, which is a trade secret, is structured.
But hey, I figured I’d give it a go. So I fired up a local Llama 3.1 instance and asked it how to set up a local copy of ASDIS, one such internal system (name and details changed to protect the innocent). And Llama did give me instructions… on how to write the American States Data Information System, a Python frontend for a single MySQL table containing basic information about the member states of the USA.
Oddly enough, that’s not what my company’s ASDIS is. It’s almost as if the LLM had no idea what I was talking about. Words fail to express my surprise at this turn of events.