sobchak
@sobchak@programming.dev
- Comment on Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM 1 week ago:
Not enough room in the GPU machine for all the HDDs I needed.
Also who got millions of photos at home?
People working on biological datasets.
- Comment on Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams – and experts are worried 1 week ago:
If the corporate VPNs keep logs and allow government access, they will be allowed. That’s how it works in some (authoritarian) countries.
- Comment on Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams – and experts are worried 1 week ago:
I believe China does statistical analysis to do stuff like detecting and blocking VPNs, suspicious looking ssh traffic, etc from home Internet connections not going to an approved business. It’s my understanding it’s very hard to get around the GFW at the moment, and pretty complex stuff is needed to mask VPN traffic to make it look normal (Project X, Xray, Reality, etc).
- Comment on Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM 1 week ago:
Rsync, syncthing, backups, mp3s, photos, json files; idk, a lot of tasks involve large amounts of small files. I personally ran into this problem training models on millions of photos. My GPUs would only get up to 25% utilization with mirrored HDDs, so I had to switch to SSDs.
- Comment on Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM 1 week ago:
HDDs have horrible random access times, so if you need to process or just copy a lot of small files, say photos, there’s a significant penalty.
- Comment on Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price. 1 week ago:
Alibaba has released Qwen models under Apache licenses (and they are some of the best models that can reasonably be ran locally). Some argue that models aren’t really open source unless the training code and datasets are made available though.
- Comment on Is gold investing a scam? 2 weeks ago:
It pretty much is the same thing. In theory, shorting the ETF will drive the price of gold down (until the short needs to be covered; like all shorts), because all accounts must eventually be settled. The price of gold is literally set by the futures market, which people with the appropriate approval can also short. Gold dealers literally look up the price on the futures market and add/subtract a few percentage points to determine how much to buy/sell physical gold for.
- Comment on Beans n Corn 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think it’s been proven that the nitrogen the beans/bacteria fix is available to the corn (before the bean plants die and decompose). Though, I have done this (along with squash), and it does seem to work pretty well. I think it gives you more vegetables per sq ft, than if you were to grow them all separately.
- Comment on Capitalism isn't the problem, THIS is the problem, and I've watched it roll over us for 40 years. [3 min. video] 2 weeks ago:
Humans lived in what could be described as a sort of primitive communism for most of the species history.
Basically, the society needs to be decentralized. If you can keep it sufficiently non hierarchal, there isn’t a lot of power people can get over many others. A problem I see with this is defending against large, centralized, outside organizations. So, I guess you’d need some federation-like structures. Some communes are pretty democratic and decentralized. The Zapitista territories are the best example I know of, of a large non-hierarchal federation of communities.
- Comment on Capitalism isn't the problem, THIS is the problem, and I've watched it roll over us for 40 years. [3 min. video] 2 weeks ago:
Small local businesses fuck over their employees too. Capitalism incentives it. It also incentives monopolies. And it seems when the wealth disparity gets large enough, it captures government and starts transforming into fascism.
- Comment on Is gold investing a scam? 2 weeks ago:
You can short gold ETFs. Gold is highly speculative and has crashed taking decades to recover (~1980-2005). It’s basically boomer-bitcoin.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to games@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on Solutions for remote access? 2 weeks ago:
Port forward/poke holes in firewall + dynamic DNS.
- Comment on Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn 3 weeks ago:
I think California recently passed the Digital Age Assurance Act, which was backed by Google,Meta, and OpenAI. I think it goes into effect in 2027.
- Comment on ChatGPT is down worldwide, conversations disappeared for users 3 weeks ago:
I find it detrimental to my productivity when integrated into an editor/IDE. I’ve found the “autocomplete” causes subtle bugs that I end up overlooking because I’m trying to go fast and putting too much trust in the generated lines/snippets. Tracing down these bugs becomes a huge time-sink. I do use chatbots in the browser for various things; mostly as a kind of “search” for alternative ways of doing things, frameworks, libraries, and algorithms. Agentic vibe-coding is ok for small one-off tools/scripts you wouldn’t need to maintain, IMO.
- Comment on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out 3 weeks ago:
Indeed, and I give them credit. China is unironically leading the world in scientific progress. I wouldn’t recommend using their services though, for privacy reasons (same with the US).
- Comment on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out 3 weeks ago:
If you’re not paying, you’re the product. Even on Chinese services. Alibaba does train my favorite local models though (Qwen).
- Comment on The cloud is just someone else's computer, but the internet is just someone else's network 3 weeks ago:
I’ve been going down this rabbit hole myself. Already set up a solar Meshtastic node and MeshCore repeater. Kinda cool, very low bandwidth and pretty unreliable though.
It’s my understanding that encryption is illegal on amateur radio bands. I’m thinking about getting a license anyways; looks fun.
HaLow, BATMAN, Reticulum and stuff like that also look cool, but I haven’t messed around with those yet.
I think radio will always have bandwidth/congestion problems. It’s like everyone within range is using the same “wire.”
I also like overlay networks like Tor and I2P, but it’s possible those will eventually be blocked or made illegal in many countries, if governments keep heading in the direction they seem to be heading.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 4 weeks ago:
OpenAI just bought the raw wafers? WTF.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 4 weeks ago:
I think the RAM manufacturers were found to be guilty of colluding/price-fixing in that case (maybe this case too).
- Comment on Nearly a quarter of U.S. households live paycheck to paycheck, report finds 5 weeks ago:
I think you may have a misconception of what the bottom 25% of earners do. Or, maybe I do. I don’t know anyone that does that stuff regularly, not even the high earners I know.
- Comment on Peter Thiel dumps entire Nvidia stake, slashes Tesla holdings amid bubble fears 5 weeks ago:
Not really. TSMC has a near monopoly on the advanced fabrication, and ASML has a near monopoly on the lithographic machines TSMC uses. Nvidia is a fab-less designer. Google has its TPUs, and Amazon has some kind of custom chip too.
- Comment on Trump scraps tariffs on beef, coffee and tropical fruit in a push to lower grocery store prices 5 weeks ago:
I’m guessing he got his bribes.
- Comment on Just seen the latest American Opinion polls. 5 weeks ago:
I think the laws are just meant as a soft-ban. There may be legal complications with outright banning strip clubs. The no physical contact takes away what I think make up stripper’s largest income source, and no nipples and alcohol makes it a less attractive place to go. I had a few hours to waste in a city once, waiting on a flight, and walked into one of these strip clubs. There was only one stripper there, one bartender, and I was the only customer; so I’m guessing it really did hurt the market.
- Comment on Just seen the latest American Opinion polls. 5 weeks ago:
I think that’s changed a bit. Hooters went bankrupt, and many local governments have heavy restrictions on strip clubs, such as no nipples can be shown, no physical contact, no license to serve liquor, etc.
- Comment on Stop cramming everything onto one Pi: treat your home lab like a tiny ISP - hardware, stack, backups and an update plan 1 month ago:
You can boot Pis off an USB HDD or SSD. I think there are specific hats for that as well. But yeah, backups, at least of configs, are nice.
- Comment on Why do Republicans hate the poor so much? 1 month ago:
The Alt-Right Playboook: Always A Bigger Fish explains that conservatives have a strong preference of hierarchy and order. They have this preference even if they are low on the hierarchy. They reason that maybe they themselves didn’t work hard enough, weren’t smart enough, or whatever, so don’t deserve to be higher up. They gain a sort of comfort from “knowing their place.” Those lower than them on the hierarchy deserve even less.
I think this explanation is spot-on, and is more or less true for every “conservative” I’ve known. I suppose fascism also has this love of hierarchy, which is what the Republican party really is now (or, at least, very similar to it).
- Comment on God ****** dammit, here we go again 1 month ago:
I was thinking about this earlier. The password manager browser plugin I use (Proton Pass) defaults to staying unlocked for the entire browser session. If someone physically gained access to my PC while my password manager was unlocked, they’d be able to access absolutely every password I have. I changed the behavior to auto-lock and ask for a 6-digit PIN, but I’m guessing it wouldn’t take an impractical amount of time to brute-force a 6-digit PIN.
Before I started use a password manager, I’d use maybe 3-4 passwords for different “risks,” (bank, email, shopping, stupid shit that made me sign up, etc). Not really sure if a password manager is better (guess it depends on the “threat” you’re worried about).
- Comment on U.S. Tech Layoffs Hit Two-Decade High in October 1 month ago:
IDK. Tech companies are bringing in more revenue than ever. The trend seems to be companies reporting great revenue growth, then laying off shortly after, to which the investors seem to reward. In the past, layoffs would usually bring stock prices down, since they have less human capital to generate profit from.
- Comment on The 512KB Club is a collection of performance-focused web pages from across the Internet. To qualify your website must both be actually useful and under 512KB in size. 1 month ago:
Interesting, didn’t know that’s how modern browsers worked. Guess my understanding was outdated from the HTTP/1 standard.