sobchak

@sobchak@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There are studies that show the tactile nature of books and hand written notes improves retention and encourages more thought, so it would seem likely that going more digital would have negative impacts on education.

  Even that grifter Sam Altman was talking about how he takes notes a while back.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jack Dorsey's New Company Falling Apart as It Forces Employees to Use AI⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think LLMs will become AGI, but… planes don’t fly by flapping their wings. We don’t necessarily need to know how animal brains work to achieve AGI, and it doesn’t necessarily have to work anything like animal brains. It’s quite possible if/when AGI is achieved, it will be completely alien.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras. Anger over ICE connections and privacy violations is fueling the sabotage.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen them installed in pairs that watch each other. I also see them in the vicinity of store security cams or intersection cams. I don’t know of one in my area that isn’t in range of another camera.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unlimited Power ⚡⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  My grandparents called it that. I guess it comes from a time where lights were the primary consumer of electricity in a household.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Get. Out⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  a robot is still going to be cheaper in the long run

  x

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Get. Out⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m working with people that seem to try to offload a lot of their work to AI, and it’s shit, and making the project take longer and shittier. Then they do things like write documents in AI and expect people to read that nonsense, and even use AI to send long, useless Slack messages. In short, it’s been detrimental to the project.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Get. Out⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t buy that. There’s little reason to automate those jobs because the labor is so cheap. And as someone who has worked most of those jobs in the past, most of those workers could be easily trained for different jobs; most are actively taking it upon themselves to train to get out of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Advice for setting up baremetal k8s lab⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I’d install proxmox on all machines because there is a proxmox provider for Terraform. Then, manually create the VMs, and to learn the barebones, use kubeadm to set everything up, and kubectl to manage it. Once comfortable and knowledgeable with that, start messing around with Terraform and Ansible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord roll out global age verification system, including an "age inference" model that runs in the background⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I joined a Matrix group, and the UX frustrated one person so much, they just quit. Kinda surprised me some people care about UX that much. I guess I’m used to using software developed by hobbyists, lol.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord roll out global age verification system, including an "age inference" model that runs in the background⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Signal is ok. SimpleX theoretically has better privacy guarantees (metadata privacy, more decentralized). Matrix is ok for communities; I think it exposes a lot of metadata though (who you are talking to, not what you’re talking about).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But bro please⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Perhaps. I read it as the “setup” being the emphasized part (i.e. the context set by the first part of the sentence), with the states being a representative of the “people” under the political theory at the time… This was written by the elite more or less fine with slavery and indentured servitude, and only thought that white male landowners really counted. Either way, I think regular citizens should be able own firearms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But bro please⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe I’m just old, but suppressors seem pointless to me. If I understand correctly, you need to use subsonic ammo to get the full effect, which pretty much negates the extra “stopping power” of rifles (or higher velocity handguns). Simple foam ear plugs, like many people wear to work, can be as good or better in terms of db reduction if going to a range or popping some off in “the back nine” if you’re fortunate. If you need to run to your gun in an emergency to save you’re own life, I don’t think you’d take the time to grab your hearing protection. Hearing impaired is better than dead. And you’re definitely not going to EDC active hearing protection. Perhaps I’m not understanding the benefits though. I see the benefits if it’s like your job or something (work at a range, are a rancher that shoots vermin/predators at night). I suppose if you’re training in some kind of militia to work in a squad, active hearing protection with integrated radio would be nice, but virtually nobody is doing that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But bro please⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The interpretation of the 2nd amendment that the courts take never made sense to me. I clearly says states can have well-regulated militias, not that citizens must have rifles with 50rd drum magazines.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Save as PDF⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I assumed LaTex is a descendant of TeX. I’m not really well informed about the history of this kind of stuff, which is why I found it interesting.

  Your POV is also interesting, as I always kind of held “hacker culture,” in pretty high regard. But, now that I think about it, I see the appeal of rigorous, well studied things, built very deliberately, on strong foundations. I guess that’s why I instinctively like things like Haskell, the kind of ML with provable bounds, information theory, etc. I’ve never messed around with Lisp-like languages, but I remember my ML-focused advisor speaking of them from when symbolic-AI and self-modifying code was all the rage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Save as PDF⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This video gave me a background on LaTeX I didn’t know about before (didn’t know Knuth was behind it): www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is H9me Assistant recommended?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s been a while since I messed with home automation, but ESPHome was amazing to program ESP microcontrollers (i.e. you most likely wouldn’t have to write any code). You can use ESPHome devices with both Home Assistant and Openhab (using MQTT, IIRC). The last I checked, it was easier to program your own functionality in OpenHAB than Home Assistant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should I be using Debian?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For servers, I usually choose the distro with a version with the EOL scheduled furthest into the future. Usually that means Ubuntu (Server) LTS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia CEO pushes back against report that his company's $100B OpenAI investment has stalled⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s still got a lot of gas. Investors still seem to be hyped about AI (e.g. the game stock downturn after Genie was announced), and that’s all that matters. Tesla has held a nonsensical value pretty much for its entire existence. Furthermore a lot of the money going into the market is passive (401ks going straight into very top-heavy index funds), propping the largest companies up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia CEO pushes back against report that his company's $100B OpenAI investment has stalled⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re firing people living HCOL countries, and hiring in LCOL countries, using AI as cover.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RAM Prices Got You Down? Try DDR3. Seriously!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Every game I’ve tried works fine. Including resource hungry games like Cyberpunk 2077. It’s my understanding that games are typically light on the CPU because they typically also try to target consoles which don’t have very good CPUs. It is noticeably slower at some (highly parallelize-able) tasks, but is fine for any game I’ve tried. The CPU is probably roughly equivalent to the CPU in a Steam Deck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RAM Prices Got You Down? Try DDR3. Seriously!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve got a PC with an i7-4770k, 32GB of RAM, and RTX 3090 that plays games just fine (and does runs local LLMs just fine too).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gold tops $5,000 for first time ever, adding to historic rally⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Price of gold is increasing faster than the dollar is declining. E.g. look at gold price charts in euros.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Dunno if that’s true or not. Generally, much more compute is used in inference than training, since you only train once, then use that model for millions of queries or whatever. However, some of these AI companies may be training many models constantly to one-up each-other and pump their stock; dunno. The “thinking” model paradigm is also transferring a lot more compute to inference. IIRC OpenAI spent $300k of compute just for inference to complete a single benchmark a few months ago (and found that, like training, exponentially increasing amounts of compute are needed for small gains in performance).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Data centers will consume 70 percent of memory chips made in 2026 - supply shortfall will cause the chip shortage to spread to other segments | Tom's Hardware⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s possible someone would make it usable. A long time ago, I bought a laptop CPU that was soldered onto a board so it would go into a normal desktop socket. Guessing there was a glut of laptop CPUs at the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨At this point, what should we do about the ICE raids? If an ICE agent breaks in without a warrant or holds you at gunpoint, what do you do?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, I’d take my fate into my own hands, and hope I could take a couple out before they took me out. Assuming I could get to a gun before they had me in their sights. Oragnaized and committed community defense could stop it from getting to that point, but the people participating also have to be prepared to die for their community.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if the Internet Goes Down? - 15 Jan, 7PM CET⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In my area, some people put small solar nodes on top of high buildings (office, university, and apartment). The node on my roof can directly communicate with one of these nodes ~20km away. Pretty crazy tor something that can run indefinitely on a 18650 battery and small solar panel. I’ve heard some people just place “guerilla nodes” to extend coverage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Definitely the safest source for advice⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I always thought it was pleasant. Kinda like MXE. Have to be careful to get the ones with no other active ingredients though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Going to a Protest? Don't Bring Your Phone Without Doing This First⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I’m guessing it’s so if you “hide” the network, it will still connect to it. Anyone can scan these advertisements, then go to wigle.net and likely get a good idea of where you live/work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Going to a Protest? Don't Bring Your Phone Without Doing This First⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Modern phones rotate random MAC addresses. For WiFi, capturing SSID probes can be enough to track somebody though (some phones also have some mitigation for that too, like not probing for an SSID after it hasn’t been seen for some amount of time). Even when turned off, many phones, including iPhones, turn into BLE beacons similar to AirTags, which can be used to track you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI insiders seek to poison the data that feeds them⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I once saw an old lecture where the guy working on Yahoo spam filters noticed that spammers would create accounts to mark their own spam messages as not spam (in an attempt to trick the spam filters; I guess a kind of a Sybil attack), and because the way the SPAM filtering models were created and used, it made the SPAM filtering more effective. It’s possible that wider variety of “poisoned” data can actually help improve models.