sobchak
@sobchak@programming.dev
- Comment on Nearly a quarter of U.S. households live paycheck to paycheck, report finds 4 hours 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 10 hours 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 1 day ago:
I’m guessing he got his bribes.
- Comment on Just seen the latest American Opinion polls. 1 day 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. 1 day 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 3 days 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? 4 days 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 week 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 week 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 week ago:
Interesting, didn’t know that’s how modern browsers worked. Guess my understanding was outdated from the HTTP/1 standard.
- 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 week ago:
Is it just the HTML that should be under 14kb? I think script, CSS, and image (except embedded SVGs) are separate requests? So these should individually be under 14kb to get the benefit?
- Comment on Death of beloved neighborhood cat sparks outrage against robotaxis in San Francisco 1 week ago:
I believe these cars drive on the same roads all day, whereas people are likely to be driving in and out of areas these systems are not familiar with. I suppose a good comparison would be of a taxi driver that only operates in the same area as the driverless cars, if that exists.
- Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops 1 week ago:
His company bought puts. They are less risky, because you don’t need to maintain margin. What you pay to buy them is all you can lose.
- Comment on YSK before you buy a replacement for your cellphone that has stopped charging, buy the $10 cleaning kits and spend the time deep cleaning the phone's charging port. 2 weeks ago:
I used to use these, but I think they contributed to my charging port failing, so I just try to use wireless for everything. I’ve read of other people that had the same issue. I think the cause was electrical arcs when attaching and detaching. Or maybe ferreous shavings getting in the pins. Whatever it was, it damaged in the charging circuit.
- Comment on ICE's 'Frightening' Facial Recognition App is Scanning US Citizens Without Their Consent 2 weeks ago:
The judiciary “interprets” the constitution. Trump filled the judiciary with loyalist or otherwise ideologically aligned judges during this term and his previous. The supreme court ruled last year that the president has immunity, and the president has the ability to pardon people, so it seems the administration is pretty much “above the law.” Even when the courts do push back, they’re acting like they’re powerless, and the admin’s tactics seems to be just ignoring, stalling, or taking the “ain’t no rules says a dog can’t play basketball” approach to working around the courts. Yes, the constitution has been severely weakened, and will probably continue to weaken.
- Comment on Why have so many services started using single-factor passwordless authentication in the last little while? 2 weeks ago:
I think to reduce friction for gaining new users.
- Comment on My collection is growing 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, if I was a demon, I’d probably invest in surveillance, private prison companies, and whatever companies supply law enforcement equipment.
- Comment on How often do you update software on your servers? 2 weeks ago:
Ain’t broke and I can’t be bothered to update. Not accessible publicly either. It also runs some software with very specific and brittle dependencies and I don’t care to risk breaking it. If distro is EOL (probably is) then it’d be a pretty time consuming getting everything set up again.
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 2 weeks ago:
That would be nice. I don’t know how to do that other than programming it yourself with something like langgraph.
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, IDK. I’m still in gold and dunno what to switch to. Gold will likely fall with stocks if we go into a recession, which I think we will (on the other hand if they print tons of money, which is likely, that’s positive for gold). I don’t see anything I’m comfortable with switching to yet.
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 2 weeks ago:
I have enough money (for now). Divested from all tech during inauguration funding news, invested in European defence companies, and then just gold because all the crazy uncertainty about everything. Still made pretty good gains, but not as much as if I stayed in tech.
- Comment on How often do you update software on your servers? 2 weeks ago:
When something doesn’t work. I.e. when an app update causes incompatibility with a service. I think I have one server that’s a few years without an update (distro version may actually be EOL for all I know).
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 2 weeks ago:
I don’t invest in these companies on principle. I ain’t going to fund the rise of fascism for stock gains. That won’t help me when I’m shot dead or in a camp.
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 2 weeks ago:
They’re OK. It’s kinda amazing how much lossy data can be compressed into a 12GB model. They don’t really start to get comparable to the large frontier models until 70B+ parameters, and you would need serious hardware to run those.
- Comment on PC Master Race 2 weeks ago:
You can plug a PC into a TV and even use Xbox and PS controllers if you like. Can have the PC auto start Steam in Big Screen mode so you’d seldom need to use a mouse+KB (trackballs or keyboards with trackpads are best in this scenario). Nothing wrong with console gaming though (well, besides supporting all the non-free software, locked-down systems, and shit companies; but most games you likely play are these as well).
- Comment on Quantum Attacks on encryption will probably be feasible by 2030 2 weeks ago:
IonQ’s timeline doesn’t look realistic. Perhaps IBM’s is; idk anything about this space. I see it’s been 6 years since quantum advantage has been demonstrated, but nothing useful has been done yet. Hard to speculate on timelines when the tech is still in its infancy.
- Comment on Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With 3 weeks ago:
They invest in things they think they will be able to sell later for a higher price. Expected consumption is sometimes part of their calculations. But, they are increasingly not in touch with reality (see blockchain, metaverse, Tesla, etc). Sometimes they knowingly take a loss to gain power over the masses (Twitter, Washington Post). They are also powerful enough to induce consumption (bribe governments for contracts, laws, bailouts, and regulations that ensure their investments will be fruitful). They are powerful enough to heavily influence which politicians will get elected, choosing who they want to bribe. They are powerful enough to force the businesses they are invested in to buy/sell to each other. The largest, most profitable companies, produce nearly nothing, they use their positions of being near-monopolies to extract rent (i.e. enshittification/technofeudalism).
- Comment on Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With 3 weeks ago:
The problem is the capitalist investor class, by and large, determines what work will be done, what kinds of jobs there will be, and who will work those jobs. They are becoming increasingly out of touch with reality as their wealth and power grows and seem to be trying to mold the world into something, somewhere along the lines of what Curtis Yarven advocates for, that most people would consider very dystopian.
This discussion is also ignoring the fact that currently, 95% of AI projects fail, and studies show that LLM use hurts the productivity of programmers. But yeah, there will almost surely be breakthroughs in the future that will produce more useful AI tech; nobody knows what the timeline for that is though.
- Comment on From the outside looking in 3 weeks ago:
As an American, since I was a teenager, I always thought Canada or the Scandinavian countries would be better places to live (mostly due to cannabis laws and healthcare). I grew up in rural US, so was aware of high levels of bigotry and poverty, but yeah, it seems to be getting worse. Rights have been getting eroded since W (except LGBT rights, until MAGA). The economy, for the working class, has been in decline since I’ve been alive. We seem to be going through a corpo-fascist self-coup now, so it’s definitely worse. In terms of foreign meddling, I don’t think much has changed since I’ve been alive until this Trump term. Disregarding LBGT acceptance, I think the late 90s were peak. Regarding WASP men, I think the 50s may have been the peak. The country was built on genocide and slavery in many uniquely brutal ways, so don’t think it was really “great” until the mid 1900s, but not even sure it was comparatively great to other peer countries back then, in anything other than having a large economy and plentiful resources to be exploited.
