HamsterRage

@HamsterRage@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why did it take so damn long for humanity to "learn" how to draw/paint realistic images?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Take a look at this:

  Image

  This is in the Museum of the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome, and it comes from an ancient Roman Villa in Rome. Probably painted in the first or second century CE. There’s walls of this stuff in the museum.

  It’s not realism, but minimalistic sketches that, in many ways, outdo realism in artistic quality. To me, this looks more like something that you might find in Leonardo’s sketchbook than on the wall of on ancient Roman Villa from 1200 years earlier.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can I offer you a tan egg?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What about the Nutria? Literally named like it’s food!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When can we expect 500TB drives to be available?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is true, but…

  Moore’s Law can be thought of as an observation about the exponential growth of technology power per $ over time. So yeah, not Moore’s Law, but something like it that ordinary people can see evolving right in front of their eyes.

  So a $40 Raspberry Pi today runs benchmarks 4.76 times faster than a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer from 1978. Is that Moore’s Law? No, but the bang/$ curve probably looks similar to it over those 30 years.

  You can see a similar curve when you look at data transmission speed and volume per $ over the same time span.

  And then for storage. Going from 5 1/4" floppy disks, or effing cassette drives, back on the earliest home computers. Or the round tapes we used to cart around when I started working in the 80’s which had a capacity of around 64KB. To micro SD cards with multi-terabyte capacity today.

  Same curve.

  Does anybody care whether the storage is a tape, or a platter, or 8 platters, or circuitry? Not for this purpose.

  The implication of, “That’s not Moore’s Law”, is that the observation isn’t valid. Which is BS. Everyone understands that that the true wonderment is how your Bang/$ goes up exponentially over time.

  Even if you’re technical you have to understand that this factor drives the applications.

  Why aren’t we all still walking around with Sony Walkmans? Because small, cheap hard drives enabled the iPod. Why aren’t we all still walking around with iPods? Because cheap data volume and speed enabled streaming services.

  While none of this involves counting transistors per inch on a chip, it’s actually more important/interesting than Moore’s Law. Because it speaks to how to the power of the technology available for everyday uses is exploding over time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Someone needs to train an LLM AI on Trump's speeches. I bet the random gibberish output would be hilarious.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Back in the 70’s and 80’s there were “Travesty Generators”. You pushed some text into them and they developed linguistic rules based on probabilities determined by the text. Then you could have them generate brand new text randomly created by applying the linguistic rules developed from the source text.

  Surprisingly, they would generate “brand new” words that weren’t in the original text, but were real words. And the output matched stylistically to the input text. So you put in Shakespeare and you got out something that sounded like Shakespeare. You get the idea.

  I built one and tried running some TS Eliot through it, because stuff is, IMHO, close to gibberish to begin with. The results were disappointing. Basically because it couldn’t get any more gibberishy that the source.

  I strongly suspect that the same would happen with Trump’s gibberish. There used to be a bunch of Travesty Generators online, and you could probably try one out to see.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I this a firm and polite way to tell an opinionated coworker to stop pushing his agenda I don't care about?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s two kinds of issues: instance and pattern. The first time or two, it’s instance. You deal with those with specificity. Something like, “I would prefer not to talk about this subject with you, please stop”.

  If it persists, then it’s a pattern problem. You deal with the pattern, not the instance. “I’ve asked you not to talk about subjects like this in the pant, but you haven’t stopped. This makes me feel like you don’t respect my boundaries and it’s making it difficult for me to work with you. Why are you doing this to me?”.

  You can escalate from there, and this might involve management involvement but at least you’ll have the clarity of having made the situation clear before it gets there.

  Honestly though, unless the coworker is actually deranged, they’ll be mortified when they find out they are making you uncomfortable and they’ll stop right away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a good eli5 analogy for GenAI not "knowing" what they say?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that a good starting place to explain the concept to people would be to describe a Travesty Generator. I remember playing with one of those back in the 1980’s. If you fed it a snippet of Shakespeare, what it churned out sounded remarkably like Shakespeare, even if it created brand “new” words.

  The results were goofy, but fun because it still almost made sense.

  The most disappointing source text I ever put in was TS Eliot. The output was just about as much rubbish as the original text.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, $15 CAD/day to “roam like home”. I have an Orange eSIM that I can keep alive if I use it at least once every 6 months - with a local french number that stays mine. It costs me about $40 CAD for a 30 day - 20GB top up. My wife uses Nomad for data only, we both don’t need local numbers, and it generally costs $12 CAD for 5 GB 2 week top-up.

  So I figure about $60-70 CAD for 3 weeks travel virtually anywhere in Europe. Calls and SMS included (for one) without long distance charges. Compared to $630 for “roam like home” for two people from a Canadian carrier - doesn’t matter which one as far as I can tell.

  We both recently got new phones to be able to use eSIMs.

  And the physical SIMs stay active. No my elderly parents can call my Canadian number if there’s an emergency and it will ring through.

  In fact, on our last trip to Rome, when we used a credit card at the hotel, it was refused and then seconds later I got a text from the bank asking for confirmation on my Canadian number. I had no choice but to text “Yes” back, and that single text activated roaming for the day and cost me $15.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As a boomer (at the tail end, admittedly), I too have lived through all of these things. Plus the other thirty years of shit that happened before it.

  The world threat that was the USSR and Mutually Assured Destruction. The Vietnam War, two Gulf Wars, and 9/11.

  The “Troubles” in Ireland and IRA bombings in London. The Munich Olympics Massacre. The rise of global terrorism. The FLQ crisis. Kent State. Watergate.

  Acid rain. Leaded gas and smog.

  15%+ mortgage rates. The oil crisis. Wage and price controls. Multiple recessions. The Dot Com bubble.

  Police raids on gay clubs. Racial slurs in everyday language. Massive gender inequality.

  24" black and white TVs. It took a week to find out how your photos came out. Watching f@#$ing “Tiny Talent Time” on a Sunday afternoon because there wasn’t any else better on the other 5 channels (if that doesn’t traumatize you, nothing will).

  You had to go to a library if you wanted to look something up in an encyclopedia.

  Cars without seatbelts, crumple zones, anti-lock brakes, traction control or airbags.

  F*CK me. “No experience”. Maybe just enough to know how much better things generally are today.

  Kids always think that they know more than their parents…until they don’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The most important goal in designing software is understandability⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So write it properly from the get-go. You can get 90% of the way by naming things properly and following the Single Responsibility Principle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Truly inspirational⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Stone only makes sense for people used to pounds, shillings and pence. For instance, “This costs 3 pound, 4 shilling and 8”, and, “I weight 12 stone, 6 pounds and 3 ounces”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's take a quick look at how software was built in the MS-DOS era: Borland Pascal 7.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If I remember correctly, Objects were introduced in Turbo Pascal 5.5, not version 7.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you call in English⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  “Row headers” seems wrong to me. Maybe “row labels”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Over 65 years ago this month, researchers ran the first FORTRAN program⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  FORTRAN IV was the first language I learned to program in. Punch cards!!!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does "Selfhosted" mean you actually have a server at home?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, there are specific hardware configurations that are designed to be servers. They probably don’t have graphics cards but do have multiple CPUs, and are often configured to run many active processes at the same time.

  But for the most part, “server” is more related to the OS configuration. No GUI, strip out all the software you don’t need, like browsers, and leave just the software you need to do the job that the server is going to do.

  As to updates, this also becomes much simpler since you don’t have a lot of the crap that has vulnerabilities. I helped manage comuter department with about 30 servers, many of which were running Windows (gag!). One of the jobs was to go through the huge list of Microsoft patches every few months. The vast majority of which, “require a user to browse to a certain website” in order to activate. Since we simply didn’t have anyone using browsers on them, we could ignore those patches until we did a big “catch up” patch once a year or so.

  Our Unix servers, HP-UX or AIX, simply didn’t have the same kind of patches coming out. Some of them ran for years without a reboot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The future of back-end development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Kotlin is a very easy transition, and it sorts out a ton of issues that you find in Java. Certainly easier than moving to Rust.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trying to get release and testing in sync⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It seems to me that you’re problem is that your definition of “freeze” seems to allow fixes for QA issues. So, not a freeze at all if the idea is to give QA a chance to have a clean testing framework on Wednesday.

  I see two alternatives:

  • Make Tuesday a true freeze. Any defects found by QA drop that feature out of the Thursday release.

  • Stop “throwing features over the wall” to QA. Make the QA testers/process part of the development team/process. Features are considered “done” and ready for submission to production only once tested. Freeze on Thursday morning with only integration testing to be done before release.

  In truth, both approaches yield the same results. If programmers have to get it right by Tuesday, then they’ll need to work more closely with QA during development. Eventually, the Wednesday testing becomes little more than a rubber stamp and they’ll push to move the freeze back to Wednesday.

  Most importantly it seems that in this situation the “definition of done”, has to be more than just “coding completed”.