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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Hell, pass init=/bin/yes and you’ll see even more greatly reduced RAM usage!

    ❯ ps aux | grep /usr/lib/sys | awk '{print $6}' | sed 's/$/+/' | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/+$/\n/' | bc
    266516
    

    So that’s 260 MiB of RSS (assuming no shared libs which is certainly false) for:

    • Daemon manager
    • Syslog daemon
    • DNS daemon (which I need and would have to replace with dnsmasq if it did not exist)
    • udev daemon
    • network daemon
    • login daemon
    • VM daemon (ever hear of the principle of least privilege?)
    • user daemon manager (I STG anyone who writes a user daemon by doing nohup & needs to be fired into the sun. pkill is not the tool I should have to use to manage my user’s daemons)

    For comparison the web page I’m writing this on uses 117 MiB, about half. I’ll very gladly make the tradeoff of two sh.itjust.works tabs for one systemd suite. Or did you send that comment using curl because web browsers are bloated?

    For another comparison 200 MiB of RAM is less than two dollars at current prices. I don’t value my time so low that I’ll avoid spending two bucks by spend hours debugging whatever bash scripting spaghetti hell other init systems cling onto to avoid “bloat”. I’ve done it, don’t miss it.


  • Yeah. What kind of GenAI would be so shitty to render something with so many artifacts, yet coherent enough to render 24 words that perfectly map to their direct French translation? But somehow the pictures are half jumbled to the point that the picture of a tail looks like a circle? Which is the opposite way GenAI normally jumbles things, text is always the first to become undecipherable.

    The only way for this to be GenAI would be with close supervision, it’s not impossible but at that point it would have been much less effort for a much better result to edit English text onto an actual French children’s book.

    Anyway who gives a shit but the superior attitude of the people here who think they are so clever pisses me off lol


  • On the one hand, deanonimization attacks are never entirely avoidable on unhardened targets and this one isn’t particularly sophisticated and leaks relatively little information.

    On the other hand deanonimization attacks are always bad and it’s a good reminder to people of the risks they are taking. This is also slightly non-obvious behavior, even if it makes sense to the technically competent, as something like an IP grabber normally requires user interaction such as clicking a link. It’s also a vector that CF might be able to mitigate by patching the ability to query a given cache directly.


  • Any source on any significant amount of children wasting time talking to AIs, or just anecdotes and a bad case of “youth these days”?

    The whole concept smells like fringe NEET 4chan-adjacent behavior. LLMs aren’t capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection, and anyone who would project companionship onto these soulless computer programs obviously has preexisting and severe mental issues (relying on AIs to fill a void in human connection is certainly unhealthy but a symptom, not the root cause).

    The potential market for these AIs will never be any bigger than the market for anime waifu body pillows, because it’s same audience, different decade. Literally everyone else thinks AI girlfriends and body pillow waifus are weird as all hell, and that’s not going to change because neurotypical people want and need human connection and can tell the difference between a rock with googly eyes and a friend.

    Also arguably a rock with googly eyes has more charm and personality than Zuck’s horror show.



  • Oh they definitely exist. At a high level the bullshit is driven by malicious greed, but there are also people who are naive and ignorant and hopeful enough to hear that drivel and truly believe in it.

    Like when Microsoft shoves GPT4 into notepad.exe. Obviously a terrible terrible product from a UX/CX perspective. But also, extremely expensive for Microsoft right? They don’t gain anything by stuffing their products with useless annoying features that eat expensive cloud compute like a kid eats candy. That only happens because their management people truly believe, honest to god, that this is a sound business strategy, which would only be the case if they are completely misunderstanding what GPT4 is and could be and actually think that future improvements would be so great that there is a path to mass monetization somehow.


  • Uncut diamond is a good way to put it.

    The scenario, world building, graphics, and acting are world-class. Combat was decent. Most side-quests were forgettable and clearly worse than the main quest. The open-world was mechanically massively underwhelming, especially considering TW3 came out five years earlier.

    This game received a lot of love and took a long time to make, but failed to achieve in some key areas. CDPR didn’t have the means to do what R* or Larian could, and that’s fine. I can’t help but feel that if these developers had put the same time and energy into a (semi) closed world à la Mass Effect or Deus Ex, not having to spend so much time filling in a huge open world map would have allowed them to make the whole game as tight and polished as the main quest stuff, and this could have been the best game of the decade or close to it. Only downside is it doesn’t tick the mandatory “Open World” box for AAA games, but does anyone actually care if the RPG elements are good? Mass Effects fans would surely disagree.


  • Whether it’s 48 or 52 % is an immaterial difference. Every other American who voted, voted for Trump. The rest don’t seem to care either way. He has very broad popular assent and is as popular as Harris give or take a margin of error.

    Everyone is lasered-focused on the EC because it makes all the difference for the practicalities, but if one is to make a broad judgement of whether Trump won fair and square the answer is “yeah, mostly”. Further proof is the fact that the House is probably going to be his as well.

    Americans now bear the collective responsibility for the horrors of the next 4(+?) years. Do not make the mistake of blaming the popular will of outright fascism on institutional failures, because institutions didn’t force half of Americans to vote for the fascist, again.


  • Oh god, I forgot you .ml fuckmuppets are incapable of maintaining a civil tone.

    Europe is a single market. While it does import goods from elsewhere (namely Asia), from what I remember that does not nearly make up for the overall downwards trend of consumption & emissions.

    Developing countries are increasing their emissions as they increase their purchasing power. While there is certainly a debate to be held over the details of that, I do not see how that invalidates my point that renewables don’t just serve to increase overall power consumption.

    However if you’re thinking of replying with the same lip you just gave me I suggest instead of responding to my comment, you take your teenage attitude and shove it somewhere the sun don’t shine.



  • Kids finish school around 3 pm where I live. They have time to do their extracurricular activities (partially) during daytime even in the dead of winter. So of course it’s the mornings they find dreadful. If school finished around 5-6 pm I think they’d be miserable then as well.

    Speaking of which, I’m about to end my work day and the sun is setting right now. FML.


  • Yes it would. I, like most 21st century humans, wake up for work and have free time after work.

    In practice for my relatively northern latitude this means I get a little bit of daylight before work (except perhaps around december/january), but winter time is very specifically designed so that today the sun will set exactly 6 minutes before I end my work day.

    Were we to keep permanent DST I would get an hour of free time in the daylight today, and at least a little bit of light outside for all winter except perhaps for a month around December. As it stands, I do not get any free time in sunlight for 5 days a week for the entire duration of ST. The switch to ST means “bye-bye sun” and I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I FUCKING HATE IT.

    The 24 hour clock is a made up construct. So are business hours. But if we already agreed to change one of these twice a year, can we make it so that it is not optimized to trap me inside for the entire duration of daytime???


  • He was really popular on twitter, and if he says mastodon’s worse despite having a smaller audience there, I trust his judgement. Literally his pinned toot.

    “First replies shown are the ones the author replied to and/or liked” seems like an obvious, simple, and transparent algorithm. Like youtube comments. Give lazy reply guys an opportunity to see without scrolling down that they aren’t as original as they think they are. The fact that this isn’t implemented in even a basic form is absolutely insane and shows a very fundamental ideological disconnect between people who want “open twitter with decent moderation” and whatever the fuck it is that the mastodon OGs/devs are trying to achieve.



  • Some people don’t want a suggestion algorithm but do want full reply federation.

    Alec from Technology Connections stopped using mastodon because of this, every post he made would get nitpicked on by 20 different people from instances who did not federate the replies with each other so each reply guy thought they were the first.

    I have a single user instance and I use a relay, but most replies are still missing if I click on a post unless I go to the original webpage.

    Lazy-federating replies when a post is viewed sounds like an obvious solution but AFAIK the mastodon devs are very opposed to this.


  • Bro I wouldn’t trust most companies not to store their only copy of super_duper_important_financial_data_2024.xlsx on an old AliExpress thumb drive attached to the CFO’s laptop in a coffee shop while he’s taking a shit.

    If your company has an actual DRP for if your datacenter catches fire or your cloud provider disappears, you are already doing better than 98 % of your competitors, and these aren’t far-fetched disaster scenarios. Maintaining an entire separate pen-and-paper shadow process, training people for it? That’s orders of magnitude more expensive than the simplest of DRPs most companies already don’t have.

    Friendly wave to all the companies currently paying millions a year extra to Broadcom/VMWare because their tools and processes are too rigid to use with literally any other hypervisor when realistically all their needs could be covered by the free tier of ProxMox and/or OpenStack.


  • For current to flow out of your house the voltage inside the house has to be slightly higher than outside. Not by much, but a little. So the inverter has a higher output voltage than line voltage by design. If everyone does this and some of the power has nowhere to go, then the average voltage goes up measurably.

    This wouldn’t be a problem if the grid had been designed to be able to bring power out of residential areas, but my casual understanding is that this doesn’t work very well with existing infrastructure, so with a bunch of extra power that has a hard time getting out the voltage keeps climbing until some inverters hit their safety shutoff.




  • It’s only fine because the panels do not do much of anything.

    When large swaths of the population become even partially self-sufficient, it’s an enormous issue for the electric grid. Again, not an issue over an occasional few hundred watts, but when whole neighborhoods cover their roofs in solar panels the following happens:

    • These (comparatively rich) people stop contributing to maintaining the grid. Half of electricity costs are distribution costs, so unless you have no net metering and a separate distribution line in your bill the rich are being subsidized by the poor to install solar capacity at home. Of course changing the billing system fixes that, but it also makes solar much less financially interesting and really pisses off people who already paid for solar and now won’t be having a positive ROI for an additional decade.
    • The panels are not remotely operable so their aggregate power generation sometimes causes enormous stress on the rest of the grid, forcing old nuclear/gas/coal PP to spin up and down much more quickly and frequently than they were designed for.
    • Locally the voltage fluctuations may be very large. Nominal where I live is 230 V, but it’s not unheard of for rich neighborhoods to be pushing 250 V on very sunny days. Then the inverters shut down automatically, but it’s always whoever happens to have the most sensitive inverter who ends up not being paid on sunny days.

    Anyways apartment solar is not really the issue here, it’s the people with 10+ panels. But there are good reasons for solar to be heavily regulated.