Spyke

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What is the worst IT setup you have seen at a company?

My partner worked for a local council. They reset your password every 90 days which prevented you from logging in via the VPN remotely. To fix it you'd call IT and they'll demand you tell them your current password and new password so they can change it themselves on your behalf.

Even worse, requesting a work iphone meant filling out an IT support ticket. So that IT could set up your phone for you, the ticket demanded your work domain username and password, along with your personal apple account username and password.

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‘R-tarded’ is a slur, and I’m sick of otherwise “liberal” people going along with the right’s move to renormalize it

I've stopped using it as people have pointed out it's hurtful, but I've never fully understood why. To me it's in the same group as idiot, fool, lunatic, imbecile and cretin. Words that aren't used to describe conditions anymore, only used as insults. While they can be used with hatred, they can also be used in a teasing way with friends. To me it doesn't reach the level of racist, sexist and homophobic slurs.

I wanted to learn more and found a paper that makes the case that ableist insults are slurs. Download it here

linux

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Linus Torvalds Begins Expressing Regrets Merging Bcachefs

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ZFS doesn't have fsck because it already does the equivalent during import, reads and scrubs. Since it's CoW and transaction based, it can rollback to a good state after power loss. So not only does it automatically check and fix things, it's less likely to have a problem from power loss in the first place. I've used it on a home NAS for 10 years, survived many power outages without a UPS. Of course things can go terribly wrong and you end up with an unrecoverable dataset, and a UPS isn't a bad idea for any computer if you want reliability.

Totally agree about mainline kernel inclusion, just makes everything easier and ZFS will always be a weird add-on in Linux.

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CopyParty is kind of a great file server

I fucking love copyparty. It starts simple enough but then the millions of options and configs let you twist it into exactly what you need.

As someone that runs a server OS that doesn't support docker, it is very refreshing to see a single binary project. It has a focus on being administrator friendly thats really fallen out of fashion these days.

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Impressive examples of how dramatically CRT TV's transformed older pixel art

Great video, though I think it's overstated how on-purpose these things were. I was only playing games in the 90s, but my understanding is the art was mostly authored on deluxe paint / on various PC systems/monitors. While also CRT, they would have much higher fidelity. I don't know how much artists were drawing, compiling for the console and viewing on a TV to make pixel by pixel adjustments. Not to mention TVs varied wildly in quality, so it's not like artists were 'tuning' their pixels for a particular CRT fuzz.

There was more of a general understanding that the TV looked worse, and to not pack key details into single pixels. Stuff like dithering and drawing shadows were existing techniques in print, and still effective today on LCDs when you render at the correct resolution.

I think CRTs were just better at displaying low resolutions generally. Watching a DVD on CRT looks amazing, on a 4k LCD it looks terrible. Even modern 3D games look amazing on a CRT.

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How does AI use so much power?

OpenAI noticed that Generative Pre-trained Transformers get better when you make them bigger. GPT-1 had 120 million parameters. GPT-2 bumped it up to 1.5 billion. GPT-3 grew to 175 billion. Now we have models with over 300 billion.

To run, every generated word requires doing math with every parameter, which nowadays is a massive amount of work, running on the most power hungry top of the line chips.

There are efforts to make smaller models that are still effective, but we are still in the range of 7-30 billion to get anything useful out of them.