Comment on
Why don't compasses have just two Cardinal directions (North, East, -North, -East)?
I think the idea of directions came before the idea of negative.
Comment on
Why don't compasses have just two Cardinal directions (North, East, -North, -East)?
I think the idea of directions came before the idea of negative.
Comment on
How long do we have before PCs get locked bootloaders and corporations ban installation of "non-approved" software? (for context: Google is restricting sideloading worldwide on Android ETA 2027)
It's called secure boot and it's been around for over 10 years now.
Comment on
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.
Comment on
The Pebble Has Been Brought Back
Reply in thread
Yeah the mobile app is open source too https://github.com/pebble-dev/mobile-app
Comment on
🧍♂️rule
OMG is that Horridus, the most complete Triceratops fossil known?
Comment on
‘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
Comment on
China's banking turmoil: 40 banks vanish in one week as crisis in the property sector deepens
Thank god we have crypto bros like Sigma G and Sina_21st to get the inside scoop on the Chinese rural bank loan crisis.
Comment on
YSK: Extreme wealth inequality is baked in to the system
Nah I'm built different.
Comment on
Why is DRM music a thing?
Does it exist anymore? iTunes went DRM free in 2009. Bandcamp is DRM free. Even streaming services can be readily downloaded from with alternative clients. Who's still selling DRM'd music?
Comment on
Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM
I have 4x 6TB HDDs in my NAS. Around 5 years ago I decided to simply replace any dead drives with 6TB ones instead of my previous strategy of slowly upgrading their size. I figured I could swap to 8TB 2.5" SATA SSDs that had just started to exist and would surely only get cheaper in the future...
Comment on
Linus Torvalds Begins Expressing Regrets Merging Bcachefs
Reply in thread
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.
Comment on
Apache2 attack helicopter
Reply in thread
Comment on
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.
Comment on
What are your red flags for job interviews?
"So it's like a pyramid, but upside down"
Comment on
external nvme ssd no faster than sd-card
TLC flash and no DRAM will do that. 😢
Comment on
HBO should use a different bumper for streaming.
They should bring back the original https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPYbzfwIJRA
Comment on
GamersNexus responds to Linus Sebastian's WAN Show segment
Reply in thread
Informing the subject of an investigation and requesting comment to the allegations is considered proper journalism. Otherwise it comes off more as an attack.
Comment on
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.
Comment on
'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers'
Reply in thread
They're still at it, they bought Campo Santo (Firewatch Devs) in 2018 and now their game In The Valley of Gods is never gonna happen, they worked on Alyx instead.
They poached a bunch of folks from Hopoo Games recently too.
Comment on
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.