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sobchak

@ sobchak @programming.dev

Posts
20
Comments
541
Joined
10 mo. ago

  • How often do you update software on your servers?

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  • 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).

  • Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter

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  • 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.

  • Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter

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  • 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.

  • If a Great Depression happened again, would people still stand together like they did during the penny auctions?

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  • Not in the same way. There is still some anti-eviction resistance that goes on today. It's rare and never successful in undoing evictions though. For the most part, I think the US is too individualistic, and the methods of preventing and breaking solidarity too refined for broad action to be successful. I imagine that during a depression, most desperate people would rather join the feds to feed their family by committing violence against others. Even now, ICE received 150k applications in a single week, and people aren't anywhere near as desperate as they'd be in a depression. The government would have to basically collapse, and even then we'd probably end up more like the poor countries ruled by gangs and warlords that dangle the possibility of escaping poverty in exchange for extreme violence.

    Labor solidarity decreased under Hoover, and only started increasing under FDR with a lot of government support. I'm skeptical we'll ever have free and fair elections again, so I don't envision a pro-union government anytime soon.

  • In contrast to the opinion of most people here, AI is actually great.

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  • I have even used it to write a message to a friend who lost their son to cancer...

    Dystopian.

  • PC Master Race

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  • 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).

  • As a backend developer, where do I even start with frontend? Feeling major choice paralysis

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  • Web components exist.

  • As a backend developer, where do I even start with frontend? Feeling major choice paralysis

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  • Kagi, DDG, and Google Search don't use frontend frameworks. Anything that cares about being optimized generally won't.

  • Quantum Attacks on encryption will probably be feasible by 2030

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  • 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.

  • Texas sues Tylenol company over autism claims

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  • I think a Republican voting official bought Dominion recently; they were likely pressured by the current admin to sell.

  • Deleted

    Signal president Meredith Whittaker says they had no choice but to use AWS, and that's a problem

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  • I'm skeptical of this claim. Signal doesn't seem like it'd be very compute-heavy, doesn't seem like text and voice would be very network-heavy, and I don't think video is used very much. If us-east-1 going down took out most their services, it doesn't seem like they're leveraging AWSs multi-region features very well anyways. It wouldn't be too hard to just rent or co-locate hardware in multiple non-hyperscalar data-centers around the world, and run a multi-zone, highly available k8s cluster. Would probably be cheaper and more robust too. I don't have experience with multi-zone k8s, but I was the sole person responsible for deploying and maintaining a highly-available single-datacenter k8s cluster on rented hardware, and it wasn't even my primary job (was a full-stack engineer and team-lead), If I could do it, I don't think they'd need to try to hire world's top experts or anything. Coincidentally, the provider was UpCloud, which is a European company, and in 8 years of using them, I don't recall seeing a single node we had become unresponsive for more than 5 minutes, and I'm not even sure those times were on UpCloud's end.

  • Tile/AirTag/Chipolo tracker recommendations for GrapheneOS?

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  • Would have to be charged every day or few. The BLE beacon tag batteries can last a year. I suppose one could install a dynamo and hook it up to that (would be more noticeable to thieves though).

  • Fascist Paramilitary invades school, abducts a mother and does who knows what with the child. [Chicago]

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  • ICE does wear stuff that says "police" now, sometimes. Regular police typically have identifying text or badges indicating the county or city the work for (and badge numbers and, often, name). These people just have vests that say "Police: Federal Agent." Police in sanctuary cities are barred from assisting ICE in abducting people. Though I'd guess many of the officers would be happy to do it.

  • Fucking idiots

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  • Punishment as deterrence has some validity too. But past a certain point, amping up the punishment isn't going deter any more people, and could interfere with rehabilitation. Most US sentences are well beyond that point though. Restorative justice is also important, but shouldn't put the perpetrator in anything like an indentured servitude situation where they'd be unable to support themselves.

  • When was the last time you actually laughed while playing a game?

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  • Just started playing Wolfenstein: New Colossus for the first time, and everything is just so over the top, it's funny. The game starts you out in a wheel chair, where you roll through a u-boat, shooting Nazis with an automatic pistol.

  • What's the most impressive video game mod you've ever come across?

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  • Star Trek New Horizons for Stellaris. Best Star Trek game I've played.

  • How important is a VPN to you?

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  • I use a VPN for bittorrent and to access content that's inaccessible in my area. For privacy, I use Tor. Most the time, I don't use a a VPN or Tor at all. I might start using a VPN all the time with how bad surveillance is getting. I trust my VPN more than my ISP being able to see every IP I exchange data with.

  • Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With

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  • 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).

  • Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With

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  • 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.