Ian Douglas Scott

@khm I'm not sure any BSD currently has support for graphics acceleration on any ARM chip's integrated GPU.

@khm NetBSD seems to run fairly well on the Pinebook Pro for me, with a USB wifi adapter that works better than the driver for the builtin in one, and without accelerated graphics, which it lacks a driver for. Accelerated OpenGL is supported on Linux. Vulkan requires a newer Rockchip processor. The RISC OS port sounds neat too, though it isn't free; I haven't tried it: https://www.riscoscomputers.co.uk/PinebokPro.shtml

@theorangetheme@en.osm.town @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social Hm, surely in space you could do vacuum tubes without the tubes? Maybe that's the secret to making orbital AI data centers viable. No hum in space though.

@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social The cost of 1940s analog computers but without the accuracy.

@goldstein@im-in.space impl !Evil for Type {}

@Nonilex@masto.ai Ah, a new ceasefire to the fighting during the ceasefire negotiated to end the fighting during the first ceasefire. Can you brute force your way to a Nobel peace prize by ceasefiremaxxing?

@mos_8502@studio8502.ca @rl_dane@polymaths.social @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social I considered trying to connect a serial mouse to the Game Boy Advance, but it doesn't support the right baud rate. (Maybe could bit bang it since it's a slow baud rate and the ARM7TDMI isn't that slow? Not something I'm really familiar with.)

@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social For the worst possible experience, someone should make power bar with 26 Nema 5-20 plugs powered by a 22 gauge suicide cord.

@CStamp@mastodon.social @octothorpe@mastodon.online Yeah, if ID requirements apply to anyone in the world making a call with a US area code, it should help (but have other unintended and/or intended consequences). But if it's still possible for someone outside the US to get a US VOIP number, or send calls or texts from a shared number they don't specifically own, without much verification... the benefit is probably pretty minimal?

@inthehands@hachyderm.io @hasani@my-spaces.social "Yeah, but our thousand year reich will definitely last longer than the last one!" People in power may have a rational interest in being conservative (and maintaining the system that is doing well for them), but in contemporary America that probably would mean supporting mainstream Democrats. Radical change is a bit risky if everything is already great for you. But when the people in power aren't there because of merit, but have convinced themselves they are, they aren't necessarily paragons of stratigic genius.

@SwiftOnSecurity@infosec.exchange Gets up at dawn every day to punch a cliff racer to death then eat it raw for breakfast.

@mcc@mastodon.social Here in California there's some nice weather at the moment. Though we'll see how bad furnace-temperature heat spells and choking wildfire smoke are this season.

@mcc@mastodon.social Paper books can be better for reading outside under a tree on a sunny day though.

@gwynnion Soon: "Iran reports entire US fleet sunk." "Trump claims this is fake news. Will nuke moon if any US ship attacked. Blames Hillary Clinton's use of windmills to rig election."

Everyone likes analogies to Dutch tulip mania, but maybe in some cases we should consider comparing things to the Scottish Darien scheme.

(A lot of the capital in Scotland was invested in a scheme to colonize Panama. Which went... about as well as you'd expect a Scottish colony in Panama to go. This is cited as a motivation for the Acts of Union, and hence a reason why there is no longer a Kingdom of Scotland.)

@IrrationalMethod@social.coop @LilahTovMoon@tech.lgbt And often quite salty.

@jgg@qoto.org Lifted pickup trucks in particular I suppose are "useful" for certain off-road conditions, but more dangerous, less reliable, and less efficient in absolutely every other condition. Though even then *practical* uses seem pretty rare since you don't see the Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management running a fleet of lifted trucks. Pickup trucks in general certainly have their uses. Though probably less than a lot of people owning them think. They may be surprised by what they can fit in a Corolla with the seats folded town. And then some of those uses may be just as well served by a kei truck as a Ford F.

@maddy@tech.lgbt Clearly operating system design peaked with the Amiga.

If we simply require all pickup trucks to be painted in neon pick and green stripes and have a speed limiter that prevents driving over 55 MPH, it would suddenly become a lot less common for people to use a lifted pickup truck just to commute and buy groceries, while they'd still be available to anyone who actually needs one.

All this technology, and we're focusing our efforts on the wrong thing.

The world's governments need to join together to start a collaborative project to bring josephoartigasia monesi back from extinction. The world need bull-sized rodents!

I'm sure such a venture would have no unforeseen consequences.

Not the most topical issue at the moment, but the concept of a metaverse real estate market could only reasonably be conceived by a non-corporal being outside of space and time trying to re-invent real estate without really *understanding* any of the three terms in the phrase "location, location, location", nor understanding the concept of a physical commute that traverses space over a period of time.

Ah, has Copilot told Microsoft how to fix Github, so today it won't be gaslighting me into thinking I didn't write a PR by having it not appear in the list of PRs, like it did yesterday?

(I do *feel* like I recall Github working better before it was bought by a major cloud company...)

@chrisford @DJGummikuh @david_chisnall And that's before you even get to Goodhart's Law. If a big tech company somehow found that use of a particular resource, like generative AI tokens, were somehow a startlingly good metric of productivity, it would cease to be a good metric of anything the moment they announce would be judging all their developers based on it.

The problem with reading commentary on The Epic of Gilgamesh is that you get to learn that the original does also sorts of neat tricks with multiple meanings, alliteration, packing a lot of detail into just a few words, and such that aren't translatable, but you aren't exactly going to learn *Assyrian* to properly appreciate it.

@DJGummikuh @david_chisnall Everyone: "Lines of code is the worst way to measure developer productivity." Jensen Huang: "Hold my GPU. Actually..."

@tpfto I think the Arden Shakespere books are often around half footnotes. Seems to work well there. Something else comes to mind but I can't member what book it is. Half the page being footnotes is perfectly good when they're useful/important to understanding the texts. Endnotes are maybe okay if they're exclusively citations. But not when you need to flip to the back of the book just to see if this one is a citation or some important additional information. And especially not helpful to have to flip to the endnotes in the Poetic Edda just to know that a particular name is one of the names for Thor.

As your duly elected god emperor, I vow to make endnotes illegal. Why would I want to keep flipping back and forth to the back of the book? Have you people not heard of footnotes?

@voided Trying to think of the most cursed "everything is a..." to design an OS around. "Everything is a process" where every hardware device is represented by one or more virtual processes? SIGTERM sends a process to the recycle bin while SIGKILL deletes it completely. "Everything is a spreadsheet" also know as "ring 0 Microsoft Excel".

Or actually, this might be lower *power* than the hardware typically used. Never mix up power and energy when making a wish from a genie.

(If you are concerned about power usage, this would make it *much* worse.)

"What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything?" I ask the language model running on a Pentium with 16 MB of RAM and a tape autoloader to use as swap.

@jonmsterling This is all true of software development too (that people would like to pretend reviews don't depend on trust in good faith, but they really do), except for the fact we were already screwed since nation state actors already have a potential interest in introducing vulnerabilities. But hey, you can always make an adversarial situation even worse, right? A lot of purported applications across different fields probably run into similar issues.

There's something I find kind of inspiring about Humanistic Judaism, founded by Rabbi Sherwin Wine in the 60s as a non-theistic "religion" that adapts traditional practices to focus on how humans, not some personal god, have shaped the culture and history of the Jewish people. But I don't really care much for "cultural Christianity", nor has that been a big part of my life beyond things like highly secularized conceptions of Christmas and Easter.

So who wants to join me in founding a church where the liturgy is based on Anglo-Scottish border ballads about outlaws and fairies?

(I suppose various forms of neopaganism are just the more theistic form of the same idea. Though often also weak on historicity, since in many places we have extremely fragmentary evidence for what the pre-Christian religious practices were actually like.)

Actually writing music and lyrics was starting to become a professional and commercial enterprise (to an extent, for some music) as soon as the printing press was introduced. But traditionally everyone who performed music or told stories (often the same thing) added a little (or not so little) bit of themself to their performance, intentionally and unintentionally. There wasn't such a strong binary between "creators" and "consumers" of artistic expression. All the more so in oral traditions before the printing press and before writing. In some ways, that's the very *opposite* of what one adds to a work by providing a prompt to a generative model. Often the most human aspect of art is the details. Play music for yourself and people around you, even if no one would care to pay for it. Write stories or tell them to people around you even if they aren't worth publishing. You don't have to be good at it. You don't need some special technology to do these things. You already can express things that are more "artistic" than anything out of a generative model. That's what makes you human.

The way people talk about purported benefits of generative AI for "democratizing" art should probably make us reflect on how our world perceives all creative endeavors in an increasingly professionalized and commercialized way. Which has been going on for a long time.

Consider music. Before the phonograph, creating music wasn't exclusively or primarily the work of professionals. Professional musicians of one sort of another have existed for a *very* long time, but the average person's experience of music often involved them or other non-professionals singing and/or playing an instrument.

If you listen to some 1920s field recording of a folk song in a remote part of Appalachia, you might not care to buy an album by that performer even if they had a modern recording studio. Most people weren't experts at singing or playing instruments. But they didn't need to be.

A lot of resources on learning instruments (especially "classical" instruments) assume you want to get good enough to perform professionally. But you don't have to.

You don't need an AI to play or compose a song. There are plenty of instruments you can buy for less than what that AI will cost (at least once they're actually charging enough to not lose money). If you don't spend long hours in serious practice, perhaps no one will want to listen to your music, especially if that means paying for a recording. If you create it with AI, no one will care either. But art doesn't have to be about that.

@harld@masto.ai To be fair, I get a similar outcome when I try to run.

"'C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\10.0.28000.0\x64" seems like a kind of cursed path for a Windows 11 SDK on a 64-bit system...

Paths like "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu" seems like the most intuitive thing in comparison.

2030s: Repeated mistakes by US solidify China as the world's leading economic superpower.
2040s-2050s: Chinese demographic crisis leads to India leading the world.
2060s-2070s: Brazilian world domination.
2080s-2090s: Human control of Brazil falls after repeated capybara revolts; Nigeria becomes leading economic power.
2100: Balkan states settle differences and unify. The Balkan Empire is unstoppable.

Most two millennium old vampires have probably given up on any messianic prophesies by this point, but the ones who haven't are *intense*.

Mark 9:1 really means that there are some Judean vampires from the first century CE (or earlier) who will yet live (for certain definitions of "live") to see the end of times. And killing ancient vampires will hasten the arrival of the second coming.

Now that's a setup for some wonderful blasphemy...

@zeux@mastodon.gamedev.place Note that outdoor air cooling of your computer at Zion National Park may yield variable results depending on the season.

Don't forget to use `-nostdinc` when abusing the C preprocessor to dubious ends.

Congratulations to human civilization for managing to not destroy itself before Artemis II returned to Earth. Let's keep it up, can we?

(Also to the space capsule for making it back safely without burning up, but that was a little less impressive, really.)

@Catvalente The other thing with this is that "hallucinate" implies that producing accurate output without fabrications is the normal way an LLM works, and "hallucination" is some failure of this that may be treatable. No. Fabricating linguistically plausible output is exactly what we expect a "language model" to do. The technology, with some tuning, may do surprisingly well at producing accurate output, but it still is fundamentally a model of language, and there's no particular reason to believe it's possible to make a version that isn't prone to hallucination without a completely different methodology than how LLMs work.

@jaredwhite I'm also totally happy if a community ends up not being welcoming to pyramid schemes, multi-level marketing, tobacco companies, gambling, or chiropractors.

@MsHearthWitch @mathowie I haven't used a Zune (once upon the time I had a Creative Zen) but as I understand it wasn't a particularly bad product. Microsoft just waited to get into the mp3 player space until shortly before the first iPhone released. Probably a bit late for that.

@mathowie Zune seems like a wonderful success in comparison. But I guess E.T. for the Atari 2600 (a more apt comparison) doesn't work as a company name.

Advertizements in SF really want you to know we're at the "adding one more AI will fix it man, just one more AI, I promise" stage of the bubble.

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social Is it really appropriate to compare a perfectly respectable mustelid to those ruthless animals?

@hypostase@bsd.network @petrikas@mastodon.art Presumably snarky comments about how "meritocracy" is most popular with people born in privileged positions is about as old as whenever someone formulated a concept of "meritocracy".