Raul

Mathematical joke: A married plane (a mathematical, flat, infinite plane, that is) started hanging out with a parabola, and one day it returned home as a slightly hunched surface. The wife looked at it in horror, so it quickly said: "Honey, I can ex-plane everything!"
;)

My thoughts about the World Cup final and systematic "misconducts" of the Argentinian players: appealing to the "contact sport" argument is really absurd. Argentina's thuginess was so unsportly, pretty much aggravated-assault punisheable. "Contact" is one thing, but a clear intention of either injuring the other player, and/or provoking a violent escalation, or both, is a very different thing, which can be in fact legally prosecuted and punished, as some incidents have shown, at least in hockey.

Unprofessional to the extreme behavior was exhibited from the Argentinian players, but imho also from the referees, for allowing that with no disincentive whatsoever for so long.

Spanish players staying cool all the way through such assaults was in itself worthy of a championship in sobreity and clearheadedness.

PC Front Panel DIY mod photos:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/f6N6YxwynmdQyYVL7

Well I have two fedora systems at home. Lo and behold, ran ss -tupn | grep 1716 and two entries came up. The culprit: kdeconnectd. Not sure if I had established a pairing in the past (for gaming maybe,) maybe it's just the services chatting for recognition? In any case not welcoming this sort of silent enlargement of the network footprint my Fedora systems are leaving behind. In particular, not liking the fact that it seems to remain established, and for very long at that: basically forever? Across updates, upgrades, reboots... anything. Will have to do some hardening on them. Found out this was up after reading something about xmsg and checking. Thanks but no thanks, @fedora@fosstodon.org

If you like DIY challenges (excluding 3d printing,) here's one. Surprisingly difficult to form those inner bevelled walls between the parallel protruding beams, without causing any damage to the adjacent close-by parallel beam.

This little thing took me hours and hours over a total of 3 days :S (And this is only the shape, finish still to be applied.)

A priceless e-"pat on the back" if you can guess what this is for :)

Best voices for me in this year's Eurovision: Poland and Ukraine

Washed quarz stones are sold in hardware stores for just a few euros a bag of 15 - 20 kg in different size ranges, for example 16-32 mm. Easy to get and cheap, and I did get one of those bags for some "Lichtschacht Dränage" update. But turns out, could use a few more stones than what the bag had. But no need for another full bag at all, even if it's so cheap. Hence the natural alternative is to look for the stones yourself. Which is also quite easy (that's why they are cheap in the first place): just take a walk alone the Rhein river bank, and pick some whiteish opalescent rounded enough stones that match the ballpark of your size range of interest. Did this a few times in different days, and surprise: this was quite a blissful and peaceful experience.

A sort of academic question came to my mind in the middle of all this. Why is it so unlikely to find actually spherical enough stones? They are irregular globs, and I guess the older ones, and/or the softer ones get smoothed out the most. But given thousands of years going through this erotion process, shouldn't the statistics tells us that after enough of it, most stones should end up quite close to roughly spherical? Well, try to find anything close to spherical. It is quite hopeless. Why this is the case escapes my logic.

In any case, if you want to enjoy some peace of mind a bit, I recommend this. Go to a river, bring a back pack or koala bag, and spend some time just picking up some worthless stones. Yes. Spend some precious time not looking into a cell phone or monitor like you are now, but away from technology and walking in the outdoors, looking for worthless stones. Choose your color or shape or whatever insterests you from the stones you grab. You will start getting quite amazed at the endless variations. You will also see quite many little insects here and there moving around whenever you move any stones. It's amazing how much life crawls in those river banks.

Hear me out. At some point in the future there will be no software development conferences. Well, there will be, but virtual ones, attended only by AI coding agents. The entire conference might last only seconds or milliseconds, might be coordinated by themselves, these agents. Might not be even yearly, because they won't care about yearly seasonaility. They might schedule it at their own accord. They might develop their own protocols to exchange all the "presentations" and questions and answers as efficiently as possible. Maybe a follow up conference could be scheduled just a few milliseconds later. or a few human years later...

But...

RAM prices. These will be virtual meetings on some cloud infrastructure. Renting the computing resources to hold these meetings, even if only for seconds or milliseconds, will end up costing a lot. In fact even more than renting real state in hotels for 3-5 days, and sending humans or some agentic robot there with conference ticket and travel expenses and all.

So eventually, full circle. AI software developer agents will use humans as proxies, and "physical" software development conferences will eventually come back, if only just to save money ;)

@cwebber All these planned huge AI datacenters should build their own solar farms then. Ought to be cheaper than buying power from existing grids in the long run. Unless govt tax exceptions benefit them from stressing existing grids and providers for even cheaper, that is.

Mentioned Gamer's Nexus, @paulshardware@techhub.social , Hardware Unboxed, and also der8auer in this tweet, because thought they ought to be interested: Google AI says I've achieved the "Holy Grail" of DIY building:
"Closed-case that runs cooler & faster than an open-bench setup."
:D

The trick was a DIY shroud for the lower front fan in my Phanteks case, a la HAVN Flow case.

Short thread with photos in X:
https://x.com/RaulSaavedra6/status/2047351449173070250?s=20

Ok to my own surprise I have found several good use cases for AI now:

- Getting expert advice on when and how to go through replacing the thermal paste and thermal pads (if needed) of an old GPU card. Turns out the thermal paste of any GPU ought to be replaced every 3-4 years. That in itself was worth learning about.

- Trying to identify a movie I can't remember the name of

- Successfully negotiating and buying an old Sapphire Pulse 6700 XT on eBay for €240. That is the current average ongoing price in the German market where this card is apparently highly valued, and in relative high demand. The Buy Now price was €255.

- Troubleshooting setting up of VLANs in my relatively complex home networking environment (Fedora Host and a pfsense VM on that host as the main router, the host being another LAN client in one of the VLANs, so two of the 3 NICS on the host required bridging for pfSense. And the host connected to the LAN physical NIC for pfSense through a Netgear little switch that supports VLANS. But the VLAN management in this switch is not at all that similar to that of VLANs in a Cisco switch, even if in principle still 802.1Q compliant.) It was all slightly nightmare-ish in fact, but once it works, it does just work, and well.

- Troubleshooting a rare yet recurring ReFS error in Windows Servers in the company I work for (which Microsoft and Veeam support themselves could not solve, because both said everything was "perfect" from their side of things.)

@GossiTheDog Well, well. The ideal "productivity booster" for any business-related activity using a Windows PC, which Microslop has been pushing desperately and obsessively onto every Windows user on the planet, in fact even onto hardware, demanding a new key on keyboards from laptop-manufacturing partners, now turns out to be "for entertainment purposes only." Well, well, well, you don't say... New Microslop motto to expect next ought to be therefore something like: "Entertainment, the new key to business productivity"

Finally got rid of my last linux system. Now 100% Windows + Copilot user.

Nvidia DLSS5: ridiculously computationally expensive AI-slop for games, demo requiring a separate 5090. So to integrate that into any single GPU (regardless of GPU tier,) it will require more dedicated hardware. More VRAM capacity needed, more power needs, more heat generation/noise, and all of that for absolutely 0 extra FPS in gaming. These are not extra costs for any additional performance. All that extra hardware and power consumption and heat, all for the AI-slop filter.

Winning product. Right.

@liw I don't really think it was like that. Maybe way before that, when computers were still mostly analog, digital computers emerged together with prog languages, those made the older analog computers and their operators quite quickly obsolete. But after that there had been no strong claim by anything that would make programmers and developers obsolete (until now with AI, that is.) I'd say it was rather the opposite for long. Everyone was rather strongly encouraged to learn some coding skills, because that was supposed to be a necessity in most future jobs. Specially younger generations and educational programs leaned that way for long. I'd say from way before 2010, and till after covid, at least right up till the AI hype exploded couple of years ago with chatgpt passing some "high level knowledge" exams, formerly out of league for any computer programs.

So much going on in the world, my interest in the Oscars this year == 0

@Natasha_Jay My guess would have been some packaging foam material got imprinted from an actual keyboard, and had fallen on the fresh cement with something heavy on it, which had pushed it down to make the imprint. Was not expecting an intentional imprinting of a keyboard mold done by an art student :)

Something I cannot unsee. I like photography, so I follow a lot of photographers on Twitter, specifically portrait photographers. I've noticed allmost all Japanese models now have these bulged lower lids under their eyes. The trend (according to AI) has a specific name: "Aegyo-sal", which seems to mean "charming/cute fat/skin." From the AI: "In many East Asian cultures, this feature is associated with a youthful, innocent, and cheerful appearance. It is believed to make the eyes look larger, brighter, and as if they are "smiling," which is highly prized in modern beauty standards influenced by K-pop and social media."

https://x.com/sosai_saiso/status/2033125977522585963?s=20

@lina@vt.social This brings to mind the so called "4-Ears model of communication." If people get stuck in the so called "Appeal-Ear", whatever message they get, they interpret it as if they have been asked to do something, or change something on what they are doing about what is being talked about. The ear that gets emphasized the most is typically a listener's responsibility, and not a result of the exact sender's words in the message: https://greator.com/en/4-ears-model/

Pi day should not be today, but the 22 of July, as explained here by a grumpy old man ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLV6e41-uxc

In any case, that "Middle Endian" date format used in the US, mm/dd/yyyy, must be one of the biggest flops in human logic.

That together with the imperial system, and the German language naming of numbers of course, which is Big Endian, except for the last two digits which are Little Endian, because why not? 1234 is One Thousand, Two Hundred and... not Thirty Four, but "Four and Thirty" (eternal hopeless facepalm)

The level of gaslighting, fake news, info-slop, and BS is going strong worldwide, and not budging one bit. Hold on to your higher skepticism levels. Suspend/postpone belief until validating. Sharpen your critical thinking alarms. It's April fools day every single day.

@nixCraft@mastodon.social I'd say the entire Atlassian suit (not just Jira) struggles with navigation and UI issues

@nixCraft@mastodon.social Define open: open... to attacks

@gabrielesvelto @adingbatponder Great! In that thread you also mention something else that is quite important: RAM will only deteriorate and get worse with age and usage. So even if this is the absolute worst time in history when one would need to look for new RAM, I will plan to re-run RAM tests on this PC some time soon to see how it's going.

@gabrielesvelto @adingbatponder At the end of that thread: " I'd also like to point out that we've got preliminary data on the topic, but I fully intend to write a proper article with a detailed analysis of the data. 17/17" Was that article published, or is it approaching publication? I'd be very interested.

@gabrielesvelto As a personal anecdote, I built a PC in 2017 with 16 GB of DDR4 RAM that I got from Amazon (Germany.) Had to return it after extensive testing with Passmark's free version of memtest86. Had failing bits. The replacement did pass the heavy testing. If there's one thing I wanted that PC to be was very stable and reliable. Few years later got a second 16 GB kit to expand the PC to 32 GB. Had to return that kit as well, it also had errors. The replacement again passed the extensive testing. This is still the PC I'm writing from now in fact. Manufacturers and their QA teams must be aware of their failure rates, but they likely do not care to save costs and make higher profits. They still sell kits with some failures, because not many users subject their PCs/RAM to the torture of these long RAM tests (4 full passes or more for sanity's sake takes hours.) And crashing here and there with normal usage is almost considered "normal" to some extent, unfortunately. From my experience, the "RAM Test" offered by Windows was an absolute joke. It never found anything on the kits that Memtest86 would find failures on in about 1 of any 2 runs. I remember watching a Youtuber testing a gaming build he had just put together, and he used prime95 to test it for some minutes only. The computer did not crash and according to him that was fine enough for a gaming PC. I happen to disagree. In particular because in that run of his, even if Prime95 did not crash, it showed calculation error warnings. That could have happened because of RAM issues. In his view, just for gaming it was fine enough that Prime95 would not crash quickly, much better even if it endures some minutes. I disagree. Any calculation error warning from Prime95 is quite a hardware stability/reliability red flag, just as any finding from memtest86. It is a failure of the industry that ECC RAM is still not standard at least for PCs, laptops, and cellphones. Maybe it should be standard for all consumer electronics in fact.

@shriramk@mastodon.social Two song title suggestions for Björk there (Bachelorette already used)

@bert_hubert@eupolicy.social Microsoft will falter because of wider (Windows) adoption loss

@cmconseils This is a great illustration of technical debt

@silvermoon82@wandering.shop Besides that, there's the reality that some things really do not need AI at all. Example: lifting the lid of a trashcan by simply stepping on the lever at the bottom. Or if no lever there, just lifting the lid with one hand, while throwing the stuff into it with the other hand. But wait, What? Are you still doing that arcaic thing? Wake up! You can automate your house, a camera can see you approaching the trashcan, it will detect that you have trash in your hands, and it will automatically control an actuator that will lift the lid for you at the right time! It will also be connected to the cloud to get software security updates and improvements, of course. And we only gather statistics on your trashcan usage for you to query at any time for no extra cost on top of the $5000 the camera, computer and actuator on the trashcan cost. A bargain! Don't waste your time pushing levers, or lifting lids. Let AI work for you! ;)

@ClickyMcTicker@hachyderm.io @lalonsander@chaos.social Biologists do. Same thing for strength of the animals not in terms of absolute weight they can lift, but relative to their body weights. Ants are therefore incredibly strong relatively speaking. And that's why the fastest land animal (in relative terms) is not the cheetah, but that tiny mite. In fact quite a few other smaller animals end up higher in the ranking than the cheetah, including cats.

@lalonsander@chaos.social Something else is that the vertical axis is per km, so absolute distances. It would be interesting to see this worked out not for absolute distances, but for relative ones with respect to the animal's body length. That way smaller animals will most likely not end up plotted as a lot less efficient compared to larger ones that do travel kilometers instead of just meters or even cm at a time. For context: I remember reading somewhere that the fastest land mammals are cheetas in absolute speed terms. But with respect to body size, cats are in fact faster. And the fastest mammal on land in terms of body size turns out to be a hare. (A bat wins the fastest mammal battles if you include flying.) The record fastest land animal in terms of body size displacements per unit of time is in fact a tiny mite: https://www.ibtimes.com/worlds-fastest-land-animal-has-new-name-meet-paratarsotomus-macropalpis-mite-made-speed-1577349

@lalonsander@chaos.social This also highlights how much more effective is walking at burning calories, compared to riding a bike for the same amount of time, at least when riding it effortlessly on flat ground. Of course you get a lot further away with the bicycle, but if you want to just burn more calories per unit of time, walking is a lot more effective in general.

@ExtinctionR@social.rebellion.global and PFAS

@absolucy This reminds me one time someone asked me how I knew something, and I could not quickly pinpoint mentally where I had actually learned about it, so I could only reply: "just reading"

@sandehalynch@mastodon.social @hugo@social.treehouse.systems Haven't read that one yet but adding it to the list

@hugo@social.treehouse.systems Sharks are just some of those ancient inhabitants of our misnamed planet: "Water." Brings to mind "The Magic of Reality" by Dawkins. It has a nice part where he shows a hugely long list of photos starting with our own, then our father or mother, one of our grandparents, and so forth for one of our ancestors in each of our previous generations. If we could go back far enough, as in a few million years, the photo would show us.. not even a mammal but a fish!