Sorry, the best I can do is install a camera and microphone on our next model, to spy on you and force interaction with advertisements.

I mean video conferencing from your living room. How neat is that?

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, really, truly.

When I look, credit unions advertise great savings rates for balances of up to $1,000. After that, it’s depressingly small: 0.05% or 0.10% vs. competitive rates of 3%+ which I currently get at my evil-corp-mega-bank. 3% doesn’t even come close to inflation and fractions of a percent feels like pissing my money away while saving for the pipe dream of owning my own home. Maybe I’m misreading something? “Finance” is not something I’m particularly confident about.

Do you know of any tools that would help people shop for ethical, local credit unions? I don’t trust any results from a web search at face value these days and I don’t have the patience to research every result to see how legit it is and do a background check to find that their board or whatever is run by fascists or something.

They use a different kind of RAM.

It’s the capacity to make RAM and the materials required to make RAM that is going to datacenters.

Bots that scrape for training do not usually respect typical methods of asking them kindly to not look at their data.

If we could start from scratch and force these bots to check for some kind of opt in data before scraping, I’d be a hell of a lot more comfortable with Gen AI scraping.

At this point, most models are trained on content taken without consent. In most cases, much of that content would, if a human were to consume it, be considered stolen/pirated. The courts just decided that these AI companies are above those laws for reasons. That reason is money.

Not an expert but… typical computers do what they do by transmitting (primarily) electrical signals between components. Is there electricity or isn’t there. It’s the “bit” with two states - on or off, 1 or 0. Electricity is the flow of electrons between atoms. Basically, we take atoms that aren’t very attached to some of their electrons and manipulate them so that they pass the electrons along when we want them to. I don’t know if there is a way to conduct and process electrical signals without using an atom’s relationship with its electrons.

Quantum computing is the suspected new way to get to “better” computing. I don’t know much about the technical side of that, beyond that they use quantum physics to expand the bit to something like a qubit, which exploits superposition (quantum particles existing in multiple states simultaneously until measured, like the Schrodinger’s cat metaphor) and entanglement (if two quantum particles’ states are related to or dependent on each other, determining the state of one particle also determines the state of the other) to transmit/process more than just a simple 1 or 0 per qubit. A lot more information can be transmitted and processed simultaneously with a more complex bit. As I understand it, quantum computing has been very slow going.

That’s my shitty explanation. I’m sure someone will come along and correct my inaccurate simplification of how it all works and list all that I missed, like fiberoptic transmission of signals.

I’m afraid the best I can give you is a proprietary, always online, underpowered, half-assed piece of spyware that will probably end up costing you a yearly subscription fee if you don’t want advertisements and get a mandatory, irreversible AI integration over-the-air upgrade 1 month after you buy it.

Yes, and I’m forced to bring Win11 home if I need to work remotely because they allegedly would need to install drivers (?) on and reconfigure their firewall for me to use the Linux Cisco VPN client? So it’s too much work.

I have a small homelab and I’ve never had to install drivers to support another operating system connecting. I also don’t have to pay a subscription for access points and can reconfigure them myself so maybe it’s a Cisco thing.

Lol

I am very, very concerned at how widely it is used by my superiors.

We have an AI committee. When ChatGPT went down, I overheard people freaking out about it. When our paid subscription had a glitch, IT sent out emails very quickly to let them know they were working to resolve it ASAP.

It’s a bit upsetting because may of them are using it to basically automate their job (write reports & emails). I do a lot of work to ensure that our data is accurate from manual data entry by a lot of people… and they just toss it into an LLM to convert it into an email… and they make like 30k more than me.

The few times I’ve used LLMs for coding help, usually because I’m curious if they’ve gotten better, they let me down. Last time it was insistent that its solution would work as expected. When I gave it an example that wouldn’t work, it even broke down each step of the function giving me the value of its variables at each step to demonstrate that it worked… but at the step where it had fucked up, it swapped the value in the variable to one that would make the final answer correct. It made me wonder how much water and energy it cost me to be gaslit into a bad solution.

How do people vibe code with this shit?

As I understand it, it’s atomic Fedora with virtually everything you might need to game on Linux baked in (no need for layering) and more or less preconfigured. Off the top of my head, proprietary Nvidia drivers, Steam, Lutris, Hero launcher, support for Xbox One wireless controller dongle, plus a number of useful tools like Tailscale. An app with a catered list of gaming-oriented flatpacks, one click updating. Also a lot of effort into replicating the Steam Deck experience for handheld devices or devices connected to a TV.

I believe they also do Aurora, which is similarly geared toward workstations with a ton of container-related tools like distro box readily available to easily use containers instead of layering where possible. The same tools may be available in Bazzite but I never checked. I have Aurora on my laptop and use a dedicated gaming device with Bazzite.

I’m not a Linux veteran by any means but I was hopping distros looking for something I could install on my family’s computers I tried atomic Fedora. When using it for myself, I became frustrated with the number of tools I use that needed to be layered or run in a container and eventually found myself on Bazzite and Aurora. So far so good.

If you pay low enough wages and workers are too exhausted to do anything about it, lower productivity is profitable. It’s about the bottom line.

If the workforce makes a pittance and is too exhausted to rebel, the bosses win.

Your banal chattering is unnecessary. Are you able to grasp the importance of my experiments? Begone from my sensory range, lest I have you disassembled for servitor parts

How about house them in a way that take away their voting rights and use them as cheap labor? Member how prisoners were used to fight the Palisades fires in January?

Don’t forget the expensive housing is provided by a for-profit prison system. It’s expensive for taxpayers, but someone else is getting rich.

There are some circumstances that are in his favor, specifically in New York. There are enough people in NYC who are willing to give progressives a try that it may actually put pressure on the Governor, who is up for reelection next year. There is a progressive candidate running against the current Governor so there is a significant incentive to shore up her support on the left and for her to play ball with Mamdani.

We’ll have to see. There are a lot of powers looking to stop him and demonstrate the futility of trying to accomplish anything progressive. If he fails I fear it will utterly demoralize progressives, but in a rare moment at least the electoral system is in his favor for the next 12 months.

Are we now protesting that they reversed their decision?

…no? I’m not really protesting so much as offering what I think the other person is trying to say. I think they are saying that Google crossed a line, and walking it back doesn’t change that fact.

In my opinion, Google has crossed countless lines over the last 5-10 years. I’m looking for alternatives that meet my own needs. That search has accelerated over the last few years, when the things Google has done have been most egregious. This isn’t a protest. This is disillusionment. I’m abandoning ship.

I think it was fairly obvious that the move was going to piss people off, they just misjudged to what extent. Modern business strategy is to claim to listen to customer feedback and just quietly plan to implement it anyway, just do it more subtly, more quietly, and more slowly.

It is very hard to make a device that is affordable, compact, efficiently cooled, and modular. Offering complete support is also infinitely more difficult when hardware is not controlled for. GPU and CPU are both customized AMD chips and the power supply is designed for their anticipated power draw.

If you want to swap your GPU, build your own SFF. Hopefully they’ll have SteamOS available for general use soon.

Had an issue with Comcast today. They forced me to use their Xfinity app, but what I needed to do wasn’t an apparent option within the app. The only option I saw was a support chatbot. The chatbot listed a link to the option I was looking for. The link opened a webview within the Xfinity app, in which there was a link to download the Xfinity app.

Unnecessary Apps and chat bots. Two of my least favorite things referring me back and forth, forever, in an endless loop.