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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Also, every single name that gets released is a name that Trump was ok with releasing. From my pov, it just turns it into a more effective blackmail tool. He’s not afraid of what’s in the files. If it was going to ruin him, it would have already done so.

    Instead it just shows others who know they are in the files that a) he’s one of them (if they didn’t already know), b) that he can protect them, c) he isn’t protecting everyone in the files just because of point a.

    Hate to be realizing this, but I think everyone who thought the release of the Epstein files would help anything got played. Just like everyone who thought the Mueller investigation would threaten his first term or result in making a second term impossible.



  • Yeah, for a while I was looking for any benefits to moving from win 10 to 11. 7 to 10 had kernel and scheduler improvements, for example.

    Only ones I could find were the virtual desktop support (though I had an alternative desktop back in the XP or Vista days that supported that, so not really groundbreaking), and WSL, which I didn’t have any use cases for.

    Other than that, it was just shit I didn’t want. Copilot, recall, more UI changes that don’t really add anything (on my work laptop where I didn’t have a choice, first thing I did was go into the UI options and undo as much as I could). One of the things I used to like about windows was that it wasn’t a mac, but the UI changes look like that’s their inspiration. The inspired folks porbably all left already.



  • I had an upgrade plan for my PC that involved a step up to a 4k monitor, but when the time came, it was hard enough just finding a 4k monitor with decent specs that I stopped to really think about whether I would really benefit from it. I already knew I didn’t need it, but I realized that I wouldn’t even really gain anything from it. I already used the UI scaling with the one 4k monitor I had at work, so that was a wash. And for games, I didn’t really have any times when I wished the resolution was higher than the 1440p I was already using, but I did have times when I wished it would generate the frames faster or more consistently.

    Part of the change was a new GPU to handle 4k better (they were supposed to justify each other), but I ended up just getting an ultrawide 1440p monitor instead.

    I don’t think I’ll ever bother with higher than 4k for TV or 1440p for PC.






  • Everything AI boom is likely a lie, and Nvidia bribing Trump to sell H200s to China, at 25% export tariff, is proof of incapacity or unwillingness of US industry to deploy them.

    I’d love for you to be right (I’d like to see nvidia compete as an underdog since they are fairly anticompetitive in their dominant position) but think this reasoning is flawed.

    Wanting to sell to China just means that demand isn’t exceeding supply, or maybe even that they have access to more supply that they’d use if they could sell to China, which is a massive market. Or even if they don’t have any excess supply, higher demand means they can set higher prices and still expect to sell all inventory.

    Like the US car companies wanting to sell cars in China doesn’t imply that they are unable to sell cars in the US, it just means they want to sell cars to China and the US.

    I agree with the rest of your comment and think it was well said, sorry about this nitpick.




  • I’d argue that SEO was one of the biggests causes of search result degradation and consider any complaints coming from them as highly suspect due to conflicting interests. Eg, a change that makes it harder to game the search engine algorithms is good for searchers but bad for SEOs.

    I hope the whole industry dies (or already is? I don’t hear much about it these days lol). They are just marketers whose whole job is to get you to look at their shit instead of the most relevant results.


  • Why do you think the encryption capabilities on your PC are there for your sake? They might have sold them to you on that, but they are really there to protect copyright data because TPM allows encryption/decryption that is completely hidden from the rest of your system. Like an encrypted handshake that then transfers an encrypted key to decrypt the video stream. But it doesn’t save the decrypted data, it immediately re-encrypts it using your display’s private key (or whatever device is next in the chain, maybe your GPU). They can make it so that the unencrypted stream never touches your RAM or travels on any wire, which means you can’t pirate shows as you watch them unless you point a camera at your screen.

    Obviously if they just said that was one of the main points, no one would want it and media companies couldn’t benefit from it because they’d have to compromise to sell content.

    The other point was so that they could build a system where they hold the encryption keys and get to choose whose data is actually private. Obviously that’s an even harder sell.

    So they did what marketers always do and lied by omission about what it was for and just outright lied if they ever said they’d never give the keys to law enforcement (did they ever even say that?).

    Let go of the idea that someone selling something to you implies any kind of loyalty, especially when either party is a large corporation.



  • Though, on the other hand, having the video saved offsite is useful because then anyone with physical access to your home can’t get rid of the video showing they’re there.

    This is not an argument in favour of using cloud services, because that gives access to your video to anyone the company deems should have access (or sometimes individual workers who either have access as part of their job or gain access because businesses suck at security). It’s in response to you saying isolate the cameras from the internet entirely; there is a good reason to have them connected (though you could have a PC handle that with a connection to two networks and no physical or software bridge between the two, just take video from one, upload (encrypted) to server on other).



  • Funny thing about “AI skills” that I’ve noticed so far is that they are actually just skills in the thing you’re trying to get AI to help with. If you’re good at that, you can often (though not always) get an effective result. Mostly because you can talk about it at a deeper level and catch mistakes the AI makes.

    If you have no idea about the thing, it might look competent to you, but you just won’t be catching the mistakes.

    In that context, I would call them thought amplifiers and pretty effective at the whole “talking about something can help debug the problem, even if the other person doesn’t contribute anything of value because you have to look at the problem differently to explain it and that different perspective might make the solution more visible”, while also being able to contribute some valueable pieces.


  • Yeah, the Linux community has done a shitload of work to bring Linux up to as good as windows (in the technical sense) and better than windows (regarding the often hostile user experience).

    Microsoft is now helping with the marketing by making the windows experience even worse, driving more people to “take the plunge” only for them to realize there isn’t a place where the floor suddenly drops away and you’re left helpless, and that that actually is a better description for using windows outside of the rails MS wants.

    If you use an AMD gpu, there’s actually fewer steps to go from empty disk to playing a game, assuming that game isn’t trying to do things with the kernel or is one of the rare games that aren’t compatible for reasons other than anti-cheat (I’ve seen one game like that so far, forget the name of it but a logistics game that needed some dotnet library or something and I ended up giving up and refunding it rather than troubleshooting it until it worked, though others on protondb did say they got it working).

    The days where windows gives an easier or better experience are gone, even ignoring all the next level enshitification of win 11. I’ve been on Linux for about a year now but wish I had switched sooner.