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Cake day: January 19th, 2024

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  • cygon@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldSo...
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    24 days ago

    I liked that about the comic.

    Our society has adopted this expectation that once a relationship has turned into love, it must remain that, and if its not eternal soul mates in total devotion, it’s not true love. You’re not allowed to dial it down, take a break from it or return to being friends, or it’s a “failed” relationship.

    The message of the comic subverts this, showing that without such baggage, you could just change the relationship to something else and still be happy.

    Instead, we assume from the beginning that the relationship is forever, throw our households together, and when the point would be right to return to normal friendship, we force ourselves to stick close until we can’t stand each other anymore.



  • I liked agile as it was practiced in the “Extreme Programming” days.

    • Rather than attempt to design the perfect system from the get-go, you accept that software architecture is a living, moving target that needs to evolve as your understanding of the problem evolves.

    • Rather than stare down a mountain of ill-defined work, you have neat little user stories that can be completed in a few days at most and you just move around some Kanban cards instead of feeding a soul-sucking bureaucratic ticketing, time tracking and monitoring system.

    • Rather than sweat and enter crunch mode for deadlines, the project owners see how many user stories (or story points or perfect hours) the team completes per week and can use a velocity graph / burndown chart to estimate when all work will be completed.

    .

    But it’s just a corporate buzzword now. “We’re agile” often enough means “we have no plan, take no responsibility and expect the team to wing it somehow” or “we cargo cult a few agile ideas that feel good to management, like endless meetings with infinite course changes where everyone gives feel-good responses to the managers.”

    Having a goal, a specification, a release plan, a vision and someone who is responsible and approachable (the “project owner”) are all part of the agile manifesto, not something it tries to do away with. I would be sad if agile faces the same fate as the waterfall model back in its time and even sadder if we return to the time-tracking-ticket-system-with-Gantt-chart hell as the default.

    Maybe we need a new term or an “agility index” to separate the cases of “incompetent manager uses buzzword to cover up messy planning” from the cases of “project owner with a clearly defined goal creates a low-bureaucracy work environment for his team.” :)


  • Tankies make liberals uncomfortable because liberals believe they are the furthest left you can go

    Without trying to be combative, but that sounds like one of those tidbits which one side believes about the other, circulated only to divide. At least I don’t have the impression that it is a view with any footing amongst liberal-minded people.

    2021 PEW poll showing that 89% of liberals and 24% of conservatives support tuition-free college.

    Most liberals want to move further left, ideas like free college and public education, public transport, less corporate power and splitting up large corporations, even unconditional basic income, etc. are popular with the majority. Just violent revolution and authoritarianism won’t roll, after all, liberal means “live and let live.”

    As a mixed-ideology lefty (maybe I fit within your definition of liberal), I’m not worried about tankies being too far left, not at all, rather, I am tempted to think of them as confused right wingers believing themselves to be “the left.”


  • cygon@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldLemmy.ml tankie censorship problem
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    27 days ago

    Thanks for bringing this up, it’s really needed.

    Your example is just one of many I’ve seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.

    I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.




  • Not yet. It can lead to that point, but this is just the kernel handling an “out of memory” situation. The kernel in the screenshot is configured to run its OOM reaper / OOM killer.

    The OOM reaper checks all running processes and looks for the one that causes the least disruption when killed. It does that by calculating a score which is based on the amount of memory a process uses, how recently it was launched and so on. Ideally, a Linux desktop user would simply see their video game, browser or media player close.

    This smart TV is in real trouble, though, it probably already killed its OSD, still didn’t even have enough memory to spawn a login shell and is now making short work of strange VLC instances that probably got left behind by a poorly written app store app :)


  • I don’t know why that comment is collecting downvotes. They are referencing George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

    Context: “Animal Farm” is a story about how communism can devolve into dictatorship. In the story, the animals on a farm drive out their tyrannical drunkard farmer. They write on the barn wall: “all animals are equal” and live in communist utopia. But some animals, too, hunger for power and status. Rather than overturn the system, they undermine it by adding “…but some animals are more equal than others” to the barn wall, legitimizing a ruling class (themselves) because they are “more equal.”


  • Disclaimer: I wondered the same, since 2014, and this is what I puzzled together for myself, read it with that in mind!

    I believe a lot of it can be traced back to the wealthy and to conservative think tanks / media control by right wing moguls.

    Back in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives were perceived as well-off business people trying to protect their own wealth (I’ve read that people used to say things like “I’m not rich enough to vote Republican” or children shouting “last one in the house is a dirty Republican”). You can even see old movies dunk on conservatives (i.e. take Stanley Kubrick’s “2010: The Year we Make Contact” (1984), at the beginning, with the satellite dish tower, the protagonist noses off about reactionaries being in control of congress, thus leading the country towards war).

    This is the rather extreme election result from 1964:

    Political map of the US in 1964

    Because liberals mostly were Democratic Party voters, Republicans and their wealthy donors tried to alter public perception of liberals (i.e. make it undesirable for their Republican indoctrinatees to be liberal). This included taking over the media (and Reagan conveniently cancelling the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which gave political bias in the media some guard rails), then painting liberals as all things undesirable: arrogant, weak, clueless, leeches, etc.

    Having a “hate object” worked so well that they kept capitalizing on it. Much of it was/is just slinging sh*t against the wall and looking what sticks, but think tanks are indeed looking at what sticks, so successful patterns get repeated. Some of these successful patterns I can see are: installing a victim complex in conservatives (feeling their back against the wall, they lash out easier, ensuring anyone talking about conservatives is conditioned to use very soft gloves) and the two-year bogeyman, often trying to capture, redefine and vilify some prior existing concept (thus, when the campaign hits, indoctrinatees can find lots of “proof” online of this thing existing).

    For example, social justice used to be universally agreed on as a good thing, woke used to mean remaining aware of systemic inequalities, now they make conservatives pop an artery. This has been going for a while (the “hate object” over time has been rock music, hippies, metal music, supposed satan worshippers, pen and paper games, paganism+atheism, video games, social justice activists, cancel culture, black lives matter, critical race theory, wokeness, …)

    And I think, yes, your perception is spot on. This is, for example, what I get when I search for “anti-conservative t-shirts” (if it’s too tiny, try it yourself - they’re all anti-liberal):

    Search result on DuckDuckGo for anti-conservative t-shirts, all results showing anti-liberal t-shirts

    TL;DR: conservatives are intentionally made and kept angry. It keeps them unified against a bigger enemy (see Genghis Gambit), drives them to go vote and prevents voters from switching sides even if they do not like some things the conservatives are doing. Add to that Russia amplifying this division like there’s no tomorrow. They’re installing this hate for liberals both in tankies and in far-right bigots (and, as far as I can tell, anti-liberal sentiment is pushed into Russian society, too).


  • Just some thoughts:

    • Current LLMs (chat AIs) are “frozen brains.” (Over-)Simplified, the synapses on the AI’s input neurons are given the 2048 prior words (the “context”) and the AI’s output synapses mean a different word each, so the synapse that lights up most strongly is the next word the AI will say. Then the picked word is added to the “context” and the neural network is executed once more for the next next word.

    • Coming up with the weights of the synapses takes insane effort (run millions of books through the “context” and look if the AI t predicts the next word correctly, if not, change a random synapse). Afaik, GPT-4 was trained on more than 2000 NVidia A100 GPUs for somewhere around 4 to 7 months, I think they mentioned paying for 7.5 Megawatt hours.

    • If you had a super computer that could keep running the AI with live training, the AI’s ability to string up words would likely, and quickly, degrade into incoherence because it would just ingest and repeat whatever went into it. Existing biological brains have these complex mechanisms of distilling experiences and evaluating them in terms of usefulness/success of their own actions.

    .

    I think that foundation, that part that makes biological brains put the action/consequence in the foreground of the learning experience, rather than just ingesting, is what eludes us. Perhaps at some future point in time, we could take the initial brain structure that grows in a human as the seed for an AI (but I guess then we’d likely have to simulate all the highly complex traits of real neurons, including mixed chemical and electrical signaling and possibly even quantum-level effects that have been theorized).



  • As an indie developer, I began divesting from Unity when Riccitiello pushed Helgason out and took over.

    Back then, the predictable changes quickly rolled in: all the features were suddenly free (once, Unity’s business model was to sell their Pro version with additional features), developers were forced into subscription licenses, Unity began gathering investor money, then acquired a micro transaction business, then a telemetry business, then a video ad business…

    I assume Bromberg will merely be its second “new economy” CEO and continue to run Unity like Uber, with a hazy revenue model that probably circles around putting Unity into as many mobile shovelware games as possible to siphon money off the ads served via Unity’s ad network and micro transactions flowing through Unity’s micro payments business.


  • I think you’re mistaken there.

    Wine is a vanilla Linux executable that runs as the user who launched it. The Windows program it runs thus also runs under that user. That’s possible because Wine doesn’t do anything system-wide (like intercepting calls or anything), it already gave the process its own version of i.e. LoadLibrary() (the Windows API function to load a DLL) and can happily remap any loaded DLL to Wine’s reimplementation of said DLL as needed.

    Here are, for example, the processes created when I run Paint Shop Pro on my system (the leftmost column indicates the user each process is running as): Processes running after launching a Windows executable via Wine

    Also, some advice from WineHQ: WineHQ warning never to run Wine as root


  • After reading, the gist of it seems to be:

    • Vanilla far-right indoctrinated dumbo (his vision: “Reds” welcome, “Blues” not, “Anti-Blue Propaganda” on public view screens)
    • Wants exploitative capitalism on steroids with companies controlling everyone’s lives completely
    • Claims current capitalism is only bad because it’s “woke capitalism” which he claims the “ruling class” is pushing
    • Wants tech bros to butter up police and give security staff jobs to their children as a favor, i.e. intentional social classism

    .

    In short, just another out of touch entrepreneur who sells snake oil cures to people suffering in the current system, so that they may invite in the boot that stomps them down for good.


  • What would be missing from VS Code or VS Codium that an IDE needs?

    I’m an ex Visual Studio user, now writing all my code in VS Codium. I organize my project tree in VS Codium, I build from it and, like a Visual Studio user, I press F5 to debug, set breakpoints and inspect variables.

    And that’s just the default install using the vanilla C/C++ extension it ships with, not some complicated setup that takes any time to get working.