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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 12th, 2023

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  • I bought a desktop PC for a little over 2k in late 2011, and still use it. I’m a back-end developer, and certainly I would like to be able to upgrade my 16 GB RAM to 32 GB in an affordable way.

    Other than that, it’s perfectly fine. IDE, a few docker containers, works.

    And modern gaming is a scam anyway. Realistic graphics do not increase fun, they just eat electricity and our money. Retro gaming or not at all.

    Imagine how things were if they were built to be maintained for 15+ years.


  • I’m retro computing, retro everything tech, and I DO need my collection!

    Just had to order a keyboard DIN connector (pre PS-2) adapter for a old 80386. Because I obviously still don’t hoard enough old stuff!

    One of the few things I’m afraid I won’t be able to use anymore are UMTS (3G) sticks and routers. Although, the router still works a perfectly fine mobile Wifi router, hmmmmm …





  • Ideas?

    • CO2 tax - if it’d be high enough to completely pay for the damage, this shit would stop pretty fast. But even less than that would help. Alternative: Certificates without loopholes. Some use would survive, e. g. an IT professional would still use $ 50 worth of energy per day if it gives a 10 % productivity boost, but models would start consolidating and use all tricks to keep it efficient, rather than push out whatever they can. Only works when imports from regions that refuse to participate are taxed when imported, or outright banned.
    • Huge advantage of machine learning: The “when” is completely flexible. Could just use excess power from renewable peaks, or even nuclear & coal nightly production. But as long as it’s cheap enough to just make more power around the clock: Why should they? They won’t do it voluntarily. Solutions could start with a “green” label for consumers, but that would probably not do that much. It also won’t help when we force them to use 100 % renewables and nuclear, and then they just buy all solar panels and wind turbines off the market leaving us with higher costs and trouble switching to net 0
    • Evaluate the market and identify the bubble. Does an AI focussed company make conservative use of existing capabilities, without overhyping them, or put their money on likely near-future developments, or depend entirely on optimistic future capabilities?
    • With such measures in place, we’d still have the models they trained so far. They’d eventually plateau anyway (or already have). When training of new models stops, as we make it too expensive to spend a lot of power for a tiny improvement, a good part of the power waste stops.

  • Could be even worse, look at what happened to Stauffenberg’s family.

    Arguable whether he signed up for that.

    Fight and die in defence of a NATO ally? Yes. Same as the aggressor, if the elected government decides so, such as in Iraq? Also yes.

    Risk having his wife, children, grandchildren taken away and put in Sippenhaft (collective punishment) or put in a reeducation orphanage? Not sure there is a moral obligation to that. Safety for his family was one of the things he got out of all this.

    His risks for resisting beyond what he already did are higher than they would be for the average citizen. On the other hand, he also could do more than the average citizen.

    A tough call, and I would not judge.










  • Seemed odd about his own testimony, as quoted in this article, that he keeps avoiding to mention HOW he was sitting and whether he complied when told to stop it. Makes me picture one of these assholes who put their dirty shoes on a second seat in a full train.

    His odd avoidance of the core of the issue made me search for other sources. Not surprising that a quick search supports most of this. Also, he refused to stop doing that, which he also does not deny as far as the quotes from this article go.

    Then, he tries to use his celebrity status to order cops to harass an elderly woman, whose statement is irrelevant because apparently there are plenty of witnesses, including the train personnel and his own confession.

    Then, he seriously tries to pull the race card.

    And this is the hero of Lemmy?

    Hat off the elderly woman and the police, though! Wish this kind of justice would happen when I’m on the train.

    This has become a cesspool of disinformation. All the out of context Kirk quotes from the past few days (was still somewhere between nonsense and disgusting in context, but an entirely different statement), and another post claims that every day 0.25 % of the US population gets shot, and this lie somehow supports the trans agenda.

    Disclaimer: Judging the situation as presented in available articles, as I don’t know what really happened.



  • I agree, but it is nearly impossible for a normal investor to be certain that the current stock price ISN’T the lowest it’ll ever be. The bullshitters have an incentive to keep up the lies a few years longer, just look at the housing bubble, and when it burst, it might burst down to the current level or even higher, if that happens in a couple of years.

    I was right once when I sold my ETFs before the Ukraine crisis unfolded, but I realise now that I was stupid-lucky-right. Will never do that again.

    Also, I fully expect that some AI usage will withstand a critical review, and will prevail, just like the dot-com.

    Then, there is the risk that the unexpected breakthrough DOES come, and the ai-super-senior can fix all the vibe-coded nonsense. I don’t see it in the next 5 years, but both unexpected breakthroughs as well as unexpected plateaus have happened in the past.


  • I am generally a sceptic myself, especially in my own area, which is software development. But recently in a board game community, someone was scolded for asking ChatGPT about a rule dispute (and it was wrong). All upvotes to unhelpful “AI bad” comments. I pointed out that while this was true 3 months ago, ChatGPT 5 (and only that one) can very accurately answer such questions when asked the right way, showed how to ask the user question and the (now correct) response, and mentioned my 35 board game test questions and results with major LLM flagship models. (Almost all LLMs did horribly, under 70% even in yes/no questions, but ChatGPT 5 with specific instructions or “Thinking” model got 100%.)

    Even as a sceptic, I can acknowledge that LLMs just jumped from completely useless to perfect in the past few months when it comes to this specific niche.