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fao_

5,079 karma · joined April 7, 2015

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fao_··on The curious case of retro demo scene graphics
> I really wonder how some people think of themselves as artists while simultaneously attacking another persons choice of self expression.

Because AI art is not art, and rips off existing artwork in a way that is more than learning from the style and imitating.

fao_··on What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves
Did you mean to comment this on the NME sibling? Haha
fao_··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
> but since you don't experience static, I assume you have grounding at your house.

It's illegal not to,

fao_··on Warranty Void If Regenerated
If someone couldn't be bothered to write it, I certainly can't be bothered to read it. I did not bother to read the article involved because the continual piss stain on the images, the website itself, and a few key phrases let me on to the fact that it was all generated.

When you interact with art, you do so to interact with the author and the point they want to make. Writing is something where a skilled writer will be able to make a point tersely and have it stick, knowing where to embellish and where to keep it simple. Every decision in art tells you about the artist. Generative AI may be able to fake the composition process, but the point of composition is it reveals something about the human. All of those are artistic decisions that a machine apparently now "can do", but not with any coherency.

The holder of the reigns of slop is not an artist, this is plain to see because they do not interact or engage with their work on the same level as an artist. The produced slop is not art, because it cannot be engaged with on the same level.

fao_··on AI didn't simplify software engineering: It just made bad engineering easier
> So, once again, the old question: If reducing jobs is the only goal, but people are also expected to have jobs to be able to pay for food and housing, what is the end goal here? What is the vision that those companies are trying to realize?

Capitalism is reliant on the underclass (the homeless, the below minimum-wage) to add pressure to the broader class of workers in a way that makes them take jobs that they ordinarily wouldn't (Because they may be e.g. physically/emotionally unsafe, unethical, demeaning), for less money than they deserve and for more hours than they should. This is done in order to ensure that the price of work for companies is low, and that they can always draw upon a needy desperate workforce if required. You either comply with company requirements, or you get fired and hope you have enough runway not to starve. This was written about over a hundred years ago and it's especially true today in the modern form of it. Programmers as a field have just been materially insulated from the modern realities of "your job is timing your bathroom breaks, tracking how many hours you spend looking at the internet, your boss verbally abuses you for being slow, and you aren't making enough money to eat properly".

This is also why many places do de-facto 'cleansings' of homeless people by exterminating their shelter or removing their ability to survive off donations, and why the support that is given for people without the means to survive is not only tedious but almost impossible to get. The majority of workers are supposed to look at that and go "well fuck, glad that's not me!" with a little part of their brain going "if i lost my job and things went badly, that could become me."

This is also why immigration enforcement is a thing — so many modern jobs that nobody else in the western world wants to do are taken by immigrants. The employer won't look too closely at the visa, and in return the person gets work. With the benefit being towards the employer — if the person refuses to do something dangerous to themselves or others, or refuses to produce enough output to sustain the exponential growth at great personal cost, well, then the company can just cut the immigrant loose with no recourse, or outright call the authorities on them so they get deported. Significantly less risky to get people to work in intolerable conditions for illegal wages if there is no hope of them suing you for this.

Back in the 1900s there were international conventions to remove passports. Now? Well, they're a convenient underclass for political manoeuvring. Why would you want people to have freedom of movement if your own citizens could just leave when things get bad, and when the benefits are a free workforce that you don't have to obey workers rights laws about?

fao_··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
> (TBF, BT ones also drop packets in RF-noisy environments, but they seem to be more resistant to it)

I've experienced the opposite. The microwave will knock out my bluetooth completely, but the wired headphones are solid but in a decade of using both wired and wireless headphones I've never heard anything weird or staticy through the wired ones. My wired headphones were the Shure SE215, and now after a decade of using those they broke, so I have the Kiwi Ears Belle.

fao_··on Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
Indeed, which is exactly what you should have done, instead of writing a comment that is simply an insult.
fao_··on Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues
> LLMs make pirated art more accessible,

[citation needed]

> 2005 pirates allegedly harmed artists by decreasing their sales.

provably false

fao_··on Fast-Servers
this is more or less, in some way, what Erlang does and how Erlang is so easy to scale.
fao_··on Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
> What you seem to be missing is that LLMs are better at/for some things than others.

I guarantee it is using the same system to write code and teach you about electronics that it is using to teach people about chemistry, and if you can't see how that means the resulting information is suspicious at best, then I don't even know what to say anymore.

fao_··on Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
Don't worry, LLMs are perfectly ok for getting information. Just ask drugs.com about penisomab https://bsky.app/profile/harrisonk.bsky.social/post/3mfs6adw...
fao_··on Show HN: RetroTick – Run classic Windows EXEs in the browser
Really doesn't surprise me, to be honest:

> We strongly recommend contributing with Claude Code or similar AI coding tools.

fao_··on Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
I disagree with your framing cynicism as an "agenda". For the record, I agree that the maker movement hasn't actually ended, and most of your points are correct; however, the idea of LLMs teaching Electronics worries me about as much as people using LLMs to learn Chemistry.

A little while ago I had to dissuade someone from learning Chemistry via an LLM, because the advice that they had been given by the LLM would have very literally either blown up the glassware, throwing molten chemicals all over their clothing, or killed them when they tried to taste whatever they were trying to synthesize. There was no consideration of safety protocol, PPE, proper glassware, or correctly dealing with chemical reactions, and nary a mention of a fucking fume hood. NileRed and a few other chemistry youtubers have utterly woeful approaches to laboratory safety (NileRed specifically I have a chip on my shoulder about — I've seen him practice bad lab work on a number of occasions and violate many of the common safety practices from e.g. Vogel's), but even then they do still take precautions! Let it not be forgotten that safety practices are born through bloodshed. Now we have a whole new wave of people who are excited to learn, and that's great, but one stray hallucination will kill them. I'm sure that the LLM will be more than happy to write an "Oh I'm sorry, it's my bad that I forgot to tell you to double glove when handling organic mercury!" but by then it is too late.

The idea of someone learning, say, House DIY from an LLM and then sawing through the joists or rewiring their electronics is utterly terrifying to me, quite frankly. Likewise, the idea of someone following an LLM's instructions and then blowing themselves up in a shower of capacitors or chemical glassware is also utterly terrifying to me.

Yes, you could do all these things before. But at least the most commonly available learning materials to you were trustworthy and written by experts!

fao_··on Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
> This is actually a clean commodity price spike because it’s specifically not for market manipulation or financial engineering. It’s because demand for this product really did explode overnight.

Based on how the same 3 billion has been circiling between Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and a few other companies... I really doubt that this is the case, to be honest.

fao_··on No Skill. No Taste
IDK, I understood them perfectly well.
fao_··on Sizing chaos
Well, except for America, according to statistics :P
fao_··on Sizing chaos
Maybe it's me, but only the first quote seems cumbersome, and wasn't very cumbersome in the article when I read it in context.
fao_··on Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
> There needs to be a statute of limitations just like there is for reporting the crimes.

The UK does not have a statute of limitations

fao_··on I gave Claude access to my pen plotter
That is not what I was saying at all :P
fao_··on I gave Claude access to my pen plotter
Even with reinforcement learning, you can still find phrases and patterns that are repeated in the smaller models. It's likely true with the larger ones, too, except the corpus is so large that you'll have fat luck to pick out which specific bits.
fao_··on I fixed Windows native development
`crote` claimed:

> with every package having several dozen patches trying to make a brand-new application release work with a decade-old release of libfoobar.

Quite frankly, as someone started distro-hopping around ~2009 & only stopped around 2020, I have experienced a lot of Linux distributions, as well as poked at a lot of maintainer pipelines — it is simply categorically untrue for the majority of non-Debian derived Linux distributions.

It used to be that a decent number of Linux distributions (Slackware, Debian, RedHat, whatever) put in a lot of work to ensure "stability", yes. However "stability" was, for the most part, simply backporting urgent security fixes to stable libraries and to their last three or so versions. The only system that is very well known for shipping "a decades old version" of a system library would be Debian (or its biggest derivative, Ubuntu), because it's release cycle is absolutely glacial, and most other Linux distributions do give somewhat of a shit about keeping relatively close to upstream. If only because maintaining a separate tree for a program just so you can use an ancient library is basically just soft-forking it, which incurs a metric shitton of effort and tech-debt that accrues over time.

One of the reasons I switched to and then ran at least one single Arch Linux installation for the back half of the 2010s (and used other computers or a dual boot for distrohopping) was partly for the challenge (I used to forget to read the NEWS before upgrading and got myself into at least one kernel panic that way lol), and partly because it was the only major rolling-release distribution at the time. In the last 6 years that's changed a lot, and now there's a whole slew of rolling-release distributions to choose from. The biggest is probably Steam's Holo distribution of Arch, but KDE's new distribution (replacing Kubuntu as the de-facto "KDE Distro") is based on Arch as well, along with I think Bazzite and CachyOS; Arch has always had a reputation (since before the 2010s) for keeping incredibly close to upstream in it's package distributions, and I think that ideology has mostly won-out now that a lot of Linux software is more generally stable and interacts reasonably well (Whereas, back when Pipewire was a thing... that was not the case).

Now, sure, I'm not going to the effort of compiling my decade+ experience of Linux into a spreadsheet of references of every major distribution I tried in the last ten years, just to prove all of this on an internet forum, but hopefully that write-up will suffice. Furthermore, as far as I can see, the burden of proof is not on me, but on `crote` to prove the claim they made.

Also, I get how if you've only ever used Debian-derivatives, all of this may appear to be incorrect. I would suggest, uh, not doing that — if only because it's a severely limiting view of what Linux systems are like. Personally, I've been a big fan of using Alpine's Edge release since before they had to drop linux-hardened and it's a really nice system to use as a daily driver.

fao_··on Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)
"By today's standards"? no that's just FORTH code
fao_··on I fixed Windows native development
> The counterpoint of this is Linux distros trying to resolve all global dependencies into a one-size-fits-nothing solution - with every package having several dozen patches trying to make a brand-new application release work with a decade-old release of libfoobar. They are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and act surprised when it doesn't fit.

This is only the case for debian and derivatives, lol. Rolling-release distributions do not have this problem. This is why most of the new distributions coming out are arch linux based.

fao_··on Breaking the spell of vibe coding
I don't think this is the case, because the AI companies are all just shuffling around the same 300 million or trillion to each other.
fao_··on Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube
> Season one it was a traditional adventure of the week style show that was popular at the time and before. because having a multi season story arc was unheard of and still more or less is today so the first season was traditional TV and only when mildly successful did it have the ability to spread its wings. and it did so so well that it forced other shows like DS9 to also have seasonal story arcs.

Unfortunately incorrect! JMS had the entire plot and "bible" written out start to finish before the show was produced, and the show was approved based on that bible. It had all the room it planned for and needed at the start. There were even built-in "escape hatches" planned for if actors had to drop out (which happened to Michael O'Hare, unfortunately)

fao_··on Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs
Indeed, and many of those same groups are also funding right wing propaganda in other countries.
fao_··on Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs
Incorrect. ICE is built off the background of 30-50 years of propaganda against "immigrants", most of it completely untrue.

The same is done for "benefits scroungers", despite the evidence being that welfare fraud only accounts for approximately 1-5% of the cost of administering state welfare, and state welfare would be about 50%+ cheaper to administer if it was a UBI rather than being means-tested. In fact, much of the measures that are implemented with the excuse of "we need to stop benefits scroungers", such as testing if someone is disabled enough to work or not, etc. are simulatenously ineffective and make up most of the cost.

Nevertheless, "benefits scroungers" has entered the zeitgeist in the UK (and the US) because of this propaganda.

The same is true for propaganda against people who have migrated to the UK/US. Many have done so as asylum seekers under horrifying circumstances, and many die in the journey. However, instead of empathy, the media greets them with distaste and horror — dehumanising them in a fundamentally racist way, specifically so that a movement that grants them rights as a workforce never takes off, so that companies can employ them for zero-hour contracts to do work in conditions that are subhuman, and pay them substantially less than minimum wage (It's incredibly beneficial for the economy, unfortunately).

fao_··on Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down
> There is no such thing as "gluten intolerance", for example

[citation needed].

I have celiac disease and a wheat allergy, which presented at the age of 3 comorbidly.

If I ingest gliadin, my immune cells take the gliadin, run a nice little check on it, and then raise holy hell and destroy my gut villae.

If I come into contact with wheat, I get a histamine response. Even a bag of (organic, locally produced) wheat flour opened in the same room as me used to be enough to make my airways close up.

fao_··on Wikipedia: Sandbox
> Especially in Zed where the only way to switch hard tabs is buried in the settings menu, and impossible to change per buffer.

Even vim lets you set that per-buffer so that's more of an editor problem than anything else, lmao

fao_··on Giving up upstream-ing my patches and feel free to pick them up
GNU GRUB is a GNU project, yes. No idea what OP is talking about https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
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