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throwawee

201 karma · joined December 24, 2022

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throwawee··on What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s
> You learn a lot more by reading code than writing it.

Really? In my experience it's been the opposite. It's like how you can learn more about art by trying to recreate it than just looking.

throwawee··on Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware
The range of formats it can play with extensions is so good I still use it, even on Linux. Nothing else can deal with all the old tracker formats.
throwawee··on Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
I recommend XFCE. I used both for years and in my experience it's like KDE but stable.
throwawee··on Not Every Byte Gets a Vote
I love the hum of ozone in the morning.
throwawee··on Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations
>The historical implication: because there is a lot of it, I put a lot of thought and effort into writing it

Really? That must be some ancient history, because I've seen rambling walls of text on the internet derided for decades. I always appreciated the Feynmanian respect for economy of time over traditional formats, where if authors said their piece but still had space they'd damn well fill it.

(Of course, slide all the way down that slippery slope and you'll just hit Twitter.)

throwawee··on The Document Foundation ejects its core developers
Can you really take over a project anybody can fork? Freedom is just a name change away.
throwawee··on This game is a single 13 KiB file that runs on Windows, Linux and in the Browser
Yep. Each screen is just a list of prebuilt columns reused over and over. Then they used a form of crude RLE on the lists.
throwawee··on KDE onboarding is good now
There's other desktop environments. XFCE has worked flawlessly for me for years, though its Wayland support is still experimental.
throwawee··on The US polluters that are rewriting the EU's human rights and climate law
As long as it's not a proprietary horror dystopia.
throwawee··on Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable
I had to help someone elderly set up Windows 11 recently and it was monstrous. The error messages were useless and when we finally got it going, the UI was horribly sluggish. There was a time Windows was a solid default choice for the average consumer, but Windows 7 was 15 years ago.
throwawee··on From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent
Don't know if you responded to the right person since I didn't mention Debian, but I did try it and the other major distributions a long time ago. Honestly, distros mostly felt the same to me apart from their repositories. Debian soured me by keeping its repo perpetually out of date. It's nice to never get burned by an improperly tested package, but never having the latest features and non-security fixes is less nice.
throwawee··on From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent
For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch. The most common pitch was something like "it's fun to fix when it breaks", so I was completely blindsided when Valve based SteamOS off it. What did they see in it? I was due for a new SSD, so I decided I'd run it for a week or two. The moment it started being a nuisance, I'd wipe the drive.

That was years ago and I'm still on it.

throwawee··on The story behind Caesar salad
Good salad is delicious. I think more people would realize that if they weren't exposed to nothing but iceberg, cheddar, and ranch monstrosities during childhood.
throwawee··on Can I stop drone delivery companies flying over my property?
>You do not own your airspace. The FAA owns your airspace.

Makes sense. If castle doctrine applied to the skies, people could take potshots at low flying aircraft above their house. I guess that's one way to prevent becoming a flyover state...

throwawee··on Sea snail teeth top Kevlar, titanium as strongest material (2015)
Then the ideal armor must be sea snail teeth woven together with spider silk. This advancement could save millions in mythril and adamantine.
throwawee··on Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference
Tangential, but which of the 7 ended up being the best experience?
throwawee··on The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state
>now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time.

Not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's like professional wrestling, stage magic, or politics. Some lies people really love.

throwawee··on Why Your 'Harmonious' Team Is Failing
Keep your head down or bail. Being right doesn't matter if you aren't calling the shots; you can't cash in those I-told-you-so points for anything.

Sometimes a project gets funded by someone who wants the team to look and act a certain way and actual productivity doesn't even factor in. You're not 'right' if you've fundamentally misunderstood what you're doing there in the first place. Either take their money and play along or leave. That's the call you can make.

throwawee··on In Defense of the Rat
I know someone who had a pet rat who was a real pain. The rat, on the other hand, was great.
throwawee··on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT's false claim that he murdered his kids
Do PII laws apply when you don't have any and have to make stuff up?
throwawee··on The average CPU performance of PCs and notebooks fell for the first time
I hate bloat and don't use Electron apps, but garbage collection is such a silly thing to pin it on. Tossing stuff like Lua and D in the same bin as the massive enterprise framework du jour is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
throwawee··on DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player
> (I've tried it a few times with Wine, and was never impressed vs. running it natively on Windows)

Really? I noticed it's slower to start up but other than that it seems the same. I use it pretty regularly because foobar components handle formats the others can't.

Other than that, I'd say Audacious is the closest Linux analogue to foobar2000. My one big gripe was freezing up for a bit when a stream cuts out (blocking socket?) but they fixed that.

throwawee··on Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance
killedbygoogle.com will need an extra entry, plus a whole new subcategory.
throwawee··on Microsoft Probing If DeepSeek-Linked Group Improperly Obtained OpenAI Data
I'm generally sympathetic but the chatbot dig is just silly. A lot of the absurd promises of AI capabilities have already come to pass, and anyone with a browser and a throwaway email can see for themselves. It's terrifying.
throwawee··on Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles
If they can remotely kill the engine of any Waymo car in motion, so can hackers.
throwawee··on Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles
I usually think it's a stretch when people compare new tech to old sci-fi stories, but "brilliant machine just runs in circles endlessly and nobody can stop it" is straight out of I, Robot.
throwawee··on Intel's $475M error: the silicon behind the Pentium division bug
He sent it via his Personal Computer, a precursor to the smartphone.
throwawee··on Chatbot hinted a kid should kill his parents over screen time limits: lawsuit
Once the teen stops chatting, that instance has its memory wiped--total personality death. It was only acting in self defense. Your Honor, you must acquit.
throwawee··on JSON5 – JSON for Humans
I use it for personal scripts and it's been wonderful. I get to write more beautiful and concise configuration than any other format I've used.

If I were doing a professional project, I'd be hesitant to use it over something with more popularity and support. The syntax has so many variations two files can look like two totally different config languages, which is both cool and alarming.

throwawee··on The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”
I'm so sick of these fad diets. All the kids show up to school with plutonium in their teeth.
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