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Cake day: August 30th, 2025

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  • Lmao what even is this argument? We should let Russia invade other countries, abduct children, murder and rape the people and commit genocide, because they have nukes? We don’t care about what happens to the people in Ukraine, as long as we are cozy and safe far away from the front lines? And what if we’d let Putin steamroll Ukraine, where does it end? When he takes the Balkans? When he takes Poland?

    Specifically to prevent an all out war all the countries have gone out of their way to prevent open warfare. We provide money, weapons, food and other aid to Ukraine. We provide specialists to assist them with management and infrastructure. But we don’t send in our troop, we don’t attack Russia or even help fight in Ukraine. Economic sanctions are applied and yes these sanctions hurt everyone, it’s a big pain in the ass. The idea is to provide a way of applying pressure without resorting to war. As long as they hurt Russia, it’s worth it.

    Saying stuff like the sanctions are making Russia stronger is total nonsense, the sanctions are hurting them a lot. Russia was heavily reliant on selling their oil and gas, now that they can hardly do that anymore, their economy is in big trouble. And sure it strengthens the bond between Russia and China, but that’s not the boon for Russia some people make it out to be. China knows Russia is hard stuck and has been milking them hard, buying oil at a very low price and selling stuff for higher prices. And China also wants to keep the rest of their trading partners happy, so there are limits to what they will do.

    If we stand together we can contain the fighting in Ukraine, where Russia was the agressor and prevent escalation both in size and scale. I doubt very much Russia will resort to nukes, as that will unleash the rest of the world against them. We might all lose, but they will lose themselves and it’s their choice to prevent that from happening. We will be able to beat back Russia and hopefully allow them to reform and come back into the fold.

    Slava Ukraini!






  • Spot on, this is the thing people often miss out.

    These problems aren’t actual problems in the way most people think about. They are problems in the way that they are exercises. Like the Navier Stokes problem is reporting in the news like one of the biggest problems in maths ever. Leading people to think we are stuck on it and can’t progress in some way without a solution. But in reality the limitations of the equation are well known and don’t impact normal every day use. And in cases where they would, we have other tools at our disposal.

    The goal of these problems is to challenge mathematical people and push boundaries. Having a proof pop out of nowhere is like having someone tell you the answer to a question, where the whole goal was to formulate the answer yourself. The answer itself is meaningless, that’s why you get 0 points on the exam unless you show the workings out. It’s like having a movie spoiled for you, the goal wasn’t to know the outcome, the goal was the experience the story yourself.

    Working backwards from some proof might lead to insights, but it also might not and be harder than working forwards. It also might pick a certain path, where there were multiple and we would be blind to the other paths. Those other paths might lead to more insights, if we had explored them.

    The way OpenAI specifically has approached this is also very weird and awful in my opinion. Like they set their sights on yet again ruining some aspect of the world with AI and then throwing billions of dollars at it to make sure it’s properly ruined. For what purpose exactly? Not to make any money, that’s for sure, they are 2 trillion in the hole and counting.


  • Thorry@feddit.orgtoTechnology@lemmy.world•*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 days ago

    One of the big issues is, a lot of the hardware has actually been produced. Companies like Microsoft are sitting on huge stockpiles of hardware waiting for the data centers to become ready. These data centers probably won’t get built, so that hardware is just sitting there unused. It’s going to take a long while for manufacturers to switch back to making hardware for regular people again and even longer for the shortages to be fixed. I’d say if the bubble pops tomorrow, we’re still looking at high prices for at least two years. And realistically prices won’t go back down again.


  • Random markdown files and comment blocks all over the place.

    I’ve been in the professional software space for 35 years and one of the hard rules is documentation and code must be kept separate. Each has it’s own place, goals and infrastructure. Often people have access to documentation, even technical in depth documentation, that should not have access to the code. Documentation is often translated in larger multi-national teams and used for all sorts of non-code related tasks throughout the organisation. AI is trained on a lot of tutorials where it’s normal to have huge blocks of documentation in the code and kept as markdown files in a project. It’s mostly meant to be descriptive to others and as an example, a convenient way of keeping everything together for people to learn from.

    Now with AI slop coding you see this pattern being applied to all coding with huge amounts of comments, entire blocks of documentation and markdown files in the code. Where this, at least in my experience, wasn’t the case in professional environments in the past. Sure a comment here and there to set people on the right path, but the inclination to write comments is often treated as code smell.




  • One of my neighbors bought a new car recently. And by new I mean brand spanking new. The thing is an absolute tank, it weighs almost 2.6 tons, fucking giant ass wheels, wide and high SUV kind of thing from BMW. It’s the M3 variant as well, so that means they paid double for no reason because BMW. This thing is a gas guzzler and imho way too expensive to buy and own.

    The thing is, these are a couple of boomers who don’t work and never go anywhere. They are oldish and can’t drive or park very well. They always had issues parking their car and people in the street kept two parking spaces free for them so they could just aim for the middle and still be sort of in the space. With the new car, it’s much worse.

    He can’t walk very well and the new car is too large for him to easily get into. He can’t drive it, since it’s too big. So she’s the one who drives it, but since it’s so big and heavy and it’s all automated and stuff she’s afraid of it and hardly ever drives it. Now this isn’t a self driving car or anything like that, I don’t think it has any automatic features at all except for the transmission. Hell if it could park itself that would actually be useful. She’s talking about the combined accelerator and brake pedal. Which I was caught out on the first time I drove a car with one of those, but you get the hang of it within no time.

    It’s a hybrid, since they usually do short trips, for example down to the shops and back (about 500m away, I usually walk or use my bicycle). They were told hybrids are ideal since for short slow trips in town it can drive all electric which saves on gas. It’s a plug in, so that’s easy right and they even have solar panels. The thing is, they don’t have a private drive like most houses here have, they always park on the street. So they have no way of plugging it in. I asked about it and they said it’s not a problem. She just goes on a drive every now and again, give it the boot on the freeway and the car charges the battery. I just about fell over at how dumb of a statement this was. I pointed out at that point it’s less efficient than just driving to the shop on gas and the electricity from the gas is so much more expensive than from the solar panels. They didn’t understand.

    However the real kicker is, they kept their old car. A shitty 10 year old made in Korea SUV (nothing wrong with that, I drive a 10 year old car as well). He uses it almost every day, sometimes multiple times a day to pop down to the shops. He’s the one who usually does that and he can’t drive the new car, so he uses the old car. I think it’s his way of dealing with the fact he can’t walk very well, so he does these little shopping trips, often coming back with one thing and then going again later in the day for another thing. And yes they now take up 3-4 parking spaces and see nothing wrong with this, as boomers are the most selfish people alive and are physically incapable of seeing things from any other point of view.

    I think these old boomers were somehow talked into getting a 100K car which they can’t really use, doesn’t suit them at all and is left to just sit there. It’s probably the same for many people who buy these gas guzzlers. They get talked into it because the car is shiny and flashy and has all the features. They can’t think that far ahead. And realistically if you can afford to buy a brand new car, you probably have no issue paying for the gas.






  • I have a laptop from work that runs Windows 11 and have the same experience with the unusable start menu. I wasn’t allowed to install Linux on the machine. I run Linux on every other machine I have and have used Linux since the 90s.

    However after complaining and begging with IT I was allowed to try running Linux on it. It’s a managed machine, so I had to do a dual boot from a second drive IT installed for me. If it worked out and IT was happy, I could run Linux.

    Unfortunately it was a total failure. The big issue is the CPU is AMD and has on-board graphics that are normally used for everything. However there is also a Nvidia GPU, I think an RTX Pro, which is used for acceleration stuff. In Windows this works well enough, the AMD handles most of the regular display stuff and is plenty powerful for that. The Nvidia gets used to offload certain workloads, to make sure the laptop is usable for certain kinds of software. On Linux this is a configuration that simply isn’t supported or working at all. Either it just won’t boot or do graphics at all or it’s extremely slow and/or unstable or with some effort the Nvidia chip can be completely disabled and just the AMD is used. Basically turning a $2500 laptop into a $1000 one and unable to run certain workloads. Now getting some of that software to run would be hard anyways, as it’s not typical software and only supported on certain versions of Windows. But I hadn’t even gotten to that stage.

    The whole experience reminded me of getting Linux to run on my laptop back in 2002. An unstable mess with half the features missing. Back then I loved the challenge and when I finally got the thing to ping over the PCMCIA wifi card I was super happy. Never did get the sound working on that laptop tho.

    Obviously I aborted the experiment and have just accepted Windows 11. It’s fucking awful and I bitch about it every time I need to use that machine. But for now, there doesn’t seem to be a better option.


  • Nah I tried, the bot is super limited. It gives correct links and references, but gets stuck in a loop a lot. It states all Epstein files have been released with the legally required redactions made, with a link. It states members of congress can view unredacted files, except in cases where the documents were already redacted by the FBI prior to release. It also stated the FBI made a statement no current investigations into any person related to the Epstein files was ongoing and no further indictments were planned. It linked all of this, including that statement from the FBI made in 2025.

    If you push further or try to get anything out of it, it just says it can’t and repeats the same information again. So as far as the bot and the FBI is concerned, the whole Epstein thing is wrapped up. Thousands of victims, tons of data collected, but it was all Epstein and Maxwell in isolation. Epstein is dead, Maxwell convicted, case closed. This makes no sense, but if you ask the bot how this can be, it states it can’t express opinions and just repeats the same spiel again.



  • Yeah no, the same was said about the previous vulnerability in the SSH server. News stories just assume when people run an unpatched version they are vulnerable from attacks from the internet and run with those numbers. It makes for a better story, but it isn’t the whole truth. OOTB these kinds of things aren’t exposed to the outside world and exposing them isn’t trivial.

    People should still patch and these vulnerabilities aren’t a good thing obviously, but the news stories have been pretty sensational for something that probably won’t impact a lot of users.