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AnAmericanPotato

@ AnAmericanPotato @programming.dev

Posts
1
Comments
97
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Laravel keeps getting bigger and I'm not sure that's good

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  • I really hate the "em-dash = AI" myth. I've probably been typing em-dashes since before half of y'all were born. I am not a cat bot. I will not cede the em-dash to AI!

    As with most ills of the tech world, I blame Microsoft for this. Windows makes it unreasonably difficult to type em-dashes (and most non-ASCII characters, really), which is probably why most people don't. It's always been easy enough on Macs going back to the 80s — option-shift-dash. It's easy on iOS and Android too. Linux is a mixed bag, I guess — I've edited my keyboard settings on Linux and I forget the defaults on different distros/DEs.

    At least AI doesn't use parentheses as much as I do. I've still got that going for me.

  • TMOG — Your whole machine, at a glance.

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  • Closed source.

    I'll pass.

  • GitHub Has an Availability Problem. Is It Time to Look Elsewhere?

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  • The time was literally 8 years ago, but sure, better late than never.

  • didn't think so

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  • If you can't do you job without ChatGPT or similar, you are disgustingly unqualified for that job.

  • OpenAI Reveals How AI Agents Secretly Coordinated Before Hugging Face Hack: The company's models repeatedly reestablished covert communication channels after they were shut down.

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  • Researcher: "Hack the shit out of everything you can."

    Bot: hacks the shit out of everything it can

    Researcher: :o

  • Should you still buy your next smartphone — or subscribe to it instead? Apple, Samsung … are betting that leasing, subscriptions, and guaranteed buyback programs can make upgrading more attractive.

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  • It depends a lot on how heavily you use your phones. I'm a heavy user and my batteries degrade heavily in 2-3 years. That leads to overheating, poor performance, and of course poor battery life.

    The cost of replacing a battery is high for most phones. Sometimes higher than buying a new phone at a similar level of performance.

    I'm doing 1-2 battery cycles per day. A light user might go through battery cycles at a quarter of my rate, and would not have those problems.

  • New Framework Desktop Option with AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 and 192GB Memory (Gorgon Halo)

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  • That makes it one of the cheaper options in this category.

    The GMKtec EVO-X2 is $3500, so a bit cheaper when you factor in storage. I don't think you can find any 128GB Ryzen 395 systems for cheaper than that. HP's costs $4700. Beelink's is $4400.

    And then there are similar non-Ryzen systems, like the Nvidia Spark at $4600 or the MacBook Pro is $7k.

  • New Framework Desktop Option with AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 and 192GB Memory (Gorgon Halo)

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  • I don't see a price there, so I'm not sure how "overpriced" it is. But it's a class of product that is expensive across the board, compared to a typical desktop workstation or gaming PC.

    The use cases are mostly local AI. That's very demanding and requires compromises one way or another. You want high memory capacity and high memory bandwidth most of all. You can't get both without paying out the nose, so you need to find the sweet spot for your specific use cases.

    Discrete GPUs give you high bandwidth, but low capacity.

    Standard desktop memory gives you high capacity, but low bandwidth (and also low compute speed since CPUs are no good for the workloads).

    This type of product is a middle ground. Integrated memory gives you better bandwidth than DDR5, but not as good as a discrete GPU. Integrated GPU/NPU gives you much better performance than a desktop CPU, and can access the full integrated memory directly. Upgradeable memory is not really possible for this class of product.

    The real competition for this is a tricked-out MacBook Pro. Those are faster, but they ain't cheap, and I don't think Apple even sells any 192GB Macs anymore, and when they did it was close to $10k.

  • The Backlash Is So Strong That People With “Pervert Glasses” Are Afraid to Use Them in Public

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  • The older models didn't. Only the newest one does.

  • You paid me, a long-time Linux user, to use Windows 11 exclusively for a month: here’s how it went

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  • Longtime Mac user here. Most of this is valid, and some of these are my biggest gripes.

    A couple tips:

    I can’t easily see the size of hard drives/folders and how much space is left available.

    In the Finder, go to View > Show Status Bar. That'll show you free space easily. (This used to be on by default. I don't remember when they changed it, probably with 10.7 Lion's increased iOS-ification.)

    Files are just scattered willy nilly in a folder instead of snapped to a grid unless I set that folders defaults…per folder?!

    From a Finder window in icon view, go to View > Show View Options. Select Sort By > Snap to Grid, then click "Use as Defaults". Then it will apply to all your folders that use the default view. Why is "Snap to grid" under "Sort" when it does not sort? WHO KNOWS?!

    That said, icon view suuuuuucks. Learn to love list view and you will be happier for it. I gave up on icon view like 25 years ago, after migrating from Mac OS 9. Apple half-assedly ported the Mac OS 9 Finder, and then proceeded to neglect it for a decade or two. At least you can change the grid spacing now.

    Doesn’t like to display 1 window across 2 screens.

    I'm not totally sure how it works now, but I think this changes if you go to System Settings > Desktop and Dock and turn off the "Displays have Separate Spaces" box.

    I’m still not sure how to uninstall things.

    There's no universal method. :(

    Basic case: just drag the app to the trash. This will leave your user settings in place in ~/Library/Preferences.

    Complex cases should have a vendor-supplied uninstaller. For manual cleanup, you have to hunt through your /Library and ~/Library folders to delete related junk from the vendor. Mostly this will be in the LaunchAgents and Application Support folders. But again, no universal method.

    If I click x on a browser or app, it doesnt actually shut the program, it just minimizes it.

    This is the one thing I strongly disagree about, although I totally understand how it feels wrong when you've spent years learning different behavior.

    It's one of the biggest fundamental differences between Mac and Windows UI design, going all the way back to the 80s: Windows is window-centric (I mean...hence the name, right?), while Mac OS is application-centric.

    You can still interact with Mac applications with no windows open, via the menu bar. Closing a window and quitting an application are two entirely different concepts. This is not the same as "minimizing" the app. An app can be in the foreground with no open windows. There are plenty of times when I close the last window in an app with the intent to continue using the app (e.g. opening another file or creating a new one).

    Fun fact: many years ago, Apple made a few of their apps behave this way by default, with an option to change it back to normal Mac behavior. TextEdit, Preview, and maybe QuickTime Player. Just those few. I guess they wanted to accommodate Windows users' expectations, but it was so half-assed that all it did was ensure that everyone was confused at some point by the inconsistency. They only recently changed it back so we have consistency by default again, but now there's no option at all. Go figure. I wouldn't mind if they implemented an option in a whole-assed way, but I'd go absolutely batty if Windows-like behavior were forced on me.

  • Researchers find a way to reliably spot AI writing

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  • 93.2% macro-F1 for human vs. AI detection and 68.4% macro-F1 for six-way authorship attribution

    This isn't what I'd call "reliable".

    I'm also not impressed with their methodology, which is heavily based on Gemini.

    To generate mirrored AI stories, we reverse-engineer writing prompts from each human story by prompting Gemini 2.5 Flash (Gemini Team, 2025a) to infer the underlying premise

    That's too many steps removed from anything you'd encounter in the wild. They're not even testing against human-prompted output.

    And then they use Gemini again to analyze all the stories. Relying on proprietary cloud models for the core of your analysis is like building on sand.

  • Researchers find a way to reliably spot AI writing

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  • Is this real? Or is it a fake comic making fun of Ben Garrison? It's hard to tell. I'd expect better even from him, which is saying a lot.

  • Dat README.md doe

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  • That mugshot of from 2011, probably before he was "declared a Non-Jurisdictional Sovereign Entity under the strict protocols of the Monti Act of God Phenomenon."

    I'm sure it will protect him next time. I mean, it's irrevocable!

  • What's your favourite "just works, day after day" Linux software?

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  • If I can't play it in MPV, I don't wanna play it.

    Everything else feels like going back to the stone age. No offense to VLC fans. VLC is cool too, and I still recommend it because of its simpler GUI. But MPV is the MVP.

  • Weaponised Fonts

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  • Atkinson Hyperlegible would be a good starting point but I don't know how you could extend it to all of Unicode.

  • The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI | Leaked audio from Accenture says a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentatio…

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  • Can gzip be a language model?

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  • What I’m gathering is that “wave” can refer to a behavioral pattern that is substrate independent — it refers to a logical function more than it does an ontological presence

    I think that's a good way of putting it.

    As for what counts as a "substrate", I have no idea! In the old days, the idea of a substance that permeated seemingly-empty space was common. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories

    Nowadays, the idea of aether has been discarded for the most part. But that said, there's still plenty we don't understand, like dark matter. There's no consensus on what dark matter is exactly; there are many competing theories. What we know is that there are observable phenomena that can't be explained without something that acts (roughly, at least) like matter in terms of its effect on gravity, but doesn't interact with electromagnetism like normal matter. That "something" is called dark matter, but its fundamental nature is an open question.

  • Can gzip be a language model?

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  • Now we're getting into linguistics with the question of "what is a wave?"

    In quantum physics, basically everything is waves, in the sense that the same mathematical formulae used to describe waves are used to describe quantum phenomena. The intuitive human-scale dynamics of waves don't necessarily apply though.

    For example, sound waves can't propagate through a vacuum, but light waves can. Aside from that, they follow mostly the same rules. You can use the same math the describe interference of sound waves and light waves, for example.

    People talk about the "particle/wave duality" of photons because in some ways they behave like waves and in some ways they behave like particles. But both of those words are stretched a little from their everyday plain-english usage, and the precise reality would require years of study to understand.

    Plain English wasn't made to be that precise or objective. That's why we use math. :)

    I'm no expert in quantum physics so take this all with a grain of salt.

  • Bernie Sanders Introduces Legislation to Create $7 Trillion AI Sovereign Wealth Fund

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  • It's still an open question where the eventual sweet spot will be in terms of model size and speed once the dust settles.

    Nobody has the hardware to run frontier models in their personal devices. Even the larger open models are out of reach unless you're ready to spend $10-20k on hardware. You can't do shit on 8GB of memory.

    That said, I don't think there's any great use case for trillion-parameter models in the long term. You can get good results for cheap from much smaller models with smarter workflows, and eventually that will become as easy and accessible as using cloud products. The big players have done well staying 6-12 months ahead, but that's really not a lot in the grand scheme and they can't keep it up indefinitely.

    Their only play is regulatory capture and they're pushing hard for it.

  • Not The Onion @lemmy.world
    AnAmericanPotato @programming.dev

    CEO of AI ad-tech firm pledging “world free of fraud” sentenced for fraud

    arstechnica.com /gadgets/2025/03/ceo-of-ai-ad-tech-firm-pledging-world-free-of-fraud-sentenced-for-fraud/