Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)J
Posts
0
Comments
330
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump
  • Well, that heavily depends upon factors like what kind of lifestyle you're living. For example, I save a shitload of money by not needing a car.

    In general I'd say that someone who lives in my town and makes roughly what I do could save 1k to 2k per month depending on how much discretionary spending they want to be able to do. Possibly more if they're very frugal.

    In case we're comparing to the USA here, Germany has lower wages and higher taxes but a lot of stuff is way cheaper, especially education and healthcare. My health insurance premium can't exceed 14.6% of my income, deductibles don't exist, and most procedures are fully covered – for instance, when I went to a hospital for surgery and stayed for four days, my total bill was 40 €.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump
  • No, I misread ("do" instead of "make").

    I went from something like 25k to something like 50k, which still wasn't impressive but okay for a junior-level dev. And vastly better than what I made before.

    These days I'm somewhere north of 80k but monthly bonuses tied to company performance make it hard to give an accurate number off the top of my head. Depending on who you ask that's either above or below average for someone of my experience level.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump
  • Germany.

    The minimum notice time scales with employment duration (if the company terminates the contact) or is four weeks (if the employee quits). However, the contact can state a longer period; this is often done to make the notice time symmetrical. The notice period for the employee can never exceed that for the company. Usually, contacts can only be terminated effective at the end of a month so that can extend things a bit further.

    At-will employment is not a thing in Germany except for informal arrangement like paying the neighbor's kid to mow the lawn. Even during the trial period (a period of typically six months at the start of an employment where firing the employee is much easier) two weeks are the absolute minimum.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump
  • I've changed jobs since then; these days I still do software but in the financial sector (which is a highly annoying sector since the problem domain is complex and unintuitive).

    Back then I did almost triple my salary (more like x 2.5 but it routine taken triple pay to get me to stay) but that's more reflective of how terribly the old job paid.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump
  • I used to work as a cheapo part-time-on-paper software developer to pay for university. All devs in the company were student workers and the quality of the work reflected that. That clown show of a job actually took so much of my energy and attention that it delayed my thesis by two years. Yikes.

    My boss was straight up delusional. Among his many bizarre ideas was the assumption that I'd stay on for about nine months after my graduation, obviously for the absurdly low pay I was making as a student. That arrangement would've worked out very well for him so he assumed I'd be all for it.

    Unfortunately for him, I was already working out the terms of my employment with another company. On the other side of the country. Who actually employed real full-time devs for real market-rate pay. There was no chance I'd stay on for longer than necessary.

    So I hand-delivered my written resignation, effective in two months – that being the legal minimum notice period based on my employment duration at the time. Boy, was he upset. He thought we had an agreement (that I never agreed to) and that I'd take as much time as needed to finish up that major project we'd recently started (because clearly that's a reason to work for pennies).

    Hell no. I did tell him I'd reconsider... if he beat the other company's offer. That would've meant a 200% pay rise. Suddenly he was much more amenable to my leaving.

  • Interesting in principle but they could've hidden their LLM use better. This passage is a bit of a giveaway:

    Here’s a polished section you can insert into your article (it fits naturally after the Sync Phase section):

    Of course since the writer has a company called "SQLite AI", they probably think of LLM fingerprints as a sign of quality.

  • Remember, tomato is a fruit, it's just not sweet.

    Shitty supermarket tomatoes aren't sweet. Homegrown tomatoes can be very sweet and very delicious.

  • How about some weird ancient ones?

    They're as much not to everyone's taste as the shows themselves but I love all of the HaréGuu openings. The original's a bop, Deluxe continues this while adding a spoken-word section the singer can barely keep up with, and Final is the best of the bunch. HaréGuu Deluxe also has a neat showtune-y ending.

    I also think that Nerima Daikon Brothers has a great opening; it very much fits with the main characters being dollar store Blues Brothers.

    If you want something that oozes cool, I can recommend the original Hellsing. A World Without Logos is an extremely stylish song as long as you don't mind completely incomprehensible lyrics. (The song sounds as if it's in English but is really just onomatopoeia. Basically Prisencolinensinainciusol in menacing.)

  • If you're in Europe and aren't quite comfortable with the "main" FSF, the European offshoot FSFe is generally considered to be fairly sensible. The FSFe has completely divorced itself from the FSF when Stallman returned to the FSF.

  • Oh dear

    Jump
  • We also might simply have outbred them. Remember that modern humans have what appears to be detectable Neanderthal DNA so interbreeding has apparently occurred; we might simply have diluted them into perceived extinction. Besides, there doesn't seem evidence for large-scale war.

    Of course that's all speculation.

  • It's true that LLMs (and GANs) are taking over a term that contains a lot of other stuff, from fuzzy logic to a fair chunk of computer linguistics.

    If you look at what AI does, however, it's mostly classification. Whether it's fitting imprecise measurements into categories or analyzing waveform to figure out which word it represents regardless of diction and dialect; a lot of AI is just the attempt at classifying hard to classify stuff.

    And then someone figure out how to hook that up to a Markov chain generator (LLMs) or run it repeatedly to "recognize" an image in pure noise (GANs). And those are cool little tricks but not really ones that solve a problem that needed solving. Okay, I'll grant that GANs make a few things in image retouching more convenient but they're also subject to a distressingly large number of failure modes and consume a monstrous amount of resources.

    Plus the whole thing where they're destroying the concept of photographic and videographic evidence. I dislike that as well.

    I really like AI when used for what it's good at: Taking messy input data and classifying it. We're getting some really cool things done that way and some even justify the resources we're spending. But I do agree with you that the vast majority of funding and resources gets spent on the next glorified chatbot in the vague hope that this one will actually generate some kind of profit. (I don't think that any of the companies who are invested in AI still actually believe their products will generate a real benefit for the end user.)

  • Blockchain is an adequate solution to a problem that already has other, cheaper solutions.

    AI is an adequate solution to a problem that has no other similarly adequate solutions (classification of complex information). Unfortunately, all the money is in that solution being applied to problems where it's not adequate (content generation, user interaction).

  • Teams

    Jump
  • Downside: Many companies use open-plan offices, which means it's too busy to concentrate. So everyone wears noise-cancelling headphones in order to be able to work at all.

    The only time I actually felt that being present was a benefit was in a company that had one from for every two people.

  • That fridge competes with a dumb fridge from a budget brand that costs 200 to 300 bucks. You can even get self-defrosting ones at that price point.

    Unlike TVs, which need to display content, fridges can work just fine when they're just a heat pump, a thermostat, a light bulb, and an insulated box (and optionally also a fan and a heating element). The biggest technical difference between a cheap fridge today and one from the 50s is in materials and using an LED bulb.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump
  • They're not all that afraid of what's out there. They spend most of their time trying to make friends and messing things up by acting like American tourists.

    In fact, most of the reason for why humanity is so powerful towards the end of the show is that several of the powerful species have befriended humanity and have given their tech to them.

    It's still milprop but milprop that places a surprisingly large emphasis on diplomacy and dealing with people in good faith. You know, what the USA typically don't do.

  • The live-action version of The Enigma of Amigara Fault is surprisingly adorable.

  • The annoying bit is that sharing a series of cryptic shell commands is typically the most efficient way of telling someone how to get things done and of keeping them from wandering off in the GUI and doing something else instead.

    This...

    dos2unix your-file.ini | crunchmeister-cli frobulate -d 9 --exclude-preflight alpha,delta --wank > ~/.config/somethingd/frobulated.dat && systemctl --user restart somethingd

    ...could be the equivalent of this.

    1. Convert your raw data INI file to UNIX file endings using an appropriate tool (outside the scope of this tutorial)
    2. Launch CrunchMeister
    3. Enter the Frobulation section and navigate to Custom Frobulation
    4. In the Input Data tab, upload the UNIXified INI file and set the data level to Full, with semicolons
    5. In the Preflight tab, ensure that the Alpha and Delta packages are deselected. Starting with CrunchMeister 5.7, the Delta package is found under the Additional packages expander
    6. In the Frobulate tab, enable wankness and hit the Frobulate! button
    7. Save the resulting file to your disk
    8. Launch Something Service Manager (install first if nor present)
    9. Click New frobulated data file
    10. Select the file you saved in step 6
    11. Click Reload service

    It's still cryptic, though. You can't have everything.

  • I think major factors in people bitching about the Windows 10 EOL is that a) Windows 10 was explicitly marketed as the final version of Windows and b) Windows 11 is so unappealing that even companies are reluctant to upgrade.

    Normally, that wouldn't be a big problem. We had dud releases before. Windows Vista had few friends due to compatibility issues but was workable. Besides, 7 was launched shortly after Vista's EOL. Likewise, Windows 8's absurd UI choices made it deeply unpopular but it was quickly followed by 8.1, which fixed that. And Windows 10 again followed shortly after 8's EOL (and well before 8.1's).

    Windows 11, however, combines a hard to justify spec hike with a complete absence of appealing new features. The notable new features that are there are raising concerns about data safety. In certain industries (e.g. medical, legal, and finance), Recall/Copilot Vision is seen as dangerous as it might access protected information and is not under the same control that the company has over its document stores. That increases the vector for a data breach that could lead to severe legal and reputational penalties.

    Microsoft failed to satisfyingly address these concerns. And there's not even hope of a new version of Windows releasing a few months after 10's EOL; Windows 12 hasn't even been announced yet.

    It's no wonder that companies are now complaining about Windows 10's support window being too short.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump
  • Yeah, and in the 70s they estimated they'd need about twice that to make significant progress in a reasonable timeframe. Fusion research is underfunded – especially when you look at how the USA dump money into places like the NIF, which research inertial confinement fusion.

    Inertial confinement fusion is great for developing better thermonuclear weapons but an unlikely candidate for practical power generation. So from that one billion bucks a year, a significant amount is pissed away on weapons research instead of power generation candidates like tokamaks and stellarators.

    I'm glad that China is funding fusion research, especially since they're in a consortium with many Western nations. When they make progress, so do we (and vice versa).