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Thorry

@ Thorry @feddit.org

Posts
2
Comments
301
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • garden [webcomic name]

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  • I still have PTSD from 25 years ago when I killed two snails. I feel terrible about it.

    I was on holiday with my first wife in France. We had this beautiful little cottage in the countryside. We went to bed at night and I wanted to close the shutters on the window, so we wouldn't get waken up at the crack of dawn. But I noticed two large snails sitting on the windowsill outside.

    They would be crushed if I closed the shutters. So I did this trick I learnt where I tapped on their shells with the tip of my finger. That tricked them into retreating into the shell. Then I gently applied force to get them off, waiting till they released themselves as to not hurt them.

    I set them down on the side, waiting for them to get a grip. Once they were firmly in place I let go and checked they were doing alright. They started crawling away and I was satisfied I could safely close the shutters without harming them. After having done so, I got a good night sleep, perhaps the last good night sleep for the rest of my life.

    The next morning I went to open the shutters, to let in the light and some fresh morning air. As I opened the shutters I heard this terrible crunching sound. I was absolutely shocked and my wife put her hand in front of her mouth, pointed at me and yelled: "SNAIL KILLER!". As I slowly opened the shutters I found that indeed the snails had crawled back to a place in front of the shutters. As I opened the shutters, the snails were completely crushed leaving nothing but a sad pile of sadness.

    Obviously I didn't close the shutters for the rest of the stay. I still feel terrible to this day I failed my small fragile gooey friends. I try to make my garden as inviting as possible for all kinds of animals. And I don't get a lot of snails, but there are a lot of other small and large critters. The God of Snails probably warns them to stay away, which is understandable.

    I'm sorry snail friends, I'll do better in the future.

  • How AI text watermarking works: a visual guide

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  • That's one of the things that frustrates me most about this whole AI thing. I fucking hate it and I want it to die, I wish it were never created in the first place. But from a tech enthusiast and a maths nerd point of view, it is super interesting.

    Like the performance of these models is shit compared to a real person doing actual work. But if we think about what we are doing on a basic level, the performance is way beyond what I would expect it to be. I wouldn't expect it to be able to form a coherent sentence or scale as well as it does (even though the resources required to run these is still very high).

    It could have been really cool shit people did studies on and played around with to explore the math. Cool little play models we could let go on a bunch of data and see what it did and how. Something for a small group of nerds and experts who are into that kind of thing, for the sake of learning and nothing else.

    But no, somehow it got transmorphed into "AI". And marketed like this actual learning almost sentient computer system that can replace all workers. You can ask it anything and it will give PhD level expert answers. Oh and it's run by a handful of the most vile men imaginable who pour all of the world's money and resources into it, all so they get to be god emperor of the world. Fucking terrible.

  • Tyler Boebert, Representative Lauren Boebert's son, arrested on sexual exploitation of children charges

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  • It's always the ones you most expect...

  • Single English word for dying of thirst, like starvation. Couldn't think of one, how does Exsiccated/Exsiccation sound?

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  • I think this is a misconception. It's the same thing where people think Germans have words for everything. This kind of thinking usually comes from English native speakers, where compounding words isn't really a thing. Germans can just stick multiple words together and form a new word. This is the same thing with the indigenous peoples of the north having a lot of words for snow. They combine multiple concepts into one word, to describe the kinds of snow. Many languages have this feature, English just happens to be one that lacks it.

  • Canada investigating how Skyrim username mixup sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

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  • I'm going to guess you have a "Don't thread on me" flag up, but also a "Thin blue line" flag at the same time?

  • Senators demand crackdown on wildfire “prediction market” bets | Fire experts warn such markets could incentivize arson.

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  • Even if it were all above board, it's just gambling and should be heavily restricted just as all other forms of betting.

  • Dr. Thanos, PhD.

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  • A kidney? Psssh that's small potatoes, how much RAM do you have?

  • TIL that the US spans about 10% of the Earth's circumference

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  • Jup that's why I mentioned Chili. My point was more that a line that follows a circumference on a sphere, depending on the angle, wouldn't look like a straight line on a mercator projection. But like I said, the basic fact is still right, it's just that squiggly line isn't the best indicator for that. If the line is a fractal it could be infinite length (thinking of coastlines), which isn't very helpful.

  • TIL that the US spans about 10% of the Earth's circumference

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  • That's not what I meant. If the line isn't a straight as drawn on a sphere, the distance will be longer than it would be when drawn on that sphere. Especially a line like this that follows roads, a squiggly line, can end up much longer than a straight line would be.

    When a straight line is drawn on a mercator projection map, and we then turn that projection back into a sphere, the line would no longer be straight. With the only exception being exactly in the north - south direction, since that is preserved with mercator.

    My point wasn't that the line is shorter, like you suggest if the line were to tunnel below the surface. Exactly the opposite, the line would appear longer than it actually is, since it wouldn't be straight if we were to look at that line on a sphere.

  • TIL that the US spans about 10% of the Earth's circumference

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  • You need to follow the curve of the Earth in order to make such a comparison. You've drawn a random squiggly line on a Mercator map projection and took the length of that and compared it to the circumference of a sphere. Those two things simply cannot be compared like that.

    The fact is still correct, the continental US is around 10% of the circumference. But in the grand scheme of things this isn't really important or relevant for anything? It's just a fun fact really. For example the country of Chile also spans about 10% of the circumference. And so does Australia. Russia approaches 20%.

    As the circumference of the planet isn't a measurement a regular person can relate to, or has any meaning for anyone, what does this comparison give us in terms of a new insight?

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Wasn't that whole gros michel story made up after the fact? Those bananas are still available, just more expensive. People who've eaten them have reported them tasting a bit more like the chemical banana taste, but not really the same. And the taste is highly dependent on how ripe the banana is. I think the actual story was the chemical banana was close enough and cheap and easy to produce. People also liked it, even though it didn't really taste like bananas. So it became the de facto banana taste. In small amounts the taste is a lot closer, but people prefer the higher amounts because of the more intense taste.

    It even says as much on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel#%3A%7E%3Atext=The+Gros+Michel+has+a%2Cseeming+version+of+the+Cavendish

    A food history myth is that artificial banana flavor was specifically developed from the Gros Michel, but isoamyl acetate is a simple compound and was not based on any specific cultivar.

  • The AI bubble could burst — and take the economy with it - The Boston Globe

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  • Or the economy crashes by AI replacing everyone and doing an absolute terrible job, causing stuff like supply chain collapse and communication/power outages.

    I have yet to see someone explain how this whole thing actually works out. Just a dozen different scenarios that turn out terrible for almost everyone. The only scenario that works out is if a handful of people like Altman absolutely rule the world, become de facto dictators as they are the ones that control the few AI companies that run everything. And by work out, I mean it works out for that handful of people. For the rest of the world it's probably just about the worst case scenario. But you just know it's the scenario scammy Altman is hoping for.

  • Show HN: Reverse Minesweeper

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  • This reminds me a lot of of daily Akari https://dailyakari.com/

    Those can be very hard to figure out sometimes, with misdirection being part of almost every one.

  • A reason to wake up early on the weekends

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  • Honorable mention to The Terrible Thunder Lizards

  • No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

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  • We used to have many many books! I had three bookcases full of books. Some dealing more with concepts and principles. Some just straight up maths in all sorts and forms. Some were reference books, just listing everything there is to know about a language or a piece of hardware for example. Grouped logically and with an index to look up stuff quickly. With the most used ones having post it notes with annotation and as crude bookmarks to look up stuff that was critical and easy to forget, but needed often.

    These books were often handed down, generation to generation. A lot of my maths books were from my grandfather, with almost every page having tons of annotations and expansions on the subject. He liked to write his knowledge and thoughts in the books with a pencil. A lot of my shelves also had notebooks full of my own writings about different subjects. Designs, compilations, quick references, etc.

    We also had something akin to the internet actually, but it was referred to as the sneakernet. Meaning to transfer information you'd have to walk from one place to another with physical media (floppy disks or even data cassettes or reels if you are real old). It wasn't fast, but there was a lot of excellent content shared around. I remember for example Ralph Brown's interrupt list. Everyone I knew that did software for DOS had a version of that list hanging around. And getting a new version from a friend of a friend was a real treat. There were also libraries and demo programs that were shared around a lot. For Pascal for example there was this SWAG (SourceWare Archive Group) collection that was shared a lot.

    When BBS became more popular, people found stuff on that. But it was never a primary source for me, it was always a copy of a disk from a friend of a friend who got it off some mythical BBS somewhere. Books and magazines also often had floppies with them and later CD-ROMs. In the early days not many people had CD drives and CDs were seen as a luxury thing. So books and magazines didn't include the CD, but had a way you could order it for a few bucks and usually it was worth it. Magazines were also much more plentiful at the time with most catering to very niche subjects. I had a magazine back then that released every few months and was nothing but source code listings, deep dives and maths. It wasn't entertainment like magazines became later, it was a way of keeping informed and doing research. Back then we didn't always have hard drives and when we did they weren't as big and very expensive. So having a large library of not just book and magazines, but also floppies and CDs was essential and a mark of a good software developer.

    It was a better time I feel like looking back. Everything was much slower. These days we get bombarded with information non stop. Software development has tight deadlines, with new releases days or weeks apart. Back then I would easily spend a week submerged in books and such to fully absorb the information, so I could develop some piece of hardware or software, or both. It would be normal to work on something for months before sharing it with others. And they would take weeks to read all about it before they felt like they could discuss it. It was still hard work, both in effort and complexity, but the brain was allowed to work at its own pace. These days we're just running all the time, because number must go up and will nobody think of the shareholders?

    I feel like I'm just an old fart who is becoming a luddite after loving tech my whole life. Not everything was better in the past, but I really don't like the direction tech has taken over the past decade or so.

  • Old fridges am I right?

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  • My girlfriend has a Samsung fridge, going strong for around 12 years now. It's absolutely fine.

    All brands are going to have duds and winners, that's just the way it is.

  • Programmers in 2026

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  • Yeah I also used to laugh a lot when they used those isolinear chips for something they were totally not intended for. Just by rearranging and tapping a few things. As an embedded systems engineer it made no sense to me. In the systems I designed at the time every component had one specific purpose. Sometimes I would get clever and use one component in several different ways to reduce the BOM. Or have a component do double duty, but then it was designed for that (like 4 gates in a single package). The idea you could take out a component, do some magic to it, and suddenly it would do something completely different was just so wrong it was funny.

    These days everything is made with whole ass Linux stacks. Like full system on a chip, multiple gigabytes of RAM, tons of storage, often even network access. I recently repaired the door on my dishwasher and the little board that opened the door had a full on ARM core on it. I think it is more powerful than many of the PCs I had in the 90s. I myself have a clock I made using a dual core ESP32 and a simple CO2 particle count sensor for my homeassistant with an ESP8266. With ESP Home flashed it can do so many things using a very small and simple script, with easy OTA updates.

    Now the idea of a system built from very powerful subsystems isn't so far fetched. Just make sure it has access to whatever LAN or CAN they have in the future and it will be able to do it. It might even have some kind of self programming feature, where it configures itself automatically if you kinda sorta get it headed in the right direction.

    And I know for a fact they do vibe coding in the future. The holodeck must be vibe coded. Nobody really knows how it works, it breaks all the time. The most important part, the safety protocols are more often offline than online. To quote the great Jack O'Neill: You'd assume a failsafe would be somewhat safe from failing. But no, it fails all the time and somehow the system isn't designed to simply turn fully off when the safety doesn't work. You'd think it's compatible with other systems they have, but somehow it's not. Smells like vibe coding to me.

  • What are they doing for it to get that hot? Crypto mining, LLMs, or running Chrome?

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  • No unfortunately not. We had a lot of cool stuff back then we never took any pictures off. This was before the time of digital cameras and a culture of documenting and sharing everything. People just did stuff and told each other about it. If someone wanted to see, they'd come over and look at it.

    It's weird to think how much things have changed. With good digital cameras at the ready at any moment and sharing stuff with a wider audience is a press of a button.

  • What are they doing for it to get that hot? Crypto mining, LLMs, or running Chrome?

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  • Reminds me of the first water cooling setup I've ever built. This was way back in the before times, a few years before Danger Den made their first block. So all we had was home made stuff.

    Me and a friend went to a local metal shop and convinced them to give us an off cut of a copper bar. They didn't want to sell it to us, but we said we needed it for a school project and they gave it to us for something like 20 bucks. My friend's uncle had a bandsaw that could cut it, so he chopped it up into slices. The bar was a rectangle, something like 16 by 8cm and the slices were around 2.5cm thick.

    I drilled 2 holes from one side, not all the way through and 2 holes 90 degrees to the other ones. This formed sort of a square. I tapped the two holes on the wider side and put in some brass fittings from the local hardware store. I sealed the threads with Teflon tape. The two holes on the side I filled with an epoxy putty, something meant to fix central heating radiators. This got a bit sloppy but it was fine.

    The bottom of the block I sanded with a little mouse sander I had. And after that finished it up by lapping the bottom on a mirror and some fine grit wet sanding paper. The block was mounted on the cpu using some bits from the hardware store. Some nuts and bolts and a couple of random bits to put some pressure on the whole thing.

    For the water stuff I went to a local pet store that had aquarium stuff. So I bought a little water pump and some tubes. As a radiator I got a damaged moped radiator, it had a dent in it, but it didn't leak. I got that for like 5 bucks because of the damage from a friend that repaired mopeds and motorcycles. The radiator was zip tied to the back of the case, with a couple of holes sloppely drilled for the hoses. I used tape to protect the hoses from the sharp edges. The simple 80mm fan I attached with duct tape as I read the air shouldn't be able to escape from in between the fan and the radiator.

    It looked jank af and didn't work very well, but it did work. The pump was a bit overpowered so it tended to cavitate and make annoying noises. I didn't have any reservoir and just bled air from where the hose connected to the radiator. This didn't work great, so air in the system was always an issue. The radiator was aluminum and I used simple anti freeze car coolant, which didn't stop the corrosion. Messing with the whole thing I got water over my hardware a lot, luckily never causing any damage except for an ugly stain in the bottom of the case. But I was proud of the thing I built.

    Keeping the radiator on the outside was the norm for a long time. I remember having a radiator about as wide and long as my case (and we had big cases back then). It sat on top of the case with some spacers and large fans that turned slowly. Because of the radiator size it was super quiet. The top of the case was just the black radiator itself and it looked pretty cool. Cases by then had special holes for the hoses to go through. No more drilling your own holes, which never worked well in thin but though sheet steel.