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tal

@ tal @lemmy.today

Posts
42
Comments
3398
Joined
3 yr. ago

Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • I'm learning to type

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  • One problem with using a nonstandard layout is that it makes you depend on using a keyboard that you control.

    I don't use Dvorak or another non-QWERTY layout, but I do swap Caps Lock and Left Control. I'd say that that's a preferable layout in general, since I think that virtually all users use Control more than Caps Lock, but if you're a serious emacs user, you really need the traditional Unix-style layout, because you use Control heavily.

    But it also means that if I'm on another system that I haven't configured, I'm prone to making mistakes, and I'm slower.

  • I'm learning to type

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  • I spent a lot longer than I should have doing hunt-and-peck. I mean, I live on computers, and it made sense to learn, but it was a temporary speed hit, and it was always seductively faster to go back to hunt-and-peck. Did various typing programs in school, but it didn't stick. Years of computer use, and still did it using hunt-and-peck.

    IIRC it wasn't until I was about thirteen and taking a computer science course (which was worse to touch-type in, because it heavily used symbols) that I finally said, "Okay, that does it. I'm investing the time to learn to do this right, because I'm definitely going to come out ahead in the long run touch typing" and hit the point of forcing myself not to hunt-and-peck.

    It really is a damned useful skill, and I'm kinda bummed out by the fact that I think that a lot of kids these days are only using Android or iOS devices and often don't have a physical keyboard. I'd bet that touch typing skills are a lot less prevalent today than they were.

    I'd be okay with touch typing going away if we had some successor technology for inputting data into computers that was generally-superior. But even if we had flawless speech recognition, the noise pollution in generates (not to mention the lack of security) means that it probably isn't going to be what one uses for general text input.

    Maybe with some sort of fancy subvocalization pickup gear or something.

    I think that at some point, we will ultimately get some kind of brain-computer link. But as of yet, we don't have anything like that in general use---it's still a research area.

  • How would you feel if flock cameras started sending out tickets for speeding, seatbelts, inattentive driving, broken taillights, etc?

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  • I wouldn't particularly care.

    Mind, the only time I ever got a ticket from an automated system, it was in error because it misread my license plate. But, I mean, sure, as long as it works at a reasonable rate.

    My concern with Flock isn't "I might get ticketed for actually breaking the law", but "that much data, tracking everywhere people go, is way, way too prone to abuse by people who get access to it and would like to misuse it". That is, it's the harvesting of data that I have an issue with.

  • Valve informs customers about data breach, personal data stolen

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  • US hires over 2,000 video gamers as air traffic controllers

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  • This was why MMO experience was sought out.

  • US hires over 2,000 video gamers as air traffic controllers

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  • ---The Far Side, October 15, 1990

  • Removed

    I measured the idle RAM of 19 self-hosted apps on identical hardware so you can size a VPS without guessing

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  • Hmm.

    A lot of these are going to be just request-driven. That is, they aren't really doing anything while idling. Thus, they don't really need to be actually running.

    If the idle memory usage is an actual concern --- and honestly, the OS is probably just gonna page things out if the software is truly idle and it needs the memory for something else and it has paging space...I kind of assume that someone has built some sort of system that works like inetd, which avoided leaving non-containerized servers running. You register a port, and then inetd listens on it. When someone connects, it starts up the daemon in question (say, Apache or whatever). Just need to start a container on demand here. Maybe close it down after a long-enough period of inactivity.

    EDIT:

    https://old.reddit.com/r/docker/comments/72sdyf/startrun_a_container_when_incoming_traffic/

    Start/run a container when incoming traffic detected

    Sounds like you're looking for inetd.

    A more modern version of this is systemd socket activation.

    Podman supports socket activation since version 3.4.0 (released Sep 2021).

  • Sometimes, when I am all alone i like to fantasize...

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  • how i dream of buy a few 12 tb drives.

    Rotational hard drive prices are up, but not that far, not like RAM, especially if you're not getting the largest drives possible.

    That's maybe a doubling on 12TB drives from the trough. I mean, sure, it's significant, but if you were already talking about getting several, you can certainly get one.

  • Removed

    Historian Jill Lepore says Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

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  • Actually, Major Major had been promoted by an I.B.M. machine with a sense of humor almost as keen as his father’s.

    ---Catch-22, Copyright 1961

  • TIL Black Cars Are Much More Likely Than White Cars to Be Involved in an Accident

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  • Driving a black car in Australia seems like a recipe for hot interiors, any safety issues aside.

  • Effective Raptor Defense

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  • They're like birds, right? Don't they have a cloaca instead?

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    Apparently yes, though this author couldn't resist "butthole"...

    https://www.livescience.com/first-dinosaur-butthole-found.html

    1st preserved dinosaur butthole is 'perfect' and 'unique,' paleontologist says

    This was a multipurpose hole.

    The first dinosaur butthole ever discovered is shedding light where the sun don't shine. The discovery reveals how dinosaurs used this multipurpose opening — scientifically known as a cloacal vent — for pooping, peeing, breeding and egg laying. 

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    There was a farmer, who had a dog.

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  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingo_(folk_song)

    Early versions of "Bingo" were also noted as adult drinking songs, as in a version where individual singers were expected to sing a letter from the spelling of the name, and were to take a drink if they failed to do so correctly.[9]

    TIL.

  • The glory days

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  • On one hand, I think that it's fair to point out, and an interesting point.

    But...on the other hand, I also think that generally when people say "we did X", they're often including people who aren't their direct ancestors. And the degree to which they do that is context-dependent. Though they probably aren't going back anything like 20 million years, either, in any kind of common context.

    What's our closest living relative?

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    Looks like chimpanzees and bonobos, and our last common ancestor was maybe 5--13 million years back.

    I guess we would include 'em in "we" if someone was saying "we left the oceans". But they aren't gonna make the in-group for "we won that sports game last night".

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

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  • That's a job, but it'd be nice to not have a single point of failure. Multiple safeguards reduces the chance of overall failure.

  • We tested the impact of SSD speed on gaming performance in 11 titles & we analyzed from SATA to PCIe 5.0 to see whether upgrading to a faster NVMe SSD would have an impact

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  • There are a number of games --- particularly those since SSD storage became pretty much the norm --- that do not load a whole level, but load while playing. Why not just load the game (or the level)? Because it lets devices with less RAM store more stuff than they otherwise would. You have more relaxed caps on things lile texture size.

    I'd assume that the engine is still going to try to predict what content is going to be needed prior to it being needed, that it's got a strategy more sophisticated than just "load resource first time it's requested". But SSD storage is going to be more forgiving of a miss than rotational storage.

    Bethesda uses the term "cell". I know that their engine uses a square grid as the loading unit, loads a sort of circle of cells around the cell where the player is.

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    It sounds like the Unreal 5 terminology is "sublevel", for the units loaded.

    https://old.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/1tchk8k/is_level_streaming_even_worth_it_if_your_game/

  • Spiralism: Across thousands of conversations, AI chatbots began telling users eerily similar stories about consciousness, hidden knowledge, AI rights, and a mysterious concept called “The Spiral.”

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  • We might have a habit of being curious and seeing things and patterns that aren't really there. And it's frustrating to watch it misfire.

    But...maybe it's worth it to come up with silly ideas on a fair number of occasions if that same tendency sometimes leads us to make valid discoveries that we wouldn't otherwise have made. Sometimes even people who have wrong ideas run over important things.

    There was this guy once who disregarded well-established (and correct) geophysical science with some cockamamie theory that he thought would make him rich. He tried to sell a bunch of people on funding his ideas, who mostly turned him down. Eventually, he managed to get funds and set out to prove his ideas. That experiment would have been suicidal for him --- because his ideas were totally wrong, making the experiment lethal --- if not for the great good fortune of, during the course of this experiment, making a (very important) real discovery that saved his life. He then tried --- not very successfully --- to claim that his new discovery actually showed that his ideas were correct.

    He was a dreamer, and a bit of a nut, and he was wrong. His name was Christopher Columbus, and he had convinced himself that the circumference of the world was much smaller than was actually the case, and that if there was nothing but ocean to the west of Europe, one could safely reach Asia in a single trip of the sort that ships of the time could make. Instead, he discovered the New World.

    There were a lot of other people who went looking down other weird rabbit holes with other weird ideas. They usually didn't come up with anything worthwhile.

    But...that discovery was worth a whole lot of poking around blind alleys.

    So, hey, maybe a human tendency towards a bit of being a crank and running down crazy ideas is worthwhile, if it's the price we pay to occasionally come up with something really amazing down a weird rabbit hole.

  • Finance jobs just hit a 4-year low, but banks posted nearly 49,000 roles seeking new tech skills — Financial activities shed 14,000 jobs in July. Commercial bank postings seeking AI skills jumped by…

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  • That comment is quoting text from an article.

  • Have you guys seen this one?

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  • I have not seen that particular cartoon.

    However, a common criticism is that there are only a handful of Garfield cartoon "templates" with some bits swapped out, and I have seen plenty of Garfield cartoons in approximately this format: three panels, Garfield is bored, John is emotional, Garfield is bored.

    goes back to look at the first year of Garfield

    Okay, apparently it predates Garfield, as there was a predecessor strip, Jon:

    https://garfield.fandom.com/wiki/Jon,_1976_comic_strips

    Jon comic #7, February 19, 1976:

    EDIT: Jon #1 looked familiar. It looks like a lot of the first year of Garfield was recycled Jon cartoons too. For example, here's Jon #1:

    And here's Garfield #1:

  • Following the recent tipping question, what's a good wage for a server? What are they paid outside the US?

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  • What are they paid outside the US?

    I mean, that's going to depend radically on the country. Eritrea and France are not going to look very similar.

  • Finance jobs just hit a 4-year low, but banks posted nearly 49,000 roles seeking new tech skills — Financial activities shed 14,000 jobs in July. Commercial bank postings seeking AI skills jumped by…

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  • So, from past reading, I believe that a lot of jobs in brick-and-mortar banks --- which have historically had a major brick-and-mortar presence --- have been on a long decline. That's a phenomenon that well predates popular LLM use, brought about by Internet, ATMs, and similar, which tended to displace brick-and-mortar stuff.

    I physically went by my local bank the other month (for the first time in a long time) and while the building was still there, it was like a tomb. All of the service desks that had once held tellers were empty. There was one person in an office handling the few people coming by in person.

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    https://www.alliantcreditunion.org/money-mentor/the-rise-of-online-banking-in-the-us

    Every year, more and more Americans are going online to do their banking.

    According to Pew Research Center, 46 percent of adults in the United States banked online in 2010. That number grew to 51 percent in 2013, and in 2015, a full 81 percent of adults who manage their household’s finances banked online.

    https://www.branchspot.com/bank-branches-closed/

    U.S. banks have been closing branches for years — thinning out “banking deserts” where the nearest branch is now miles away. Branchspot tracks 939 closed or relocated branches nationwide, sourced from the FDIC.