@freakazoid@retro.social
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

freakazoid

@freakazoid@retro.social

He/him or they/them. GenX parent of two kids living in #Pittsburgh #Pennsylvania USA.

My posts get auto-deleted after 6 months.

#retrocomputing #amateurradio #space #electronics #c64 #rc2014

#nobot #noarchive #noindex #noscrape #nobridge

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freakazoid, to random
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Umm, no.

"Anarchist, punk rock, cowboy. Who is also a Police Officer."

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@BlackDogActual

freakazoid, to random
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I had forgotten about Gerald Bull, his supergun, and his assassination, almost certainly by Israel.

The Tragic Story Of The Ill-Fated Supergun
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/28/the-tragic-story-of-the-ill-fated-supergun/

ajroach42, to random
@ajroach42@retro.social avatar

I just got my first email from star labs about starlite shipping.

The first one that wasn't a response to a question I asked them since I got my initial order confirmation in ... September, I think, of 23.

It says that my product will ship on Friday May 31st, probably, unless something goes wrong.

That's welcome news!

But it's also in blatant contradiction to the last update on their status page, which indicated that all the orders would ship in by May 12th.

and, again, this is the first communication they've initiated with me since my order confirmation.

freakazoid,
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@ajroach42 @tuckerm FWIW my Oryx Pro 9 crashes fairly regularly if I do heavy-duty stuff using the discrete GPU, possibly due to their use of cheap thermal paste and heat sinks that don't have sufficient thermal capacity. I've also had issues with the WiFi card. I don't think I will buy another laptop from them without some indication that they've improved their processes.

freakazoid, to random
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iFixit's had enough with Samsung. That secret contract was only part of the problem.

Anyway, I've been saying Samsung sucks for years. Not sure why it wasn't obvious to anyone who's used one of their crapware-laden devices.

iFixit divorces Samsung over lack of real commitment to self-repair program
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/05/23/ifixit_samsung_repair/

freakazoid, to random
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Let's start by degrowing the military, police, and prisons. No more using resources to produce negative value.

freakazoid, to random
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The nobot hashtag in my profile means no bots boosting my posts either.

Why is it techbros are so completely incapable of understanding consent?

freakazoid, to random
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This problem is why Arch Linux is both harder and easier to use: harder because you have to configure everything yourself. Easier because there's very little magic that's invisible until it's not.

https://mastodon.social/@jk/112485636960778400

freakazoid, to random
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LOL imagine moving from Windows to MacOS because of Microsoft's AI fuckery. Almost as shortsighted of a decision as moving from Github to GitLab when MS bought the former.

Worse, really, because Apple's been progressively locking down MacOS for over a decade in the name of "security" but by sheer coincidence that also happens to shepherd people into their app store.

If you @ me with Apple defenses I will block you. I have no time for people who think it's a good use of their time to carry water for a trillion dollar company.

freakazoid,
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When I was arriving home this morning from dropping the kids off at school, I was driving at about 5 mph in the alley behind my house. A bird in the road kept taking off as I approached and landing about 10 feet farther down the alley. Which meant it kept having to flee over and over.

That's basically what people are doing when they move from one proprietary silo to another because one got too shitty for them.

freakazoid,
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I'm not saying people should use Linux. I'm saying computers are shit thanks to capitalism. Turn off your computer and never turn it on again. If Linux is right for you, you will figure it out on your own.

freakazoid,
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This message posted on a computer.

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

On a more constructive note, in many ways it's easier to use Linux than it's ever been. But there are also more choices than there ever have been, and some things are harder. There is no clear winner when it comes to usable Linux distros; if you ask five people you will get 15 answers.

It would be better if Linux were easier to try out. But that's extremely difficult if you have a Mac. I think it's still fairly straight forward to boot a live USB stick on a PC, laptop or otherwise, but even that's not a given with secure boot. Thanks to all the security issues involved (and a desire to make it as hard as possible to move away from Windows) PCs no longer boot from removable media by default. So booting anything else is a big hurdle.

But, honestly, if you can't even make it over that hurdle, you have no hope at all of using a computer instead of having the computer use you. The lesson for those of us who DO know how to use computers is that we need to help people make it over that hurdle. We can't just tell them to use Linux.

I didn't learn to use Linux because some rando on the Internet told me to. I learned DOS because my dad taught me. I learned to install OS/2 because my dad showed me how. That got me over the hurdle of installing new OSes. Then a friend was trying out Slackware, and I was able to help him out because of that experience I already had with different OSes. Then the same friend sold me a Pentium 200 in a motherboard, and I built a Linux box around it.

I don't think the Internet changes the necessity of this sort of experience and support at all. You need people who can be THERE, because you might brick your computer, and that's scary, even if it's theoretically possible to use your phone to look stuff up.

freakazoid,
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Linux has its share of enshittification these days, primarily via Red Hat and Canonical. I use an Ubuntu derivative (PopOS) on my laptop, but if Canonical were to vanish off the face of the planet they could pretty easily switch over to Debian as a base, because Ubuntu still uses Debian as a base. I use Debian on my desktop, and if I ever reinstall my laptop it's what I'll use (it came with PopOS preinstalled).

AFAIK Debian is the only noncommercial Linux distro that has a well-funded nonprofit organization behind it. It's not necessarily the easiest to use, but it's been around for over 30 years and could well be around and still unenshittified 30 years from now. I can't say that about any other Linux distro. Slackware has been around that long, but it is still developed by its original developer, which is a huge risk factor.

freakazoid, to random
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$0.10 for a thin paper bag with no handles that broke before I got to my car. The bag obviously won't be reused and probably won't be recycled because of the likelihood of contamination in the shared bin & truck. Making the bag ban nothing but a tax on the end user that helps nobody, least of all the environment.

freakazoid, to random
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Funny how "Let's get as many people as we can hooked now and figure out how to monetize them later" has never worked out well for the people getting hooked.

freakazoid, to random
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Maybe instead of swimming as fast as you can to stay in front of the enshittification wave, you should just get out of the water.

freakazoid, to random
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I think Go must be part of a conspiracy to get us all using AI to do our programming. Because what human wants to be typing "if err != nil" blocks all day?

It's a programming language for machines, not humans.

whitequark, to random
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both telegram and matrix have untrustworthy cryptography, but telegram has gaslit me significantly fewer times and generally not on an ongoing basis, which is really the main thing i care about in a messenger

"it's vulnerable to IND-CCA3" anybody who can pull off that attack on me deserves whatever they get out of it. i just want a messenger that isn't built by americans who have a Single Phone Number and also doesn't gaslight me. is that too much to ask for?

freakazoid,
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@whitequark Telegram doesn't encrypt group chats at all, though. They are not comparable in that regard.

And it only encrypts DMs if you turn that on.

freakazoid, to random
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I don't have the attention span to be able to work on only one thing at a time.

I also don't have the attention span to be able to work on more than one thing at a time.

freakazoid, to random
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The constant quest by capitalists and techbros to cut those messy unpredictable humans out of the equation.

freakazoid, to random
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https://mstdn.social/@Smith007 bot or sock puppet account. All its posts that aren't pro-Israel are bland nonsense accompanied by an unrelated image with nonsense alt text.

freakazoid,
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@tuckerm Looks like we have a whole network of bots on our hands.

danilo, to random
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An ongoing pattern in the AI march:

  • the hardware efficiency improves
  • the software efficiency improves

So I continue to argue that energy consumption as a PRIMARY criticism of AI is going to be unpersuasive, as incentives drive down the energy costs with time, and all critique of the energy costs is just as applicable to conventional cloud computing, which we have already accepted into our social bargain

(and which underpins every single tech salary)

so instead:

https://redeem-tomorrow.com/the-average-ai-criticism-has-gotten-lazy-and-thats-dangerous

freakazoid,
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@danilo Incidentally, what year is that figure from? Europe's, and especially Germany's, energy consumption have been dropping due to high energy prices. I seem to recall Google had a few datacenters in Germany. I'm sure they'll operate them until the equipment has depreciated, but I wouldn't be surprised if they shut them down and take the loss on the buildings after that, if they haven't already.

freakazoid,
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

@danilo Sounds about right. And that number keeps rising faster than other consumers of electricity, so it will be equivalent to ever larger chunks of human activity over time. Which is fine, if people consider the utility of those datacenters to be worth it.

And by "worth it" I mean not just the price of the electricity but the externalities that come with it. One of the great things about datacenters from a multinational corporation's perspective is that you have some flexibility in where to put them. Flexibility to avoid, for example, places that do a better job of pricing in the externalities of electricity production. Fortunately, Google and Facebook (and I think Microsoft as well?) have also tried to choose places that have cheap electricity from sources like hydroelectric, but that can still displace other users into dirtier energy sources.

freakazoid,
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@danilo I totally agree.

Personally, I never found the energy arguments against crypfocurrency to be particularly compelling. I figured eventually transaction fees would have to pay for all energy consumption due to the transaction, or mining wouldn't be profitable. It's still too soon to tell, but I think we're starting to see that with this latest Bitcoin halving, but it's hard to tell because it seems like transaction fees are driven a lot more by demand than by miners. The total hashrate seems to be dropping, though.

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