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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I need to finally figure out which client’s most stable for Kodi, cause even though I’m freeloading on a friend’s YouTube platinum account, the official TV app’s still an incredibly unpleasant experience even without ads

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I’m extremely left leaning, but even I feel like I just got hit with a nonsensical smattering of woke lingo.

hahaha what the fuck. do people still fall for this “I’m extremely left-leaning but let me tell you about the wokes” routine?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I was in the exact same boat til recently, but switching off of Proton was actually surprisingly easy even though I had it tied into a bunch of accounts and infrastructure. I actually ended up saving a lot of money compared with Proton Unlimited, and it’s a relief to not have all my eggs in one basket, especially since stuff like Proton’s no logs policy is effectively worthless, and if you’re a whistleblower or similar you’re expected to use a VPN or Tor to access your mail every time to keep from being arrested… but most likely your VPN (and possibly Tor client) is Proton too if you’re paying for it, with the same worthless no logs policy.

some quick recommendations:

Proton Mail

Proton Calendar

tuta does both of these. their mail is e2e and fine — it’s jankier than proton but also less resource-intensive. it’s also the only other choice for now :(

I haven’t used their calendar yet, but from a distance it looks good. I should give it a shot sometime soon.

Proton VPN

this depends on what you’re using your VPN for. actual security? fucked if I know. high bandwidth fuckery? airvpn is pretty good and they’ll let you allocate ports.

Proton Drive

tuta’s getting this soon apparently. otherwise, I can second Backblaze being very reasonably priced if you don’t mind having to choose and set up your own e2e software.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 days ago (6 children)

I had assumed the golden age of people coming here to critihype LLMs was over because most people outside of Silicon Valley (including a lot of nontechnical people) have realized the technology’s garbage but nope! we’ve got a rush of posters trying the same shit that didn’t work a year ago, as if we’ve never seen critihype before. maybe bitcoin hitting $100,000 makes them think their new grift is gonna make it? maybe their favorite fuckheads entering office is making all their e/acc dreams come true? who can say.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 days ago

who the fuck is “we”? you’re some asshole who bought the critihype so hard you think that when the chatbot does dumb computer shit that only proves it’s more human and more dangerous. you’re not in on this grift, you’re a mark.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 days ago (8 children)

AI chat bots that do bizarre and pointless things, but are clearly capable of some kind of sophistication, are exactly the warning sign that as it gains new capabilities this is a danger we need to be aware of.

hahahaha nope

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago

I’m excited to try it! I’ve had so many game ideas lately that’d be a lot more convenient to do with godot’s tooling, but would really benefit from something like Bevy’s ECS. this one looks broadly inspired by a similar API to Bevy so it could be the best of both worlds. I’m very curious how it performs — it’s almost certainly gonna be slower than Bevy, but there’s a lot of types of games where logic isn’t a bottleneck.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago (2 children)

hell yeah! roguelikes are so much fun to work on! that could be a very good way to learn GDScript. generally I recommend learning your first couple languages to completion — but where you decide what complete is, including “I’m tired of this language/project” (not at all an uncommon case, and a good sign your brain’s ready for something new). once you’re at that point, you’ll likely be ready for a new language — and languages generally get much easier to learn once you’ve got a couple under your belt.

(also, I might take on a roguelike project in Godot myself… there’s a new library I want to try which implements my favorite way to do game logic for roguelikes)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago (4 children)

I extremely recommend The Little Schemer as a gentle introduction to both programming interactively and to some of the fundamentals of computer science. some of the other books in the series are also good, gentle introductions to some more advanced CS topics too, but they all assume you’ve read through some of this one.

Andrew Plotkin’s Lists and Lists is also pretty good as a self-contained learning environment with a tutorial

other than that, I second the Python recommendation. another first language recommendation I can make is GDScript, the Godot scripting language. it has a very good in-browser interactive tutorial for programming fundamentals, and a very detailed manual once your learning goes beyond what the interactive tutorial teaches. game programming isn’t the easiest way to start in general, but Godot has a few advantages in this area: you can see an interesting result right away when writing code, its scripting language is very well-integrated with its tooling, and it’s fairly close to a couple of other languages in syntax and semantics (specifically Python) so your knowledge should transfer fairly well.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago (1 children)

is that why tournament StarCraft fucking looks like that? it’s anxiety-inducing and my brain hates it. maybe the intense focus on APM and rote strategy is why I ended up liking turn-based strategy games a lot more

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago

b-but David, they’ve been so reasonable and here we are getting emotional about the fucking garbage technology they’ve come here to shove down our throats alongside a heaping serving of capitalist brainrot from the same types of self-described geniuses who gave us OKRs

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago (2 children)

See also how he has claimed he was the best at quake.

oh hell no

See also how his elden ring build was bad, his diablo 4 world record relied on abusing an exploit, he thinks polytopia is some sort of complex high level game on the level of chess. The man is a dullard.

so many right-wing grifters want to be associated with gaming because gamers are really easy to trick. in this case it’s particularly obvious: musk doesn’t give a fuck about the games he claims to be an expert in, but souls games are particularly nerdy and quake’s in that right nostalgia spot that most of musk’s marks know what it is but don’t know how high-level play looks

because he refuses to play competitively or follow any of the rules around organized speedrunning, musk’s doing the modern, depressing equivalent of claiming to be the strongest guy around (no you can’t see him lift any weights in a competition setting, only the suspiciously light ones in his home gym) and therefore obviously the best leader. all the associated messaging — how you need to be a genius to play at this (actually relatively low) level, how speedrunning (extremely poorly) helps you see the matrix, how game X (it’s gonna be fucking starcraft next I swear) makes you an expert in resource management — is crafted to make the susceptible associate these lazy non-wins with political leadership.

also, lol @ musk, best buddies with Tim Sweeney, forgetting that unreal tournament exists. maybe that makes two of them — Sweeney really doesn’t give a fuck about UT anymore either

 

this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:

This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.

fucking masterful

an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol

 

this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:

Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.

I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.

The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.

 

after the predictable failure of the Rabbit R1, it feels like we’ve heard relatively nothing about the Humane AI Pin, which released first but was rapidly overshadowed by the R1’s shittiness. as it turns out, the reason why we haven’t heard much about the Humane AI pin is because it’s fucked:

Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.

it’s fucked in ways you might not have seen coming, but Humane should have:

Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone.

 

as I was reading through this one, the quotes I wanted to pull kept growing in size until it was just the whole article, so fuck it, this one’s pretty damning

here’s a thin sample of what you can expect, but it gets much worse from here:

Internal conversations at Nvidia viewed by 404 Media show when employees working on the project raised questions about potential legal issues surrounding the use of datasets compiled by academics for research purposes and YouTube videos, managers told them they had clearance to use that content from the highest levels of the company.

A former Nvidia employee, whom 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about internal Nvidia processes, said that employees were asked to scrape videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other sources to train an AI model for Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human” products. The project, internally named Cosmos (but different from the company’s existing Cosmos deep learning product), has not yet been released to the public.

 

so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:

Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain.

Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.

does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.

here’s some more banal shit:

We find there are three kinds of politicians:

Those who support Little Tech. We support them.

Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them.

Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.

I find there are three kinds of politicians:

  • those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
  • those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
  • those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
 

who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do

0
test post (awful.systems)
 

federation may be fucked :(

 

(via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)

surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive

even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down

 

(here’s a Verge article about the Waymo car getting burned during a Chinese New Year celebration)

a self-driving car got destroyed (to a round of applause from the crowd) in San Francisco! will the robot car fans on the orange site take this opportunity to explore why the tech seems to be extremely unpopular among the populations of the cities where it’s deployed?

of course the fuck not, time to spin the wheel of racist dog whistles and see which one we land on! a note to the roving orange site fans (hi, fuck off), these replies are either heavily upvoted or have broad agreement in the thread (or I’m posting them here cause I want to laugh at some stupid shit, you don’t dictate the terms of my enjoyment)

This isn't a revolt against AI. SF attracts anarchist mobs and they'll vandalize buses, trains, police cars, bikes, whatever is around.

we’re off to a strong start with some bullshit straight from musk’s twitter (which he stole from the fever dreams of the conservatives on his platform)

Alternatively: this is San Francisco where on a good day the locals don’t need much excuse to set fire to a car (although I usually associate it with the Giants winning a World Series) and this poor dumb stupid driverless Waymo drove into a celebratory and by the looks of it somewhat drunken crowd on the Streets of Chinatown during the Chinese New Year where in following its prime directive to do no harm, it got itself stuck up the creek without a paddle so to speak. Waymo probably should have accounted for that ahead of time and told their cars not to go near Chinatown this evening.

remember that no matter what, the robot car is the victim here. there’s no chance Waymo was doing anything dangerous or assholeish in the area; much like robocop, the car is an innocent victim of its fucking prime directives??? and you wouldn’t set fire to robocop, would you?

This is a hilarious take. A few youths went bonkers and defaced private property. Has nothing to do with philosophical beliefs or a Big Tech agenda. You should debate the finer points of the Big Tech agenda with them while they run up to you in a maddened rage.

yeah! I can’t wait until these angry mobs set fire to your robot car body! then you’ll see!

Arguments about driverless cars aside, the youth in this country are seriously lost. It only takes one generation of poor parenting and poor civic policies to ruin a culture.

this one is downvoted, but this reply isn’t:

Sounds like they were right. The youth at that point was lost, and are now raising people who will literally burn down a waymo for fun, or because of some horrifically ignorant idea about fairness.

oh you poor woke kids don’t like when shitty dangerous robot cars are on the streets? are you gonna start crying about how it’s “unfair” they’re covering up pedestrian injuries and traffic accidents now? your grandpa would never stand for this

 

(via mastodon)

 

remember, regardless of how outspoken you are in life, nothing will stop the capitalists from reanimating your defiled corpse into a shitheaded centrist zombie if there’s a buck in it:

“I'd just like to say that as much as I think billionaires are destroying the fabric of society with unchecked greed and blatant self-interest at the expense of basic human rights for everyone else, it is a little strange to me that people get mad at them. People are the ones who gave them the money in the first place," the AI Carlin said.

(editor’s note: the above is supposed to be a joke from the comedy special these fucking assholes hijacked Carlin’s corpse to promote. I can’t find the punchline, but it’s supposed to be a joke)

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