The RJ plugs are my least favourite. Still snags but the plastic bit that snags is feeble enough to break off easily, and then the plug doesn’t have anything holding it in to the port. And those covers usually make it harder to fit it through holes intended for ethernet cables as well as make it harder to unclip it from the port.

The reason that 25 number came up is that’s how old the cohort they were studying brain development got when their funding was cut. There’s no reason to not believe brains continue developing all our lives, or that even if that study did find a “cut off point” that it would be the same from person to person.

Just realized that even if there is no mechanism to get the exact date from any of these age tracking systems, they’ll be able to infer the exact dates by just looking at when the user/device transitions to the next bracket. Then they’ll know the birthday for the start of that bracket falls somewhere between the last check and the current one.

Though maybe that data can be poisoned by making it transition backwards occasionally, so it looks like the user is editing their age older and back or something. But, on the other hand, a lack of data or poisoned data is going to be a flag on its own at some point (if not already).

Not sure it will, as it would have to be able to handle users older than that, so wouldn’t have a reason for the default age to be that. Also depends on the UI (like my steam bday is something like jan 1 1900 because that’s the default age already entered).

Actually, I think that’s windows 11. Though despite it never trying to get you to install win 11, it’s still worse than the one that does.

Of magma or plasma, whichever is most convenient.

Apparently the win 12 rumours were just a hoax. Even Microslop isn’t that out of touch (at this point in time).

Ah, that’s efficiency of use and depends more on how familiar you are with the software as well as the design and task. Like editing an image or video is going to be a lot easier with a gui than a command line interface (other than generating slop I guess).

When people talk about how efficient software is, it’s usually referring more to the amount of resources it uses (including time) to run its processes.

Eg an electron app is running a browser that is manipulating and rendering html elements running JavaScript (or other scripts/semi-compiled code). There is an interpreter that needs to process whatever code it is to do the manipulation and then an html renderer to turn that into an image to display on the screen. The interpreter and renderer run as machine code on the CPU, interacting with the window manager and the kernel.

A native app doesn’t bother with the interpreter and html renderer and itself runs as machine code on the CPU and interacts with the window manager and kernel. This saves a bunch of memory, since there isn’t an intermediate html state that needs to be stored, and time by cutting out the interpreter and html render steps.

Can you elaborate on that? I disagree but would like to understand why you think that. Maybe you’re referring to something I wouldn’t disagree with.

Yeah, for things that will likely be used, caching is good. I just have a problem with the “memory is free, so find more stuff to cache to fill it” or “we have gigabytes of RAM so it doesn’t matter how memory-efficient any program I write is”.

I don’t want my PC wasting resources trying to guess every possible next action I might take. Even I don’t know for sure what games I’ll play tonight.

Ib4 “uNusEd RAm iS wAStEd RaM!”

No, unused RAM keeps my PC running fast. I remember the days where accidentally hitting the windows key while in a game meant waiting a minute for it to swap the desktop pages in, only to have to swap the game pages back when you immediately click back into it, expecting it to either crash your computer or probably disconnect from whatever server you were connected to. Fuck that shit.

There isn’t anything fundamentally slower about using a GUI vs just text in a console. There’s more to draw but it scales linearly. The drawing things on the screen part isn’t the slow bit for slow programs. Well, it can be if it’s coded inefficiently, but there are plenty of programs with GUIs that are snappy… Like games, which generally draw even more complex things than your average GUI app.

Slow apps are more likely because of an inefficient framework (like running in a web browser with heavy reliance on scripts rather than native code), inefficient algorithms that scale poorly, poor resource use, bad organization that results in doing the same operation more times than necessary, etc.

Except for KDE. At least compared to cinnamon, I find KDE much more responsive.

AI generated code will make things worse. They are good at providing solutions that generally give the correct output but the code they generate tends to be shit in a final product style.

Though perhaps performance will improve since at least the AI isn’t limited by only knowing JavaScript.

The outside would be burnt and the inside raw. There might be a layer of well-cooked chicken between them, though just cutting through it to see that will contaminate the cooked bit from the raw bit. That’s why the penicillin sauce is so important.

A decent number of them have already sent cash gifts. Which is already spent paying off the loan for the wedding planner and the artists that made some concept art of the theme which is being presented as actual footage of the venue, despite a few of the visuals being things that cutting edge technology cannot physically produce.

Oh and after the last meeting where some of this was laid out, the wedding planner just started laughing hysterically, left the room, and isn’t answering or returning calls. The kids who were playing out front know a bit more information but are worried they’d get in trouble if they repeated what she said about the groom.

Yeah, it’s good enough that it even had me fooled, despite all my “it just correlates words” comments. It was getting to the desired result, so I was starting to think that the framework around the agentic coding AIs was able to give it enough useful context to make the correlations useful, even if it wasn’t really thinking.

But it’s really just a bunch of duct tape slapped over cracks in a leaky tank they want to put more water in. While it’s impressive how far it has come, the fundamental issues will always be there because it’s still accurate to call LLMs massive text predictors.

The people who believe LLMs have achieved AGI are either just lying to try to prolong the bubble in the hopes of actually getting it to the singularity before it pops or are revealing their own lack of expertise because they either haven’t noticed the fundamental issues or think they are minor things that can be solved because any instance can be patched.

But a) they can only be patched by people who know the correction (so the patches won’t happen in the bleeding edge until humans solve the problem they wanted AI to solve), and b) it will require an infinite number of these patches even to just cover all permutations of everything we do know.

Here’s an example I ran into, since work wants us to use AI to produce work stuff, whatever, they get to deal with the result.

But I had asked it to add some debug code to verify that a process was working by saving the in memory result of that process to a file, so I could ensure the next step was even possible to do based on the output of the first step (because the second step was failing). Get the file output and it looks fine, other than missing some whitespace, but that’s ok.

And then while debugging, it says the issue is the data for step 1 isn’t being passed to the function the calls if all. Wait, how can this be, the file looks fine? Oh when it added the debug code, it added a new code path that just calls the step 1 code (properly). Which does work for verifying step 1 on its own but not for verifying the actual code path.

The code for this task is full of examples like that, almost as if it is intelligent but it’s using the genie model of being helpful where it tries to technically follow directions while subverting expectations anywhere it isn’t specified.

Thinking about my overall task, I’m not sure using AI has saved time. It produces code that looks more like final code, but adds a lot of subtle unexpected issues on the way.

An alternative that will avoid the user agent trick is to curl | cat, which just prints the result of the first command to the console. curl >> filename.sh will write it to a script file that you can review and then mark executable and run if you deem it safe, which is safer than doing a curl | cat followed by a curl | bash (because it’s still possible for the 2nd curl to return a different set of commands).

You can control the user agent with curl and spoof a browser’s user agent for one fetch, then a second fetch using the normal curl user agent and compare the results to detect malicious urls in an automated way.

A command line analyzer tool would be nice for people who aren’t as familiar with the commands (and to defeat obfuscation) and arguments, though I believe the problem is NP, so it won’t likely ever be completely foolproof. Though maybe it can be if it is run in a sandbox to see what it does instead of just analyzed.

I think those are where the name “desktop” comes from, though that term now refers to other computer things.

I refer to them as “tower”, “case” (which is technically just the shell and frame, but can include the contents), “computer”, or “machine”.