👻 u/darkghost
👤 Self description: Left leaning independent (in s/US-politics)
Posts
My telechron electric clock that has been in the family for 80 years has stopped telling time. I am sad.
AI thoughts and observations — Doing some research lately and I saw that the market cap of Nvidia is larger than big pharma, all 23 of the largest big pharma companies... combined. The next data point came in the form of these stats: the amount invested is 17 times that of dot-com and 4 times that of subprime mortgages. In the US it was responsible for a third of GDP growth last year. Despite that, the tech is kind of unproven with vague ways it can help the average person. Writing things with...
Intel NUC — This has to be one of my worst purchases. I have been trying for years and putting up with this nonsense for years to get the damned HDMI out to be functional 100%. HDMI will randomly crash into snow and blink out for 3 seconds. Sound works sometimes, when it feels like it, after the appropriate blood sacrifice over a blood moon. I finally come into a lower resolution monitor, hopeful that it will behave at less than 4k with older tech. What a fool I was. It is no different. I had...
Would you pay for search? — Arstechnica has a front page article about Kagi, a paid search engine. The argument is somewhat compelling to me at least. It's thus: (paraphrased) "...
My professional experience with Gemini, the soulless LLM, not the protocol. — I do science type stuff. It's a living, for now at least. My employer encourages us to make use of Google Gemini. So I've been playing around with it. Here are my experiences: I asked Gemini to summarize journal articles I've written. Gemini gets the basic details wrong and then butchers the conclusions. Maybe that's too esoteric. So I bring up an old data set I've analyzed before and ask it to analyze it for me. I...
Being old — I get quizzed sometimes about how things used to be by younger coworkers. Today's struck me as an old man moment. In the 80s, what OS were TVs running? I proceeded to explain how to remotely drive an electron beam. Then described that brief blissful time when TVs were standard def and flat screen so it would just turn on. No waiting for warm up and boot up.
The impulsive distro test — I decided to embark on a distro test. But which one? There's so many choices. Some distros get no love. So many you may not have heard of. Let's shine a spotlight on one. Let's try the distro at the less than enviable position of #100 on DistroWatch.com. Today's winner is... Chimera Linux! Here is the description per DistroWatch: "Chimera Linux is an independent distribution which uses an unusual combination of technologies behind the scenes. Chimera Linux uses BSD...
Things I hate about living in the now part II — Getting an unknown tracker alert on my phone. Why are these legal again? I never found it and it didn't pop up again. Must have been someone in proximity to me while I was out and about. Yes, I had it play a sound and did a manual scan. Didn't hear anything and didn't pop up.
Things I despise about living in the now. A data broker I'd never heard of mailed me (slightly wrong address but it somehow made it.) Apparently someone tried to change information about me and it failed due to an inability to verify my identity. It leads me to so many questions: Who are these guys? They're not a credit bureau. Why do I have a customer ID at a business I have never done business with? Who tried to change my info? What consequences would this have? Is this a ruse to squeeze more...
I was commenting on a discussion started by @HansBrix about the web browser. In another thread, they pointed out how the browser is just about everything these days and that's why people can live with ChromeOS. It is quite a bit absurd, and represents the regression in technology I feared in the 90s. The personal computer revolution was a revolution because it meant anyone could use a computer and didn't have to pay for mainframe time or shared access. Today's cloud is just the mainframe era...