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badlucklottery

1,265 karma · joined July 9, 2014

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badlucklottery··on AI execs may be too out of touch to build for the general public
You'd think the amount of awkward "how do you do, fellow humans?" moments from tech execs when they do interviews or podcasts would deter them but nope.

It shows how thoroughly they've built their echo chambers.

badlucklottery··on US federal budget deficit jumps 12% in one year to nearly $2 Trillion
Obama inherited a housing crisis and two wars.

Biden had to deal the tail end of a pandemic and the financial fallout of that.

Not saying both couldn't have done much better on the budget but, if you compare them to Bush and Trump, they honestly do look quite competent.

badlucklottery··on Is Liquid Metal Killing Our PCs? Scientific Analysis and a 2-Year Test [video]
> LM on untreated copper (which I thought wasn't really advised).

I think the supposed issue is nickel (the most common waterblock coating) has a much lower thermal conductivity so you might lose a degree or two under load vs a bare copper block.

Which kind of makes sense: people who know what they're doing use liquid metal to squeeze out that last couple degrees vs PTM/graphene so going bare copper and dealing the the buildup problems maybe makes sense for them too.

He mentions in this video that liquid metal really should just be for the extreme overclockers who don't mind changing it out and resurfacing their waterblocks regularly which is good advice. The fact liquid metal is even semi-mainstream and comes standard on any consumer hardware is kind of stupid.

badlucklottery··on Seattle Bans Rental Junk Fees
> If you want to know why big, progressive cities have the most unaffordable housing, look no further than this law.

Eh, I'd be willing to wager it's because those cites are where many high-paying jobs are.

Anyway:

> Which, of course, means that non pet owners are now subsidizing pet owners and the damage and wear and tear that pets cause.

Or owners can just quantify and charge for the actual wear and tear? If someone's dog digs up the yard or their claws scrape the up wood floors, just charge them to fix it (or, more likely, take it out of the deposit).

That's why these are often viewed as "junk fees", they charge you for some potential damage vs. any actual damage.

badlucklottery··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
Definitely cool.

I noticed it felt a little janky on my PC despite being "60 FPS"...then I noticed the "60 FPS" is hard-coded into the HTML.

badlucklottery··on Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees
> I wish fully remote was something you could earn once you've spent X amount of years at a company.

IME this is how it used to be in many companies. You earn trust for a few years then petition to go remote. There was usually a lot of process involved (I remember having my request go up the chain to a VP for approval) but as long as you were a high performer and okay with a mild pay cut, it generally went through.

Then post-COVID many companies had trouble luring people back when being in-office was purely optional. That's when you started seeing the RTO mandates and the refusal to allow anyone to switch to remote regardless of performance.

badlucklottery··on Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees
I suspect the "more likely to leave their jobs" is the part the executives actually care about.

If you're remote and there's an "upgrade" remote job, there's very little friction to switch beyond the usual onboarding. You don't have to find a local job for your spouse, sell your house, switch your kids' schools, etc. You just mail your old laptop in and wait for a new one to arrive. Maybe you have to get up early or work later to match the local time zone if you have many in-office coworkers.

And, if you work at a big company that pays well, it can also let you get off the hamster wheel early and "leave your job" for retirement by moving to a medium- or low cost of living area while continuing to get paid an outsized amount for the area.

badlucklottery··on Beware of Drunk Deer, French Police Say, Announcing Season of Inebriation
When I was a teenager, I had an Italian greyhound who would collect fallen apples from our tree in our back yard. He'd make a pile and leave it for a week or so. Then he'd go out and chew on the apples before running around the yard at full speed until he passed out in the sun.

Once we figured out what he was up to, I'd keep an eye on him so I could go pick him up and lay him inside on the cool tile next to his water bowl when he was done for the day.

badlucklottery··on Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan
It's not really "random", there is a coherent story (and a moral to that story) underneath all the weirdness and you'll sometimes forget how crazy it's gotten because your current objective tends to make sense (ex: "defuse the bombs").

But all MGS games are basically playable Kojima manifestos with sci-fi trappings. The actual minute-to-minute gameplay for them is really, really good so even if you don't dig the story they're worth playing.

The previous poster is right that MGS4 does clear a lot of this up. But MGS4 also slams more weirdness and callbacks to the previous games on top of it.

badlucklottery··on The peril of laziness lost
>WET - Write Everything Twice

I've always heard this as the "Rule of three": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(computer_progra...

badlucklottery··on Hobby CNC machining and resin casting (2015)
Agreed. If you want to just make parts and not tinker with a CNC machine, get a Z1.

I had near-zero experience with CNC and got a Cavera Air last year and it mostly "just works" from the hardware side. I just fixture stuff and run my gcode, zero issues with the hardware. The Z1 seems to be even more streamlined w/r/t things like chip evacuation.

But, my god, Makera's firmware/software is fucking garbage. Especially the CAM workbench.

The community firmware and controller software (https://github.com/Carvera-Community) is so much better and feature-filled that it's kind of sad. They also have a tool library and post-processor for the FreeCAD CAM workbench in that repo which will let you make a clean break from Makera's terrible software.

On the upside: Makera apparently won't invalidate your warranty for using the community firmware/controller software, which is nice.

badlucklottery··on The FAA’s flight restriction for drones is an attempt to criminalize filming ICE
> You can still film ICE / CBP from the ground.

"How do you tell the difference between a protestor with a camera and a protestor with a grenade?"

Do you see how the assumption of extreme (and very unlikely) danger is bad excuse for violating people's rights?

badlucklottery··on RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one
I've been a watercooling "enthusiast" for about 20 years now and, while the DIY-ness of the old school builds was a lot of fun for young me, I'm also glad I can just buy some off-the-shelf (or at worst "small batch") components that let me get really effective and near silent performance by just slamming some stuff together.

No more scouring junk yards for a particular heater core from wrecked cars or modding aquarium pumps.

That being said, I also never really understood the "add colorful lights to your PC" aspect of some builds.

badlucklottery··on How to make the Framework Desktop run even quieter
> Is it all to support the biggest and baddest high end GPUs that cost more than the rest of the system?

I think it's more to have a big window with lots of RGB LEDs to show off on the internet.

Newer SFF cases from Ncase/Formd/Louqe are designed with perforations or mesh on every exterior surface to maximize air flow. They can support an air-cooled 5090 and an AIO or massive tower cooler for the CPU. Put a 1000W SFX PSU in there and I don't know if you'd really be wanting for anything spec-wise.

badlucklottery··on Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation
Solid copper projectiles are the primary leadless solution on the market but they're much more expensive than the traditional copper jacket over lead core construction.

There's also solutions like Federal Syntech (https://www.federalpremium.com/handgun/syntech/) that doesn't get rid of the lead but fully encapsulates it to avoid the airborne lead problem.

badlucklottery··on Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
This is my experience as well.

LLM currently produce pretty mediocre code. A lot of that is a "garbage in, garbage out" issue but it's just the current state of things.

If the alternative is noob code or just not doing a task at all, then mediocre is great.

But 90% of the time I'm working in a familiar language/domain so I can grind out better code relatively quickly and do so in a way that's cohesive with nearby code in the codebase. The main use-case I have for AI in that case is writing the trivial unit tests for me.

So it's another "No Silver Bullet" technology where the problem it's fixing isn't the essential problem software engineers are facing.

badlucklottery··on QuakeNotch, Quake Terminal on your MacBook's notch
Same with Chrome on desktop.

There's an animated background element with shooting stars that seems to be updating per-pixel. The more pixels it draws, like for a high res screen, the slower the page seems to render. I deleted that element and it scrolled smoothly.

badlucklottery··on I Deleted My Steam Account After 20 Years
tl;dr seems to be: "Steam makes my work as a modder much harder so I'm done spending my time making broken games on their platform work well" plus a lot of salt.

Bummer for the community but it seems like a reasonable position.

badlucklottery··on Meta announces Oakley smart glasses
I think part of the issue is that Zuckerberg is a smaller dude and they're pretty big sunglasses so he has a bit of that "Look! I'm wearing dad's glasses!" thing going on.
badlucklottery··on Even Tesla's Insurance Arm Is Getting Wrecked
> then why on earth is the Tesla stock not going down?

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

TSLA's value has never been correlated to the fundamentals of the business. So it continuing to do so isn't super surprising.

As long as there's a steady supply of unsavvy investors/future bag-holders willing to buy, it'll keep climbing.

badlucklottery··on Redis is open source again
> Because fragmentation is apparently good?

I think it's more "they are no longer piggybacking off our work for free".

I also think what they actually wanted was that plus "...and they paid us".

badlucklottery··on OpenAI tells judge it would buy Chrome from Google
> Why does chrome demand $400m in input spend ongoing, if it no longer has to deliver Google specific changes?

I don't know if it needs $400m but I wouldn't be surprised if it's $20m+ just to keep the browser secure.

Google paid out $12m last year in bug bounties and I assume they spend that much or more for in-house security researchers/developers (headcount is expensive) and periodic independent audits of the codebase.

badlucklottery··on Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference
> Who's the audience for this announcement?

Probably whales who can afford to rent one from Google Cloud.

badlucklottery··on Quantum mechanics might have the solution to joystick drift
I think every major console already has software calibration. IIRC PS5 likes to hide calibration inside each game vs. having it system wide like other systems.

Unfortunately, recalibration only "fixes" minor stick drift and, due to how the sticks wear, drift tends to go from "minor" to "major" really quickly.

The issue is that the stick will eventually report an increasingly unpredictable position. So it's not an issue of it predictably reporting (-1, -5) at rest, it's more like random values from -5 to 5 in both axes. This also affects the direction when actually pressing the stick so pushing the stick "north" may cause you to move N, NNW, _or_ NNE and unpredictably so.

badlucklottery··on Pee If You Want to Go Deeper (2021)
> What is the incentive?

You reward them with praise when they pee in the toilet. People are pretty receptive to praise and kids even more so.

badlucklottery··on HDMI 2.2 is set to debut at CES 2025
Yeah, DisplayPort "lost" w/r/t the connector but it seems like DP-over-USB-C is the way forward.

Being able to put video, audio, power, and USB connectivity over one relatively common connector seems like the obvious choice.

badlucklottery··on Trillium TPU Is GA
Vertical integration.

Nvidia is making big bucks "selling shovels in a gold rush". Google has made their own shovel factory and they can avoid paying Nvidia's margins.

badlucklottery··on Google's Shadow Campaigns
Yeah, I suspect that's why they're trying to focus on how Google is campaigning rather than what they're campaigning for.

Because it sounds like Microsoft is trying to force current customers who are going from on-prem to cloud to use Azure or re-pay licensing fees. Which does seem like anticompetitive bullshit to me and something that shouldn't be allowed.

badlucklottery··on Exercise May Be the Most Potent Medical Intervention Ever Known
> then shouldn't I crave it the way I crave sugar? Or at least not actively dislike it?

As someone who's been lifting weights and doing regular cardio 4 or 5 days a week for 25+ years:

No, you might just hate it forever. I do.

I've never liked doing it and have always had to guilt myself into it because I find it so unpleasant.

But whenever I'm unable to do it (injury, surgery/accident recovery, etc.) I feel substantially worse both physically and psychologically (I know not doing it is reducing the number of "good" years I get to have in life). So I just tough it out and get to work.

badlucklottery··on Oregon law rolling back drug decriminalization set to take effect
Part of the problem (as I understand it) is Oregon didn't really have the actual treatment capacity to make their decriminalization approach work when the law first rolled out.

Oregon has since poured tons of money into treatment centers and capacity is much, much better. But it unfortunately appears to be too little too late w/r/t public sentiment on decriminalization. Hopefully the next state to try it can learn from Oregon's mistakes and make sure their plan includes ramping capacity beforehand instead of simultaneously.

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