everyone

Yeah that is good, there are some good things, but I think on average the computer user experience is worse.. In the 80's and 90's with the rise of microcomputers and the net and the web and Linux, things were so utopian, things just seemed to keep getting cooler and computing was empowering people.

That was the cool part of "the cycle". We are defo in the shit part now. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8201080-the-master-switc...

When you look at how molecules like RNA work, and krebs cycle, and the billions of cells we are composed of, and so on, it always strikes me as astronomically lucky that we function at all. Like how can this assemblage of Rube Goldberg machines function for more than 1 seconds without catastrophically falling apart?

I think multicellular creatures on earth are just so complex they are basically ineffable.. We can understand certain general principles and statistical trends, but the entire system holistically is incomprehensible for a human level intelligence.

Kind of analogous to ML, we absolutely understand how each neuron works, we built them! But we often dont really understand how the resulting model works.

What's happened in software / computing in the last 20 years that's good? Imo it could be argued that overall the user experience has gotten worse. Dead internet theory, enshittification.

* The web is pretty much dead. Time Berners Lee's ideals certainly are.

* Computing is dominated by completely evil megacorps.

* They are making a concerted effort to make people as tech-illiterate as possible and also make universal computing illegal.

* Theres been years where GPU's were being price gouged, 1st by crypto bros, then NFT bros, now LLM bros.

* Cant even buy RAM now.

* They put e-fuses into hardware now, comes right out of the factory as ready made e-waste that cant be repurposed.

* The biggest platforms, Android and iOS, are walled garden, locked down, corporate nightmare worlds. And there is practically no alternative.

* Social media is making people depressed and also very easy to manipulate en-masse by anyone willing to pay.

* Moore's law stopped and software bloat overtook performance gains.

* VR might have been cool but it was pre-enshittified in its nascent stages. Freakin' facebook bought Oculus before they had released a single headset.

Apparently one reason cars from the 90's last longer than new ones (which almost always fail in some way immediately after warranty expires) is the advancement and increased usage of computer modelling / simulation. In the 90's they had pretty much mastered car manufacturing and made parts which they were certain would outlast the warranty, erring on the side of caution they mostly ended up making parts that lasted much longer than the warranty.

Now, with computer modelling and simulations, they can accurately design a part to be as cheap as possible to make while being just durable enough to last for the duration of the warranty. D4A did a good video on it.. https://youtu.be/SeMZGICNSMg?si=sideQIwNBr9s9QW6

Any of this kinda talk these days is just part of the hype train for the LLM companies tulipomania pyramid scheme.

Afaik no-one that is actually working on AGI is anywhere close atm.

You use anything on the web without uBlock Origin?

Yes! thank fuck!

That's the tragedy of the MAFIAA death throes period imo.. With all their lawsuits and bullshit they never even slowed down the big public trackers and torrents of the popular stuff they were trying to stop being shared.. Instead they killed loads of small private trackers which housed exquisitely curated collections of stuff that wasn't available anywhere else for neither love nor money.

I find the stream rips to be really shitty quality.. The original source is very low bitrate, compressed tae fuck. I find for stream rips from netflix for example I need to download a 4k rip in order to watch in 1080, and that's acceptable.

<3 Still a great public tracker. We absolutely need people who will run sites like this and crack and bypass stiff like Denuvo and so on. We really do need to keep these sort of skills, tools, and communities alive to be able to resist digital oppression and techno-fascists. Sounds corny as hell but it's true imo.

That made me lol.

It's literally retro futuristic. Looks exactly like a concept car from the 80's

I am a big space and tech fan, I have a crazy amount of hours in KSP and realism overhaul. I used to follow starship very closely, finally a rocket that's actually better than Saturn 5!

But I cant separate space-x from elon. He is, for want of a better word, evil; supporting trump, supporting extreme right party in Germany, DOGE illegally and irresponsibly causing chaos, flouting the law at every turn. He is a tech-fascist. If we want democracy and egality its imperative that people like him are stopped.

I want everything elon does to fail more than I want starship to succeed. It's fine, the rocket tech genie is out of the bottle now, someone else will make a good rocket.

I mean I might be a hardware guy myself depending on your definition. I've never dealt with rocket engineers.. Are they "hardware guys" according to you? If so it seems you are using that term incredibly broadly.

In theory more automation = less drudge work for humans, so its great. But in practice, in corrupt societies, elites reap all the benefits while the lower classes eat all the downsides.

The thing is though, this is not a tech problem, it's a society problem. Elites will use literally any technology from any era to do the same thing. It's been the case for 1000's of years, even Romans had factories and slave powered mega-farms for example.

Lots of countries are extremely corrupt, they have systems that allow power to concentrate over time (political/ military/ financial, it doesnt matter, it ends up the same either way. Eg. With enough financial power you also gain all the political power and vice versa). That's the root issue people should be trying to fix imo. And how to fix? I dunno, something drastic, we probably need something like the French revolutions.

"low level highly performance sensitive" doesnt mean uncommon. What you're doing may be common with loads of examples to copy. (I dont know cus u didnt say what you're actually doing)

Is anyone doing this who is not making CRUD web-apps or other very common types of programs for which there is masses of training data to copy from the net?

I tend to do oddball stuff (eg. software for custom arcade machines, AR games) and any forays I've made into AI code have made it seem like a total waste of time for me. (ie. I will spend much longer trying to get AI do to a shitty job, compared to just doing it myself)

USA is cooked imo. The people are depoliticized. Many of them are obsessed with pointless distracting culture war, but still completely politically inactive. I think USA will simply continue on the path it's been on since Reagan, until it's exactly like modern day Russia.

Goatse to the rescue! I'm sure someone can AI generate a 3d version

Satyr.. I assume this is satire?

If they're wasting time during an interview on nonsense like that, nah.

I dont have a personal smartphone (I do have a pile of them in my office for testing software I make) but I dont use one myself. Its fine, I can do my banking and whatever. I live in Ireland.

A less drastic option is get an Android phone and put Lineage Android on it. https://lineageos.org/

There's a bunch of officially supported phones but most Android phones will have unofficial support also.

The interviewer asking stuff like that is a good sign to leave immediately.

7 was the peak though cus it actually worked flawlessly.. In my experience earlier versions of windows were kinda janky and unstable.

The fundamental difference between Linux and OSes like Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, is that the people making Linux are simply trying to make it good, give it as many features as possible, let the user do as much as possible, make it as easy to use as possible.. Whereas the design of the others is guided by a bunch of weird business-goals and internal politics that constantly change.

That's why Linux keeps getting better while the others keep getting worse.

There are defo still some workarounds to make new google / gmail accounts without giving a phone number or any info.

I mean considering how absolutely fucked the 2d printing space has been (HP) It's not surprising that 3d printing will involve identical shenanigans once it becomes even slightly mainstream. And that's what Bambu does, make 3d printing accessible.

I like Rossman and usually agree with him, but imo hes a very bad speaker. I cant watch his videos. His problem is that, instead of getting to the point, he spends an inordinate amount of time pre-defending against bad faith arguments he assumes he will receive in response to his point. Thats just pointless imo, he should just make his point and if idiots dont get it then who cares, I dont think theres anything we can do for them anyway.

Surgeons, coroners, forensic pathologists, morticians, butchers, slaughterhouse workers, etc. are hopefully sane..

Some people just arent squeamish I suppose.