rook

joined 1 year ago
[–] rook@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

Nvidia doing their part to help consumers associate AI with unwanted useless bloatware that’s foisted upon them.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/12/the-new-nvidia-app-is-probably-hurting-your-pc-gaming-performance/

[–] rook@awful.systems 12 points 3 weeks ago

I will find someone who I consider better than me in relevant ways,

Lemme guess, rich, white, asshole? (now I write this, I realise it could be about the author of the blog post too, and not just the bull he’s seeking).

These people continue to be so utterly delusional about the nature of success. The desperate need to believe that genetics is destiny, and that the ultra-wealthy got that way because they are also ultra-competent instead of merely being ultra-lucky and/or ultra-rapacious.

I guess the future is a race to see what comes first… the ultra-wealthy habsburging themselves into oblivion, the oceans boiling, or a resurgence in the construction of hand-built artisanal tumbrels.

[–] rook@awful.systems 12 points 3 weeks ago

Funny how right-wing types reaaaaaly love unborn kids. They’re the best focus group for almost any policy!

[–] rook@awful.systems 13 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

What’s a hard quality of life indicator?

[–] rook@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Interesting post and corresponding mastodon thread on the non-decentralised-ness of bluesky by cwebber.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698

The author is keen about this particular “vision statement”:

Preparing for the organization as a future adversary.

The assumption being, stuff gets enshittified and how might you guard your product against the future stupid and awful whims of management and investors?

Of course, they don’t consider that it cuts both ways, and Jack Dorsey’s personal grumbles about Twitter. The risk from his point of view was the company he founded doing evil unthinkable things like, uh, banning nazis. He’s keen for that sort of thing to never happen again on his platforms.

[–] rook@awful.systems 20 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (10 children)

It’s a long read, but a good one (though not a nice one).

  • learn about how all the people who actually make decisions in c++ world are complete assholes!
  • liking go (the programming language) correlated with brain damage!
  • in c++ world, it is ok to throw an arbitrary number of highly competent non-bros out of the window in order to keep a bro on board, even if said bro drugged and raped a minor!
  • the c++ module system is like a gunshot wound to the ass!
  • c++ leadership is delusional about memory safety!
  • even more assholes!

Someone on mastodon (can’t remember who right now) joked that they were expecting the c++ committee to publicly support trump, in the hopes he would retract the usg memory safety requirements. I can now believe that they might have considered that, and are probably hoping he’ll come down in their favour now that he’s coming in.

[–] rook@awful.systems 5 points 4 weeks ago

Just take the same approach that mathstodon does with their latex formatting, to wit: just barf the probably-human-unreadable format strings out over activity pub, and shrug when people complain because what else are you gonna do?

It isn’t like inline images work any better over activitypub in general (and even markdown/html is tricky, in the face of various mediocre mastodon client apps, some of which I use) and doing server-side conversion of latex (or whatever)to mathml is a nonstarter because of it will just be filtered out by clients anyway as unsupported and possibly malicious.

The least bad option might be something like asciimath (which can be prettyprinted via mathjax client javascript in the web view of the site) as its raw form is less awful to read than latex, and so would be more suited to viewing via activitypub or in a lemmy app.

I wonder what proportion of awful.systems users view it via the web interface.

[–] rook@awful.systems 4 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Everyone and their dog uses mathjax or katex to render math client-side these days. I’m not gonna say that it would be trivial, but it also shouldn’t require you to get elbow-deep in lemmy’s own post-formatting code.

Unfortunately, there’s no obvious prior art that can be stolen here, and there’s only one slightly confused feature request in the lemmy-ui repo, so someone is going to have to nail all the bits together themselves.

[–] rook@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The austin allegro was far ahead of its time.

[–] rook@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)
[–] rook@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices

Haha, no. Flat UI was done for reasons of fashion, not efficiency. UI will always expand to consume the available memory and compute, regardless of how boring it looks. Exhibit A: Electron!

[–] rook@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

He will say what he thinks needs to be said, and the forced-birthers understand this. They haven’t defeated abortion yet and aren’t going to split their efforts, but they will continue to put pressure on ivf in the meantime. Remember, they weren’t always anti-abortion, and didn’t switch to it overnight! Their current position that life begins at conception necessarily conflicts with current ivf practises, and they’ll say they don’t disapprove of ivf in principle, and they might even have a friend who’s getting ivf, but talk is cheap and they’ll absolutely oppose any legislation that tries to guarantee access to it. Which is precisely what is happening.

view more: next ›