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vid

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What's the incentive for people to participate in file sharing networks? To some degree it's access to a world of free media (same as access to a world of decentralized identities), but to a large degree it's an interesting hobby/excuse to be interested in tech. Some people have racks of hard drives dedicated to hobbies like this, just because it's interesting and is worthy.

I always assume, unfortunately, that once companies start to get to a certain point they become strategic, and military applications comes into play. They then probably get special consideration when it comes to funding and access. All of Musk's efforts certainly fit this paradigm.

I completely support not being dependant on a foreign company (or any company at all, standards FTW) and I don't think there should even be a shadow of possibility that an organization like the ICC could be cut off from services due to a foreign directive, but while I have seen it repeated many times, I think the article's opening assertion is not true; https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...

It is very distressing how many organizations have become dependant on Microsoft and the US cloud for core services. I hope that an unintended consequence of the current US administration's approach is that this becomes less so.

[dead] 9 months ago

32 GB GDDR6 VRAM through a 256-bit memory bus. Not the fastest, but could shake things up if it is available at this price.

It's interesting how much Slashdot has receded, but I really like its predicate scoring system, as well as the ability for people to post anonymously.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I think emulating a physical screen in a virtual field of view is the wrong way to do this. Why introduce off-axis viewing and all the other unnecessary weirdnesses? What if the entire field of view were the screen, with head and eye movement as navigation? I guess make the windows transparent so it's less disorienting, and it would at least initially be overwhelming, but past that it could be quite transformative.

There are still plenty of people in that group who don't want performance vehicles, highways, McMansions &c. Not only are there people who didn't "benefit" from that environment, there are many people who chose to focus on the needs of the planet or others. A lot of this comes down to urban/suburban/rural divides.

It's just really counterproductive to focus on these easy "majority" stats that break down on examination and contribute to the polarization of society.

Thank you dang! I guess it felt like a thousand lost points cumulatively in the moment, but knowing some people, especially such a thoughtful person as yourself, appreciate diverse posts makes a high karma score wonderfully inconsequential.

Maybe they do now, but I remember losing a lot more than that for that comment. I recall it was just after I made a comment that received a lot of upvotes, which were more than wiped out by having a critical view of the ultimate morality of LoTR. Then again, my "karma" currently at 1066 after 12 years goes up and down by points at a time, so a few points lost will be felt more than for people who have tens of thousands of points.

I don't like the word "karma" because it's often, for better in worse, group affinity (and we are most often trajectories rather than pure insight). I often find minority views and unexplored paths interesting, even when they're obviously wrong.

One time I made a negative comment about Lord of the Rings, and I think I lost a thousand points. Does it really make sense that my karma as a complete user drops so much because of one specific comment? Blasphemy, but maybe Reddit's per-subreddit score makes more sense.

I can promise I don't craft my comments for karma, though many people deserve their high 'karma' because they offer genuinely great contributions.

The way I see it is the web was supposed to transform into the Semantic Web in 2000. What that means is you can give everything an identifier and create any type of relationship, turning the entire web into a database designed for a type of reasoning. On its own this is pretty benign, and I thought it would be a Good Thing because it would engage people past pages, links, and predetermined content. I imagined it becoming interesting for most people to craft meaningful connections. I also thought it would enable people to be more usefully and grounded-ly critical of big orgs, through projects like Sunlight Foundation and eventually Wikipedia (and now Wikidata, which uses the formal Semantic Web).

But the basic idea of "things" and relationships is easy to conceptualize, in fact those physical evidence boards with people and things connected by association have been around for a long time.

But the formal Semantic Web tech proved too complicated, so it's only really used in areas like science and to a limited degree for SEO. However, companies like Google and Facebook saw the value and built their own "knowledge graphs," and eventually companies like Palintir started selling services built on the ability to create knowledge graphs about anything. There are a few companies that do this on a smaller scale, but Palintir has really taken off, and given (and perhaps because of) the personality of the founders and its policing/military focus, and the fact that everyone is incidentally connected one way or another, it has become a very dangerous tool because it ironically does the opposite of what these tools should do on a large scale, enables big orgs to track individuals, starting perhaps legitimately with crooks and terrorists but now expanding into every field and citizen, meaning everyone can be tracked, predicted, and managed (barring good societal rules). If it isn't stopped, it gives absolute control to whoever is on top.

David Lynch LA House 10 months ago

Between preserving a 'compound' (presumably by a wealth private person) and converting it back to three properties and homes, I'd want to see the latter.

KDE is not just more configurable, they pack incredible innovation, like KDE Connect. Not to mention their semantic desktop ideas, which have been watered down post Nepomuk, nearly 20 years later still ahead of its time. It's the best of open source and user choice to have this international and often quite different source of new ideas and abilities.

That's what I think of, along with favour from their new investment sibling, the US government. AMD doesn't want to be super competitive, they like their margins and being second choice in a hypetastic market. Even though Arc has very low adoption, it was making signs of doing scrappy things, like enabling two 24GB GPUs on one card from third party vendors, which got the hobby/upstart community pretty excited. Ultimately it's not a real market giving the people what they want via competition, it's all contrived by politics and the biggest players.

Is it really "usually?" I think that people often think of the worse cases (Argentina, etc). Looking at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG?most_rec..., the US is at 103, there are 102 countries with worse inflation, and 215 with better. From https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/wld/wor..., the Global Average Inflation rate for 2023 was 5.7%, more than the US but not out of control.

I don't know what the effect is called, but suddenly some unrest in some country or inflation in another calls for creating a whole new money system. It seems unreasonable and I'm a bit suspicious of where it comes from.

I'd never thought of ATMs scanning the serial numbers of cash, but that makes sense. However, and maybe this isn't leading practice, but stores just seem to put cash in a collective cash drawer, so they can't exactly tell what cash was used for what (though cash purchase would be rare these days). Are there regulations around logging serial numbers now?

Obviously avoiding surveillance can be a bigger red flag than being surveilled.

I use a google account for convenience for some purposes, and host my own email (out of principle, not exactly super interesting material). It would be nice if when I enter the 'duress' password it erased everything except the gmail related activity.

For the past decade my home server is also my desktop workstation. According to canon people shouldn't do this because the workstation might crash or be updated more frequently or create conflicting resource usage, but with containers it's never been a problem for me and lets me have one more capable computer (with dGPU) essentially for each purpose, rather than managing two systems, one of which I only use for ~20 hours a week (I usually use my laptop). However I definitely would like it to use as little power when in low processing states.

I mean "Linux" (as a user OS) should for the most part be a common experience, so if a very technical or very non technical person wants to do something or someone wants to support someone doing ordinary things using a different distro, they aren't on a whole new arbitrary mini-adventure full of surprises, except at the desktop level.

Mind you even though I've been running Linux for decades, I have lost the enthusiasm for the low level details and am happiest when I can use apt for everything and have the OS manage dependencies and updates. I see a lot of negative comments about Flatpack and my experiences haven't been great, so I don't know if it is comprehensively good and will solve issues like low level drivers (GPUs).

I run KDE Neon and this checks out. However, it's a terrible idea to create another distro. The Linux world needs more cohesion. I might go back to Ubuntu if their KDE 6 is decent now. I use the DE for the purpose of running programs in the environment and that includes being able to easily set up things like CUDA, which is easiest with Ubuntu, a PITA with other options.