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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Illusion — Why do we keep believing that AI will solve the climate crisis (which it is facilitating), get rid of poverty (on which it is heavily relying), and unleash the full potential of human creativity (which it is undermining)?

    Because we keep reading sensationalist advertisements presented as articles instead of experimenting with it ourselves, understanding what it is

    And unfortunately, this article is also just a response to media clickbait, not a discussion point it tries to look like



  • Yes, I can. But you need much more to accomplish this

    1. You need reach: are there any mods/admins that would feel ok with vouching for your abilities? And preferably have info about your proposal stickied on a bunch of communities where it could reach people open to chip in?
    2. You need to convince those you reach that you’re not a Nigerian Prince. Mod/Admin saying you’re legit could help with it but maybe there’s something more you could do to convince the public?
      Maybe I simply don’t know who you are, maybe in reality you are second in command after Dessalines. But either you are a random dev saying “I can do that” - in this case you need to somehow convince others that you really can. Or you are not recognised for your work - in this case you need to point us to what tie you to. I saw the fedi project on your GitHub so you probably can code (I’m not going to be auditing your project in order to asses your skills, sorry). But are you just a dreamer or are you serious?
      I’m sorry if what I’m saying sounds harsh. I just feel that how you are coming through to the other side gets lost in translation here
    3. GitHub is not the most popular support medium. Why not also have Patreon/Koffi/OpenCollective/etc? Many will chip in easier if they’re already present on the platform








  • That would actually be a good idea. With people growing up and learning on their own, you don’t have a fully controlled system. The world inside the Matrix will be evolving and from time to time there will be some glitch somewhere. If you have a base of defined childhoods, then only physical differences between bodies and random occurences inside are uncontrolled

    If I were to construct the Matrix, I would go after cloning (fewer biological lottery) and predefined lifepaths to keep everything nice and stable






  • From what I learned at university:
    CISC instruction set (x86) was developed to adress the technical reality of its time - time costly CPU operation and fast read from storage. Not long after that the situation has changed - storage reads became slower in comparison to computing time (putting it simply it’s faster to read an archive and unpack it than to read unpacked thing). But in the meantime the PC boom has happened. In a way backward compatibility and market inertia locked us with instruction set that is not the best optimised for our tech, despite the fact that RISC (for example ARM) was conceived earlier.

    In a way software (compilers and interpreters too) is like a muscle. The more/wider it’s used, the better it becomes. You can be writing in python but if your interpreter has some missed optimization opportunities, your code will be running faster on architecture with a better optimized interpreter available.

    From personal observations:
    The biggest cost of software is not to write something super efficient. It’s maintainability (readability and debugging), ease of use (onboarding/training time) and versatility (“let’s add the feature that is missing to what we have, instead of reinventing the wheel and maintaining two toolsets”).

    The new languages are not created because they can do something faster than assembler (they can’t, btw). If assembly code is written as optimal as possible, high level languages can at best be as fast. Writing such assembly is a problem behind the keyboard, not a technical limitation. The only thing high-level languages do better is how much time it takes a human to work with it.
    I would not be surprised to learn that bigger part of these big bucks you mention go not into optimization but rather into “how can we work around that difference so the high-level interface stays the same as for more widely used x86?”

    In the end it all boils down to machine code - it’s the only thing that really exists when it comes to executing code. If your “human to bits translator” produces unoptimized binaries, it doesn’t matter how high-level your code was written in.
    And sometime in the meantime we’ve arrived at a level when even a few behemoths like Google or Microsoft throwing money into research (not that I believe they are doing so when it comes to optimization) is enough.
    It’s the field use that from time to time provides a use-case that helps finding edge-case where optimization can be made.
    To purposefully find it? Dumping your datacenter in liquid nitrogen might be cheaper and probably more predictable.

    So yeah, I mostly agree with him.
    Maybe the times have changed a little, the thing that gave RISCs the most kick were smartphones, then one board computers, so not long ago. The improvements are always bigger at the beginning.
    But the fact that some companies are trying to get RISC back into userland in my opinion means that the computer world has only started to heal itself after the effects of PC boom. There’s around 20 year difference where x86 was the main thing and RISC was a niche





  • Gnome is quite heavy, before you succumb to the void of choosing the best prompt format, try some other, lighter WMs. I like Fluxbox very much; XFCE is lighter than Gnome/KDE but still similar; i3 is also lightweight.
    I guess there might be some light Firefox forks, or maybe even go back to iceweasel?

    As for command line, check out:

    • tmux
    • zsh (it’s completion mechanisms are imo better than bash)
    • mc
    • how to define your shortcuts as functions inside every login shell, instead of using aliases which are easier but have limitations

    Btw, slackware still maintains x32
    And there’s also arch32