• 70 Posts
  • 385 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Am I likely to be annoyed about where the fiber comes into the house?

    That one depends on the company installing it. When I got it installed they asked me exactly where I wanted the fiber to terminate and ran it through the house to an outlet under my desk. So let them know and they might put it where you need it.

    As for the router, I recommend buying a mini PC with at least 2 Ethernet ports and 4GB of RAM and running OPNsense. It’s great and will give you all the control you need. Or you can repurpose any old PC you have lying around and just add some Ethernet ports on a PCIE card.






  • It’s hilarious – and also a bit sad – that Tan and his ilk assume that someone must be paying me to write. They apparently cannot imagine any human motivation beyond money. It does not occur to them that a person could simply be inspired to action because they care about things like community, democracy and truth.

    See also: “if people weren’t under threat of unemployment ruining their lives, they wouldn’t be motivated to work.” Many right-wingers seem to have no conception of being motivated to do something because it’s good to do.










  • What’s especially troubling is that many human programmers seem to prefer the ChatGPT answers. The Purdue researchers polled 12 programmers — admittedly a small sample size — and found they preferred ChatGPT at a rate of 35 percent and didn’t catch AI-generated mistakes at 39 percent.

    Why is this happening? It might just be that ChatGPT is more polite than people online.

    It’s probably more because you can ask it your exact question (not just search for something more or less similar) and it will at least give you a lead that you can use to discover the answer, even if it doesn’t give you a perfect answer.

    Also, who does a survey of 12 people and publishes the results? Is that normal?



  • “Recall screenshots are only linked to a specific user profile and Recall does not share them with other users, make them available for Microsoft to view, or use them for targeting advertisements. Screenshots are only available to the person whose profile was used to sign in to the device,” Microsoft says.

    It’s conspicuous that this statement talks only about the raw screenshots, not any data derived from them (such as aggregated data, inferred data, or even just slightly reprocessed data). So Microsoft could do any minor reworking of the data and send it off to the cloud for their own purposes, while technically complying with the above.











  • At our small company many of us became more productive with working from home, to the point that they closed the office. A couple of people are finding it difficult because of their home situations, so it would be good still to have a space to work outside the home. But generally we’re getting more done these days, and most who do work that needs prolonged concentration find this more conducive to that.

    It varies between different companies, teams, roles and temperaments. What Dell is doing sounds like corporate heavy-handedness.






  • tl;dw: x86 processors have been doing speculative execution of branches for years in an insecure way. New variants of the Spectre vulnerability keep being found and patches issued. Each patch reduces performance, and the performance reduction is cumulative. The video accuses Intel of adopting a fundamentally flawed architecture for the sake of pursuing performance, a cheat that they eventually got called out for. It’s not so much performance loss, the video claims, as performance that shouldn’t have been available in the first place in a secure design. (And AMD I guess cut some of the same corners to compete with Intel.)

    For any x86 CPU these days you should not expect the performance shown in the initial reviews, because problems always come to light and get fixes that reduce it. It happens to AMD too, but Intel seem to be slightly worse for this.