ShittyBeatlesFCPres @ ShittyBeatlesFCPres @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I had better than 20x20 vision when they gave us eye-tests in high school and I’ve often gotten, “Holy shit, you can read that from here?” I always chose screen space over font-size even on small laptops but I recently had to dial it back a notch for the first time. The optometrists come for us all, eventually.

My vision still seems fine but it takes longer to adjust and focus. Like I have a digital clock I used to glance at to check the time and now I have to squint for a few seconds and wait. It’s sort of like a phone camera auto-focus where it sorts things out but it used to be immediate.

Don’t forget Bitcoin mining (and especially that they pay them some absurd amount to not mine when at peak load.) That presumably all gets passed on to consumers.

TCL Nextware G. I got them a couple of years ago so there might be better/cheaper versions now but the simplicity is half the point to me. I like that it’s just a 1080p generic monitor and there’s no drivers or need for a discrete GPU or anything like that.

Out of curiosity, I just checked Amazon and my receipt. They were cheaper in 2023 but I’m in the U.S. and TCL is a Chinese company so prices are ¯(ツ)/¯ here.

I bought some cheap USB-C glasses awhile back. Definitely not VR or mixed reality — there’s not motion tracking — but it was cheap and it’s actually weirdly handy. It plugs into any modern phone, Steam Deck, laptop etc. and is just a monitor.

It’s good on flights but I’ve also found niche applications. Like attending a presentation/lecture? Just pull it up on your phone and lay back. It actually helps me pay attention since I can’t do anything else with screens over my eyes. (I can touch-type or use a game controller but it’s basically impossible to use a touchscreen you can’t see.)

“Orange man bad” is certainly not the left. That’s the moderates. The left is more “unions good” and “Medicare for All” and “tax billionaires” and “Green New Deal.” Stuff like that. It’s a pretty popular agenda with everyone but the donor class.

And Biden’s enacted policies were not the Green New Deal despite the branding around it. Some aspects were included in the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act but, obviously, getting Manchin and Sinema to support anything required fewer progressive priorities and more fundraisers/bribes.

It’s actually pretty reliable. It’s left wing, to be sure, but during the BLM protests, for instance, they had actual reporters on the ground and were live-streaming everything. They’re transparent.

I don’t know where to place it on the “reliable” spectrum. From what I’ve seen, their articles are sourced and edited but live streaming from a chaotic situation is sort of like being a “war correspondent” where it can be impossible to know what’s happening. So, it’s probably important to get more context later as more comes to light. But I’ve never seen them lie deliberately or anything.

I don’t know the term for it but maybe “guerrilla journalism” or something like that. They’ll send a dude on a skateboard to the middle of a riot while other reporters are in the “press zone” and covering police press conferences or whatever.

“Source: News reports” is the funniest part. It’s like submitting a scientific paper and saying your source is “microscopes and shit.”

Wouldn’t it be caiman-infested in Bolivia and not alligator-infested? It’s South America.

Thank you for clarifying and adding detail. I’m basically just a tourist who had friends living/working/studying in China. But Sinophobia annoys me in a dozen ways.

It’s one of those situations where you have first-hand experience and other people have imaginary concepts based on propaganda. Assume everywhere is similar and be delighted when you find cultural differences or new food or whatever. Regular, sane people all want the same things, regardless of borders.

I didn’t think they should use A.I. yet at all. I don’t think the shitty version of machine learning of today is ready for engineering giant explosive things. As someone else pointed out, document management for regulatory filings and stuff is (hopefully) the use case. I don’t care if it’s used in that way.

Basically, I think today’s “A.I.” should be treated as alpha software. It has a ton of potential but there is a lot left to do, especially on things involving human or even critter life like rocket science, self-driving cars, or military applications where “edge cases” are life or death situations. (I don’t think it should be used for military applications until it’s really fucking mature tech but it’s already apparently being used for that so the cat’s out the bag there.)

The article says “starting with mid-level staff” and they clearly don’t know how to do things. If they mean White House literally, low-level staff are probably the only people who do know how to do things right now. I doubt the kitchen workers, cleaning staff, tour guides, etc. are even people to Trump. Even the chef/kitchen staff just probably has to handle state dinners and other events but most days, just make a McDonald’s run or burn a steak.

That makes sense. Like you, I’ve generally found that LLMs are incredibly useful for certain, highly specific things but people (CEOs especially) need to understand their limitations.

When it first came out, I purposely used ChatGPT on a trip to evaluate it. I was in a historic city on a business trip where I stayed an extra few days so I was traveling alone. It was good at being a tour guide. Obviously, I could have researched everything and read guidebooks but I was focused on my work stuff. Being able to ask follow-up questions and have a conversation was a real improvement over traditional search.

That’s obviously a limited use case where I was asking questions that could have been answered in traditional ways but I found that to be a good consumer use case. It knew details that wouldn’t necessarily be in a Wikipedia article or Guidebook that would take me 15 Google searches to answer. Just my own little curiosity questions about an old building or whatever. I cross-checked things later and it didn’t hallucinate. Obviously, a very limited use case but it was good at it.

What the fuck is SpaceX using a large language model for?

I’m middle aged and in OK shape but notice lots of differences. Like, I can still do long hikes but need a recovery day and if I get injured, I basically just don’t heal anymore. A shoulder injury just means I have a bad shoulder now and not “I will be back to normal in a week.”

Thanks for the correction. “Capitalistic” was a poor word choice. I meant it as “sort of capitalist” rather than “fully capitalist.” Market-based but with Chinese characteristics, I guess? Capitalistish?

Some friends lived/worked there when we were younger — in college, they focused on China and I focused on Europe/Econ — so I’d visit and talk to them about their housing situations but they weren’t speculators or anything. I didn’t know about the “homes are for living, not for investment” act. (You won’t believe this about a Lemmy user but I’m a software engineer and science/tech nerd. So, at this point, I mostly follow their space program and tech industry. All my other knowledge is based on personal experience or what friends told me and is definitely a bit outdated.)

Yes. I’ve been there a few times and there are homeless people in the major cities. The property market is largely capitalistic. Maybe someone with more expertise can elaborate but there (or maybe were?) restrictions on working in some cities. Basically like “internal” immigration restrictions.

The policies may not be around anymore and they weren’t necessarily made with ill-intent. It was more of a “Beijing can’t handle anymore people until we build housing and water infrastructure.” But people obviously go where economic opportunity is no matter what governments say. So, there are people working in the informal economy illegally like “illegal immigrants” might be classified in the U.S. or Europe. It’s not like shanty towns or favelas, in my limited experience, but there are slums with, at best, makeshift shelters.

I’m not making excuses for another country but to me, it was like in the West but at a different scale and so a different situation. Some of the policies struck me as harsh at first but I don’t know what the fuck to do if a city’s infrastructure really can’t handle sudden mass migration. And they do build public housing, even if often in ways I wouldn’t. (For instance, demolishing what are to me historic neighborhoods to build giant apartment towers. But I also understand that what’s “historic” to an American is a laughably small period of time.)

I’m trying to be fair, here. Like in any country, there’s homelessness, mental illness, addiction, etc. but I don’t think the Chinese government is ignoring it any more than my own country. And I don’t know what it’s like to have zillions of years of history and over a billion people. Hopefully, someone who lives there can correct any mistakes I’ve made in this summary.

Please don’t tell me Drudge Report is still influential in 2025. It’s like finding out how many people’s number one source of news is My Yahoo or some shit. It’s bad for morale.

I fix my elderly relatives’ computers. I know the horrors that lie within. I don’t need to be reminded.

I had a soft shell crab poboy and saw Morris Day and The Time today. We don’t have a lot of pessimism in New Orleans for a reason.

I would recommend installing a fairly vanilla Gnome distro (like Fedora or something) and then a KDE version (most major distros have a KDE spin) in a virtual machine. Gnome Boxes is a really easy way to do that. And then just customize the shit out of both of them and see what you like best.

Gnome is more of a macOS-like experience so to me, it feels more trackpad driven (though keyboard shortcuts are plentiful). Install some extensions if you don’t like something. Someone else probably also didn’t like something.

KDE is more like Windows. I’m less familiar with it but it’s on my Steam Deck so I use it a decent amount. It’s more mouse and keyboard driven, as far as I can tell. So, that’s why I think it would be fine to evaluate in a VM.

They’re both high quality, though, so it’s really about what you prefer. I like Gnome, obviously, but I prefer to code on a smallish laptop (for portability/travel reasons) and a dock whereas a lot of people want an elaborate multi-monitor situation and a different interface. Everyone has their own workflow. Both work equally well so it’s just a matter of taste and preference. (Most Linux decisions are like that and people get weirdly angry about it but that’s part of the fun. Choose your own adventure.)