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cardfire

@ cardfire @sh.itjust.works

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1 yr. ago

  • Euro-Office, Europe's open-source alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs, launches June 9

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  • Having degoogled this year, I deeply miss Google sheets and the ability to (a) summon it on any device and (b) share it with shy real-time participants.

    I am trying out cryptpad which feels both flabby in terms of complexity and ui, but also in terms of delays and nuisances in processing and learning curve. Like if I were dumped into 'Corel quattro' or 'Lotus 123' for the first time, now.

    But I don't want them being able to slurp up my data and then hand it over to an adversarial government, so I am very interested in continuing to shift to European service providers for email, password management, and office documents.

    The criticism in the thread isn't about the vendor in specific, but the technology in general? Because I need persuasion (not that it's your job, I just know we are all fumbling towards hopefully "better")

  • Euro-Office, Europe's open-source alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs, launches June 9

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  • Can you elaborate?

  • Last.fm is now independent

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  • I'm on Fennec, a Mozilla derivative for Android

    "Your request was blocked. To protect our website, our security firewall has flagged this request as potentially unsafe. Please try clearing your cookies and refreshing the page. If the problem persists, try again later or on a different computer network."

    Error 406

  • COLLAPSE of Personal Computing | Investigation Into the Destruction of Ownership - Gamers Nexus

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  • Muskrats. Gross.

  • COLLAPSE of Personal Computing | Investigation Into the Destruction of Ownership - Gamers Nexus

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  • I could have done 99% of my last job from an old Atom X5-8500 tablet if I bolted on a good external display and HID. I am perfectly happy navigating with a little J5005 Pentium Silver NUC since everything lived in a browser anyways.

    If excel needed more time, let it cook, long as you don't exceed a million rows it'll probably get there someday.

    Video and production work requires real compute, but 99% of us desk jockeys could have got by with thin clients and a little elbow grease. But I would contend that we may be living int he golden age of low-watt computing because we have the some combination of all computer games ever written in the history of man, the vast majority of them compilable and runnable on today's ardware or otherwise emulatable

    And thanks to Valve, there is it now a very established market for running even AAA 3D titles on dog shit commodity hardware. It's pretty much just the mfps crowd that have to buy each next years release of post-processing laden Call Of Modern Battlefied Spartan Halo 2027, that need to worry about graphics falling behind, when we have such a rich ecosystem of excellent indies. All of my favorite games are like five or eight years old (I play a ton of Crab Champions, and Risk of Rain 2, etc with my gaming crew, these days).

    All that to say, old hardware will keep us gaming indefinitely if the will is there. I think the big threat is people forfeiting the sovereignty of their compute and consumption for the illusion of convenience, the same way so few people own ebikes in my country while everyone has Uber and Lyft fees every month on their statements.

    Wair till people figure out they can be their own GeForce Now for $0 with Tailscale and Artemis/Apollo.

  • COLLAPSE of Personal Computing | Investigation Into the Destruction of Ownership - Gamers Nexus

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  • Welcome to PCGaming.lemmy, the best circular firing squad of TK'ers around!

    Please, show me more of how you treat your community? Go on, showing us how supportive and clever you are.

    And I fucking love the Muppets.

  • COLLAPSE of Personal Computing | Investigation Into the Destruction of Ownership - Gamers Nexus

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  • Please Daddy, insult me some more. Show us how you really treat your brethren. Bring it.

    It's fine that anyone chose to give Steve-O their words and attention for firsthand interviews. I choose not to give him my attention. This shouldn't mortally offend you, but here we are. 🤷🏻

    Don't worry, someone else already did the heavy lifting of finding articles and citing sources. You're free! You don't have to read or think if you don't want to, and you can tune in to your favorite YouTube channel some more!

    Or you can keep making it my problem. I've got all day for this shit.

  • 'People will buy intelligence from us on a meter': ChatGPT's Sam Altman's AI vision worries critics

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  • I mean, I used an LLM to generate the ampacty chart when I couldn't find one I liked with web searches, and then just cleaned it up in a spreadsheet for asthetics, before printing it out. 😅

    At first I tried using one of the image generation functions but I noticed that it was making up imaginary values AFTER if printed it. And therein lies my core criticism of relying on LLM's, that they will lie to me with impunity and with absolute confidence every fourth answer they give.

    You and I agree that readily being able to drill down to information is the superpower that we have to leverage in our human world, and that pattern recognition as well as memorization are key tools on that path.

    I also feel that delay you're talking about, injecting latency into my day, as I type out the same question for the eighth time on the sixth day, and realizing this is something that could just be on my wall and that I should probably try to flashcard.

    I have definitely seen smart people get dumb with AI though, because it coopts and changes behaviors on some weird and fundamental level. Not just dumb people like me. 😅

  • 'People will buy intelligence from us on a meter': ChatGPT's Sam Altman's AI vision worries critics

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  • I mean, mostly yes, but also I did benefit from an LLM arguing with me and telling me to not be so cavalier with 15kwh of batteries. It was helpful to have some safety guard rails. It was useful for giving more expansive considerations and playing devil's advocate against my designs.

    I only shocked myself twice, from the solar panels. 😅

  • COLLAPSE of Personal Computing | Investigation Into the Destruction of Ownership - Gamers Nexus

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  • Dude, I appreciate the ever-loving f*** out of you actually taking the time to compile this, and a site sources. This is genuinely what I was hoping to get out of the thread ( all of the haterade was just... An unhealthy bonus, I guess?) And I'll be diving into those links.

    I sometimes feel torn about these kinds of market consolidation issues, because it's certainly not Samsung or skhynix's fault there are no at-scale fabs from first party American brands, and that both until and AMD did everything in their power to reduce domestic production and spin off their own Fab facilities for literally anyone else to manage wherever possible.

    It's Red Lobster and every other Private Equity managed restaurant chain becoming a real estate holding company, just with a lot more electrons.

    But it's not like TSMC or SK Hynix did this to us, and it's on all of the consumers to keep the board partners and oackagers honest.

    Thst said, I tend to think consolidation is universally bad, absent any nationalization of infrastructure, and my country has this same nightmare playing out with its housing as Blackrock and other equity groups have make a clear effort to force all of us to be perpetual renters.

    We in this thread are likely universally in agreement about the problems at hand. I respect that you cut across my bullshit and everyone else's to actually bring citations and thoughts. Cheers.

  • 'People will buy intelligence from us on a meter': ChatGPT's Sam Altman's AI vision worries critics

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  • I feel like I spend months trying to find the right phrase the people will understand when I mention llms, since I refuse to call these things artificial intelligence.

    My favorite thus far, are "spicy autocorrect" and "next words calculator." The fact that it has all of the compendium of human knowledge on physics or last millennium economics, means it is an excellent research assistant and engineering consultant, as long as I can keep in mind that it's going to lie to me with impunity and with utmost confidence every fourth question I ask.

  • 'People will buy intelligence from us on a meter': ChatGPT's Sam Altman's AI vision worries critics

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  • This is one of the hardest points for me to articulate, trying to convince everyday folks including families and friends that these Technologies are actively making us dumber.

    Wiring up a solar and battery array, and then wiring up an entire miniature rack mount full of tech myself using 'AI' was absolutely critical in understanding the Nuance between different products and between different wiring schemes, but I realized after about 3 months that I was spending at least 15 times a day asking about the ampacity of different wire gauges ("how much current can this gauge of wire carry safely? What about that gauge of wire?") Before I finally just made a table of common wire gauges in both aluminum and copper, and then printed it out and tacked it onto my wall like it was still 1997.

    I reduced my net time spent querying by at least 20% in the past month by looking at my patterns.

    This isn't a brag. This is me admitting that I got stupid and then I'm forgetting the power isn't knowing stuff but in having that knowledge at our fingertips, and that asking some mega Data Center two states away to boil half their freshwater and brown out half their town so that I can be told that I really do have to up my wiring material, makes me feel gross.

  • DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search

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  • So much, this. My brokerage apps are my biggest offenders for phoning to unauthorized parties, makes me nervous as hell.

    I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, that I miss using Mullvad but that DDG supplanted them as my VPN of choice, just because there are other anti-tracking and adjacent security Services integrated into my life so seamlessly.

    Unrelated to DDG, if you sideload on Android I want to shill HARD for this FDroid package, called Hail, , which when powered with Shizuku can fully suspend apps selectively at will.

    So I identify any apps that like to phone home regularly, and just tell them to aggressively take naps until summoned, I feel like I only want to allow 10% of my apps to run to the background regularly. This app gives me a toggle for that, and DDG is my lamp light for selecting the most egregious offenders.

  • DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search

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  • I bought a literal thermometer, not a thermostat just a thermometer, which I wanted to log temperatures, and it insisted on me downloading an app and then setting up a free account. Noped out of that s*** and left caustic reviews but it was impossible to use without a smart device, without internet access, and without the invasion of privacy.

    Just repeat that story a hundred times and you're describing modern domestic life.

  • DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search

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  • Hey dude, just wanted to say that I learned a little bit from you today. Thanks for sharing on here.

    I remember Apple famously disallowing any kind of "Write Once, Run Anywhere" platform tech at the dawn of iOS, ATVos and iPad OS, quite openly trying to fuck with Adobe's and Sun's shit.

    But using apps to avoid needing all of the traffic and rendering capabilities for modern websites was key in its early days and I remember even 10 years ago recommending to clients and customers that were stuck with awful internet connections or underpowered devices, to try using the apps instead of the websites for things.

    Nowadays, I only want to visit so many corpo resources strictly through a browser and fighting tooth and nail to avoid ever letting their apps on my phones. I would literally fire a bank for not having a functional Web page to do what I need done , especially since I probably can't be on vanilla android for much longer the way things are going and too many secure apps require Google Play services for their circle of trust.

  • DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search

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  • The thing about THAT is Bing built their house literally copying Google's homework. In the early days (maybe 2013? Long before they went masks-off) google published examples of them inventing new unique words that didn't organizational exist in open web pages, and those popping up and Bing search indexes 3 weeks later.

    Kagi, at least according to a few talks Doctorow of the EFF gave in recent history, admit their indices just came from Google's as well.

    Watching everyone's favorite advertising agency turn heal so swiftly has been one of the biggest bummers of my adult life.

  • DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search

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  • While their first party browser convinced me if it's privacy capabilities, I need extensions (yes, recognizing that makes me much more fingerprintable) so I use their browser less than 1% of the time.

    However, I have subscribed for their premium Services because I already trust their anti-tracker on my mobile devices and they have sufficient number of VPN nodes to be useful to me (I do miss Mullvad, and probably will use them when I'm traveling International, but it is getting harder to find good nodes and they don't have servers in south Korea at all, either).

    And their measures to make a neutered and neutral AI interface is the first time I've ever paid for general AI access, finding it's helped some of my efforts as AI has been a necessary component for building my home studio and mini rack. I'm scared that my brain has already been ruined, acclimating to Google's integration of Bard and then later Gemini, and I make a regular exercise of hunting for sites that have articles or discussions that will help me work through tech projects and puzzles "the hard way" with just vanilla search queries and amendments.

    I love that DDG's tech stack seems to play well in the general broader ecosystem, so it's my search engine of choice for all of my Gecko/Fusion browsers (Fennec, WaterFox, LibreWolf, and occasionally, full-fat vanilla Firefox).

    I had really thought I could grow into using Kagi but I couldn't make it make sense for myself. When you're limiting paid subscribers at the first tier to 300 general web queries a month, and i could consume that many just on correcting my own typos and re-searches alone, DDG was a better investment for me for the time being.

    TL;DR - I love that these guys play well with others, so I'll even pay for the access because I need them to still exist in a decade.

  • COLLAPSE of Personal Computing | Investigation Into the Destruction of Ownership - Gamers Nexus

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  • Beginning to think I'm deeply wrong, and that this place just isn't for anyone outside the (albeit decentralized yet obviously prevalent) groupthink.

    I've never seen so many people line up to glaze such an unprofitable human outside of r/conservative/conspiracy. Never imagined it'd hit a nerve saying "I don't give this one creator viewership."

    Next, I'll find out they're mad I still watch LTT.

  • COLLAPSE of Personal Computing | Investigation Into the Destruction of Ownership - Gamers Nexus

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  • That's right, anyone with a perspective different than yours is clearly broken and incapable of rehabilitation!

    edit: it dawns on me that if I only answer with snark I'm not doing any better than the people that are just attacking me. Perhaps it's worth defining terms so that we can argue more clearly about the subject. I apologize if you already know all of this and I'm just trying to get on the same page, here.

    For most products that you and I want to run in our tech stacks, we are relying on packagers, whether that's software or hardware i rely on someone to make my shit accessible and useful to me. Skhynix or TSMC has some teeny tiny silicone stack roll off the line, I can't just cram that into my tower or phone. I need a company like PNY or EVGA (rrrriiiiippp) to actually wrap those up with cooling components and distribution lanes, and interfaces, which allowed them to run with all of our cool devices based on industry standards.

    The thesis for a lot of our community these days, and for sensationalist ambulance chasing video publishers, seems to be that every board partner has grown to be a Mustachio-twirling villain, as if ASrock or BeeTech just simply hate their user base.

    From where I'm sitting, I can see material costs for these most basic components in our systems (the storage and memory) are likely going to double and triple the bill of materials going into my gear, as the Barabones version is my yesteryear PC has gone down in price, but buying my variant has increased by at least 30%.

    I would entertain a conversation of grand conspiracy and villainous collusion, but not if I have to sit through three and a half hours of everyone's favorite neckbeard droning on in front of his camera while I desperately wish that I could My Little Pony the shit out of his straggly mane of hair, brushing him out for hours.

    I walked away from giving Mr Nexus any viewership whey he started going after the jugular on adjacent tech channels, often the ones who actuary explained the mechanics of board partners to me first when I was younger.

    I have always focused on, and advocated for, low-watt competing and with an emphasis on gaming. I cared more abut Atoms than Threadrippers, and have not bothered with purists that works trek new that everyone needs the best of the best.

    My interest is more in accessibility than anything else, which is why I'm absolutely f****** thrilled and delighted that we now have Chinese silicon vendors looking to flood the zone with cheap DDR4 and slower DDR5.

    But through it all, if we find out that, as a wild counterexample, " making the next iPhone in the domestic us would make each unit cost $30,000usd" for instance, that means that our smart devices never actually only cost $1,000. It means that we have all been comfortable with subsidized devices and sponsored exploitation under the surface."

    If the labor the crafts are things, from fabrication, to packaging, to distribution, cannot operate with the cost of labor, services, and materials, then we should absolutely expect prices to spike horrendously.

    But for most folks supply chain woes aren't about human rights abuses (unless they happen to hate a specific brand, the way that Foxconn critics would lambast apple but not sony or microsoft, and the same one facility complex in Shenzhen might be manufacturing iPhones, PlayStations and Xboxes all at the same time).

    To bring together my big, haphazard, stupid point: Conspiracies can exist, and I would be interested to hear analysis around Market collusion from literally any other source on the planet, I don't believe Everyone's Favorite Burke would be the only voice to promote this issue and I don't trust his track record of cherry picking and sensationalism to actually arrive at a serious conversation about equitable distribution of our technologies and equitable valuation of the labor that goes into it. Instead, I expect more selective outrage, and I expect people won't read past my criticisms if one man, but will continue to fail to bring anything worth reading and discussing to this forum. You know, the table where we read and write and discuss.

    Thst, or I'm just a "broken human" -- and what does that say about you, if I'm what you see in your own team, here? These communities are what we make of them.