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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 16th, 2024

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  • That first picture is great. That’s essentially generative AI, right? You cast out a problem and have it solved multiple times asynchronously, then find the (mean/median/mode) value.

    I do wonder how many of those ladies (weird how “computer” was a largely female profession, and then IT quickly became a largely male profession. Not making any commentary here, just kind of a showerthought observation) got laid off because of the computer. I wonder what they did after their jobs were replaced by it, and if that in turn was a net positive for them/their families.

    I guess this was right around the peak of the babyboom, so I think I know what they did. And for a while there, it was feasible for a typical family to do well on a single income.

    That’d be nice. Maybe next time around we can get it so that families can do well on a single part-time income. Or more gender-equality for who stays home and who works. Hell, I think a lot of families would be happy to be able to do well on two full-time incomes now. But this is getting into the devaluation of human labor now, instead of the evolution of technology.


  • On the one hand, I get it. I really do. It takes an absurd amount of resources for what it does.

    On the other hand, I wonder if people said the same of early generation comptuers. UNIVAC used tubes of mercury for RAM and consumed 125KW of electricity to process a whopping 2k operations per second.

    Probably not. Most people weren’t aware of it, nor did they have a care for power consumption, water consumption, etc. We were in peak-American Exceptionalism in the post-war era.

    But, had they, and computers kinda just…died. Right there, in the 1950s. Would we have gone to the moon? Would we have HDTV? iPhones? Social Media? A treacherous imbecile in charge of the most powerful military the world has ever seen?

    Probably not.

    So…I do worry about the consumption, and the ecological and environmental impact. But, what if that is a necessary evil for the continued evolution of technology, and with it, society? And, if it is, do we want that?

    And, to go a step further, could AI potentially aid in finding realistic ways to undo the harms that it had caused? Or those of anthropogenic climate change? Or uncover new unforseen dangers?

    Did the inventors of UNIVAC ponder if its descendants would one day aid in curing terminal illness, or predicting intense weather, or realize how much it would evolve in the coming decades? Moore wouldn’t have even coined his iconic law for another 14 years.

    What I don’t like…what I really don’t like…is that this phase of technological evolution is coinciding with rampant pro-capital/anti-social rhetoric and governance. I like that it’s forcing conversations around modernizing copyright law, licenses, etc…but I don’t like who is involved in those conversations.






  • Reminds me of when I was getting pissed off that Windows would randomly close Teams Windows and browser tabs, exactly every 59 seconds.

    Till I found out that the windows version of caffeine hits the F15 key every 59 seconds by default. I had previously set up PowerToys to map an “extra” key on my keyboard to do Ctrl+W. That “extra” key actually turned out to be F15.











  • I’m doing my part.

    I set up bazzite in a VM and passed my GPU thru it.

    Now I’ve got a nuc clone in my office with bazzite on it as well and it’s just a moonlight client. But it’s silent. Or damn close. The GPU is two floors away, I hear nothing!

    That was two separate downloads, too…Nvidia-gnone and gnome-standard.

    I was on Nobara a couple months ago and liked it…but a colleague piqued my interest on immutable distros and now here I am.