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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I think the problem is Valve lost control of the messaging, which led to bad expectations.

    At least in the US, a computer hooked up to a TV to play games means it’s a “console” and not a computer. Maybe we can blame Nintendo back in the 80s for going out of their way to avoid calling the NES a computer (despite it’s name in Japan being Famicom, Family Computer), but the distinction exists today despite technologically no real difference. You know this, I know this, Valve knows this. So Valve wants to make a computer you hook up to your TV so they can get you to use their money printing machine Steam in the living room too.

    If you read Valve’s marketing material on the Steam Machine, they don’t use the word “console” once. It’s always either by name or the terms PC, computer, or system. They likely don’t mention the word “console” because to date, video game consoles follow a different business model, one where the model subsidizes the shit out of the hardware and then make money on the back end with game sales/licensing.

    Current “console” hardware starts in the <$500 price bracket, and with so much third party media marketing calling the Steam Machine a console, that got people’s mind set on pricing expectations of that market.



  • It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.

    If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.

    tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care




  • Nothing legally stops you from listening. To transmit, you are legally required to have a callsign (which you must broadcast during transmit) and your callsign must be licensed for that frequency.

    If you break the law, it’s highly unlikely that the FCC themselves will hunt you down and fine you. If you’re using it to talk to others on the HAM bands, they’ll likely get pissed at you for not being licensed but actually tracking you down is difficult. Using it for your own personal projects, friend groups, etc, it’s unlikely anyone would notice you at all.

    A license is like $15 for life (just need to occasionally tell the FCC you’re still alive), the test will teach you some stuff, I don’t see it as that onerous to play by the rules so I’d recommend following them.


  • A HAM license realistically is for two things:

    1 the test teaches you major items you should know about how radio works 2 how to not fuck shit up for everyone else

    For the bands allocated to HAM radio in the US, as long as you’re not fucking shit up for everyone else the FCC doesn’t really care. A good example of that and my personal favorite rule is the power transmission rule of “only enough power to complete the transmission”. Functionally it’s so vague that I doubt anyone would ever actually get their license suspended over it.

    The group AFRL ARRL has a pretty restrictive “band plan” that I think is where the above comment’s salt is coming from. A perception I have and have heard others talk about is the HAM community has a tendency to be borderline hostile to newcomers and are very gate-keepy, which ARRL in my experience embodies.

    I have a license purely to play by the rules from a legal standpoint when I’m out in the rocky mountains hiking and camping with friends, makes communicating with different groups way easier

    Edit: formatting, typoing ARRL



  • I don’t think the term AI has been used in a vague way, it’s that there’s a huge disconnect between how the technical fields use it vs general populace and marketing groups heavily abuse that disconnect.

    Artificial has two meanings/use cases. One is to indicate something is fake (video game NPC, chess bots, vegan cheese). The end product looks close enough to the real thing that for its intended use case it works well enough. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, treat it like a duck even though we all know it’s a bunny with a costume on. LLMs on a technical level fit this definition.

    The other definition is man made. Artificial diamonds are a great example of this, they’re still diamonds at the end of the day, they have all the same chemical makeups, same chemical and physical properties. The only difference is they came from a laboratory made by adult workers vs child slave labor.

    My pet theory is science fiction got the general populace to think of artificial intelligence to be using the “man-made” definition instead of the “fake” definition that these companies are using. In the past the subtle nuance never caused a problem so we all just kinda ignored it


  • That’s always the hard part of these “government fraud” narratives. It’s the insidious shit, the ineptitude, incompetence. Not something you can walk into the FDA and find a filing cabinet labeled “deliberate and known waste contracts”.

    I work in aerospace and the worst engineers I’ve had the displeasure of working with were on cost+ contracts (the money keeps rolling in until the job is “done”).

    The only real way to track down abuses like that is to stick an oversight committee on each and every contract, watch them like a hawk. But who watches the watchers? You run the risk at every stage, eventually you either need to trust or gamble


  • I think a better definition would be “achieve something in an unintended or uncommon way”. Fits the bill on what generally passes in the tech community as a “hack” while also covering some normal life stuff.

    Getting a cheaper flight booked by using a IP address assigned to a different geographical location? Sure I’d call that a life hack. Getting a cheaper flight by booking a late night, early morning flight? No, those are deliberately cheaper

    Also re: your other comment about not making a reply at all, sometimes for people like us it’s just better to not get into internet fights over semantics (no matter how much fun they can be)






  • Realistically no. The support needed to manage the devices we all use is just insane, and I think a lot of people take for granted how the x86 platform has evolved over the last few decades. The ARM landscape does not have the standards set that x86 does and that will always hold it back. Qualcomm learned long ago that it’s within their best interest to be constantly changing the SoCs and never really documenting/supporting them very well because it forces all of the downstream vendors to do constant refreshes. Toss in the development hellscape my fellow programmers created ourselves and we get the vicious cycle we’re in today where Google saying they’ll support a device for longer than a few years was the headline sales pitch

    -typed on a Pixel 8 which was purchased due to that sales pitch


  • In a round about way, it probably is geographically related. So few people live there due to the land being pretty useless, but not so useless that the people there are spread out and when county lines were drawn they followed county sizes similar to Midwestern states. More western states drew larger counties but had similar population density averages so the number of people per county are high enough that there are enough suicides that someone may actually be tracking that on an annual basis

    Arbitrarily cherry picking that squished pentagon county in northern Nebraska, there are only 769 people living in the entire county . If just one of them committed suicide that county would be off the charts lethal at 137. So when you take the US average suicide rate per year it could take up to ten years for someone in the county to commit suicide. So there probably isn’t anyone keeping real statistics in that county

    Realistically I think this is a bad map since counties with lower populations get disproportionately amplified suicide rates