• 2 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Somewhat relevant: when I first searched for those videos I searched for “robot that tests Ikea chairs by sitting on them” or something. I got lots of results, but every one of them was about robots that were building furniture, not testing it. To actually get the results I wanted I needed to say “furniture testing machine”.

    So, I guess the Internet doesn’t think those are actually robots, so they don’t worry about their purpose.



  • On the subject of devices lasting a long time, does anybody remember when Ikea used to have displays in their stores where you could see a machine testing a piece of furniture over and over? Like, they had one that simulated someone sitting down in a chair over and over again, or one that simulated a drawer being opened over and over again.

    Those machines were great. They should bring them back.







  • No, they haven’t. They’re effectively prop masters. Someone wants a prop that looks a lot like a legal document, the LLM can generate something that is so convincing as a prop that it might even fool a real judge. Someone else wants a prop that looks like a computer program, it can generate something that might actually run, and one that will certainly look good on screen.

    If the prop master requests a chat where it looks like the chatbot is gaining agency, it can fake that too. It has been trained on fiction like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Wargames. It can also generate a chat where it looks like a chatbot feels sorry for what it did. But, no matter what it’s doing, it’s basically saying “what would an answer to this look like in a way that might fool a human being”.




  • illegal immigrants being turned away

    This sentence makes no sense. “Turned away” implies that they are rejected at the border. If they’re rejected at the border, at no point are they illegal immigrants, they’re just people who want to pass the border for whatever reason. The only way they can become illegal immigrants is if they pass the border and are not turned away at the border.

    we have no idea about their criminal history and ignoring them allows drug dealers and gangs to sneak through

    This is Fox News propaganda. Drug dealers and gang members aren’t taking their passports to a checkpoint and asking to please be admitted. If they’re “sneaking through”, it’s because the US has one of the largest borders in the world, and it’s effectively impossible to police all 9000 km of border, and it’s obviously also unrealistic to build a secure wall covering all 9000 km.




  • problem there is getting the entire industry on board, you inevitably run into the “now we have 1 more standard”-problem

    True, but, this is one way where the near monopolies in the PC space are an advantage. If Nvidia makes the change on their own, all the motherboard companies would have to follow suit. If Nvidia worked with AMD it would effectively be a standard already.

    Nvidia might want to do it as it stands because their main market these days is data center “GPUs” which are nothing like the gaming cards, so if they could make their gaming cards look more like the datacenter “GPUs”, they could possibly save some design time.


  • Physically smaller, but that’s only because they’re still designing it to be compact, where the motherboards are designed to be spread out. We’re still basically using the same setup that was used for the Voodoo VGA graphics cards in the 1990s, but the cards have more and more powerful, but also bigger and bigger.

    It would be really nice if they re-thought the way the second computer connected to the first, and gave people more control over that second one. For example, mount the graphics card parallel to the motherboard instead of perpendicular, and give it more space to spread out so it’s easier to cool. And, speaking of cooling, allow us to mount our own coolers on the more easily. My graphics card is by far the loudest fan in my case. I want a quiet computer, so I want to be able to put a Noctua fan on my GPU, not just my CPU.


  • I haven’t bought a GPU in years, but it’s absurd how they all seem to now take 3 slots.

    The motherboard architecture really needs a revision in the modern GPU world. Instead of balancing it in a tiny slot, it should be stacked parallel with the motherboard and supported on all 4 corners (and possibly in the middle too to prevent sagging) similar to how the Raspberry Pi world has Pi Hats which go on top of the main board.


  • Physically assembling it is still fairly difficult. There’s the physical effort of wrangling a heavy heatsink or a huge graphics card into place while being gentle so you don’t bend or break any of the connectors. There’s plugging in all the cables in a tight space where you can’t always clearly see. There’s knowing which cable goes where when the labeling is small and all the cables look basically the same. There’s the challenge of knowing when a cable or a card is properly seated, knowing how much you can push to get something locked into place, without pushing too much and breaking it.

    It’s harder than lego, but it’s not rocket surgery.


  • It warned you about that, but I don’t think actually frying a monitor was common. I was cautious, but I still made mistakes and gave it values that my monitor couldn’t handle, but the worst that happened was a dangerous sound coming out of the monitor and no useful picture on the screen. I immediately shut off my monitor when that happened, but it didn’t do any permanent damage.

    Probably a cheaply made monitor might have issues, but well built monitors had hardware protection against invalid settings.