aard

aard, 22 days ago

Had to look that lawyer bit up as it just sounded too much like Gravenreuth - and indeed it was.

aard, 28 days ago

Generally yes, but you still need hardware support (mostly kernel and mesa). They upstream - but generally you currently want packages built from their git for that.

Also the installer is very mac hardware specific.

aard, 1 month ago

Short version: A bunch of shitty companies have as business model to sell open databases to companies to track security vulnerabilities - at pretty much zero effort to themselves. So they’ve been bugging the kernel folks to start issuing CVEs and do impact analysis so they have more to sell - and the kernel folks just went “it is the kernel, everything is critical”

tl;dr: this is pretty much an elaborate “go fuck yourself” towards shady ‘security’ companies.

aard, 1 month ago

Is it a ‘death by quantity’ thing?

Pretty much that - those companies rely on open projects to sort it for them, so they’re pretty much scraping open databases, and selling good data they pull from there. That’s why they were complaining about the kernel stuff - the info required was there already, just you needed to put effort in, so they were asking for CVEs. Now they got their CVEs - but to profit from it they’d still need to put the same effort in as they’d had to without CVEs in place.

aard, 1 month ago

Making an exception for one organisation, pressured by politicians, would be harmful. BBC has the following policy about neutral reporting:

We don’t use loaded words like “evil” or “cowardly”. We don’t talk about “terrorists”. And we’re not the only ones to follow this line. Some of the world’s most respected news organisations have exactly the same policy

aard, 1 month ago

Ability for AM radios to interrupt other playback for announcements has been around at least since the 90s. Back then it was commonly used to pause cassette playback when traffic announcements were made.

This just requires for the device to monitor radio when on, and to be on - and with how integrated it is in modern days cars functionality I’d say the chance for them to be on is higher than it was in the 90s. So having that functionality is a pretty good way to reach a lot of car drivers.

aard, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

RDS and related protocols like TMC have specifications for both FM and AM transmitters. Those are used to stop playback if an urgent message comes. I’m assuming you have AM stations with such signals in the US (I don’t think we have in the EU) - otherwise the AM radio mandate would indeed be stupid.

edit: did some digging (it’s been almost 30 years since I cared about that stuff) - seems the US was pretty late to the party for radio data channels, and side channels for AM (which wasn’t of that much interest here due to the FM heavy radio landscape in Europe) only was discussed in the early 90s for the US specific variants. I couldn’t find any details if that actually ever got implemented. Given that most documentation available on that topic is heavily focusing on EU I’d guess it never got that much use in the US.

aard, 1 month ago

For AI and compute… They’re far behind. CUDA just wins. I hope a joint standard will be coming up soon, but until then Nvidia wins

I got a W6800 recently. I know a nvidia model of the same generation would be faster for AI - but that thing is fast enough to run stable diffusion variants with high resolution pictures locally without getting too annoyed.

aard, 1 month ago

Admittedly I’m just toying around for entertainment purposes - but I didn’t really have any problems of getting anything I wanted to try out with rocm support. Bigger annoyance was different projects targetting specific distributions or specific software versions (mostly ancient python), but as I’m doing everything in containers anyway that also was manageable.

aard, 2 months ago

I see you’re not working in any industry having to deal with Qualcomm.

aard, 2 months ago

It starts with them only doing initial talks about buying their hardware for a project with you for a 7-figure payment, and doesn’t improve from there.

aard, 2 months ago

It surely is a bubble - so probably a bit different than many other bubbles.

I think OpenAI made the right call (for them) to commercialize when they did - as that pretty much was their only chance to do so. Things has moved fast over the last 1.5 years - and what used to take a decade in tech has happened within months: OpenAI is the dinosaur company grandfathered in, while for already about a year it’s been more sensible for anybody wanting to do something with LLM to selfhost (or buy hosting capacity, but put up own data) one of the more open language models, and possibly adjust or re-train it.

As a company owner I get a ridiculous amount of spam for a year already from all kinds of companies building products on top of OpenAI stack, or are trying to sell training or conferences. All those companies will be left with nothing once all the slower users realize technology has moved on. It’s like somebody trying to build all their product offerings based on VMWare stack nowadays.

If you as a company want to offer something around AI right now the safest option is probably offering hosting, or if you want to do more hands on, adjustment of open models. Both of those are very risky, and many will go bust in years to come - but not as suicidal as building on top of a closed dinosaur.

aard, 2 months ago

A problem of this bubble is that it is making AI synonymous with LLM - and when it goes down will burn other more sensibly forms of AI.

aard, 2 months ago

He probably needs a comaintainer. We could select one of us and then try pressuring him into accepting that.

aard, 3 months ago

Microsoft is trying the same - but royally screwing up how they deal with hardware partners. Performance wise the snapdragons they use are roughly a decade behind what Apple is doing - I have both systems for work projects.

The x86 emulation in Windows is imo better solved than rosetta - but the rest of the stack is a mess. For example, the deployment tools only got arm support a few months ago.

And Linux support on those things sucks - while using it on the M1 is great.

aard, 3 months ago

AMD can compete in performance and power/Watt mid to high load, but is shit with low load efficiency. intel has nothing at all. Apple scales nicely over the complete range.

If you want a relatively small notebook with lots of RAM you also don’t have options (not really AMDs fault, but hardware manufacturers seem to produce mostly shit now). Framework is pretty much the only somewhat decent option with 64GB max, if you want more there’s pretty much only apple - which is way overcharging for that.

aard, 3 months ago

Mobile workstation. There are some Xeon notebooks which also can take more than 64GB - but they have bad availability, cost about the same as a high end mac book pro, are significantly larger and heavier, run hot and have shitty battery life for comparable performance.

The overall hardware situation has been ridiculous for many years now. I recently got a new Dell Latitude for a customer project - runs hot, performance and runtime suck. Runs out even faster than my tiny GPD pocket 3, while providing worse performance. Compared specs - they indeed stuck a smaller battery into the business notebook than into the portable toy. We’re now at a point were a Chinese niche hardware maker does better thermal management for x86 systems than any of the established manufacturers. Current AMD mobile CPUs are great - and I’d love to have a good notebook with one, just nobody bothers building it.

aard, 3 months ago

Any option without patreon? I deleted my account there a few years back after they tried to push those shitty payment policy changes.

aard, 3 months ago

I just tried to sign up there, but seems they only accept stripe as payment - which still insists on making me solve unsolvable captchas before letting me pay.

aard, 3 months ago

They used to link to my dig wrapper on my homepage for having their clients debug DNS problems for many years - even with translations of my UI in the various language help sites. I always found it amusing that a hoster of their size does that, instead of spending a lunchbreak to throw something together that integrates with their help page.

There also was a non significant number of users which didn’t understand that my homepage had nothing to do with OVH, and ended up mailing me about their DNS problems.

aard, 3 months ago

His first colony will be a death trap.

That’s a feature, not a bug. His family got rich with mines in south africa, exploiting the locals. For getting more rich by mining mars you’ll have to bring your own locals to exploit, and there’s no need to make it to comfortable for them.

aard, 3 months ago

https://kyu.de/pictrs/image/ebfe40ed-a98c-468b-89f0-57bed3803d99.png

aard, 4 months ago

They’re in a lot of government networks world wide (I visited them a long time ago to discuss some potential cooperation) - they’re technically quite sound, and as bonus them being privately owned and headquartered in small Finland is generally seen as reducing the likelihood of backdoors or similar issues due to conflicting state interests.

aard, 4 months ago

What kind of monster stores bananas in the fridge?

aard, 4 months ago

You nowadays even need to pay attention on Android as you might get an “software related to what you’re currently trying to install” with an install button on top of the install button you want - in the location where the install button used to be in googles playstore. Whoever came up with that stupid idea needs their computer privileges revoked for the rest of their life.

aard, 4 months ago

https://kyu.de/pictrs/image/11cfb7f1-b495-41e0-a673-423547a9f95f.png

aard, 5 months ago

RAM is cheap, and even if you’re just doing absolute basic shit your current PC will work better with 16GB of RAM (also looking at you here, Apple). If it’s not a phone you’re buying don’t get anything with less than 16GB.

aard, 5 months ago

On a phone the additional power draw of larger modules can be an issue - plus phones are designed to freeze background apps to conserve memory, so you can get away with less.

I currently have 6GB in my phone, which mostly is fine. In a few situations I’d have preferred having 8, though. 4 or less hasn’t made sense for a few years now.

aard, 5 months ago

I guess it depends on how you are using your phone. If you’re mostly using it between charges (possibly replacing other devices) it indeed doesn’t matter. If you care about standby time, or use it as music player or similar tasks more than active use it does matter.

aard, 5 months ago

Make sure you use a long extension cord to a fuse without RCD for the hair dryer, though - otherwise the constant resetting of the breaker will eat up all your time savings.

aard, 5 months ago

Wall is a linguist, which influenced several of his design choices. You have a wide variety of expressing what you want in perl, just as with natural languages - some ways are maybe a bit harder to read for newcomers, while others are not worse than something like python. Typically you’d have coding guides for projects.

I did a webchat in perl in the 90s, and eventually rewrote it in php3 - php was easier to manage properly isolated between users than perl via the CGI interface, so it became popular with hosters very quickly. I went back to doing all my web scripting in perl once I started hosting my own servers,though.

aard, 5 months ago

I wasn’t quite sure what to think about this, so I’ve asked my local LLM. Seems it is fine.

https://kyu.de/pictrs/image/75740d07-1543-4702-8f61-3a71212aa04b.png

aard, 5 months ago

It generally doesn’t have a high opinion of translators (note that the emojis here are inserted as path markers to help with prompt debugging - but everyting else is from the LLM):

https://kyu.de/pictrs/image/9abadcd3-1000-4112-9c3e-d4831c8eb751.png

aard, 5 months ago

https://kyu.de/pictrs/image/e00ee66c-e8b3-40fd-939b-a8073f730906.png

aard, 5 months ago

I’m a father of two young kids nowadays, and I also was a teenager in the 90s with internet access when my parents didn’t really know what it is.

I think her statement should read “no unrestricted/unlimited smartphone access for children”, but I think for a child time limited, guided smartphone access is important - just by letting her use my phone now and then I don’t think I’d be able to have her build up the media competency required for not wasting her pocket money on nonsensical predatory games when she’s a teenager.

She’s 7 now - she generally can chat with a limited amount of people (family members and some friends), make pictures, and request app installation. I’m approving pretty much every free app nowadays - at the beginning I was curating, but we went over game mechanics several times, so she’s now recognizing predatory or low effort games herself, and gets rid of them after trying them out. I have my doubts educating a teenager with significantly more technical skills, disagreeing with everything you say, and some ability to throw money at the problem will be as open as her to slowly learning those kind of pitfalls.

aard, 5 months ago

While failing at art he was still Austrian.

aard, 5 months ago

The Tesla factory in Germany has roughly 3 times as many reportable incidents as comparable factories.

aard, 7 months ago

For the usual candidates I either keep detailed notes, or make sure I can quickly find an earlier conversation (chat, email, whatever).

So in that case I’m then just answering “As we’ve discussed on 14.04. at 13:39, 17.04 14:30 and 20.04 at 14:15 already…”

They typically get the hint that when I’m capable of remembering in detail when we discussed it they maybe should make an effort of remembering what we discussed.

aard, 7 months ago

They have, and in my experience it works nicer than Rosetta.

Windows 10 had it limited to 32bit binaries (but Windows 10 on ARM is generally very broken). Windows 11 can handle both 32 and 64bit emulation.

aard, 7 months ago

Don’t want to go into too much details - from a high level perspective the Windows version integrates better into the overall system. In Rosetta, once you’re in the emulation layer it can be rather complicated to execute native components from there. In Windows - with some exceptions - that’s not a problem.

aard, 8 months ago

For me personally the shitty UI of discord causes so much friction that I’ll never interact with discord ever again, unless I can reach it via some gateway from some of the messaging systems I use - which so far doesn’t happen as I’d need to log in to discord to configure the gateway. I tried that once, never again.

aard, 8 months ago

It is a web designers masturbation phantasy - fancy looking, but convoluted and impractical.

aard, 8 months ago

It’s been a few years since I gave it a try - so I don’t remember specifics, just the impression I described above, and that it put me off from using it.

aard, 8 months ago

Bluesky already allows you to use your own domain for your handle. Currently they just use a TXT record in DNS to verify it is your domain - but adding another record to specify on which instance this is hosted shouldn’t be too hard.

aard, 8 months ago

My 9yo daughter has a tablet with family link, so I can monitor what apps she wants to install. As the garbage games are mostly at the top free, she keeps asking for games that I reject, in most cases because it’s riddled with ads.

Did you ever consider using this as opportunity to educate your daughter about ads in general, how some games try to push adds to get you to do something, and also how some games have game mechanics trying to push you to do specific things, and then just let her figure out if those games are worth playing, or not?

She’s definitely old enough - I had that discussion with my daughter when she was 5, we have an agreement that we limit the number of games installed on her phone - and the kind of shitty game you’re talking about typically gets uninstalled again pretty quickly.

In a few years she’ll be able to install stuff by herself - if you never explained to her what and why games/apps are doing she’ll not be ready to deal with that, and it’ll be out of your control.

aard, 8 months ago

especially if you have Nvidia

This is something that needs to be highlighted over and over again: Don’t buy nvidia if there’s ever a chance of running anything but Windows.

aard, 8 months ago

Also: The Wii is about to turn 17. And is holding up surprisingly well. My kids love the sports and dance games - and none of the newer platforms really managed to provide the same feeling for that kind of activity games.