Profile avatar is “melting face” by Liz Bravo. CC BY-SA 4.0 | I am not affiliated with OpenMoji

I promote software freedom.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • The responsiveness between a hard drive and an SSD is night and day. NVMe is even faster but not noticeable unless you move a hell of a lot of data around. A motherboard having at least 1 M.2 NVMe slot is common, so installing the OS on it is an option. Hard drives have more storage per price, but unless space is significant factor I suggest using SSDs (also quieter than a spinning disk!). More info on storage formats in this video

    Recent generations of motherboards use DDR5 RAM, which were very expensive on release. I think the price has come down but I am not up to date this generation. You may be able to save money making a DDR4 system but you’ll be stuck on a less supported platform.

    AMD had like ~10 years of bad/power hungry processors and Intel stagnated, re-releasing 4-core processors over and over. AMD made a big comeback with their Ryzen series becoming best bang for buck, then even over taking Intel. I think it’s pretty even now.

    If you don’t intend to game or do certain compute workloads then you can avoid buying a GPU. Integrated CPUs have come quite far (still low end compared to a dedicated GPU). Crypto mining, Covid and now AI has made the GPUs market expensive and boring. Nvidia has more higher-end cards, mid range is way more expensive for both and low end sucks ass. On Linux AMD GPUs drivers come with the OS, but Nvidia you have to get their proprietary drivers (Linux gaming has come a long way).


  • It’s harder for regular folk to move and they may not (yet) have an issue with what we may see, but regular folk would tolerate anything and tolerate it forever? They just have a different line which companies cannot cross.

    I think (and admittedly, I hope) every proprietary software is destined to shit the bed due to the irresistible temptation to make the user’s experience worse for increased profit. If there’s no alternative then users have no choice but luckily many of us will even create useful software just as a passion. You may be right that we just have not created software aimed at them because it’s other tech people who give feedback/contribute.






  • When you know the goal but do not know how to functionally get there then an artificial neural network can be useful. To get Chinese Go artificial opponent working was done by making the program run many games against many iterations of itself to adjust itself towards the correct moves for any situation. The biggest difference is the scope of problems this type of tool is capable of solving.

    Technology creating more jobs in the industrial revolution isn’t a valid argument that automating intelligence will create more jobs. Even if we grant that it does, are you assuming that it will create more jobs that it nullifies forever? If we can agree there’s a point where it stops being positive then we just disagree on the time it will happen.

    If we assume jobs are created and they too complex to be suitable for the majority of people (who mostly work in transport) then we have the same societal problem: job available, apply within (humans need not apply). If we’re to take the industrial revolution as gospel then most people leave the workforce when the jobs are automated.


  • Humans were the best chess players until computers brute forced the solution with uninteligent computational power. Humans were the best at Chinese Go for longer as brute forcing would take too long. Humans were no longer the best at Go when machine learning beat pros consistently. This is one-way, hunans don’t win back ground. If we assume AI doesn’t get better than this saying “technology does not reduce unemployment” is still short sighted.

    The alignment problem should be taken seriously even if wealthy assholes agree, but AI killing humans is a seperate issue.


  • There’s no new jobs for horses after the combustion engine was invented to do physical labor - why would there be more “intelligence jobs” for humans when intelligence is automated? If it’s a pertinent question then such people have not questioned their wishful thinking.

    AI today doesn’t need to affect all jobs to cause mass disruptions. The biggest industry is transport - what jobs does MIT’s president imagine will be created for 60 year old truckers if they’re replaced with autos? Do we get the funny joke where people suggest truckers should learn programming?