Companies are expected to make money, not revolutionize the world

I’d like to believe that, but I don’t think investors have caught on yet. That’s where the day of reckoning will come.

AI is a field that’s gone through boom and bust cycles before. The 1960s were a boom era for the field, and it largely came from DoD money via DARPA. This was awkward for a lot of the university pre and post grads in AI at the time, as they were often part of the anti-war movement. Then the anti-war movement starts to win and the public turns against the Vietnam war. This, in turn, causes that DARPA money to dry up, and it’s not replaced with anything from elsewhere in the government. This leads to an AI winter.

Just to be clear, I like AI as a field of research. I don’t at all like what capitalism is doing with it. But what did we get from that time of huge AI investment? Some things that can be traced directly back to it are optimizing compilers, virtual memory, Unix, and virtual environments. Computing today would look entirely different without it. We may have eventually invented those things otherwise, but it would have taken much, much longer.

. . . with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need

Why is this a need? The constant push for better and better has not been healthy for humanity or the planet. Exponential growth was always going to hit a ceiling. The limit on Moore’s Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.

We still don’t have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That’s at least a decade away

Sure you can, today, and this is why:

So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because . . .

Regardless of the reasons, the AAA space is going to have to pull back. Which is perfectly fine by me, because their games are trash. Even the good ones are often filled with micro transaction nonsense. None of them have innovated anything in years; that’s all been done at the indie level. Which is where the real party is at.

Would it be so bad if graphics were locked at the PS4 level? Comparable hardware can run some incredible games from 50 years of development. We’re not even close to innovating new types of games that can run on that. Planet X2 is a recent RTS game that runs on a Commodore 64. The genre didn’t really exist at the time, and the control scheme is a bit wonky, but it’s playable. If you can essentially backport a genre to the C64, what could we do with PS4 level hardware that we just haven’t thought of yet?

Yeah, there will be worse graphics because of this. Meh. You’ll have native 4K/144Hz just by nature of pulling back on pushing GPUs. Even big games like Rocket League, LoL, and CS:GO have been doing this by not pushing graphics as far as they can go. Those games all look fine for what they’re trying to do.

I want smaller games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I’m not kidding.

Electronics usually wants to control the temperature range more tightly than a butane soldering iron could do. Fine for plumbing work, though. Electronics soldering irons usually don’t have the thermal mass to handle plumbing work.

My biggest complaint about the ts100, Pinecil, and the iFixit station is that the tips are specialized and rather expensive.

You’re probably adding $25-35 to that for a USB-C power supply that can handle it, but yes, it’s cheaper than this. $50-75 if you want it battery powered.

But yeah, I’m not sure what iFixit is bringing to the market that’s better than what exists.

How about some kind of federated alternative instead? But maybe with a better pricing model than what Lemmy does, where instances have 1% of their users tossing in a few bucks, and many smaller instances have the operators paying for most of it out of their own pocket. This would take a lot more bandwidth, storage, and CPU/GPU than a Lemmy instance would.

USB in 1996: Let’s make one connector that handles everything

USB in 2024: Let’s make one connector do thirty different incompatible combinations of things

Scorched Earth is the mother of all games. Therefore, all games are inferior to Scorched Earth.

Oh, yeah, a lot of people made that mistake. It was badly named.

Lying through its teeth.

There was a bunch of DOS software that runs too fast to be usable on later processors. Like a Rouge-like game where you fly across the map too fast to control. The Turbo button would bring it down to 8086 speeds so that stuff is usable.

Flame throwers are allowed as long as they’re not aimed at civilians. Thermite is just another type of flame when it comes down to it.

There’s downsides to the companies, though. Interviewing new candidates takes money, and takes time away from people already on the team. If everyone is switching jobs to get a higher salary, then companies aren’t saving anything in the long run. They also have a major knowledge base walking out the door, and that’s hard to quantify.

It’s a false savings.

If I were to steel man this, it’d be cross-pollination. Old employees get set in their ways and tend to put up with the problems. They’ve simply integrated ways to work around problems in their workflow. New people bring in new ideas, and also point out how broken certain things are and then agitate for change.

This, I think, doesn’t totally sink the idea of the “company man” who sticks around for decades. It means there should be a healthy mix.

I keep waiting for someone to come up with some kind of explanation for this that even sorta makes sense. No, as far as I can tell, companies just work this way.

Implement a cryptographic web of trust system on top of Lemmy. People meet to exchange keys and sign them on Lemmy’s system. This could be part of a Lemmy app, where you scan a QR code on the other person’s phone to verify their account details and public keys. Web of trust systems have historically been cumbersome for most users. With the right UI, it doesn’t have to be.

Have some kind of incentive to get verified on the web of trust system. Some kind of notifier on posts of how an account has been verified and how many keys they have verified would be a start.

Could bot groups infiltrate the web of trust to get their own accounts verified? Yes, but they can also be easily cut off when discovered.

“I get headaches when I run on Nvidia hardware. Now, AMD, running on those things are like swimming in a river of fine chocolate.”

And they validated this data 4 times. It’s really good data.

Seems like most of them moved on to vaccines, election tampering, and flat earth. Other than the odd blurb about 5G (ignoring older generations and WiFi), I barely hear at all about cell phones causing cancer anymore. Used to be all over Reddit.

It was still pretty out there. RF in these frequencies isn’t new. Radar installations have been using them for decades before, and at far higher power levels than what comes out of any cell phone.

Not only that, but today’s cell phones tend to use less output power than those old bricks from the '80s. If there were issues, we’d expect early adopters to be affected all the more, and there just wasn’t anything there.

Could there be a difference in how the signal works between radar, analog phones, and digital phones that causes a problem? If it had, it would have been a big surprise. Still, there was a crack of possibility open, which is now sealed shut.

WHO uses the precautionary principle a little too hard sometimes. If it was carcinogenic at all, it’d be at a very small rate.

Tom’s Hardware wrote plenty of junk back in the day. I remember articles where Tom’s Hardware would say “AMD trashes Intel in this benchmark”, but the difference was barely measurable. It was like they had a form fill for what to say after showing a graph. If one side was ahead by any margin at all, it trashed the competition.

Anandtech was more sobering, but their website was a mess. Go to any section of the site (storage, gpus, whatever) and product announcements are sorted together with reviews. There are about ten product announcements for every review. When trying to get a comparison of different products for a build, it was hard to track down a useful article.

Neither site had much changed their layout in 20 years, but Tom’s Hardware at least makes it easier to find what you want.

It’s curious that things went this way. Broadcom originally made these chips for the cheapass end of the tablet market, but I thought RPi was gobbling up the entire supply. Why put in those features in the first place when the Pi5 wasn’t going to use them?

Seems to be a constant problem with the Rasbperry Pi Foundation designs. They’ve often screwed up their power design.

Not that using shitty old phone chargers was ever going to work, but it should never have been as picky as it was.