Losing the internet archive would be such a huge loss… I really hope they have a backup plan in case things go bad legally.

Running AI models isn’t that resource intensive. Training the models is the difficult part.

And also, you can sort of brute force things to look good it with shaders.

Same boat… But I had some success with low poly 3D models which I found are pretty easy to make. Learning a bit about color theory, how to match colors, as well as learning a bit about level design goes a long way. You can make a great looking game this way.

But my dream game is 2D pixel art, and I really suck at it.

Skill issue of the developer to fix it or skill issue of the submitter?

If you don’t want to be on the bleeding edge and want a distro with longer support, CentOS Stream isn’t bad. Sure, there was some controversy surrounding it, when Red Hat killed the old CentOS. But ignoring that, the distro itself is pretty good and stable.

Did you even read my post? I said that you need plates to drive, but you don’t need plates if you are parked (or on private property). If a car is parked, you have plenty of time to read the VIN. Driving on public roads without plates is illegal and you risk jail time.

I highly doubt cameras would be able to recognize this as a valid plate.

Where I live, you only need valid plates to drive on public roads. If the car is parked or you drive on private property, there’s no problem. The procedure for getting plates requires you to not have plates for like 2 or 3 days.

Cars can still be identified by the VIN which is on the windshield.

Much better. SSDs and HDDs do monitor the health of the drives (and you can see many parameters through SMART), while pen drives and SD cards don’t.

Of course, they have their limits which is why raid exists. File systems like ZFS are built on the premise that drives are unreliable. It’s up to you if you want that redundancy. The most important thing to not lose data is to have backups. Ideally at least 3 copies, 1 off site (e.g. on a cloud, or on a disk at some place other than your home).

PhotoRec and TestDisk are probably the best, but they don’t recover file structure.

Fuck up #1: no backups

Fuck up #2: using SD cards for data storage. SD cards and USB drives are ephemeral storage devices, not to be relied on. Most of the time they use file systems like FAT32 which are far less safe than NTFS or ext4. Use reliable storage media, like hard drives.

Fuck up #3: no backups.

With all the recent hype around AI, I feel that a lot of people don’t understand how it works and how it is useful. AI is useful at solving certain types of problems that are really difficult using traditional programming, like finding patterns that aren’t obvious to us.

For example, object recognition is about finding patterns in images. Our brains are great at this, but writing a computer program capable of taking pixels and figuring out if the pattern is there is very hard.

Even if AI is sometimes going to misclassify objects, it can still be useful. For example, in a factory you can use AI to find defects in the production line. Even if you don’t get it perfect, going from 100 defects per 1M products to 10 per million is a huge difference and saves the factory a lot of money.

When you release something, your work is not done. You have to maintain it, fix bugs, release patches, and probably the worst part, keeping it up to date.

For example, Apple decides to deprecate some API, or decides to switch cpu architecture, or for the millionth time change how app signing works, or add some new security feature that breaks your app. Now you need to make your app work properly on the new platform, switch APIs, all the fun. Or, there’s some critical vulnerability in library you used and customers are deleting your app from their computers (a lot of companies use automated scanners that check against published CVEs). It’s most fun when you learn that the new version that fixes the vulnerability completely breaks compatibility with the old one and now you have to rewrite all the code that used that library.

Also, maintaining open source projects is not fun. It’s a lot of work, in most cases unpaid, thankless, and building a community around a project is really hard.

Writing the actual code is the easy part. Thinking about what to write and how to organize it so it doesn’t become spaghetti is the hard part and what being a good developer is all about.

And then use AI to take some bullet points and turn them into a well formatted response.

AI has poisoned the well it was fed from. The only solution to get a good AI moving forward is to train it using curated data. That is going to be a lot of work.

On the other hand, this might be a business opportunity. Selling curated data to companies that want to make AIs.

Let’s go back to binary blobs. Everything being xml and json is boring.

I wouldn’t recommend Optiplexes… HP, Dell, Lenovo pre-builts use proprietary parts making them a pain in the rear to work with. I recommend getting a PC made with standard parts.

Personally I prefer older PCs in standard formfactors. I avoid HP, Dell, Lenovo pre-builts because they use proprietary power supplies and motherboards, making them difficult to upgrade. Laptops aren’t really upgradable, they don’t have enough SATA ports, and USB isn’t reliable enough for storage. Raspberry Pies, while power efficient, are too underpowered. Old server hardware is also an option, but they are generally too noisy.