Aceticon @ Aceticon @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Yeah, but they're great at discharging the righteous indignation of people who might otherwise do something extreme like going on demonstrations or start campaigning for non-"moderate" political parties.

This way people just put their personal data next to a meaningless and powerless piece of text on a website alongside that of other people, get the feeling of release after having done something about what pisses them of, and won't do anything further about it.

Petitions are the single greatest invention of the Internet Age to keep the masses dormant (Social Media would've been it if, it wasn't that, as the far-right has shown, it can be used to turn some people into activists).

Welcome to the world of making software for random people, almost certainly made worse by she being a woman.

As others pointed out, most people do appreciate it, but they tend to be silent about it, whilst a small minority are demanding little whinny bitches (in a non-gendered way) who think they're owed service and some are even trolls.

To those reading this, I suggest when you get something you like for free you at least give some feedback that you liked it and, if the person has some kind of sponsoring scheme going on and you really like it, consider contributing, if only to incentivise more of the same.

Those on the other side are people too and they will appreciate it.

Yeah, I've been there - it's how I learned to upgrade and eventually assemble my own PCs: I couldn't just buy a new one every time it started to run slow with newer games so I learned which parts gave the better bang for the bug (back in those days it was often memory) and would upgrade them and eventually hit another bottleneck and upgrade that part and so on, and once in a while I did need to to a big upgrade (i.e. the motherboard, which usually meant also new CPU and new memory).

I was also pretty lost - at least to begin with - back then, but, you know, doing is learning.

Anyways, I still keep the "no waste" habits from back then (for example, recently I upgraded my CPU with one which the benchmarks say is twice as powerful, only my CPU is from 2018 and I didn't want to upgrade the motherboard so the replacement had to be a CPU for the same socket type, so something also from that time. Ended up getting a server class CPU for it, which back then was over €200 but now, 2nd hand, cost me just €17).

Over time have learned to prioritize other things also and learned that sometimes spending a bit more upfront saves a lot more over time (for example, if I aim for stuff that produces less heat (i.e. that use less power to do its work, which in todays technical lingo is "lower TDP") and I might spend a bit more but save it all and then some in lower electricity costs over time.

Point being that with a bit of reading and looking around you can learn what you need to better chose what you get, even if 2nd hand, in such a way that the results are less of a hassle and sometimes even end up saving more money (such as how parts that use a lot of power even 2nd hand can, in year or two, add up to something more expensive than newer parts which consume less because the 2nd hand ones eat so much more power).

Also as one gets more financially able to afford it, it's normal to trade personal time savings for money, in the sense that I don't really need to have a fragile setup held together with chewing gum and string which is constantly giving me problems and I have to waste tons of time on it just to keep it going, when at least for some things I can get a ton of extra convenience and save a lot of my time by spending a little bit more money. There is a monetary value for one not to have to worry about something breaking all the time and having to constantly tweak and maintain it, you just have to find how much is it worth it for you (I can tell you peace of mind and no-hassle It's worth a lot more for me nowadays than back when I was a teen).

Well, that's the second part of my theory but I didn't went into it to avoid muddling the point I was making:

• I think the "neutral" majority shift more to one side or the other depending on who dominates society and the main sources of culture and information in it.

So in present "Greed is good" (very much a Sociopath slogan) times with mainstream media and a large section of the Culture production and distribution (in the form of TV, but also TV Show and Movie making) in the hands of extremelly wealthy people and when those we are told we should look up to are people like Musk (well, him specifically maybe not anymore) and Bezos, the "neutral" majority has shifted significantly towards the asshole side of things.

The World would be a lot different if our "heroes" were Scientists and Environmentalists.

The "Most moral army in the World" really showing their country's "Western values" there...

The secret is to give yourself as Elitez Hacker objectives things like "least maintenance time required" or "maximum computing power lowest energy consumption" (or it's companion "silent yet powerful").

Maybe "I'm fed up with the constant need for tweaking and the jet-plane-like quality of my heater-that-does-computing-on-the-side" is the real mid-life crisis of techies.

Curiously, judging by my recent upgrade parts search, the peak of the capability-to-power-used curve on PCs (at least gaming ones) seems to have peaked about a decade ago.

Signed, a fellow Old Sea Dog Of Tech who has also gone through the same change over a decade ago

That's not mid-life, that's entire-life.

Years ago I concluded (wrongly or rightly) that most people are neutral, a small handfull are actually good people (willing to sacrifice their personal benefit for people they don't know with no expectation of gaining from it, even in the form of social approval) and a small handful are assholes, but the assholes do such a disproportionate amount of damage that they end up having a massive impact on everybody else.

The stuff in computer games that makes NPCs move around the game world from point A to point B has been called AI for ages (and in this case specifically, is generally the A* pathing algorithm which isn't even all that complex).

It's only recently that marketing-types, salesmen and journalists with no actual technical expertise have started pushing AI as if the I in the acronym actually meant general intelligence rather than the "intelligence-alike" meaning that it has had for decades.

Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.

Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and "influencers" aren't techies, they're people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.

The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they're some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn't work like that.

Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we're going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.

There are only two types of "Super High-IQ" people who will go for an unpaid job working in politics for the likes of Musk:

• Very naive young things, hence very inexperienced and who are going to do all mistakes in the book and then some for the next couple of years as they learn the ropes. By the time they know enough about the job they'll be burned out from working for a guy like Musk not to mention knowing enough to know they're better of elsewhere.
• Grifters looking for making maximum money from being in politics. Since they're not getting paid, that means corruption, lots and lots of corruption.

Also, even amongst the "very naive young things", in my own personal experience, the high intelligent types with the personality to be real believers of far right stuff, are at most above average intelligence but below genius level IQ (which is 120) and hence not really "super high"-IQ (which would more 160+) - I once worked with a guy like that who thought himself very intelligent and in his new job ended up working in an office with two genious level colleagues and he was very entertaining because of his "buttons" were so obvious and he was so easy to give the run around.

Super-high IQ people are often the very opposite of street smart, but one thing they aren't is stupid and at most fall into the first part of the saying "you can deceive most people some of the time, or some people all of the time, but you can't deceive most people all of the time" - they can be swindled but they'll figure it out faster than most.

They're running around looking for the thiefs.

Same moneys, fancier tools.

Yeah, but that happens only once per person, whilst the other one happens every day.

Cryptos are inherently volatile because they're natural Ponzi-schemes with no oversight hence no crack-downs by the Law, and have low liquidity - they pull ill all manner of greedy types, suckers and swindlers and naturally end up with boom/hope-bust/fear cycles which have large movements due to the low liquidity of them as an asset. They're also far easier to manipulate with very little investment, especially the smaller ones (exactly the ones that you claim aren't as volatile).

The Tech per se doesn't make so, it's what it allows crossed with human nature that makes it so.

Tradeable essential goods are not supposed to be currency, they're supposed to be for consumption and bartering if shit really hits the fan. I was responding to your point on using cryptos for wealth protection and now you've moved the goalposts to "currency". Yeah. barteable goods aren't good currencies, which is why we have currencies for trading rather than bartering as was was done before currencies were created.

As for the S&P 500 dying, how do you expect crypto would survive a scenario that causes that outcome, considering that the companies that hold and maintain the Internet infrastructure, from consumer ISPs all the way up to LVL1 providers are almost all publicly traded companies? If the S&P 500 dies that means companies are going bust left and right and in that kind of situation the networks needed for crypto would simply stop working (plus a lot of other infrastructure too, but the most complex and interconnected stuff would go first) and people would be down to hard cash and bartering.

The Internet might have originally been designed as ARPANET, a network supposed to survive nuclear war, but the modern Internet is a completely different beast and even ARPANET wasn't capable of maintaining connectivity to consumer homes in the event of a catastrophe, it was only supposed to keep an small number of nodes connected.

Crypto is massively dependent on modern high-tech infrastructure and would collapse well before any currency that still has notes and coins.

As for the not quite so bad stuff, the worst crash of the S&P 500 ever had less price movement from top to bottom (which might take months or even years to fully play) than any normal month for Bitcoin.

Finally, indeed Diversification can include crypto, my point was that for wealth protection purposes you can simply diversify with traditional assets to create a robust wealth protection mechanism - just as I protected myself from the 2008 crash by merely spreading my assets across different banks in different countries - (unless, that is, you're trying to protect yourself from something so bad the S&P 500 dies, in which case as I explained above and in my previous post, it's down to stuff like hard cash, gold and bartering) and crypto won't actually add any security to a diversified wealth protection portfolio, quite the contrary since it's too infrastructure dependent to work in the worst situations and too volatile to maintain a steady value in normal times and mild to bad situations.

Compared to "traditional" Finance assets, crypto's wealth protection ability is somewhere between Stocks and Derivatives and the latter are generally not sold to customers who aren't considered sophisticated exactly because Derivatives can be very very risky (worse than Crypto, even, if we're talking about stuff like Futures).

Yeah, but today is always the first day of the rest of your life.

I had my money - which at the time include the proceedings of working a few years in Finance - spread over 3 bank accounts in 3 countries back then and came through it all with no loss whatsoever.

Further, crypto is so stupidly volatile that even stocks are better at protecting your wealth because you're actually less likely to see half its value gone in a week with stocks (incredibly unlikely, even, if you get a tracker fund on a major index).

And don't get me started on the ultimate most conservative (literally capable of surviving the collapse of modern civilization) wealth protection thing around - gold.

The point being that unless you expect the collapse of modern civilization (in which case you might try gold or, even better, tradeable essential needs like the kind of food that doesn't spoil easily such as dried pulses), the best way to safekeep your wealth is as usual Diversification, with a focus on things with a stable value, which crypto is definitely not.

Except that it's so incredibly volatile that from one months to the next you literally don't know if your crypto wealth will be worth twice as much or half as much.

If what you're trying to protect yourself from is runs on banks, you'de be better of with gold, works of art, even stocks (which are less volatile than crypto) or, even simpler, spread your money over several banks, ideally in more than one country.

I think the problem is because CRT displays didn't have pixels so the uniform noise which is static was not only uniformely spread in distribution and intensity (i.e. greyscale level) but also had "dots" of all sizes.

Also another possible thing that's off is the speed at which the noise changes: was it the 25fps refresh rate of a CRT monitor, related to that rate but not necessarily at that rate or did the noise itself had more persistent and less persistent parts?

The noise is basically the product of radio waves at all frequencies with various intensities (though all low) with only the ones that could pass the bandpass filter of the TV tuner coming through (and being boosted up in intensitity by automatic gain control) and being painted along a phosphorous screen (hence no pixels) as the beam draw line by line the screen 25 times per second so to get that effect right you probably have to simulate it mathematically from a starting point of random radio noise and it can't be going through things with pixels (such as 3D textures) to be shown and probably requires some kind of procedural shader.