JDubbleu @ JDubbleu @programming.dev

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244

Joined

2 yr. ago

I've hosted one on a raspberry pi and it took at most a second to process and act on commands. Basic speech to text doesn't require massive models and has become much less compute intensive in the past decade.

It's a gamble to get a used car you know nothing about when you have a truck you know is at least a bit reliable. My family grew up playing used car roulette and it's pretty damn hard to come out ahead in this scenario. Best to run the thing until it dies while saving up for a new or like new vehicle.

Thank you! I'm already getting some great use out of it as my new company hired me largely because of my AWS experience. I also learned a ton there thanks to my exceptionally brilliant team so I can't say I regret my time there even if it was stressful.

For companies not to milk every god damn cent out of consumers while providing a worse experience than the free alternatives. Netflix limits steam quality to 720p in browsers (except for Edge) forcing you to use their Windows app or a spyware filled smart TV to access 4k content THAT YOU PAY FOR. Cracking down on password sharing such that it is an inconvenience to try to use your Netflix account outside of your home. Constant price raises to all the streaming services for lesser features over time, and content that could just disappear from the platform entirely. We haven't even gotten to ads on paid tiers and "promotional" suggestions that are thinly veiled ads on non-ad plans.

You know what doesn't do those things? An MP4 file on a Plex server. It's gotten so frustrating to use streaming services that my partner and I torrent movies we have legal access to because it's a better experience, and I'm guaranteed to be able to finish a series without it being ripped from the platform. I can also watch the 4k content I PAY FOR in any browser I please. There is zero reason a bunch of volunteers working together should be able to provide a better user experience than multi-billion dollar companies.

You know what I rarely pirate? Steam games. They've made the user experience 10x better than pirating with non-intrusive DRM and an endless number of features I use regularly (controller support, custom configurations, cloud saves, online "local" co-op, remote game streaming, workshop/mod support, community guides, automatic updates, local network downloads...I could go on for an hour). The times I do pirate are for games I'm not sure I will like or games that might not run well on my Steam Deck. You know what Valve is doing to combat this? Introducing a game trial feature.

I did a lot of research a few years ago and settled on ProtonVPN. I won't say anything authoritative regarding privacy as I haven't done any recent research, but I've been very happy with the service so far.

I run a seedbox with all the traffic from qBittorrent tunneled through ProtonVPN and I've gotten up to 200 Mbps down through a few very healthy torrents before, and on dedicated speed tests I can pull down ~250 Mbps on my gigabit service. I've also never had it go down despite using the exact same server 24/7.

Their documentation is also amazing and they generate connection configs for Wireguard and OpenVPN on their website using provided parameters making it dead simple to get started.

Yup! That's the bullshit part and what really grinds my gears when people say we're just whining. I have 0 problem going to an office that I was assigned at my date of hire. What I have a problem with is 1) retroactively assigning offices to remote designated employees and 2) forcibly relocating people across the country for zero reason. They're actively uprooting entire families and fucking so many people over.

I'm fortunate enough to have gotten another job before it impacted me thanks to referrals from friends, but not everyone is as fortunate.

I work at AWS (won't after this Friday since I got a remote job), and while I'm pretty low on the totem pole, internally it is very clear what is going on. Leadership is slowly phasing out non-proximate workers. Why? No one knows really, but our best guess is unofficial layoffs and upholding commercial real estate.

It started with RTO 3 days a week for everyone except remote employees in May. Then in September basically all remote employees were forced to relocate to their team hub. This was as much of a shit show as you think. You were given 30 days to decide and 60 days to move. What people did was "decide" on the last day to move, and then drag their feet for the next 60. Then quit without notice as soon as they had another job lined up. Don't get me wrong the market is rough, but 90 days is enough to find a job if you have halfway decent connections and AWS on your resume. By now my team already lost half of our devs (3/6).

More recently, in waves, they're forcing people to relocate to team hubs. Even teams who were historically spread out across the US. I'm from the west coast but my team is in Colorado and the second I caught wind of this I grinded my ass off and got another job. When I told my manager he was very understanding but frustrated at the situation. My two teammates were even more frustrated, and one of them is on the west coast too. My team could be one person soon.

Didn't mean for this to turn into a rant, but Amazon is nuking teams left and right like this and it will catch up to them. As a whole things are breaking more often in AWS systems than usual, and our service is starting to show cracks. Our reliability is down hard because we had a collective 35 years of knowledge leave our org. Almost all of whom were the team expert.

Catch me loading up a new version of Super Smash Bros Melee every time I gotta save a timestamp.

For me, a native speaker, I've been confused maybe twice by the use of singular they, and all it took was a quick clarification to remedy. This is because it seems pretty rare in English to use a pronoun without some context surrounding it.

If someone came to me and said, "they went to the store" my confusion would be due to a lack of context. Who are we even talking about in the first place? In that scenario gender neutral he, which is confusing for a myriad of other reasons and can lead to false assumptions, would be just as confusing.

However in an exchange like, "where did this person go? They went to the store" or, "where did Alex and Bob go? They went to the store" the context provides whether they is singular or plural. Revisiting the first example with zero context, "they" would normally be replaced by a proper noun. This sets the required context and makes future uses of "they" make perfect sense.

Whereas with gender neutral he I'd assume you knew the gender of who you were referring to. I grew up using they in the singular form constantly, and it's not like I was surrounded by queer culture, it's just a function of how English is spoken in some places even outside of the UK (I'm from California).

I can definitely see it being confusing though if you were taught "proper" formal English. No one I've ever encountered speaks that way and it's largely reserved for academic works. Hell, should'nt've and wheredya might as well be in the dictionary by now.

The only universally correct date format is ISO.

The great thing about Linux DEs is that it doesn't matter if it's conventionally bad, it matters that it works for you. You could use the cubic alt tab animation and control your computer through seances for all anyone cares. As long as you can do what you want just send it and use what's best for you.

As someone who grew up somewhere super flat it really doesn't get to you because it's all you've ever known. However, now that I live somewhere with hills it drives me crazy when I visit home.

It's not quite blockchain. It is incredibly useful in a broad range of applications, and has genuinely changed how millions of people work. Sure it's not the magic bullet wall street thinks it is, but my work has been improved immensely through the use of generative AI. Especially with uniquely challenging software problems and niche questions.

I think it'll be similar to VR. Extremely useful and interesting, but over-hyped and not going to penetrate our lives as much as most people think.

I have it free through T-Mobile and still use my Plex server for any movies on Netflix because I can get 4k BluRay quality. Hell, you can even request that the torrent download start to end effectively letting you stream it. Make sure to only do that on healthy torrents though because it's awful for the health of smaller torrents.

Clocks use IIII instead of IV most of the time. This is completely normal and not at all out of place

I think in this case AM4 is fine. I recommended it because OP mentioned the price was a bit much, and AM4 at the moment gets you a lot of value. Especially given they are someone who plays indie games primarily with some heavier games occasionally and isn't on all the latest AAA games. I'm actually very similar to them where I'll play the occasional AAA game, but I mainly stick to Minecraft and KSP (which is stupid CPU intensive). My R5 3600 was more than enough for this and my upgrade was 100% unnecessary, so the 5600X should last them quite a while. There is also a decent upgrade path from a 5600X to a 5800X3D or 5900X3D.

We're starting to see gaps between generations get smaller as Moore's law fails, so I think parts are going to start lasting a bit longer now anyway. Hell, my 4970k lasted me almost 7 years, and my mom ran it in her work PC I built her for another 3 after that.

I honestly don't think either path is a bad one, just up to them if they want to save some money or get a little bit more upgradability.

I'm going to preface this with this computer will last quite a while, but you won't have nearly as much of an upgrade path if you went with an AM5 platform (latest AMD CPU socket) on DDR5 (latest generation of RAM). With that said, your use case seems to be one that will not require keeping up with the latest games, so if you want to save some money this is what I would do.

NOTE: Prices are from Amazon, you can likely find a few components cheaper elsewhere.

CPU: You don't need an R5 7600. I was running an R5 3600 up until a few months ago and the only reason I upgraded was I found a 5800X3D for a good price. I'd go for an R5 5600X which is $60 cheaper than the 7600 and will be more than enough for City Skylines 2

Motherboard: You can now get a B450DS3H board for that CPU for $40 cheaper

RAM: You'll now be on DDR4. Get a 16GB kit of CL16 DDR4, will be about the same price as the DDR5 you have. May want to go for 32GB of RAM because sim games eat RAM, but ultimately up to you. You can always buy more down the road if needed as a 32GB kit is like $5 less than 2 16GB kits.

Case: The no-name brand cases on Amazon are actually quite good. You can get a nice case for ~$50. Hell, I just found a Thermaltake Versa H18 for that price. Another $55 saved.

GPU: I haven't kept up to date on GPUs, but I've heard good things about the 6700XT, and benchmarks look respectable for BG3 and City Skylines 2. You could likely get away with something a bit less powerful, but price to performance seems to side with the 6700XT.

This brings the price down to $831. You could ditch the aftermarket cooler and get it under $800 as the 5600X comes with a cooler, but I'm never going to knock aftermarket coolers as they tend to be much quieter and less whiny than stock.

Adding onto what the other commenter said, LEO satellites (the orbit Starlink uses) just don't have the same operational lifespan as geostationary satellite (the orbit of this Dish Network satellite). They experience a ton more drag because they sit under 1k km, while geostationary are up at 36k km and as such LEO satellites require way more fuel to stay in orbit.

This is not to say 4 years is not on the lower end of LEO satellites which are usually expected to last 7 years, but geostationary satellites are over double the expected life span at 15-20 years. Finally, even though Starlink is more wasteful, their satellites will fall out of orbit pretty damn fast (within a couple years) compared to geostationary satellites (30+ years).

Source: Google and KSP

Hard agree. If my dumbass can do the math for this in Kerbal Space Program on the back of an envelope, these fucks sure as hell can with entire aerospace engineering teams.