abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Since you're a Mac person, I think you should put MacOS on it. iCloud. Time Machine. AirDrop. Bonjour (zeroconf networking). HomeKit. Etc etc. Those are totally worth having and they are all free except iCloud (which is the the best family photo storage/sync/backup platform and totally worth paying for in my opinion).

For software that needs Linux or just runs better on Linux, use Docker. But you will probably need more RAM, because Docker on a Mac runs a Linux Virtual Machine. You'll essentially be running MacOS and Linux side by side — I personally allocate half my RAM to Docker on my Mac... wether or not 4GB for each OS is enough obviously depends what software you run but it's likely to be cutting it pretty tight).

You can use OpenCore Legacy Patcher to run a modern version of MacOS on old hardware (Apple sets hardware support cut offs based on the minimum specs that hardware was sold in, and your Mac Mini has a faster CPU than the minimum, you've upgraded the storage, and you can upgrade the RAM).

But the biggest reason to go with MacOS is you own a Mac Studio which is far better than your Mac Mini for all the same tasks. One day, you're going to upgrade your main computer and downgrade the Mac Studio to all the tasks your Mac Mini was doing. And booting Linux on the Mac Studio isn't likely to be a good option in the foreseeable future. Linux running inside Docker on a MacOS host though? That works wonderfully. Even with x86 software on an ARM Mac.

I run x86 Linux on my Arm Mac in Docker by the way. It's not as fast as ARM Linux software on the same hardware... but it is way faster than x86 software on 2012 x86 hardware. Which is to say, could be better but totally good enough.

isn’t this kind of like Netflix offering shares to the subscribers who stream the most

Not really, because a Netflix subscriber is purely a consumer of content. Someone who posts on Reddit is contributing real value which can be profited from.

A better comparison is the difference between a "Bank" and a "Credit Union". A bank has customers and shareholders. The shareholders profit by selling services to customers. With a Credit Union your customers are your shareholders.

Credit Unions don't sell services... they use the account holders money to pay for services which provided to account holders. They also use the account holder's money to invest and earn profits. Those profits are returned (in full, minus operational costs) to the account holders in the form of interest rates based on the amount of money in each account (banks do that too, but credit unions usually have better interest rates). PS: if you have an account with a bank, you should probably consider closing it and find a good Credit Union... especially in the modern world where transactions are online and you don't have as much need for cash/etc (banks tend to have more branches).

It seems like Reddit is planning to be somewhere in between. With shareholders, and customers, and "customers who are also shareholders". Maybe it's something the we should consider over here in the fediverse... because I certainly don't trust reddit's leadership to do anything good with the content I provided for them (which is why I deleted it...)

The sentence "IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE" doesn't fly where I live. You don't get to choose wether or not you're liable - the law decides who is liable. This thing is about as enforceable as those sovereign citizen license plates and would get the same reaction in a court room.

Plenty of other commonly used licenses have the same issue unfortunately and and the biggest nightmare (at least in my country) is laws against "misleading" or "deceptive" conduct. Telling someone you're not liable for anything is blatantly misleading/deceptive.

Even if your software works perfectly, you are still breaking the law... a victimless crime that would normally fly under the radar or result in a "cut that shit out" order by the court... but it'll really hurt your case if there is actually a victim (e.g. if your software has a bad security flaw that caused real damage).

That's why organisations with big legal teams tend to choose licenses like Apache 2.0. Ones with language like "unless required by applicable law (such as deliberate and grossly negligent acts)".

They're working on Linux compatibility. It's not ready yet but it's well along the way with about half the necessary tasks completed. Windows will be after that.

Pulsar is a fork of Atom, which was discontinued because almost everyone jumped ship to VSCode.

What does Pulsar do that is better than VSCode? All the features this article highlights are in VSCode too, and I can think of a bunch of features that Pulsar doesn't have (dev containers are a big one for me - they allow you to have different versions of the same software installed, depending what project you're working on right now... and you can work on/run both versions of the same software at the same time, on the same hardware... you can also emulate other CPU architectures in a dev container, some of the software I work with every day can't actually run natively on my hardware).

very generous severance packages

Zuckerberg has done that - 16 weeks severance for every year you've worked there. If you're a ten year employee, your severance package is three years pay.

Even if you were only hired a year ago, you're going to have months at full pay to find another job.

prohibitions on raising workload on other employees

Pretty sure Facebook is one of those workplaces where you just work "all day". It's not really possible to increase someone's workload. And with a severance package as generous as the one they're doing, I can't imagine why anyone would fire someone who is actually needed.

You can't fire someone just because they made a mistake. Especially this kind of mistake - it's easy to look back in hindsight but back then, looking into the future, it was impossible to know how covid would affect the economy.

I also think Mark is wrong. This isn't just about covid - it's also about climate change, and Russia's war. Two more things that in hindsight have had very clear consequences but where it's nearly impossible to predict he future.

We know climate change is bad, we know pandemics are bad, we certainly know war is bad... but how bad will they be? You can only work with rough estimates.

Please tell me the country where declining to offer that candidate a job would be illegal.

Australia. It's not clearly illegal but it's dangerous territory. Candidates have a general right to be treated as equals and you need to reject someone for reasons that are relevant to the job position.

Something that can easily be changed, like a shirt, might not be OK. ANZ bank (a massive bank with several hundred billion dollars in assets they manage), for example, requires customer facing staff to wear a branded uniform but back at the office? You can wear whatever you want. When they changed their dress code years ago to no-longer require a suit/tie the CEO deliberately wore ugly clothes for a while to set an example.

Obviously no candidates are expected to turn up to an interview in their uniform - they don't have a uniform yet. And if someone can wear a Marilyn Manson shirt in the office, then why not also at the interview?

The bank I'm with is even more relaxed - even customer facing staff can wear anything they want. Sure, if it's offensive they'll be told to wear something else, but that's a conversation I'd be having with the candidate rather than a reason to reject their application. I might reject them if I don't like their response.

I dunno what country you're in, but in my country you are required by law to have a valid reason to reject a job candidate. That reason can be pretty simple, such as "your application was not as strong as other candidates" but you need to be able to back that claim up if you're challenged (and you can be challenged on it).

The recommended approach is to have a list of selection criteria, and carefully consider each one then write it down and keep a record of the decision for a while, incase you end up on the wrong end of a discrimination lawsuit. Candidates have the right to ask why they were unsuccessful (and they should ask - to find out what they can do better to improve their chances next time. As a hiring manager I would note down anyone who asks and consider offering them a job in the future, bypassing the normal recruitment process).

I rank each criteria from one to ten, then disregard the worst scoring candidates until I have a short list that I can compare directly (at that point, I wouldn't worry too much about numbers. You are allowed to say "you were a great candidate, but we had multiple great candidates and had to pick one. Sorry".

If your selection criteria includes "they need to wear nice clothes" then you're treading on very dangerous territory and could be breaking the law. The damages here are commonly six months pay at the salary of the position they applied for, and can also include a court order for you not to be involved in the hiring process going forward.

It's perfectly reasonable to require someone to dress well if they have a customer facing role... but that requirement should be implemented at work and not during the job interview. I'm well aware that a lot of hiring managers rely heavily on these things to make their decision but they should not be doing that. It's not as bad as picking someone because they're a straight white male candidate (which is also very common), but it's still a bad policy.

McDonalds isn’t going anywhere, no matter how bad their hiring practices get.

I disagree. Screwing up your hiring process is a Darwin Award level mistake for a company. McDonalds is very very good at hiring people and a big part of that is their willingness to hire people who aren't good enough and then giving those people the training they need to succeed at work.

Choosing not to hire someone because they like baseball is insane and there's no way that would fly at McDonalds.

For your use case I recommend working with the web - HTML/CSS for basic interface designs and where those fall short SVG or Canvas or WebGL.

There are various frameworks but if you're just starting out I wouldn't touch those with a ten foot pole. You need to learn how these things work first, without adding complicated third party code to your environment.

You can write code that runs on the server, or client side in the browser. Most web software is a mix of both. Literally any language works well server side, but client side most people use JavaScript (you don't have to do that - you can write code in almost any language and compile it to WASM (Web Assembly)... but JavaScript has deep integration with HTML/CSS so it's probably the best choice.

I'd start with w3schools.com for the absolute basics.

Web software doesn't have to run in a browser. You probably use apps every day that use Electron - which is essentially a way to integrate web applications into your operating system (and also, a way to run web apps without an internet connection).

It's really quite simple to get your head around, a web browser sends a text message like this (I've simplified it) to a server::

    
GET /example/page HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

  

And the server responds with another text message, like this:

    
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2024 12:00:00 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.1 (Unix)
Last-Modified: Sat, 18 Feb 2024 12:00:00 GMT
Content-Length: 438
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: close

＜html>
＜head>
  ＜title>An Example Page＜/title>
＜/head>
＜body>
  ＜p>Hello, World!＜/p>
＜/body>
＜/html>

  

You can generate that response with software, or you can have it sitting as a file on the disk.

As someone who's written GUI software for a couple decades - trust me that simple "text in, text out" approach to writing software is really really good especially when you just want to get something to work and don't want to spend years refining every little detail. I'm a thousand times more productive writing web software than anything else.

I would just use an iPad. You can buy them really cheap secondhand.

Even old models have excellent color quality and wide viewing angles. New(er) models have ambient light sensors that pick up not only the brightness of the room but also the color temperature of your ceiling lights, which are almost certainly different to natural sunlight through the windows, and will seamlessly adjust the picture to look "right" throughout the day (if you enable that feature). You can make it even more yellow at night if you want.

They do unfortunately have a built in battery but the battery power management features are first rate and the operating system will quickly detect a permanent power source and reduce the charge level of the battery to make sure it lasts (lithium batteries don't like being full all the time).

They use almost no power, have no fans, etc.

You can find plenty of picture frame mounts to hide the cable, and there's a "guided access" feature (intended for kids mostly) to lock it down. You won't be able to close the app or turn the iPad off in guided access mode.

There are plenty of picture frame apps, or you could write your own (as a website if you're not comfortable using Xcode). Definitely rotate the photo at least every few hours, or the display will burn in. And I wouldn't put it in the sun - you want the display running at less than full brightness to further extend the life of the device. Additional customisation is available via the "shortcuts" app, which is a visual scripting/automation tool.

You could also choose not to run any app at all, and just leave the iPad on the regular home screen with a rotating wallpaper, some widgets showing the weather/etc, and maybe a couple apps to do home automation or whatever.

This isn't the only fine though. It's one of several they've been hit by in recent years and more might be coming. They are also getting bigger over time.

Well, no. That’s just plain wrong. There is only a certain amount of demand for software, like for every other product or service. That’s literally economy 101.

But that demand isn't going anywhere. A company with good profits is always going to be willing to re-invest a percentage of those profits in better software. A new company starting out is always going to invest whatever amount of risk they can tolerate on brand new software written from scratch.

That money will not be spent on AI, because AI is practically free. It will always be spent on humans doing work to create software. Maybe the work looks a bit different as in "computer, make that button green" vs button.color = 'green' however it's still work that needs to be done and honestly it's not that big of an efficiency gain. It's certainly not as big as the jump we did decades ago from hole punch programming to typing code on a keyboard. That jump did not result in lay offs, we have far more programmers now than we did then.

If productivity improves, if anything that will mean more job opportunities. It lowers the barrier to entry allowing new projects that were not financially viable in the past.

AI is a tool for coders to use and it will never make coders obsolete. As someone trying to enter the industry, my advice is lean into it and use AI as a learning tool.

Having said that - it is pretty hard to find a job in the industry right now, due to all the layoffs. Those layoffs are related to covid not AI, so it should be temporary... but in the mean time you're likely to be competing for jobs with people who have decades of experience.

I believe there is still a shortage of developers long term, but short term not so much.

OpenAI runs on Azure, which is carbon neutral.

OpenAI’s take is someone will create this technology - it might as well be them since their motivation is relatively pure. OpenAI is a non profit and they do work hard to minimise the damage their tech can cause. Which is why this video generation feature has not been launched yet.

Um… the Taylor Swift porn deepfakes were Dall-e.

Sure - they try to prevent that stuff, but it’s hardly perfect. And not all bullying is easily spotted. Imagine a deepfake of a kid sending a text message, but the bubbles are green. Or maybe they’re smiling at someone they hate.

Also, stable diffusion is more than good enough for this stuff. It’s free and any decent gaming laptop can run that. Takes mine 20 seconds to produce a decent deepfake… I’ve used it to touch up my own photos.

The difference is it costs billions of dollars to run a company manufacturing printers and it’s easy for law enforcement to pressure them into not printing money.

It costs nothing to produce an AI image, you can run this stuff on a cheap gaming PC or laptop.

And you can do it with open source software. If the software has restrictions on creating abusive material, you can find a fork with that feature disabled. If it has stenography, you can find one with that disabled too.

You can tag an image to prove a certain person (or camera) took a photo. You can’t stop people from removing that.

TLDR: a year ago AI video was garbage. Today it’s almost as good as one that would cost a few hundred thousand dollars to pay a human production team to make (according to someone who’s professional work is creating those videos).

It’s not quite there - hands glitch out occasionally. Sometimes animation doesn’t quite line up right (e.g. walking might skip a step) but it’s 99% there and and the improvements over the last 12 months are astounding. That last 1% surely won’t take long to close.

There was a landscape drone video from a helicopter that looked absolutely real.

Note this is not publicly available yet - OpenAI said they are still working on safety features to reduce the risk of it being used to create content that they want no part in.