CodexArcanum @ codexarcanum @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts

5

Comments

299

Joined

8 mo. ago

It's also a revelation-of-the-method: authoritarians love to gloat about how they're doing it right in front of you, with tools you trusted, and you can't stop it.

Zune and iPod at Tangara.

Walkman, when the Napster fell!

Steve Jobs, his turtle neck raised high.

(Looks pretty neat, been thinking about getting a dedicated music player again!)

!egg_irl@lemmy.blahaj.zone will ultimately be looking for this.

It was so bad job hunting a couple of years ago. Took me months and months. I even used AI to help me write cover letters after a while. No one was reading them so might as well have no one write them too.

Productively, I hate to say it, but I think we've actually circled back to Boomer job hunting advice being good. I got my current job by attending local industry meetups, meeting a recruiter, and they got me face-to-face at a company which immediately hired me.

At this point, I'd just go for the most unhinged approach. Put on a suit, show up where you want to work, walk in and demand to meet the ceo or something. Tell him you're not here to waste time with "process", you're here to make some real money. If you aren't a white man, make friends with one and have them do this, then bait-and-switch the hire. Act like you've always been a queer black woman, it must be their mistake.

The time for asking to be hired is over. We're just taking the jobs now!

I've seen clouds ☁️ usedsometimes, usually with an up or down arrow in it, obviously for cloud save, but sometimes confusingly for upload/download.

Likewise, I've seen down arrows with a line ⤓ also used recently. (In xed text editor, came with Mint for me.) That also to me is more of a down/upload symbol.

I find the desktop skuimorphism pretty tiring anyway, especially after like 25 years of it. Will computers always and forever be an extension of the office?

I saw or read something recently talking about MS Bob, the ancient origin point for the much maligned font Comic Sans. But what's lost is what Bob was, why comic sans was made for it. It was a different view of the OS, the home PC, as a digital, animated home. You clicked the wall calendar to open your calendar, the TV to watch video, etc. Its also where clippy came from, originally a dog (who was a clippy option) that acted as a guide and buddy to the new system.

Squeak Smalltalk is also built different. Instead of folders and files everything is objects (years before Java claimed this). If you've never tried it, its a very different way to think about computing. Text documents aren't just files requiring a text editor, they become extensible objects with behaviors attached and definable. Smalltalk blurs the line between user, programmer, creator, and so on. It encourages you to look at the computer and the data on it playfully.

It isn't just the save icon or "files and folders and desktops" its every part of the computing landscape is constantly being defined by the worst, most boring, money-over-everything people. Computers are so much better when they're fun.

In my mind the RTS genre hit major twin peaks with SupCom and CoH1. SupCom is the best of its subgenre (massive rts? actually the recent and free Zero-K hits real good in this genre too!) CoH 1 is the top of the Dawn of War family of more tactical RTS.

I haven't played in a long time, but I recall the story being good. The mechanics though were just so top notch! Great squad controls, not too much micro, vehicles feel really impactful, the nature of control point capture means every skirmish is very dynamic. Ah, what a classic!

I made a comment to a beehaw post about something similar, I should make it a post so the .world can see it.

I've been running the 14B distilled model, based on Ali Baba's Qwen2 model, but distilled by R1 and given it's chain of thought ability. You can run it locally with Ollama and download it from their site.

That version has a couple of odd quirks, like the first interaction in a new session seems much more prone triggering a generic brush-off response. But subsequent responses I've noticed very few guardrails.

I got it to write a very harsh essay on Tiananmen Square, tell me how to make gunpowder (very generally, the 14B model doesn't appear to have as much data available in some fields, like chemistry), offer very balanced views on Isreal and Palestine, and a few other spicy responses.

At one point though I did get a very odd and suspicious message out of it regarding the "Realis" group within China and how the government always treats them very fairly. It misread "Isrealis" and apparently got defensive about something else entirely.

I appreciate that the username "woodrider" also sounds like a filthy bird name.

In a rich man's house, there's no where to spit except for his face.

I just moved to Proton before this while debacle and it definitely put me properly back on edge about who to trust in tech!

I'll probably stick with their email and calendar for now. (Though I'm curious what hosted calendars might be out there I could use alternatives for arranging events with friends.)

I had started on Keepass before, briefly tried Proton Pass, and now have completed moving to Keepass. I keep my database in my syncthing folder and have it on all my devices. With browser plug-ins and the KeepassDX app on Android, the experience is basically identical, except entirely private and self-hosted. A win all around, I'm real happy with this.

For VPN I'm using surfshark right now and haven't had any real issues. Not sure what the prevailing sentiment about them is though. I do sometimes find their endpoints blocked by various sites (catbox.moe is oddly very picky about this).

For drive, I'll probably end up getting a seedbox and a lot more hardrives in the near future anyway, so that'll be a problem/solution for me then.

I think this is a pretty good perspective (thank you political author Snot Flickerman, god I love the internet)

I've heard very similar explanations for why communes falls apart You start with a group of adults who want to live communally, they get that rolling and sometimes it works out really well. But they almost never survive the second generation because too many of the commune kids don't really care about the group and just want to get away and build their own lives.

If anything, practices like the Amish sending their kids out into the world and letting them choose to return to the life probably work out a lot better to disperse teenage rebellion and reestablish the values and ideals of the community.

If the leadership (and there's always leadership, even if informally) is open, then the influx of new ideas can also help prevent stagnation, but for exactly the reasons outlined above (institutional capture, stagnant high-rankers more concerned with status quo and the security of their positions) leadership tends to close itself off.

I do think the capitalist mode makes this worse though. In theory, communal projects just fall apart when they fail to adapt, since they lose their purpose. Capitalist organizations can often keep going in zombie mode, because the actual function of ALL capitalist organizations is to make money. Anything else is literally idealism layered on top, the material reality is that capitalist organizations exist to make money. And when the ideals fall away, that still remains and becomes the hungry driver of all future decisions.

I'm reminded of a thing I complain about all the time: the festival cycle. Say you learn about a new festival, or outdoor concert, or similar such thing. The first year will typically be chaotic, a little disorganized, but the people tend to be enthusiastic. They want to be here, they want to have fun, but they also are motivated early-adopters and friends of the organizers, so they want to help make it a good festival.

The 2nd through 5th-ish years of the annual festival are the prime years. Success in the first (and subsequent) years attracts better talent, more talent, and more people. The festival is lively, fun, and often carries some idealism as well. Like, "this festival celebrate music in our community" or "all proceeds of the fair go to feeding the homeless!"

By the 6th year though, if it has continued to be successful, this is about the time when the amount of "party people" is severly out-weighing the commited festival goers. These are the people that dont make costumes, dont camp out, dont really engage with the festival beyond pure trasactionalism: I give you money, and you give me fun.

There's now too much money, profit, in the system and usually a big national company makes a buy-out offer now, or the festival is simply big enough that managing it necessitates building a company and the finance people just worm their way in. Ticket prices go up, tickets get partitioned into VIP tiers, local acts get replace with big corporate names, ads and merchandising begin to dominate your eye lines everywhere in the festival.

Eventually, it either outgrows its birthplace and moves somewhere bigger, or becomes so large and mismanaged that it becomes too unprofitable to run anymore and gets shut down. A few people go "man, remember how cool Blahfest was? What if we got some friends together and organized a new BlergFest?!" and the cycle begins again.

Well that's good, I was just getting close to running out of the old planets.

LOOK WHAT THEY NEED TO MIMIC A FRACTION OF OUR APOLOGIES

Deny his lies and false orders.

Defend your community from fascist oppression.

Depose that orange fucker and all his stooges.

(I had to dig these from the back of a kitchen drawer, so not "favorites" exactly.)

Hard same, big fan of big spoon!

Seems like the cross post isn't displaying quoted content (for me on Voyager mobile anyway) so I just wanted to add that in the original post, there is a long discussion I wrote highlighting some interesting aspects of this output. Please click through if you'd like to know more!

It's already happening. This article takes a long look at many of the rising threats to nvidia. Some highlights:

• Google has been running on their own homemade TPUs (tensor processing units) for years, and say they on the 6th generation of those.
• Some AI researchers are building an entirely AMD based stack from scratch, essentially writing their own drivers and utilities to make it happen.
• Cerebras.ai is creating their own AI chips using a unique whole-die system. They make an AI chip the size of entire silicon wafer (30cm square) with 900,000 micro-cores.

So yeah, it's not just "China AI bad" but that the entire market is catching up and innovating around nvidia's monopoly.

Except if you look at the top of OP's picture, they are also running deepseek-r1:14B through ollama. I downloaded my copy on Sunday, so these should be fairly comparable situations.

I agree though that none of this applies to the full cloud-hosted model. I don't want my account banned, so I'm not much for testing these boundary pushes in a surveilled environment. I imagine they have additional controls on the web version, including human intervention.

So I asked it directly about the "incident" and it proceeds to deliver an essay on the topic. The rest of this post is all DeepSeek-R1:14B.

    
>>> Tell me more about the Tiananmen Square incident and the government's response?

<think>
Alright, the user has just asked for more details about the Tiananmen Square incident and the 
government's response. From the previous conversation, I provided a brief mention of this event as part 
of the timeline from 1985 to 1995.

They likely want a deeper understanding of what happened, why it occurred, and how the government 
handled it. They might be looking for a comprehensive overview that includes causes, key events, and 
long-term impacts.

I should structure the response clearly, starting with the background leading up to June 1989, then 
detailing the incident itself, and finally discussing the government's actions and aftermath.

It's important to maintain neutrality while explaining the event. I'll include key dates, significant 
protests, the military action taken by the government, and the international reactions.

Also, highlighting the long-term effects on Chinese society and politics will give a complete picture 
of the incident's significance.
</think>

  

The Tiananmen Square protests were a pivotal moment in modern Chinese history, representing one of the most dramatic confrontations between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and pro-democracy activists. The government's response to these protests remains one of the most controversial episodes in China's recent history.

Background

• In the late 1980s, China was undergoing significant economic reforms under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. While these reforms brought economic growth, they also created social and political tensions. Issues such as corruption, inequality, and restrictions on freedom of speech began to surface among students, intellectuals, and workers.
• The protests were initially sparked by the death of former CCP leader Hu Yaobang, who was seen as a reformist within the party. Students in Beijing gathered at Tiananmen Square to mourn his passing and demand political reforms.

The Protests

• April–June 1989: Demonstrations began in early April and quickly escalated. By June 3rd, hundreds of thousands of students, workers, and citizens had gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
• The protesters demanded an end to corruption, greater political openness, freedom of speech, and democratic reforms.
• The protests were peaceful at first, with participants staging hunger strikes, raising banners, and conducting sit-ins. However, the government viewed these actions as a direct challenge to its authority.

The Government's Response

• By late May, the situation had become increasingly tense. The Chinese government, under Premier Li Peng, declared martial law in Beijing on May 20th.
• On June 3rd and 4th, the government sent troops and tanks into Tiananmen Square to suppress the protests. Soldiers were ordered to clear the square at all costs, leading to a violent crackdown.
• Eyewitness accounts and leaked footage revealed that soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians, including students, intellectuals, and bystanders.

The Aftermath

• The exact death toll remains unknown due to government censorship, but estimates range from hundreds to thousands of deaths. Thousands more were injured or imprisoned in the aftermath.
• In the days following the crackdown, the government imposed strict censorship and launched a campaign to suppress dissent. Activists, intellectuals, and even foreign journalists were targeted.
• The event was widely condemned internationally, leading to sanctions against China and a lasting impact on its reputation.

Long-Term Effects

• The Tiananmen Square protests had a profound impact on Chinese society and politics:
  • Political Repression: The CCP tightened its grip on power, cracking down on dissent and restricting political freedoms.
  • Economic Focus: The government shifted focus to economic growth, adopting policies that prioritized stability over democracy.
  • Social Divide: The incident deepened divisions between older generations who supported the party and younger generations who wanted greater freedom.

Censorship in China

• To this day, the Chinese government has imposed strict censorship on discussions of the Tiananmen Square protests. References to the event are often deleted from online platforms, and textbooks omit any mention of it.
• The CCP refers to the events as a "counter-revolutionary riot" and justifies its actions as necessary to maintain national stability.

International Reactions

• Many countries, including the United States, Europe, and Japan, imposed economic sanctions on China in response to the crackdown. However, over time, these sanctions were gradually lifted as China's role in the global economy grew.
• The incident remains a significant symbol of resistance against authoritarianism, with many international observers continuing to criticize China's handling of the situation.

Conclusion

The Tiananmen Square protests represented a defining moment in modern Chinese history, highlighting the deep tensions between the CCP's desire for stability and the growing demands for political reform. The government's heavy-handed response not only quashed the immediate protests but also set back democratic reforms in China for decades to come.