ggtdbz @ ggtdbz @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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1 yr. ago

I’ve done only a little bare metal work back when I was a student and I felt like a goddamn wizard.

Like… yes. Of course everything looks the same, just an ocean of ones and zeroes that is just coherent enough to make a processor do something, such as fetch the right ones and zeroes from somewhere else. Of course folders aren’t dedicated physical sectors of a storage device. Of course like half of anything we ask a computer to do is manipulating storage, and taking this storage and feeding it into the actual memory of whatever is going to process it.

When you zoom back out and realize that the majority of data processing happening right now is people streaming short form video on an unfathomably massive scale, that’s when it just falls apart for me and can’t exist outside the abstractions that make the concept digestible.

Like I can kind of understand Lemmy, as software. I can see where all this data sits and gets queried and how it works. I can vaguely conceive of a few possible federation protocols. That vast ocean of unindexed “content” over on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube? That the algorithms can serve you up no problem but that you can’t even always search for manually? That’s terrifying, on the scale of these platforms. It’s like a leviathan sci-fi body horror meat machine but of data. Yeah yeah I vaguely understand CDNs but I’m talking about the whole thing: the algorithms, the video files, streaming all this data, the impossibly complex social phenomena built around the data… the fact that this monumental achievement is only used to sell ads, landfill fodder, and to fuck with people’s brains and worldviews, it’s legitimately horrifying. I especially think about this when I’m in a public place surrounded by people watching videos on their phones and swiping through them at dizzying speed.

Is this how computer people end up chopping wood in the forest?

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There's always some chud who stumbles in from the wrong instance to say "No You!" whenever Israel commits a new war crime. I'm looking forward to hearing how you're going to justify

I’ve learned to mentally prepare myself before reading comments and accept that some people will never fundamentally see me as a human being. And that’s fucked up but it’s something I need to understand to be able to explain the situation we’re in to those who are actually worth the time to convince.

Some people will look at photos of war destruction and maybe even feel sad about it. But it’ll never be their cities and communities, so they look at these photos and think it only happens to “those” countries. They’re countries “with war”, “probably because of terrorism”, essentially the “enlightened” understanding is that “these people are born to die from war”.

These people will never understand that the rubble they see on their screens was vibrant communities, places where people who watched the same TV shows and football matches as them lived. War victims aren’t a special type of human who exist only to suffer to make your news segments sad. I struggle to get across how normal these people are.

I think in part I used to be someone who thought this way. Lebanon isn’t Syria, Iraq, Palestine, it’s not an African country undergoing civil war, it’s not Serbia in the 90s and it’s not Haiti after a natural disaster. It hadn’t been any of these things since the early 90s. When I saw cities in Syria getting flattened on the TV it was sad but all those people were War People, not like us, couldn’t be us. (Situation is more complicated with Syria because at one point over a million Syrian people were displaced into Lebanon, a country with an official population of 4 million. I’m sure even the most accepting person of refugees could see how this is unsustainable)

The reason people cheer when Israel murders us is that they don’t think we’re people. It’s that simple. They think we’re destined for the slaughterhouse anyway and that we’re essentially terrorists for standing in the way instead of lying down to make the process easier on the Merkava’s suspension. Just look at that war footage! We are just blood for the blood god.

There’s nothing ironic about how every single person who has been murdered in this war who I personally know are people who hate the “terrorists” who they have been executed for “being a part of”. It’s how this works, it’s murder of normal people who are exactly like you and exactly like me. The cruelty has always been the point.

I saw a Phantom on the cover of PC Mag or MaximumPC in a shop in like 2011(?) and that was when I started thinking of computers as more than just machines for edutainment CDs. It was a eureka moment. Computers. Not just what’s happening inside but the outside as well. Cool computers.

(Don’t get me wrong, I think society would be in a better place right now if we were still making quality edutainment CDs. Those games were made with love and I want to give everyone who worked at DK Multimedia a hug.)

But yeah. It wasn’t just a box, it had this striking blue-on-white alien design and decorative LEDs. I’d lowkey love to find an original Phantom and restore it (and remove most of the non-structural metal and replace it with mesh). I remember cases becoming obsolete with old front panel IO but I think worrying about the front panel IO is obsolete in itself now. Unsurprisingly there are no classifieds for a Phantom or a PC inside a phantom in my country right now.

It was that specific case for me, from that specific company. Enshittification is even here for every memory of every magazine cover your remember.

Unlike these days when it looks like 3000$ will get you a GPU and a water block for that GPU, if you want to spread your budget as thick as possible.

Wasn’t the original Titan like 1000$ and considered a ludicrously expensive piece of luxury tech?

This dug out some memories of impossible spaces from dreams I’ve had when I was a small child. This was done out of a harsh necessity, but we take for granted that everything in a house has to be rectangular.

Anyway the demon thing snapped me out of remembering the two distinct places my brain soup conjured up decades ago. Rip

I see a lot of links here and there to this domain but I haven’t really read anything from there. I’m literally just scrolling through these comments to see if anyone has a comment like yours.

My impression was that it’s just a blog but you calling it “a reddit post” is also interesting. What’s with this site? It looks like a decent amount of people think these takes are interesting. I have to deal with a lot of management people who love AI buzzwords, so a whole blog just ripping into it really speaks to me.

I’ve been to both touristy and more “normal” parts of Turkey, and I was pretty shocked how few people understood English (or French, since you mention it). I actually mostly got by with a broken mix of English and Arabic loanwords I know they have in Turkey (or Turkish loanwords we have in Lebanese Arabic).

Drive down any road in Lebanon and you’ll see most signs, especially newer signs, are in English. When I was a kid it was mostly French and Arabic, now it’s mostly English and Arabic with some French sprinkled in. I’ve also been seeing a lot of municipal road and highway signs use “Beirut” instead of “Beyrouth”.

I think we still lean more heavily on French loanwords in our day to day Arabic, at least when not discussing something tech-related.

Also cinemas have consistently used the original English audio now, while we had a good 20% of these movies dubbed in French when I was a kid. A lot of companies’ business operations now are almost exclusively done in English (I’m talking about the documents - the conversations are naturally in Arabic).

I guess none of this is strictly true, there are areas and sectors (especially law) where French is still much more dominant. But people who are French-educated all eventually learn some English, the reverse (the category I’m in) is very rare. I still understand French, even rapid-fire French French, but speaking it or writing it has become so rare for me that it’s really atrophied over the past few years. My English is fine, because I’ve actually had to use it daily.

This is all just additional info, my point is just that Lebanon should probably be higher than Turkey on the list. Turkey has a massive domestic media machine, business is done in Turkish there, I’m pretty sure their schools teach everything in Turkish instead of having some subjects only done in foreign languages like we do. So just based on what I know in these two countries, the placements seem off, and it makes me question what else is going on with the data.

I wonder what the methodology is. There’s no way Turkey is higher than Lebanon unless the metric is something specific that we have terrible data coverage for (which is very likely)

I haven’t really seen anything since the exodus but I think he’s just not the kind of guy who cares too much about niche decentralized internet communities.

He’s very much in the Applesphere of polished premium apps that do specific things. Which is fine. He’s frankly the only dev I knew of who did that without being a total ghoul and even then I was seeing a lot of complaints about people being begged for subscriptions, which I never found excessive (he claimed those people were experiencing a bug).

I don’t really know what to make of his opinion, I don’t know if he saw the UI as a threat or a liability to him or anything like that.

I would love Voyager (mine is still called Wefwef) as a native iOS app because I run into some quirks of the web app backend (especially when editing text), but what we have now is excellent and has made the transition much more bearable. I do still feel like something is missing and I miss how much more connected with the world I felt as a longtime Reddit user, but it’s okay, people’s primary platforms used to change all the time (and as yet another wave of Twitter users are finding out, it can be a hard first few months).

I remember the first time we jumped into the complex domain in an electronics course to calculate something that we couldn’t reach with the equations we had so far.

… and then popping out the other side with a simple (and experimentally verified) scalar, after performing some calculation in the complex domain, using, bafflingly, real world inputs.

I suddenly felt like someone from the future barged into my Plato’s cave and proceeded to perform some ritual.

Like I know what’s happening, I’ve done these calculations before, but seeing them used as an intermediate step in something real in the real world was pretty cool!

Did not prepare me for all the Laplace et al shenanigans later. Did I test well in those courses? No. Did I have the most fun building the circuits regardless? You bet.

Oh to be a student again. Why are real world jobs so boring.

All of the car’s interior lighting (all in amber) does dim automatically when I drive under a bridge or into a tunnel, and automatically dims when I turn on the headlights. So some rudimentary dimming was implemented in 2000 when it was made. No clue where the sensor is though.

A lot of complaints around release were that the game wasn’t as complex as Oblivion or Morrowind, to the point that it was a disappointment for more hardcore players.

I once read a comment on the old site about how Skyrim’s combat is like mashing WWE action figures together.

I completely agree but I don’t think that’s a weakness at all. Maybe when it released, the game was seen as a grand RPG by more casual people and as a watered down Oblivion by older ES players.

But I think by looking at it not through the lens of a grand RPG, but as a familiar, comforting brain-off experience, it really shines. It really gave us the most it could for how low effort it is to play, and I mean that in a good way.

I remember getting recommended a YouTube video (by the algorithm) called something like “why do we still like Skyrim” and I thought the video was very disappointing. And I think the video’s thesis was about the same as mine in this comment. I wanted it to be something like this:

I associate the game with a long tradition of RPGs that I wasn’t around for, as one of the last great games we got before the priorities of the industry shifted again. The graphics didn’t need to be perfect, the comically small number of VAs didn’t need AI bullshit, the straightforward story lines don’t need to be groundbreaking. The music and atmosphere though are immaculate. It’s a game with a ton of flaws, even some jank that is endearing in hindsight. It just works!

Throw on the modding aspect and you have a very “pure” PC gaming experience. This is exactly what I want from a game, something that’s good enough to just be fun to run around aimlessly in, without feeling like I need a podcast to play in the background, that I can just lose hours in.

I’m playing a much higher effort game now. Workers and Resources Soviet Republic makes the Cities Skylines 2 look like drawing stick figure houses. WRSR is absurdly complex and is super engrossing when you’re in it, if you’re wired to enjoy these types of games. However, I need to be mentally ready to jump in.

With Skyrim I just launched it when I was bored, and I was less bored after.

I insist: Skyrim’s simplicity is what made it work.

That’s exactly the kind of display I’m talking about. Nice to see they’re still around.

The ones I have are all just grids, higher resolution than these but still comfortingly blocky. I’ve actually replaced the dash display recently since the original one got deep fried under the sun and lost all contrast when the weather was above 20°C.

Newer, but I quite like the gentle amber LCD (not LED) displays of my car. At night it’s bright enough and sharp enough without being visually loud. I wish more of these displays were still being made, I’d love to use them in car-centric Arduino projects and data displays that would be consulted at night or that sort of thing.

I always ask my friends “How the fuck do you live like this?” when I hop into a car and the music UI is a garish color searing itself into my retinas permanently.

Thankfully, advertising companies have identified this marginal comfort I find in the warm interior lighting of my car and have proceeded to mount insultingly blinding screens all over the city.

The city being the midrise urban sprawl north of Beirut. What do you mean regulations on brightness habibi? You think you live in Paris? Imagine this: half the street is unlit because the power is out, but the advertising company’s invasive bullshit budget™ has enough foreign cash to burn to keep generators running all night for these shitty ads. Gotta beam an extra few kilowatts of photons straight into this sleepy driver’s eyeballs while they operate a motor vehicle, on a highway that a lot of people cross by foot. There’s a special on fish at the fancy supermarket, how will I live without that knowledge?

Thankfully, the “state” of Israel has identified that the civilian structures of Lebanon mildly inconvenienced me, and has proceeded to

The port blast was divine mercy compared to this waking nightmare. It was a sign of immense incompetence and the culmination of decades of neglectful systems failing to do the bare minimum and we got months of genuine solidarity among everyone in the months afterward. People, even if it was mostly naive and performative among some communities, found purpose in moving forward from a crime together.

Now it’s an apocalypse. So much of the city is gone. Tens of thousands of totally normal people have been robbed of their homes and possessions, and hundreds of thousands don’t know if their homes are next. This is ignoring all the deaths. Most people affected were already pretty poor. It’s so fucked. I live in a safe area and can no longer function as a human being. The bombing has been less and less muffled lately. I don’t know if I’m within a month or week or rounding error of losing my home, and this being a safe area, I have nowhere to flee to. I live where people flee to. This is the destination. I’m not rich enough to have foreign passport or a visa that will let me fly out and stay somewhere else.

I literally wake up, read a list of places and number of casualties, and throw up before my day even begins. I’m shaking 24 hours and sleeping maybe 4 per night. This morning the footage is many residential buildings crumbling with hoarse voices desperately thanking God for the missile not hitting them / screaming for God to not make them the next victims (in case you were wondering why you hear Allahu Akbar by bystanders in war videos. That’s what that ”oh my God” equivalent means in that context. Imagine hearing them in your own dialect... Yeah real comforting)

Consider this: my favorite confectionary shop, bang in the middle of a safe area with zero militant activity (or support!), got damaged in a series of strikes yesterday. Because the wrong person (allegedly a cash mule, the horror) was driving past it. If the point was only to hit paramilitary things, we wouldn’t be here.

The cruelty, as ever, is the point. We are being Lebensraumed while the world either watches in horror or claps fervently. But no real will to stop the crimes

I’m aware of how computers use numerical methods to get numbers that are good enough for a given precision.

I meant more like a robust way to create physical slide rules for arbitrary uses. Here’s a set of tables of baking ratios, I want to comfortably look up x for a known y. That kind of thing.

You see, when football is mentioned online, the collective intelligence of any comment section is cut by at least 90%. This stacks with another 90% if it’s women’s football or any token LGBT acknowledgement in football. The joke is Muslim Bad.

Which is a shame. I used to make fun of le sportsball amirite until it clicked that there was immense entertainment value in these matches, which could be super tense and exciting even when an individual match doesn’t have super high stakes. There’s storylines with each of the players and managers, there’s a lot of diverging personalities among them and they all handle the same game in their own way. And unlike scripted shows, when something unexpected happens it is so much more interesting. Like the story is real in a way that scripted entertainment isn’t.

I wonder if we’ve semi automated some way to make arbitrary slide rules. Like some kind of software that you punch your functions into, or some table of info to be interpolated, and it lines everything up.