masterspace @ masterspace @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

Autocad costs that much because Autodesk behaves anti-competitively and has locked firms into their proprietary tooling / file formats / training and the firms have no choice but to keep paying them.

Their predatory behaviour towards the engineering industry is literally why I taught myself programming and switched to software development.

They are a prime example of why you shouldn't build your company around closed source proprietary software, but open source software that can be forked or self hosted in a worst case scenario.

But seriously people, you're supposed to leave enough space to be able to come to a full stop if the person in front of you were to suddenly come to a full stop.

Can you bring a 60mph car to a stop in 10 bible lengths? No? Then backup further.

That works for pattern matching, but you don't want to do that for doing accurate calculations. There is no reason to average the AI run calculation of 12345 x 54321 because that can be done with a tiny calculator with a solar cell the size of a pencil eraser. Doing calculations like that multiple times adds up fast and will always be less reliable than just doing it right in the first place.

I agree.

Same with reporting historical facts.

I disagree. Those are not remotely the same problem. Both in how they're technically executed, and in what the user expects out of them.

But the AI that is being forced down our throats is worse than wikipedia because it averages content from ALL of reddit, facebook, and other massive sites where crackpots are given the same weight as informed individuals and there are no guardrails.

No, it's just different. Is it wrong sometime? Yes. But it can also get you the right answer to a normal human question orders of magnitude faster than a series of traditional searches and documentation readings.

Does that information still need to be vetted afterwards? Yeah, but it's a lot easier to say "copilot, I'm looking at a crossover circuit and I've got one giant wire coil, three white rectangles and a capacitor, what is each of them doing and how kind of meter will I need to test them", then it is to individually search for each component and search for what type of meter you need to test them. Do you still need to verify that info after? Yeah, but it's a lot easier to verify once you know what to actually search for.

Basically any time one human query needs to synthesize information from multiple different sources, an AI search is going to be significantly faster.

I'm not saying I agree with AI being shoehorned into everything, i'm seeing it being pushed into places it shouldn't first hand, but strictly speaking, things don't have to be more reliable if they're fast enough.

Quantum computers are inherently unreliable, but you can perform the same calculation multiple times and average the result / discard the outliers and it will still be faster than a classical computer.

Same thing like back when I was in grade school and teachers would say to not trust internet sources and make sure to look everything up in an physical book / encyclopedia because a book is more reliable. Like, yes, it is, but it also takes me 100x as long to look it up, so ultimately starting at Wikipedia is going to get me to the right answer faster, the vast majority of the time, even if it's not 100% accurate or reliable (this was nearer Wikipedia's original launch).

This is a really good interview, and does a good job highlighting Javascript's biggest strength: it's flexibility.

“It was also an incredible rush job, so there were mistakes in it. Something that I think is important about it is that I knew there would be mistakes, and there would be gaps, so I made it very malleable as a language.”

He cites the “discovery” of asm.js inside of JavaScript, calling it “another thing I’m particularly proud of in the last 10 years.” It uses the bitwise operators that were included in the original JavaScript which are now the basis for a statically-typed language with machine types for high-speed performance. “If it hadn’t been in there from 1995, it would’ve been hard to add later. And the fact that it was there all along meant we could do incredibly fast JavaScript.”

He tells InfoWorld it’s “this very potent seed that was in the original JavaScript from the 10 days of May in 1995.” JavaScript’s 32-bit math operators (known as bitwise operators) trace their lineage all the way back to the C programming language — and to Java. This eventually led to WebAssembly — a way to convert instructions into a quickly-executable binary format for virtual machines — and the realization that with a JavaScript engine, “you can have two languages — the old language I did with the curly braces and the functions and the shift operators, and this new language which is a binary language, not meant for reading by humans or writing. But it can be generated by compilers and tools, and can be read by tools…”

Being dismissive doesn't sound cool when you're objectively wrong.

No there absolutely is not 'just as much'.

Literally at a core fundamental there isn't in terms of what users see, since lemmy's algorithm isn't engagement driven.

Just a friendly reminder that a usb microscope is cheaper than a chaturbate subscription.

Undoubtedly, but we still chose to come to Lemmy because we visited it and saw a bunch of people that we mostly agreed with on it.

Think about how many Lemmy users block hexbear or lemmy.ml, or would spit in disgust when they visit gab or voat or something.

Users prune those sources because they aren't interested in hearing wildly toxic fringe ideas (or flat out being propagandized to), but it's still fundamentally up to you as a user to decide what you consider rationale and worthy of discussion, and then going forward the content you see on here is only what's shared by very like minded individuals.

Don't get me wrong, I think that Reddit and other corporate owned social media intentionally promotes rage bait and other distressing content, both in comments and posts, and that drives people to go even more nuts and become more polarized compared to a non-engagement driven algorithm like Lemmy's, but even open and decentralized social media platforms create filter bubbles and information silos.

The internet inherently creates information silos, because of the nature of how it works.

Cable TV, Newspapers, the Radio, etc. were all broad-cast networks, as in one person talks and that gets cast broadly to all listeners on the network.

Channels provided some level of user choice in what they listened to, but not very much. At most they still picked between only a handful of different options.

The internet fundamentally isn't a broadcast network though, it's a messaging network. When you publish a video on YouTube it isn't broad cast to every one with an internet channel, instead, the users goes out and looks for the information they want and requests and YouTube sends it back to them.

This inherently creates filter bubbles because the information you receive is based on your own existing preferences and requests, which creates a feedback loop the reinforces your opinions.

Yeah I currently use Printables just because I trust Prusa more than the others, but at the end of the day Prusa is still a private company that could change its policies and decide to fuck over all its users or sell out to a company that does.

Thingiverse is just slow and crappy these days, Makers world defaults to locking everything down and not allowing remixes, so an open federated alternative would be great.

Why is this mildly infuriating?

A farm animal killed a wild predator who was preying on other farm animals. That sucks, but it's also a reality of us producing food.

It's remarkably light on details about the coerced / forced labour.

It just mentions that they ship in thousands of workers from the western regions of China where there are forced / coerced labour issues.

I'm not one to trust or believe the Chinese government, but this article didn't exactly convince me there was an issue in the first place.

Edit: never mind, I missed the link to this article which has a lot more detail: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-05-29/chinas-economy-runs-on-uyghur-forced-labour

Most overrated language imho. I actually enjoy Java more.

The percentage of users complaining is the same thing. If your software has 100 users that means 1 complaint, if your software has 1,000,000 users that means 10,000 complaints, for the exact same software.

Fair point, I would argue that it's not e entirely fair to compare a mobile OS that basically eschews backwards compatibility, for a desktop OS that can still run 30 year old applications, but it's not entirely unfair either, they're still both OSes and lots of the complaints have nothing to do with the burden of legacy support.

I didn't mean like people's choice popular, I just meant most used. The more something is used the more memes you'll see about it's issues.

Oh I don't think it remotely is. I just find it irritating that someone sees lots of complaints about the most used thing and takes that as an indication that it's bad, and ignores the indication that it's not (it being the most used thing).

Lots of complaints about something popular literally means nothing on its own. The content of those complaints have validity, but there's nothing to learn from their metadata.

React Native's new architecture is not that bad.

You basically just got a single lightweight JavaScript thread that runs your update loop around which components should be rendered and updated, but then all the components are bound directly to underlying C++ native components.

I would still expect the start menu to be aiming for zero dependencies and as fast a start as humanly possible, but it's not that crazy compared to something like Electron (which itself is not as inherently bad as most people make it out to be).

The real problem with slow web apps has less to do with the architecture of the apps, and more to do with them letting developers build apps really quickly and easily, meaning that you often have apps built by developers who don't entirely know what they're doing, and they introduce tons of inefficiencies like double rendering etc.

Yes, the most popular OS on the planets used by the most people on a daily basis, also has a high number of memes about it. Shocking. What information you've gleaned.