yiliu

Title game on point tho

Isildur: BTW I'm selling these cool new One Ring™ limited edition rings, forged in darkness and bound to the One Ring...we've got sizes for men, women, elves, and dwarves!

Elrord: O shit gimme 5 of those bad boys

As a software dev and open source contributor: stay the course, then! I'll take open source software over a union 10 times out of 10. I get paid so well for what I do that it's silly, and I love spending my time doing the stuff I like. I've been a union member in other fields, it's not an experience I'd like to repeat.

I seriously doubt anybody is contributing to open source for status & seniority. Respect, maybe. The status & seniority people become managers; as the old joke goes, that's the best way to get them out of the workforce.

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like...over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a "pretty girl" it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an "ugly girl" you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack "...but diverse!" on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse...but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

Lol, I read that as "There's no reason to believe Trump still has classified documents", and I was thinking "bull shit there's not!"

The actual headline makes much more sense.

Well, right, you're dealing with statistics. It's not impossible that Trump will quantum-teleport into the sun, physics allows for that possibility. It's just incredibly unlikely. And the odds of some other person getting elected with no actual effort to make it happen before now is similarly basically zero. Theoretically possible is all very well, but we live in the real world.

As a Canadian, I'd love to believe that. As someone who's recently driven in and out of Vancouver a bunch of times...I really don't.

Yeah, this was really interesting. The big revelation is that in Europe, the vast majority of cars (80+% or something) are standard transmission, whereas in the US the vast majority (95+%) are automatic.

And the thing is...you can't use your cellphone while you're driving a manual.

Combine that with the relatively gigantic cars & trucks that Americans prefer, and you get a long way to explaining the huge gap in relative fatalities.

Of course...that doesn't explain why fatalities are more than twice as high in the US as in Canada (where automatic transmissions & trucks are similarly popular)

Aww, why didn't he stay the course? Things have been going so well!

I've installed Linux on at least 20 laptops & desktops in the past decade, many for first-time users. I generally go with Mint or ElementaryOS for newbies. I can't remember ever having a compatibility issue. I'm sure they still happen sometimes, but when people talk about it they act like it's still 2005.

They've never released proper open-source drivers for Linux, or helped external developers make any, or made it easy to use their closed driver with Linux. They're just hostile to open source, basically. That used to be pretty common in the old days, but most companies have given up and joined in, which is why installing Linux is usually a smooth experience these days.

If you're using Linux: get an AMD card. They just work out of the box, no failures to boot to GUI or anything. It just works...like everything else. Which, having spent 20 years fighting with graphics drivers on Linux, is sheer bliss to me.

Oh, but the defacto standard for anything AI-related is NVidia. So if you ever wanna mess with LLMs, object detection, speech recognition, etc...you're likely stuck with NVidia, and the old routine: Got a problem? Of course you do. Try reinstalling the drivers three times, then uninstall some random other packages, then burn some incense, say 10 Hail Marys, and make an offering to the GPU gods before restarting the computer. Didn't work? Well, repeat all those steps in a different order. Fifth time's the charm!

That was true in 2000. The situation had improved a lot by, like, 2005, but it was still pretty rough. You were still likely to have to drop to a console at some point even in 2010.

These days there's 20 distributions that are easier to install, use, and maintain than Windows, and you don't even have to know ls to use it.