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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • Honestly, Windows isn’t ready for the desktop, either, it’s just not ready in a different way that most people are familiar with.

    Things like an OS update breaking the system should be rare, not so common that people are barely surprised when it happens to them. In a unified system developed as one integral product by one company there should be one config UI, not at least three (one of which is essentially undocumented). “Use third-party software to disable core features of the OS” shouldn’t be sensible advice.

    Windows is horribly janky, it’s just common enough that people accept that jank as an unavoidable part of using a computer.



  • Most modern mainboards don’t even support ACPI S3/S4 anymore. The ACPI spec is pretty badly written and most implementations were flaky in some way. So when ACPI S0ix (aka Modern Standby) came around the old states were essentially abandoned.

    Of course S0ix is less a hibernation and more kindly asking the OS to turn off the screen and consider using fewer resources.



  • That undersells them slightly.

    LLMs are powerful tools for generating text that looks like something. Need something rephrased in a different style? They’re good at that. Need something summarized? They can do that, too. Need a question answered? No can do.

    LLMs can’t generate answers to questions. They can only generate text that looks like answers to questions. Often enough that answer is even correct, though usually suboptimal. But they’ll also happily generate complete bullshit answers and to them there’s no difference to a real answer.

    They’re text transformers marketed as general problem solvers because a) the market for text transformers isn’t that big and b) general problem solvers is what AI researchers are always trying to create. They have their use cases but certainly not ones worth the kind of spending they get.





  • I remember talking to someone about where LLMs are and aren’t useful. I pointed out that LLMs would be absolutely worthless for me as my work mostly consists of interacting with company-internal APIs, which the LLM obviously hasn’t been trained on.

    The other person insisted that that is exactly what LLMs are great at. They wouldn’t explain how exactly the LLM was supposed to know how my company’s internal software, which is a trade secret, is structured.

    But hey, I figured I’d give it a go. So I fired up a local Llama 3.1 instance and asked it how to set up a local copy of ASDIS, one such internal system (name and details changed to protect the innocent). And Llama did give me instructions… on how to write the American States Data Information System, a Python frontend for a single MySQL table containing basic information about the member states of the USA.

    Oddly enough, that’s not what my company’s ASDIS is. It’s almost as if the LLM had no idea what I was talking about. Words fail to express my surprise at this turn of events.







  • Jesus_666@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlCommit
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    2 months ago

    I’m kinda planning on teaching my team how to use interactive rebases to clean the history before a merge request.

    The first thing they’ll learn is to make a temporary second branch so they can just toss their borked one if they screw up. I’m not going to deal with their git issues for them.



  • Yeah, it doesn’t take a lot to build a decent home server. I just rebuilt mine (the old one’s Turion II Neo was perhaps a bit too weak) and the most expensive part were the HDDs. I didn’t want to reuse the old ones.

    A slightly underclocked Athlon 3000G, 16 gigs of spare RAM, and three 4 TB WD Red Pluses give me all the power I actually need at a reasonable power budget. I initially wanted to go with an N100 but those never support more than two SATA drives directly.


  • Depends. If you want something that will keep your files reasonably safe and accessible then a laptop isn’t great because most of them won’t let you mount multiple hard drives without doing something silly like running everything over USB.

    Of course that’s where an old desktop is the computer of choice.