/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user.

Website: reboil.com

Mastodon: [email protected]

  • 0 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoGames@lemmy.world•6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?English
    121·
    25 days ago

    Most problems people have with Linux, I think, come from trying to be Linux power users from the start by performing very advanced techniques beyond their time and patience: dual booting multiple operating systems (so they don’t have to buy Linux-dedicated hardware), using any graphics card (the latest and greatest GPUs are all closed source and developers who work on Linux do so because they despise closed source), using the least expensive hardware (which are typically closed source and buggy with anything except Windows), and emulating Windows apps so they don’t have to learn new workflows or abandon their favorite games (technically, Proton with Steam allows Windows games like FFXIV to be played, but it’s a neverending journey to get it working and keeping it working.

    If you switch to Linux, accept that for a smooth experience you’ll have to pay more than you would for a Windows machine (e.g. System76, Framework) And if you want graphics card support for your emulated Windows games on Steam, you’re going to have to use the specific flavor of Linux the manufacturer supports.

    That said, if you value free/libre open source software, then making the switch from Windows is totally worth it.

  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoTechnology@lemmy.world•Sergey Brin: We need you working 60 hours a week so we can replace you as soon as possibleEnglish
    56·
    1 month ago

    Tech bro billionaires are the only geniuses on earth

    Relevant excerpt from The Internet Con (2023) by Cory Doctorow about the folly of thinking tech CEO monopolies are justified due to merit. Later in the book, Doctorow explains how the recent (since the Reagan presidency) appearance of big tech monopolies was instead due to failure of the US DOJ and FTC to enforce anti-trust laws after Robert Bork successfully lobbied to have the Chicago School of economics’s consumer welfare doctrine (monopolies can be good if companies pinky promise to lower prices for consumers; see Bork’s 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox) adopted by the US Supreme Court.

    from Chapter 1

    If tech were led by exceptional geniuses whose singular vision made it impossible to unseat them, then you’d expect that the structure of the tech industry itself would be exceptional. That is, you’d expect that tech’s mass-extinction event, which turned the wild and wooly web into a few giant websites, was unique to tech, driven by those storied geniuses.

    But that’s not the case at all. Nearly every industry in the world looks like the tech industry: dominated by a handful of giant companies that emerged out of a cataclysmic, forty-year die-off of smaller firms which either failed or were folded into the surviving giants.

    Here’s a partial list of concentrated industries from the Open Markets Institute—industries where between one and five companies account for the vast majority of business: pharmaceuticals, health insurers, appliances, athletic shoes, defense contractors, book publishing, booze, drug stores, office supplies, eyeglasses, LCD glass, glass bottles, vitamin C, car parts, bottle caps, airlines, railroads, mattresses, Lasik lasers, cowboy boots and candy.

    If tech’s consolidation is down to the exceptional genius of its leaders, then they are part of a bumper crop of exceptional geniuses who all managed to rise to prominence in their respective firms and then steer them into positions where they crushed, bought or sidelined all their competitors over the past forty years or so.

    Occam’s Razor posits that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. For that reason, I think we can safely reject the idea that sunspots, water contaminants or gamma rays caused an exceptional generation of business leaders to be conceived all at the same time, all over the world.

    Likewise, I am going to discount the possibility that, in the 1970s and 1980s, aliens came to Earth and knocked up the future mothers of a new subrace of elite CEOs whose extraterrestrial DNA conferred upon them the power to steer companies to total industrial dominance.

    Not only do those explanations stretch the imagination, but they also ignore a simpler, far more tangible explanation for the incredible die-off of businesses in every industry. Forty years ago, countries all over the world altered the basis on which they enforced their competition laws—often called “antitrust” laws—to be more tolerant of monopolies. Forty years later, we have a lot of monopolies.

    These facts are related.

  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoTechnology@lemmy.world•*Permanently Deleted*English
    9·
    1 month ago

    Relevant excerpt from part 11 of Anathem (2008) by Neal Stephenson:

    Artificial Inanity

    Note: Reticulum=Internet, syndev=computer, crap~=spam

    “Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.

    “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.

    “Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”

    “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

    “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”

    “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid–First Millennium A.R.”

    “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”

    “So, are Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies?” asked Arsibalt, utterly fascinated.

    “The ROBE evolved into something totally different early in the Second Millennium,” Sammann said dismissively.

    “What did it evolve into?” Jesry asked.

    “No one is sure,” Sammann said. “We only get hints when it finds ways to physically instantiate itself, which, fortunately, does not happen that often. But we digress. The functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists. You might say that those Ita who brought the Ret out of the Dark Age could only defeat it by co-opting it. So, to make a long story short, for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus versions—bogons, as we call them.”

    “The only way to preserve the integrity of the defenses is to subject them to unceasing assault,” Osa said, and any idiot could guess he was quoting some old Vale aphorism.

    “Yes,” Sammann said, “and it works so well that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don’t know it’s there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every day. However, the recent events, and the stresses posed by the Antiswarm, appear to have introduced the low-level bug that I spoke of.”

    “So the practical consequence for us,” Lio said, “is that—?”

    “Our cells on the ground may be having difficulty distinguishing between legitimate messages and bogons. And some of the messages that flash up on our screens may be bogons as well.”

  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoTechnology@lemmy.world•AI coding assistant refuses to write code, tells user to learn programming insteadEnglish
    12·
    2 months ago

    I recall a joke thought experiment me and some friends in high school had when discussing how answer keys for final exams were created. Multiple choice answer keys are easy to imagine: just lists of letters A through E. However, when we considered the essay portion of final exams, we joked that perhaps we could just be presented with five entire completed essays and be tasked with identifying, A through E, the essay that best answered the prompt. All without having to write a single word of prose.

    It seems that that joke situation is upon us.

  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoTechnology@lemmy.world•New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.English
    11·
    2 months ago

    It’s like useful information grows as fruit from trees in a digital forest we call the Internet. However, the fruit spoils over time (becomes less relevant) and requires fertile soil (educated people being online) that can be eroded away (not investing in education or infrastructure) or paved over (intellectual property law). LLMs are like processed food created in factories that lack key characteristics of more nutritious fresh ingredients you can find at a farmer’s market. Sure, you can feed more people (provide faster answers to questions) by growing a monocrop (training your LLM on a handful of generous people who publish under Creative Commons licenses like CC BY-SA on Stack Overflow), but you also risk a plague destroying your industry like how the Panama disease fungus destroyed nearly all Gros Michel banana farming (companies firing those generous software developers who “waste time” by volunteering to communities like Stack Overflow and replacing them with LLMs).

    There’s some solar punk ethical fusion of LLMs and sustainable cultivation of high quality information, but we’re definitely not there yet.