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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 28th, 2023

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  • I’m kinda done trying to have some sort of anti-stance with this. AI reminds me too much of smartphones, where anybody who didn’t have one was an asshole, ignorant stupid old person blah. I held out on a smartphone for something like ten years, just because they were pricey, I had my dumbphone and PC, I didn’t need one. Eventually you just couldn’t do adult business effectively without one and there I stood with an iPhone 4 when 3G was getting ready to disappear.

    Everyone does nothing but piss and moan about their phones, now, all the “normal” people have been sucked into the vortex that created the “neckbeard”, and we live in a dystopia where everyone can’t seem to leave the house without their government tracking device. It didn’t matter at all back when they were hot and new, every kid had to have one and now we’re fucked.

    It’s the same with AI. People jumped on that shit scary fast, I think GenZ was desperate to have something that felt like “their” technology. Once I heard the scientists acting like people were stupid for being anti-AI, then I knew it was over. The upper-middle-class has spoken, all you can do now is decide to get treated like crap. Capital wants AI, and what baby wants, baby gets. They have learned to whip you with your own children to make you obey.

    My favorite use for Copilot is using it to translate normal declarative sentences into that awful passive-aggressive language they use in offices because they just can’t have the terrifying confrontation of, “I put all that information in the last email, please read it again.” It’s really good at that because it’s been trained on everything you’ve probably ever sent though Outlook.

    That shit’s an arbitrary class barrier, so it’s good that you can use Copilot to translate sentences into White Woman to learn office talk the way I can use SpanishDict to translate my English into Spanish and back. There wasn’t really a way to do that before, and now you can study it and learn it so you can deal with the fucked up social requirements that go into a job that pays above the median wage.

    Otherwise I have no profitable use for it. I desperately need to learn one.

    So yeah, start using the shit out of it or get kicked out the airlock. Sucks for the artists but capital wants change and you’ve already lost. Yeah, I don’t really want to get good at anything, either, if this thing’s just gonna suck it up, take my skills and make me go work at McDonald’s anyway after decades of dedication. Love how technology empowers like 2/10ths of the people and throws most of us under the bus, again and again.



  • It’s the same story as Sears. I can’t find the actually knowledgeable person who broke it down but in the case of Sears all the obvious stuff you thought they should do, they either tried or couldn’t have managed for some good reason. Near the end there was a lot of debt stopping them from getting creative. Many of the typical Monday morning quarterback ideas wouldn’t have worked.

    Come on, bro, these guys sat around in board rooms and meetings racking their brains about it, hiring consultants and probably fielding wacky ideas from people’s kids, anything, and they did it for years but couldn’t save the company. Your casual ideas from years later weren’t it.

    We’ve pretty much lost our local mall, and a lot of them have closed, not because people lacked ideas, but because fundamental shifts had happened in the market, and the problems that the mall solved no longer existed or were solved better. I noticed that we have quite a lot of thriving retail around the mall, it’s just the actual mall seems to no longer make business sense.

    Radioshack is probably the same. I’d imagine that what really killed it is Amazon’s network. Maybe you don’t really want that many diodes, but all 500 of them cost little and will last you years, while Amazon allows you to summon them to your hand like Thor’s hammer.

    Radioshack seemed to thrive the most when PC’s cost $4000 for a cheap one and there weren’t that many places to buy one in retail stores. I think all of their strongest product lines and best ideas have just been whittled away somehow or another, with lots of markets shrinking. They sold a lot of random electronics, like clock radios and cheap stereos, all of which have ended up in Walmarts and Targets and such. That handful of electronics parts was their true business, the demand went away, and there was no good pivot.

    Cellphones? Who *isn’t *selling those? They couldn’t have become a core business. I get my cellphones from ebay ffs.

    Honestly losing consumer demand for a couple of diodes is a big deal. The beauty of selling things like that is that it can cost you 3 cents, you can charge the customer 50 cents, the markup is ridiculous, and the customer doesn’t bat an eye. Bolts and screws are similar business. But sell them something for $3000 at a loss to get them into the store to see the shiny thing and they’ll try to bargain down every nickel.

    Nah, I think they were just done. It’s a shame, and I’ll always have fond memories of the stores and the Christmas catalogs, but I think it’s over for them, through no great fault of the company.





  • I’ve become more and more convinced that considerations like yours, which I do not understand since I don’t rely on GPUs professionally, have been the main driver of Nvidia’s market share. It makes sense.

    The online gamer talk is that people just buy Nvidia for no good reason, it’s just internet guys refusing to do any real research because they only want a reason to stroke their own egos. This gamer-based GPU market is a loud minority whose video games don’t seem to rely too heavily on any card features for decent performance, or especially compatibility, with what they’re doing. Thus, the constant idea that people “buy Nvidia for no good reason except marketing”.

    But if AMD cards can’t really handle things like machine learning, then obviously that is a HUGE deficiency. The public probably isn’t certain of its needs when it spends $400 on a graphics card, it just notices that serious users choose Nvidia for some reason. The public buys Nvidia, just in case. Maybe they want to do something they haven’t thought of yet. I guess they’re right. The card also plays games pretty well, if that’s all they ever do.

    If you KNOW for certain that you just want to play games, then yeah, the AMD card offers a lot of bang for your buck. People aren’t that certain when they assemble a system, though, or when they buy a pre-built. I would venture that the average shopper at least entertains the idea that they might do some light video editing, the use case feels inevitable for the modern PC owner. So already they’re worrying about maybe some sort of compatibility issue with software they haven’t bought, yet. I’ve heard a lot of stories like yours, and so have they. I’ve never heard the reverse. I’ve never heard somebody say they’d like to try Nvidia but they need AMD. Never. So everyone tends to buy Nvidia.

    The people dropping the ball are the reviewers, who should be putting a LOT more emphasis on use cases like yours. People are putting a lot of money into labs for exhaustive testing of cooling fans for fuck’s sake, but just running the same old gaming benchmarks like that’s the only thing anyone will ever do with the most expensive component in the modern PC.

    I’ve also heard of some software that just does not work without CUDA. Those differences between cards should be tested and the results made public. The hardware journalism scene needs to stop focusing so hard on damned video games and start focusing on all the software where Nvidia vs AMD really does make a difference, maybe it would force AMD to step up its game. At the very least, the gamebros would stop acting like people buy Nvidia cards for no reason except some sort of weird flex.

    No, dummy, AMD can’t run a lot of important shit that you don’t care about. There’s more to this than the FPS count on Shadow of the Tomb Raider.





  • Reddit tended to be best where it had stolen better communities from the old web.

    For example, r/Excel was always a stunningly chill place to get help with MS Excel. But notice that the community was/is tightly focused on a subject, that subject would have objectively correct answers to any questions about it, and the mods could politely but firmly discourage any spicier conversations as off-topic. You can keep that sort of place decent almost indefinitely.

    Such communities would have been their own little message board before Reddit came along and hoovered them all up.

    Likewise with all the other subreddits that were famously full of answers, ones you never had heard of. Just the other day I googled a question about some random piece of cable I had in my hand and guess who had answered it 4 years ago? Yeah. Those little communities tend to be really solid. They never get that big, either. You can’t just fuck around in them, you have to stay on topic and the average user hates that.

    But Reddit turns into a wretched, life-draining parasitic monster in any form where the public feels like they have the right to run their mouths and chatter. So, most of Reddit, really. Anywhere that gives the average schmuck a place to vent will degenerate, rapidly, usually toward an abusive groupthink. It’s just populism, then, and a textbook answer to why that’s bad.

    It’s the bane of all social media. I don’t think people are generally that shitty. I’ve decided that social media, including Reddit, just empowers small, loud minorities of miserable, exhausting people who have nigh-fascist opinions on every single thing, and as soon as the normal-ass people see that they’ve joined the chat, the normal-ass people all vanish, overnight, leaving behind only shitbags who love attention, or believe they have a right to it, at everyone else’s expense. There’s no getting rid of them when they show up, you can only get rid of you. I hope you weren’t having a nice time, because it’s over now, time to move on.

    Reddit always had its great little subreddits full of truly precious answers as a counterweight to all that. It would appear that they were the only thing of value that Reddit ever had, too.

    Lemmy doesn’t really have that. It looks like the most obnoxious parts of Reddit came here, so, you know, every computer problem is solved by installing Linux, and other mouthfuls of that flavor. Then somebody opened the floodgates and now you’re arguing with Commies about every political thing. Meanwhile, no great little subLemmies full of answers for your obscure questions exist to make up for it.

    Like you said, it was super chill for a month, but then, yeah. It’s kinda same shit different day. It’s reminding me that I’ve decided to view social media as a vice, almost exactly like smoking, and changing cigarette brands does not solve the problem.





  • I will never forget when my tourist ass was bumbling through O’Hare on my way to my gate and this dark haired woman who I have dubbed the Executive Raven went blasting past me in a pencil skirt and 3-inch heels with her little rolly suitcase clacking behind her and I thought, “damn.”

    Then I got to my gate and she was already there waiting for her own flight, she’d whipped out a laptop and an earpiece and appeared to be running the entire world so that it wouldn’t collapse in the three hours that she would be on the plane.

    You meet a lot of these people in airports. I think me and the OOP don’t meet a lot of them, otherwise.






  • Beefalo@midwest.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlSalmon
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    2 years ago

    Idunno, I feel like they certainly fathom it to some degree. They have an awful lot of funky little predator evasion techniques for an animal with no fathom.

    That whole schooling thing is a bunch of fish going, I know they like eating us, but I’d rather they eat YOU.

    I do agree that they have no conception of humanity, just that sometimes their friends get raptured away by something that makes a boat noise.