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18 days agoI guess Techno Viking finally caught up to Chuck Norris.
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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 4th, 2023
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Gwenview is a new one on me. Thanks for the tip! Downloading it now.
Raster as background and marking up as vector graphics on an overlay.
There are lots of use cases for exactly that, like certain graphics tasks my partner does for her employer (flyers, t-shirt designs). with an existing raster image as background in Inkscape. For what I do, that workflow would be serious overkill.
- Audio configuration: I just install DRS in Win10 and it works, as does all of the GPU integration*. My DAW also just works, no fiddling with the buffer to get rid of the crackling or to get it recognized.
- FL Studio: It’s not really FLS that I’m missing but rather I have a couple VSTs that absolutely won’t work in Linux, plus a huge amount of patches I built in those instruments. However, Bitwig kicks so much ass that it’s been worthwhile to try to rebuild those sounds inside Bitwig’s Grid.
- Inventor and AutoCAD: I hate Autodesk with the fury of a 1000 suns, but I know these apps cold and have a huge library of parts and assemblies. FreeCAD just ain’t there yet, and the new workbench menu has been an annoying learning curve. Inventor can handle enormous assemblies on my (previously running Win 10) laptop; FreeCAD still crashes when the object tree gets over a certain depth even on my burliest workstation. Assemblies in FreeCAD are a total mess too. I want to love FreeCAD and have great hopes for future versions.
- Suspend: one of my laptops won’t suspend correctly. Sometimes it reboots, sometimes it suspends, sometimes it goes into a weird middle state running at full throttle but the screen is dark and the keyboard is unresponsive even to REIUSB. I just always shut it down now, no BFD.
And despite all that, I don’t miss Windows at all.
*DRS was actually painless on Aurora Linux with my big workstation that only has a dGPU. All my computers with both iGPU and dGPU were more fiddly. I mostly blame Nvidia on this issue. I’m pretty sure the suspend problem is also an iGPU/dGPU thing and also blaming Nvidia for that.
3·2 months agoI’m in Europe where restaurants and food are generally better regulated.
Ah, gotcha! That right there is an enormous game-changer, and I’m agree with everything you say here. The US food chain is straight-up toxic. You may know this already: the US allows food treatments that are outright banned in most other countries. My travels in Europe were a revelation; I can eat things over there that invariably sicken me here, most notably bread and raw eggs. I would probably dine out more too if I lived in Europe. :D
Totally fair and thank you for the elaboration.
Trying to learn by own practical experience in this day and age seems like a bit late to the party, though.
I’ll counter this point with: I think we’re in a golden age of home cooking. YouTube alone is a gold mine for technique development and refinement. That won’t do anything for your lack of interest though.
So tired of hearing this dumb fuck argument. Ordering food =/= fastfood.
Well that’s good, because I’m not talking about fast food; I don’t eat fast food. Ever. My point was about knowing what you’re putting into your body, knowing how it was sourced and prepped. Dining out is at least three layers of abstraction from that knowledge. I’ve spent a lot of time working in restaurants, including high end ones. Apart from zero-compromise, prix-fixe, tasting menu establishments, recipes are always built to a price point. More restaurants than not use Sysco, First Street, or other nasty industrial sourcing. Most restaurants source their meats directly or indirectly from IBP/Tyson because they cornered the market on meat at scale*. And that’s before factoring in time-saving shortcuts, like not washing produce and using Sysco bases. For just one example on the sourcing risks, at high end restaurant where I worked the pantry cooks had to wear gloves to receive and sort the produce because the pesticides and container treatment gave them rashes.
*IBP used to be a reliable, quality source despite being CAFO meats, and what I used in my own charcuterie business. After the acquisition by Tyson, shit went downhill almost overnight. I closed up operations because sourcing at that scale was no longer possible for me.
The amount of people that seem to think their little bit of homecooking can compete with professional chef’s is laughable.
A chef is a cost engineer and inventory manager. But I get your point: Sturgeon’s Law absolutely applies to most people’s kitchen results.
How does it not? It’s just a boring activity.
I sincerely asked, and I assume you are similarly sincere in asking.
For me, it’s an absolutely quotidian task, every aspect of which I approach mindfully and joyfully. Using a good knife, decent pans, a halfway decent grill/range/oven… the joy of using good tools skillfully cannot be overstated. I mean… where else in our days do we get to play with knives around people and they love the results? :D Woodworking, I guess, but you can’t eat those results.
I love everything about cooking:
- sourcing good local and seasonal ingredients
- prepping the ingredients properly and with the least waste
- layering flavor profiles
- creating a full sensory experience for myself and my circle
- understanding the underlying physics and chemistry at every step
- creating even a simple dish that appeals to all senses
- did I mention playing with knives?
- then getting to feed, nourish, and sate people with my craft… The experience of cooking takes the necessary and workaday task of sustaining ourselves and elevates it to an alchemical and spiritual level.
From a holistic, connected-to-the-land, tree-hugging hippie context, cooking takes the alchemy from Shit Wizards (AKA farmers) and transmutates those inputs into magical energy. Food nourishes the body; good cooking nourishes the soul. Gathering tribe around a meal that I made is even more fulfilling than the literal billions of people who, directly or indirectly, use the software I built.
From a biological context, knowing the provenance of my food is the culinary equivalent of using open source software. From an ethical living context, knowing that my food providers are using fair labor practices, compassionate animal welfare, and good land stewardship enables me to make food that I eat and share in good conscience. Also, garbage in, garbage out on every level. This is stuff you’re putting in your body. The body that carries around your brain, both of which ya kinda need to do other things you enjoy. Food is medicine, and so many ills I see, physical and otherwise, stem from poor food sourcing and prep.
From an efficiency, conservation, and creativity context:
- turning “waste” material into an amazing stock
- turning leftovers into an entirely new dish that utterly slaps
- that on-the-knife-edge, tuned-up feeling of bringing a meal together… it rivals playing live to a sold-out crowd
- doing more with the least amount of everything… give me a good knife, good cutting board, good produce stand, a saute pan, and a shitty butane burner, and I will crank out a meal for you that will get YOU laid :D
- the mind-body connection of skillfully wielding my tools in pursuit of an explicit and relatively immediate goal; it might take me years to build software, but it takes just an evening to make something that feeds my tribe
In the grand scheme of human experience, there are few things that everyone can do that fire on all sensory cylinders while delivering the spiritual high of creativity manifested. Cooking is something everyone can do.
Why does cooking suck for you?
19·5 months agoSerious question: what are y’all’s methods to prevent/deal with spicy pillows?
They are trying to cause riots
This is my exact read on the matter. We can’t be the only ones to see it this way. What surprises me is that more analysts and pundits aren’t talking about the economic violence from this angle. And when the masses finally reach their threshold, the Conservatives will do their “Whaaaat? So much for the tolerant Left.”
What were the handful of instances wherein violence wasn’t required to defeat fascists?
No paywall link: https://archive.ph/bn5e5
1·1 year agoYou raise good points. Thank you for your replies. All of this still requires planet-cooking levels of power for garbage and to hurt workers.
And an additional response, because I didn’t fully answer your question. LLMs don’t reason. They traverse a data structure based on weightings relative to the occurrence frequency in their training content. Loosely speaking, it’s a graph (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(abstract_data_type)). It appears like reasoning because the LLM is iterating over material that has been previously reasoned out. An LLM can’t reason through a problem that it hasn’t previously seen unlike, say, a squirrel.
By the same logic, raytracing is ancient tech that should be abandoned.
Nice straw man argument you have there.
I’ll restate, since my point didn’t seem to come across. All of the “AI” garbage that is getting jammed into everything is merely scaled up from what has been before. Scaling up is not advancement. A possible analogy would be automobiles in the late 60s and 90s: Just put in more cubic inches and bigger chassis! More power from more displacement does not mean more advanced. Continuing that analogy, 2.0L engines cranking out 400ft-lb and 500HP while delivering 28MPG average is advanced engineering. Right now, the software and hardware running LLMs are just MOAR cubic inches. We haven’t come up with more advanced data structures.
These types of solutions can have a place and can produce something adjacent to the desired results. We make great use of expert systems constantly within narrow domains. Camera autofocus systems leap to mind. When “fuzzy logic” autofocus was introduced, it was a boon to photography. Another example of narrow-ish domain ML software is medical decision support software, which I developed in a previous job in the early 2000s. There was nothing advanced about most of it; the data structures used were developed in the 50s by a medical doctor from Columbia University (Larry Weed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Weed). The advanced part was the computer language he also developed for quantifying medical knowledge. Any computer with enough storage, RAM, and the hardware ability to quickly traverse the data structures can be made to appear advanced when fed with enough collated data, i.e. turning data into information.
Since I never had the chance to try it out myself, how was your neural network and LLMs reasoning back in the day? Imo that’s the most impressive part, not that it can write.
It was slick for the time. It obviously wasn’t an LLM per se, but both were a form of LM. The OCR and auto-suggest for DOS were pretty shit-hot for x386. The two together inspried one of my huge projects in engineering school: a whole-book scanner* that removed page curl and gutter shadow, and then generated a text-under-image PDF. By training the software on a large body of varied physical books and retentively combing over the OCR output and retraining, the results approached what one would see in the modern suite that now comes with your scanner. I only achieved my results because I had unfettered use of a quad Xeon beast in the college library where I worked. That software drove the early digitization processes for this (which I also built): http://digitallib.oit.edu/digital/collection/kwl/search
*in contrast to most book scanning at the time, which required the book to be cut apart and the pages fed into an automatically fed scanner; lots of books couldn’t be damaged like that.
Edit: a word
No, no they’re not. These are just repackaged and scaled-up neural nets. Anyone remember those? The concept and good chunks of the math are over 200 years old. Hell, there was two-layer neural net software in the early 90s that ran on my x386. Specifically, Neural Network PC Tools by Russell Eberhart. The DIY implementation of OCR in that book is a great example of roll-your-own neural net. What we have today, much like most modern technology, is just lots MORE of the same. Back in the DOS days, there was even an ML application that would offer contextual suggestions for mistyped command line entries.
Typical of Silicon Valley, they are trying to rent out old garbage and use it to replace workers and creatives.
our highly trained Canadian Geese
This explains so damned much of their behavior. I for one look forward to these operatives helping us out with our myriad domestic issues.
I’m not a hunter. But I do understand a lot about environmental conservation and the need for balance. We have eliminated enough of the animals that predate on deer such that some other means, ie hunters, are required to control deer populations. The other option is mass kills, which strike me as wasteful on so many levels.
When I lived in Vermont, there was a conservation movement to attract younger people to deer hunting because natural controls just aren’t there anymore. Where I live now, a distemper outbreak decimated the coyotes, and the deer are out of control. The coyotes are finally bouncing back, but it’s going to take a while. In my small city, the deer are so rampant, it’s common to see dozens on a short bike ride through town. Their food supply is depleted enough such that most deer here appear unhealthy and undernourished. The exploded deer population have follow-on effects: increased expense for deer control measures, collisions (one almost slammed into me on my bike two days ago; not the first time), destruction of plantings to control erosion, and spreading ticks.
I would like to see prospering wild animal populations, rather than this mess we made.
Nah. I used to think that GUI git clients were The Way. But they all fall short, especially when the ***slightest ***thing goes sideways. Once you get your head around the paradigm, the git CLI is how you get real shit done and quickly. If anything, the GUI clients are all sharp edges and half-measures; the only reason I pull out a GUI client is to get a visual on all the branches in progress/already merged.