Illusion — Why do we keep believing that AI will solve the climate crisis (which it is facilitating), get rid of poverty (on which it is heavily relying), and unleash the full potential of human creativity (which it is undermining)?

Because we keep reading sensationalist advertisements presented as articles instead of experimenting with it ourselves, understanding what it is

And unfortunately, this article is also just a response to media clickbait, not a discussion point it tries to look like

In general whatever anyone does to anything, current userbase will 90% of the time be against it. But

“Next, we’ll remove all the action buttons with their superfluous interaction counts from the main timeline,” Musk posted in a subscriber-only post on X in October of last year. “Just view count will show, unless you tap into a post.”

So the main thing will be views. Not how many agree, how many object. Views
And probably it will also become the main analytic datapoint

Shit in, shit out

From what I learned at university:
CISC instruction set (x86) was developed to adress the technical reality of its time - time costly CPU operation and fast read from storage. Not long after that the situation has changed - storage reads became slower in comparison to computing time (putting it simply it’s faster to read an archive and unpack it than to read unpacked thing). But in the meantime the PC boom has happened. In a way backward compatibility and market inertia locked us with instruction set that is not the best optimised for our tech, despite the fact that RISC (for example ARM) was conceived earlier.

In a way software (compilers and interpreters too) is like a muscle. The more/wider it’s used, the better it becomes. You can be writing in python but if your interpreter has some missed optimization opportunities, your code will be running faster on architecture with a better optimized interpreter available.

From personal observations:
The biggest cost of software is not to write something super efficient. It’s maintainability (readability and debugging), ease of use (onboarding/training time) and versatility (“let’s add the feature that is missing to what we have, instead of reinventing the wheel and maintaining two toolsets”).

The new languages are not created because they can do something faster than assembler (they can’t, btw). If assembly code is written as optimal as possible, high level languages can at best be as fast. Writing such assembly is a problem behind the keyboard, not a technical limitation. The only thing high-level languages do better is how much time it takes a human to work with it.
I would not be surprised to learn that bigger part of these big bucks you mention go not into optimization but rather into “how can we work around that difference so the high-level interface stays the same as for more widely used x86?”

In the end it all boils down to machine code - it’s the only thing that really exists when it comes to executing code. If your “human to bits translator” produces unoptimized binaries, it doesn’t matter how high-level your code was written in.
And sometime in the meantime we’ve arrived at a level when even a few behemoths like Google or Microsoft throwing money into research (not that I believe they are doing so when it comes to optimization) is enough.
It’s the field use that from time to time provides a use-case that helps finding edge-case where optimization can be made.
To purposefully find it? Dumping your datacenter in liquid nitrogen might be cheaper and probably more predictable.

So yeah, I mostly agree with him.
Maybe the times have changed a little, the thing that gave RISCs the most kick were smartphones, then one board computers, so not long ago. The improvements are always bigger at the beginning.
But the fact that some companies are trying to get RISC back into userland in my opinion means that the computer world has only started to heal itself after the effects of PC boom. There’s around 20 year difference where x86 was the main thing and RISC was a niche

So they made notes on Facebook. IMO it would be already dead if not for Messenger

In 5-10 years time these will be “recommended system requirements”

Gnome is quite heavy, before you succumb to the void of choosing the best prompt format, try some other, lighter WMs. I like Fluxbox very much; XFCE is lighter than Gnome/KDE but still similar; i3 is also lightweight.
I guess there might be some light Firefox forks, or maybe even go back to iceweasel?

As for command line, check out:

• tmux
• zsh (it’s completion mechanisms are imo better than bash)
• mc
• how to define your shortcuts as functions inside every login shell, instead of using aliases which are easier but have limitations

Btw, slackware still maintains x32
And there’s also arch32

Beam? What happened to the fibre? Is light that slower in a fibre cable?

I think, the point is, that this is the shit no-one has seen. It’s still hidden inside OP. Lurking

Yeeeaaah…
I think it’s a very good game and it did a lot of things well in portraying cyberpunk setting. But maybe let’s not set our expectations as high as before?

Yeah, I was 100% joking. I have never played any football manager.

But as Darkest Dungeon introduced the idea of managing a roster of heroes, I can see how it can be easy to sink hours into base management alone

Looks interesting, thanks :)

Sooo, football manager in fantasy setting? :)

I’m not sure if it counts as niche, but I like stealth games. Thiefs, Dishonored, Mark of the Ninja.

Discovering secrets unseen, clearing whole levels and running like hell to the next dark corner when I get cocky :D

I haven’t played Brogue but in nutshell IA is a proper roguelike and somehow manages to create the atmosphere of being alone in the dark in a mansion full of acolytes and worse

InfraArcana was a little bit tough but is a very good roguelike

I’m not sure. I feel the answer is “none”, it’s very organic and immersive.

But I did spend some time fiddling with settings. You probably don’t want the same sensitivity in both axes (you need more left-right than up-down); having a little bit of deadzone/minimal movement can be a good idea; I also think there was an option to have some curves defined (so movement scales with speed of movement).

And I wasn’t completely new to gamepad, I’ve played many hours in Dark Souls on xbox pad before.
Switching from mkb to gamepad did take some time. Something like 2-3 months of playing 2-3h, 2-3 times a week

I don’t own a steam deck and I’m not playing in competitive FPSes, but I’ve been using PS4 pad with gyro to play Elite Dangerous and Cyberpunk. Maybe these 2¢ will be helpful in some way.

What I’ve found out to work for me was:

• Set up gyro to get enabled with “shoulder/scope aiming”
• Use one stick for looking around, another for movement
• Keep gyro range small and sensitivity low

That way the big movements I do with sticks, when I need precision I switch to aiming and can aim with gyro, and gyro input is less twitchy because of low output range and low sensitivity

Aard 2 - translator that takes you to wikidictionary
andOTP - offline OTP with easy option to encrypt your backup with your PGP key
AnyMemo - very nice flashcard app. Creating your own (with Tatoeba for example) is very easy
Carnet - simple notes app
FairMail - great mail app. IMO better than K-9
Feeder - RSS watcher
Ghost Commander - file manager. UI is a little bit clunky but much better than enything else
KeePassDX - password manager
Librera Reader - IMO the best PDF/epub/mobi reader there is
monocles translator - nice translator similar to DeepL
NewPipe - youtube and bandcamp
Ning - local network scanner
OCR
Odyssey Music Player
OpenCamera
OpenKeychain - PGP
OsmAnd~ - navigation and maps in general
CV Project - Mozilla projecton capturing voice recordings
QKSMS - for sms
RCX - cloud client
Shelter - the “work profile” manager
Simple Calendar - calendar with very nice widgets
Sky Map - you can point your phone in the direction of a star and see it annotated
Weather Widget - for the weather
WebMediaShare/WebApps - discontinued unfortunately, but it’s great at appifying an URL, so you don’t have to use official app

I use more, but these are the ones I think might be most interesting to others. I don’t know if all of these are absolutely 100% open source (and that depends on definition) but all of these are in F-droid.