nefarious

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Can I pick a PC? x86 is retro, right? /joke

But seriously, probably the PS2. Mainly because it's the only console I got as a kid and also because it's the last console before games and consoles started wanting to phone home over the Internet. I have PS3 games that I'm pretty sure are permanently hampered or unplayable because their servers are offline, but I feel confident I can still boot any PS2 game I own and play it without issues.

[–] [email protected] 99 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Careful, you have to also add --no-preserve-root to make sure you get all of it out. If you leave the roots, it'll just grow back later!

(But seriously, don't actually do this unless you're prepared to lose data and potentially even brick your computer. Don't even try it on a VM or a computer you're planning to wipe anyway, because if something is mounted that you don't expect, you'll wipe that too. On older Linux kernels, EFI variables were mounted as writable, so running rm -rf / could actually brick your computer. This shouldn't still be the case, but I wouldn't test it, myself.)

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago

I think this article from the Verge explains it pretty well.

tl;dr:

  • The Fed kept interest rates low from 2008 to 2021. Low interest rates made it easier to borrow money and meant that debt-backed investments like bonds had a low return, so investors favored stocks for a better yield on their investment.
  • This meant tech companies could borrow a ton of money at low interest rates and raise a ton of money from investors through stock sales, allowing them to build services that weren't profitable in order to grow as rapidly as possible. This basically defined the internet as we know it today - big companies offering free/cheap services with minimal restrictions. Companies could afford to charge low fees and look the other way on things like ad blockers.
  • However, now that interest rates are going up, borrowing is much more expensive and investors are less motivated to buy stock, so all that easy money has dried up. Companies are having to raise revenue by increasing prices, adding more ads, blocking ad blockers, etc.
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Yes, because they died in an incredibly predictable way by going out unprepared and they brought a kid to die with them.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Copyright and trademarks are different things. In this case it looks like it applies mainly to the Xbox "X" logo like is seen on this (hilarious) page of the filing and is only for things related to messaging and gaming, so it's not as broad as it sounds. Based on a cursory look at Google results from before July 1st, I can't find any examples of Microsoft actually suing anyone for using the letter X, either.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Trademarks can apply to different areas. In this case, Microsoft's trademark is for services related to online chat and gaming, not for something like a window manager.

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn76041368&docId=ORC20030304054014&linkId=20#docIndex=19&page=1

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't trust ChatGPT/GPT-4 for much to begin with, but this study is not great. From Ars Technica's article on the same topic (with emphasis added by me):

While this new study may appear like a smoking gun to prove the hunches of the GPT-4 critics, others say not so fast. Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan thinks that its findings don't conclusively prove a decline in GPT-4's performance and are potentially consistent with fine-tuning adjustments made by OpenAI. For example, in terms of measuring code generation capabilities, he criticized the study for evaluating the immediacy of the code's ability to be executed rather than its correctness.

"The change they report is that the newer GPT-4 adds non-code text to its output. They don't evaluate the correctness of the code (strange)," he tweeted. "They merely check if the code is directly executable. So the newer model's attempt to be more helpful counted against it."

AI researcher Simon Willison also challenges the paper's conclusions. "I don't find it very convincing," he told Ars. "A decent portion of their criticism involves whether or not code output is wrapped in Markdown backticks or not." He also finds other problems with the paper's methodology. "It looks to me like they ran temperature 0.1 for everything," he said. "It makes the results slightly more deterministic, but very few real-world prompts are run at that temperature, so I don't think it tells us much about real-world use cases for the models."

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Sorry, I don't see what this has to do with my comment? I was answering the question "What is the point of Youtube Premium anyway?" and said nothing about the price increase.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (7 children)

It means the creators I enjoy actually get paid, whereas with adblock they don't get any ad revenue.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

The team is bringing back some of the games by integrating the Ruffle emulator for the now-defunct Adobe Flash, and more than 50 games will be brought back starting on July 25th. Over the long term, “we hope to convert many of the most beloved games to HTML5,” TNT says.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

TIL! Thanks for the clarification.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I have a Targus cooling pad that works pretty well for that. It's like a thin plastic tray thing with vents and a USB-powered fan to provide extra cooling, but I mostly use it without the fan to elevate my laptop off my lap and allow for extra airflow. Something similar might work well for your use case.

That said, I've noticed my laptop's fan will start to make an obnoxious rattling noise if I use it on my lap for too long. Fan rattle is a known issue with my laptop and it goes away once it's sat on my desk for a while, but it can be annoying so YMMV.

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