[–] -1 points 2 days ago

The post using NES as a comparison is the main problem, in my opinion, especially given that Quake in 13k of javascript exists (only 3 levels, but still), which is a closer apples to apples comparison.

Besides, "needs to run on a multitude of browsers" is not hard unless you decide to make your javascript do absolutely everything, and even then it's easy to keep it working on the major browsers, you just aim for the lowest common denominator (usually Safari). The browsers do the heavy lifting of running on a multitude of OSs and architectures.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago (1 child)

    I have an old (not quite 2013 though) Atom

    That's not mid spec, that's bottom spec

    So? That’s pretty much always been the case.

    Ah yes, transistor fabrication has always been very close to the atomic level , no wonder it "pretty much always been the case". /s

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago (3 children)

    Consumer hardware is perfectly capable of running much larger models too if you give it enough RAM, and is only held back by RAM being expensive.

    And average users having, at most, 8GB of RAM, with 2GB being eaten by Windows and another 2, minimum, by Chrome. Remember, average user is the person who doesn't bother with latest games and doesn't run linux, they only do some office stuff, watch videos and browse social media.

    But prices for RAM will eventually come down again and hardware in general will keep becoming more capable.

    At best, I expect RAM prices to drop back to their sane price somewhere in 2029-30.

    Also, you may not have noticed, but for average users (people that mostly just browse social media and watch videos), mid-spec computers from 2013 are almost perfectly serviceable today - just swap the HDD for a SSD and you're golden. Smartphones have also stopped getting significant hardware upgrades, despite shittier software trying to force obsolescence on older, mid-spec models.

    Why would hardware stop improving exactly now?

    Because current fabrication process of chips seems to be very close to limits imposed by the laws of physics. The 1nm fab process that TSMC might manage to pull by next year is possibly the literal limit of MOSFET. Unless someone comes up with a different fabrication process that can reach atomic precision, or somehow get more power efficiency from the same area/volume of transistors, or some wonder material, there's no reason to expect hardware to keep improving at the same pace it did decades ago. "AI will discover-" It won't. There is nothing indicating it might, much less will. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I seriously doubt AI will magic out some new way to get Moore's law back on track

    Accordingly, the AI models shipped with consumer devices will keep becoming more powerful and online models will be needed less and less for “average person” tasks.

    I seriously doubt that for a single reason: money. Why let the user have the model when you can rent it off to them? Or, even worse, the model runs locally, but you have to pay a fucking subscription in order to use it because fuck you. "You will own nothing and be happy about it"

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  • [–] 7 points 3 days ago (5 children)

    The reason why AI companies are spending so much money is to rollout data centres to run the AI in the first place.

    Yet all companies fail to point whether there actually is, or will be, enough demand for ALL the capacity being built. Remember, we're talking like 10+ huge datacenters that are effectively useless for anything other than AI.

    If the AI industry has to pay off 5 trillion dollars over the course of 20 years, that's 250 billion dollars a year

    The author compares with Google/Alphabet revenue, a company which deals in ads and several other services. Guess the problem of comparing a company with a somewhat diverse portfolio vs. one that has one single product. Microsoft had a gross revenue of 281 billion dollars in 2025. AI companies need Microsoft levels of revenue by the end of next year.

    Profits Can Grow, By A Lot

    They can also not grow, because Anthropic and OpenAI can end up scaring customers into open models.

    That means that there will never be a point where a company wins the AI wars

    Wrong, Nvidia has clearly won the war by selling shovels that are useless for anything but AI. RAM manufacturers are also laughing all the way to the bank.

    the average person isn't going to use a locally hosted model, ever.

    True. But average person can stop using said model if it starts being a scummy piece of shit charging hidden fees or eating up tokens more than the week prior. Besides, someone might try to rent their AI stacks for a profit and undercut the 2 inflated giants.

    There's Still Plenty Of Capital To Raise

    Everything's pointing to the opposite for 2027, with capital drying up, especially with "scaredy investors terrified of democrats being against datacenters". Anthropic going public is likely due to its less than ideal credit rating (thus forcing it to deal with higher interest rates), so they can raise more money and leave suckers holding the worthless share bag.

    Alphabet, Meta, and NVIDIA are all AI companies

    Alphabet is a "everything about google" business that has a side gig with AI, Meta is a spy operation business that has a side gig with AI, and Nvidia is an overpriced hardware business. None of them is an "AI company". The main problem of this bubble is absurdly excessive investment into AI, lots of scummy "it's technically a loan, but legally the company can omit this from the balance sheet" shenanigans and the desperation to force AI down the throats of the whole world.

    I don't think the rhetoric about the AI bubble is really about finances. (...) I think the supposed AI bubble has become such a large talking point because it represents the hope that things can go back to how they used to be. (...) So, people wishcast. They tell themselves that this is all a giant bubble, and one day soon, everything will crash down and immediately go back to how it used to be.

    Boy, imagine seeing an unproven technology receiving 2 FUCKING TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS, being promised another 3 in investments and thinking "nah, this ain't about finances".

    As many people already said, the genie is out of the bottle. Nobody realistically expects shit to come back like it was before. Slop won, everyone that used to produce content lost, congrats, enjoy the shitshow of razing what little of the non corporate internet remained.

    Even if AI turns out to be a bubble, it will be a bubble in the same way that the internet was a bubble, where the underlying technology remains useful.

    The bubble is mainly in the datacenters, whose sole reason of existing is feeding AI. Remove AI companies and you'll have literally zero customers. AWS, Meta, Google, Microsoft have no use for nvidia chips for actual server work.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 days ago

    Yea, it sucks when you're super hyped about something and literally no one wants to hear about it.

    One thing that helps me out is writing about it, even if no one reads about it, so maybe keeping a blog can help you let off some of that steam. Maybe making a fun page in neocities to show off your stuff for anyone that might also be interested in GDG can be a step up from a blog

    Another way that can help you is doing audio or video reviews/analyses of the episodes and show the drawings they inspired you to do, no need to show your face or even post it to YT or any big social media, as trolls can decide to pile up and harass you.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    The problem is with "fact checking" that all lessons are correct and working as expected.

    Right now, of all the lessons/courses generated and available, do you vouch for the accuracy of ALL of them? Do you guarantee that, if someone who knew about the subject matter (like, physics) double checked every available question and answer in that field, they'd reply "Yes, this is all correct"? If the answer is no to either, do you know how many questions and answers are misleading or plain wrong?

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    Video interessante mostrando que, mesmo sem ter qualquer chance de eleger presidente, o Missão/MBL é um perigo. São efetivamente mais reacionários que bolsonaristas e todas as porcarias vergonhosas e cringe deles são propaganda mirada nos jovens ressentidos e que vai fervendo aos poucos - muitos acham que tudo é só zueira, só resenha, e é aí que tá o perigo, como todas as "zoeiras" do 4chan

     

    In a rather unsurprising twist, the pilot, porn actor Mitsuyasu Maeno, was an ultranationalist.

    The attack was due to the bribery scandal after Kodama was exposed as lobbying in favor of Lockheed-Martin in Japan, which the ultranationalists loathed as they still saw the USA as an evil alien that should be expelled from their country.

    Oh, he was also a CIA asset

     

    In a rather unsurprising twist, the pilot, porn actor Mitsuyasu Maeno, was an ultranationalist.

    The attack was due to the bribery scandal after Kodama was exposed as lobbying in favor of Lockheed-Martin in Japan, which the ultranationalists loathed as they still saw the USA as an evil alien that should be expelled from their country.

    Oh, he was also a CIA asset

     

    Found this channel, Threat Interactive, some time ago and have been watching the videos. He uses debugging tools to go step by step on how each frame is generated, explaining bottlenecks, things that reduce performance (like computing some stuff more than once, out of order, etc) and things that make the final frame look bad (usually bad anti aliasing)

    The dude gets very mad about the state of current games' pipelines, mainly due to how Unreal and Nvidia have fucked things over for their profit - and really, when we take graphics from today and compare with games from 2016, it's easy to see downgrades in quality AND performance.

     

    DelistedGames lists games that were, at one point, available for play or digital "purchase", but are no longer so.

    I want to know if there are any sites that lists games that never had any sort of digital release - stuff like Battlefield Vietnam, Universe at War or Freelancer.

    I can't figure if mobygames has some sort of filter to show only games currently on sale, that would suffice

     

    The ritual is done at least 20 times, with months or years between each session, taking 10 to 30 minutes. The ones that pass through it all are accepted as warriors and future leaders

    https://pib.socioambiental.org/en/Povo:Sater%C3%A9_Maw%C3%A9

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maw%C3%A9_people

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraponera_clavata (bullet ant)

     

    Window guidance - essentially, the central bank increases or limits credit for certain sectors in order to incentivize their growth.

    Learned from watching this documentary - The Princes of Yen | The Hidden Power of Central Banks (yt link) - , so if anyone knows if any information is wrong or misleading, please tell me so :)

    Other stuff the doc mentions is that the late 1980s Japanese economic crisis was caused on purpose by the Ministry of Finance, through the Bank of Japan, by enforcing all banks to reach minimal loan quotas; all of that in order to force structural changes to the finance system, as without a crisis, there is "no reason to change the structure"

     

    Some time ago, I asked about desktop environments that could be controlled with a game controller - https://programming.dev/post/54830683

    I decided to start with DietPi, seeing as it's a much more minimal image than the minimal Armbian. RKDevTools burned it to the nvme just fine^[I absolutely hate that the program uses a 2-step disconnect/connect to the usb, which led to many a failed attempt to burn the image. What I mean is: first it writes the uboot image, then it enters a "Waiting for loader" state where it has to send a signal to the board and/or wait for it to boot under LOADER mode. For whatever reason, I had a very high failure rate in this step, whether due to cable or usb port, I'm not sure, but it was a fucking headache. I really wish you could do it step by step in order to avoid this kind of problem]. DietPi works fine, retroarch runs fine. Great.

    Next, I install Kodi. For some reason, it doesn't show me the screen: the terminal stays on screen, showing the entire log output, pressing keyboard keys make sounds of selecting options, but the graphical part of Kodi is nowhere. 2 restarts later, attempting with root and the normal user, same problem. A cursory search on the internet gave me nothing (dietpi kodi terminal). Fuck me.

    I then install KDE. Similar to Kodi, it simply doesn't launch. As I installed via the metapackage, I expected it would've installed with either lightdm or sddm (the login screen manager). In either case, running the command to start kde from the terminal simply gave me an error. Like with Kodi, I couldn't find this or a similar problem on a search (dietpi kde won't start) and it wouldn't run either as root or normal user.

    Oh, DietPi also took forever to finish booting up because it would take its sweet time checking eth0, then wlan0 (10s on each), then nearly a minute with journalctl.

    Fuck that shit.

    Armbian with KDE was the next option. Sure, I wanted to avoid a bloated desktop environment, but if it worked out of the box, I could just remove packages later. Lo and behold, it did! Setting up the controller to work was easy, too, yes! But boy, what a load of cruft! Luckily, Armbian offers, under armbian-config command, an option to downsize the full KDE to a minimal install. So I did.

    By the way, did you know that Armbian uses a different network stack if you don't use the minimal install? And that the package is apparently removed from the full KDE install if you downsize it? I didn't until it happened. Guess how happy i was in finding out that Armbian removed THE ONE FUCKING PACKAGE THAT ALLOWED ME TO DOWNLOAD ANY OTHER FUCKING PACKAGE. Of course I didn't immediately figure out what happened, it took some searching because the apt update error insisted it couldn't reach ports.ubuntu.com despite me being connected to my wifi, despite the config file still existing, despite a couple of restarts. Only after I found the bit of Armbian explaining this idea of using a different network stack in a different flavor was when I checked and voilá, I had no program to actually turn on and connect to a network. You would think that there would at least be some warning somewhere, or that the default systemd.network package would be installed anyway but stay disabled in this default, but nope, just get rekt noob, fuck you.

    Already feeling like going back to oPi's own android rom, I trudged on and went with Armbian minimal. If that one failed or fucked itself over for no reason, I would give up. It does use a bit more memory and runs more processes than dietPi, but it doesn't fuck around during boot, it's fast, which is a huge plus. Before installing KDE minimal, I try to make a snapshot using timeshift. For whatever reason, it doesn't work. It simply gets stuck with RSYNC doing fuck-all. Under normal circumstances, it should show the progress percentage. In my case, it would show 0.0%, then the line would disappear after a couple of seconds. Leaving it there for 20 minutes resulted in nothing, despite the total used space at the time being under 3GB. There goes my plan for avoiding rkdevtools yet again. Sigh.

    I fire up armbian-config and install minimal KDE. It works! I reboot just to be sure it wasn't a fluke and yes, it still works! Time to configure some stuff and... Where's the settings program? Why is there no settings? Nothing to configure keyboard, power management, locale... What the fuck? Turns out that a minimal install of KDE does not install systemsettings, which is KDE's package for configuring lots of stuff. I guess my notion of "minimal should include THE FUCKING SETTINGS" is wrong, but I digress. Once I figured the package and installed it, everything was fine. For 5 minutes.

    To my dismay, plasma-bigscreen isn't a package available in the repo and the fucking page only offers a x86_64 package for download. So that option was out.

    I start installing some packages, like retroarch again, also Firefox. I launch the good ol' browser and the screen immediately goes black, then shows the boot sequence. Huh. My first thought is that the board was overheating, as I forgot to properly connect the heatsink. All set, Firefox opens for 3 seconds then I'm rebooted again. Fuck me. I turn off the board, wait a bit, turn on, try again and FF crashes again. It's not temperature and I have no fucking clue what could be instead. The solution was installing flatpak bazaar and then using brave browser (ugh, I know). It crashed once, but after I had like 10 tabs open. I also tried Librewolf but it crashed the system after i typed one thing to search.

    Now, since I want to use this without needing a keyboard, I set up the controller again - the first time also happens to freeze the settings window for unknown reasons. Anyway, I successfully set up SDDM to auto login (after installing its setting package, because why would a minimal install need settings, right?), then do a CTRL ALT F4 to try retroarch in a different terminal. It runs fine, but when I quit, it immediately starts again. I quit again, then I see a bunch of repeated apt commands being tried again. I reboot.

    You know the meme that getting audio running on Linux is a fucking mess worse than X11? There is truth to that. For reasons known only to bug gremlins, my audio stopped working^[It's possible the reason was one of the apt commands that ran during my retroarch test above, which begs the question of why the fuck the terminal went crazy and tried to run those commands right after quitting the program I ran and without my fucking input]. Reboot, still no sound. Thanks to the memes, I at least know which packages to look for: pipewire, alsa and pulseaudio. Armbian installed pulseaudio, but not some of its settings. I go ahead and install some more packages, reboot again and finally get it working again, though the sound test window still complains that it couldn't find an audio driver.

    Now, let's see if retroarch actually works. Hm, I'm sure it was supposed to have an option to download cores. As a matter of fact, it does, but it's hidden by default in the linux install, so I go to /home/fist/.config/retroarch and manually edit retroarch.cfg so it'll show the option to download cores. Only it doesn't work and also breaks the UI. The log complain it can't write to the folder, though the UI breaking isn't logged, it's just a neat side effect. After some fucking around and manual downloads - which also refuse to be installed due to write permissions - I set a folder in /home/fist/libretro as the one for retroarch to look for the cores and throw all the cores there, including copies of the ones installed via apt.

    It's finally working, though I've yet to stress test Dolphin (flatpak version) or Flycast, which should be the more demanding emulators. One of the reasons for the change was that the orange android's version of dolphin was insufferable with detecting controls and would often crash after a while. If that repeats here, well, I'll feel it was all for nothing.

    I'm not too keen on KDE taking ~1.8GB of RAM either, so I might experiment with alternatives, like getting Kodi or Flex (which I'll have to use the rpi package) to run instead of it, although trying to logout immediately logs back in with KDE again - due to my SDDM config.

    So, the tally of problems I encountered:

    1. No plasma-bigscreen for aarch64
    2. kodi wouldn't start its graphics (dietpi)
    3. kde wouldn't start (dietpi)
    4. slow boot (dietpi)
    5. armbian removing the network control package without a fallback
    6. timeshift wouldn't work (armbian)
    7. minimal KDE doesn't install system settings (armbian)
    8. couldn't connect 2 bluetooth controllers at the same time (armbian)
    9. Firefox/Librewolf consistently crash the system (armbian)
    10. KDE activating the lock screen despite no option toggled to do so (armbian)
    11. audio stopped working (armbian)
    12. Retroarch refusing to download cores; failing to install cores from a directory (armbian)

    I understand the concept of rough edges and that, for ARM in general, it should be expected from linux distros, but some of the problems I faced are less rough edges and more stupid fucking design - I mean this especially on problems 5 and 7

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