• 0 Posts
  • 111 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 8th, 2023

help-circle

  • Good meme. However I do think that most people starting out will not really have to deal with any of those issues in the first few years apart from maybe the pip/venv/poetry/etc choice. But whatever they’ll pick it’ll probably work well enough for whatever they’re doing. When I started out I didn’t use any external libraries apart from pygame (which probably came pre-installed). I programmed in the IDLE editor that came with Python. I have no idea how I functioned that way, but I learnt a lot and hat plenty of fun.


  • At the moment Assetto Corsa and Wreckfest.

    Assetto Corsa because it’s a simracing sandbox. I’ve modded it to hell with Content Manager and CSP. I also have a lot of paid mods for mainly formula cars like the RSS Formula 1/2/3/4 cars and the VRC Formula E cars. The AI is the perfect level of silly to cause absolute mayhem with the right settings, but also pretty interesting races when you want them to behave.

    Wreckfest is a joy on the Steam deck and for casual mayhem. It still has a nice driving model imo, while remaining casual. The maps are optimized for crashing into others which means you’re never safe.


  • I was just about to post the same thing. I’ve been using Linux for almost 10 years. I never really understood the folder layout anyway into this detail. My reasoning always was that /lib was more system-wide and /usr/lib was for stuff installed for me only. That never made sense though, since there is only one /usr and not one for every user. But I never really thought further, I just let it be.


  • I try to steer as many people as I know to Signal, but I don’t want to be the type of person who accepts no compromise so I also use a bunch of others. Whatsapp is the most common, as pretty much everyone here in the Netherlands uses it. I used to use Telegram, but nowadays I trust it less than Whatsapp and all my Telegram chats have moved to Signal. SMS is only there for backup and older people who don’t use other apps. And Discord is there for people who want their messages to never be read, because that app is a dumpster fire that constantly makes me miss messages.





  • No, people just don’t like crypto because it’s a huge waste of energy that has no use for the average person at the moment and is only used by rich people to get richer without much regulation. Don’t get me wrong, it might definitely be useful when used correctly in the future. Not wasting as much energy by ditching proof of work, becoming actually useful for normal transactions, etc. But right now it’s just an overhyped technology for obnoxious cryptobros.




  • Imo it’s both overblown and very impressive. Deep neural networks are capable of many things that we didn’t even imagine 10 years ago. We’ve made huge leaps.

    The problem is that every company is putting “AI” in everything and techbro’s and managers are heavily overvaluing the technology. Most companies don’t need AI. In many cases there are way better methods to do the thing they want to do. The fridge or washing machine doesn’t need AI, the website of whatever company doesn’t need an AI assistant, and most people don’t need an AI accelerator in their laptop or phone.



  • Machine learning and compression have always been closely tied together. It’s trying to learn the “rules” that describe the data rather than memorizing all the data.

    I remember implementing a paper older than me in our “Information Theory” course at university that treated the creation of a decision tree as compression. Their algorithm considered sending the decisions tree and all the exceptions to the decision tree and the tree itself. If a node in the tree increased the overall message size, it would simply be pruned. This way they ensured that you wouldn’t make conclusions while having very little data and would only add the big patterns in the data.

    Fundamentally it is just compression, it’s just a way better method of compression than all the models that we had before.

    EDIT: The paper I’m talking about is “Inferring decision trees using the minimum description length principle” - L. Ross Quinlan & Ronald L. Rivest


  • I’m on Arch (actually a converted Antergos) and I have an NVIDIA card as well. My first attempt a few months ago was horrible, bricking my system and requiring a bootable USB an a whole evening to get Linux working again.

    My second attempt was recently, and went a lot better. X11 no longer seems to work, so I’m kinda stuck with it, but it feels snappy as long as my second monitor is disconnected. I’ve yet to try some gaming. My main monitor is a VRR 144Hz panel with garbage-tier HDR. The HDR worked out of the box on KDE Plasma, with the same shitty quality as on Windows, so I immediately turned it off again. When my second monitor is connected I get terrible hitching. Every second or so the screen just freezes for hundreds of milliseconds. Something about it (1280x1024, 75Hz, DVI) must not make Wayland happy. No settings seem to change anything, only physically disconnecting the monitor seems to work.






  • I bought a ThinkPad new in 2014 for my study for like 1200 euro’s. She’s still happily purring today. Around 2019 I made the mistake of emptying a cup of tea into the ThinkPad accidentally and then holding it upside down to get the water out. I think I should’ve just let it leak out of the bottom since the laptop has holes for that, but I panicked. This broke the keyboard, but not the rest of the laptop. I got an official new keyboard for like 100 euro’s which came with a tool and the simple instructions, and since then everything has been working flawlessly.

    So I recommend ThinkPads, although I can’t really say anything about compatibility of new models