They’re going to keep making more powerful hardware either way, since parallel processing capability supports graphics and AI just fine.

It’s not quite as simple as that. AI needs less precision than regular graphics, so chips developed with AI in mind do not necessarily translate into higher performance for other things.

In science/engineering, people want more—not less—precision. So we look for GPUs with capable 64-bit processing, while AI is driving the industry in the other direction, from 32 down to 16.

I suppose the same could be said on the lemmy side. There’s no reason someone couldn’t write a lemmy app that lets you do what an RSS client does in terms of only showing content from a selected subgroup of communities.

You raise a good point that it would be nice to have more control over which group of communities you are drawing from at a given time. (Is there a way to group subscriptions and switch between them?) It’s a bit disconcerting to see 5 tech headlines and then suddenly something about the war in Ukraine or whatever. It jars my train of thought. With an RSS client, you can group feeds however you want.

That said, my experience with RSS readers is not quite so idyllic. In the end, rather than having nicely partitioned feed groups by topic, I wind up having to separate the ones that produce content frequently but with a poor signal-to-noise from those that post once in awhile but are generally worth your time. With something like lemmy, people are helping you do the work of finding the more interesting content from that site that posts every 10 minutes.

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Anyways, did I miss anything?

I think the big problem in link aggregation is how to sort/prioritize content for the end user. RSS does not provide a way to do this, nor should it as far as I’m concerned. It should simply be about public content being tagged in a standardized way for any app to come along and organize it using whatever algorithm.

A simple RSS reader has the problem that the more prolific sites will tend to flood your feed and make it tedious to scroll through miles of links. Commercial news portals try to learn your tastes through some sort of machine learning algorithm and direct content accordingly. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but tends to build echo chambers around people that reinforce their biases, and that hasn’t done a lot of good for the world to put it mildly.

The lemmy approach is to use one of a number of sorting algorithms built atop a crowd-sourced voting model. It may not be perfect, but I prefer it to being psychoanalyzed by an AI.

Btw there was a post from about a month ago where someone was offering to make any RSS feed into a community. I’ve subscribed to a few of them and it’s actually pretty awesome.

I didn’t even have a color monitor :'( I would’ve been jealous of yours.

I almost quit programming too when my brother walked in one day as I was feverishly typing. “What? You’re programming basic? That’s for losers.” Then he whips up a ski slalom game in a single incomprehensible line of apl and I was like wtaf?

Today I’m a professional dev and my bro is a perl hacker. I still can’t understand a line of his code.

I remember magazines from the 80s where you could find code in BASIC for some little game. It’s how I learned how to program as a kid.

Didn’t kbin have a separate mechanism for supporting a post in a more public way? I can’t remember how that worked now, but it was in addition to the regular voting I think?

You mean like the comment fields we’re using right here on lemmy?

As others have pointed out, it’s usually some markdown that’s embedded within the text. Lemmy is using a format that’s actually called “markdown” if I’m not mistaken, or a slight variation/subset thereof.

I’ve gotten used to the double-star for bold and what not to the point that it annoys me when some message client or whatever doesn’t support it. I share code snippets with people fairly often, and the code markdown is particularly useful to maintain its legibility.

I guess the MAC address guy is up next. 48 bits may not go so far if every light bulb is going to want its own.

Imagine if you were the guy who made the call on IPv4 addresses…

Falsehoods About Time

Having a background in astronomy, I knew going into programming that time would be an absolute bitch.

Most recently, I thought I could code a script that could project when Easter would land every year to mark it on office timesheets. After spending an embarrassing amount of…er…time on it, I gave up and downloaded a table of pre-calculated dates. I suppose at some point, assuming the code survives that long, it will have a Y2K-style moment, but I didn’t trust my own algorithm over the table. I do think it is healthy, if not essential, to not trust your own code.

Falsehoods About Text

I’d like to add “Splitting at code-point boundary is safe” to your list. Man, was I ever naive!

We need to watermark insert something into our watermark posts that watermark can be traced back to its origin watermark if the AI starts training watermark on it.

1st reaction: lmao

2nd reaction: hey wait, this is pure genius!

Huh… I always thought Stalin was the most Mario-looking dictator.

Overclockers have already had it running at 9.1GHz with liquid helium cooling, and it potentially offers an enormous amount of processing power if you water cool your PC.

Well, maybe then you can run Cities: Skylines II…

Ooh this looks right up my alley…thanks for posting!

Ah I think I found it. I need to go:

{
    "format_on_save": "off"
}

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It was more than just tab conversion. For example, it decided on its own that:

if(...) {
    ...
}
else {
    ...
}

would look better like:

if(...) {
    ...
} else {
    ...
}

I mean I guess I could live with that, but really? I imagine there’s some config where you can disable all this, but it just doesn’t seem worth some giant git commit every time I touch a file with the editor.