Conscientious spectre making a home in the threadiverse.

I also toot as @tojikomori.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Apparently not in Windows settings:

    If the BIOS says it supports Modern Standby, Windows takes it at its word and completely disables the ability to enter S3 sleep (classic standby). There’s no official or documented option for disabling Modern Standby through Windows, which is incredibly annoying.

    Side note: for a while, there was actually a registry setting you could change to disable Modern Standby on the Windows side. Unfortunately, Microsoft removed it, and to my knowledge, has never added it back.

    I’m not a Windows user, so I can’t confirm one way or the other, but toward the end of the end of the article the author gives vendor-specific instructions for disabling the S0 Low Power Idle capability from BIOS.








  • A lot of nuance and empathy in this piece, it’s worth a close read.

    As women, we didn’t feel we should have to defend ourselves against such a ridiculous statement, we shouldn’t need an uncomfortable public confrontation; but why did none of the men say anything? This is where it got interesting. They felt they didn’t want to speak on our behalf, didn’t want to be perceived as jumping in and taking our voices. We were surprised, we felt they didn’t have our backs and didn’t see it as an issue. They felt confused as to how to act.

    I’ve had similar experiences on both ends of that. Confrontation is wearying so usually I just do an internal eye-roll and move on. But at other times I’ve felt something ought to be said, but thought I lacked the expertise or lived experience to make a convincing case.


  • Maybe this is just a contrarian view, but I see “AI” as a potential rather than a technology. Right now, transformer-based technologies are what most of us mean when we talk about AI, and it’s not clear to me how much more potential that idea really has. When I look at how much energy it takes to set up something like GPT-4 I see us pushing hardware to its limit and yet the outcomes are still too often unsatisfying. Significant breakthroughs are needed somewhere in that architecture just to do the kind of things we’re trying to do today at the fidelity we expect and without breaking the bank.

    The technology we have today might be to AI what the phonograph was to audio recording. As a technology we hit the limits of its potential pretty quickly and then… we fixated. Entirely different technologies eventually led to the lossless spatial audio experiences we can enjoy today, and seem more likely to carry future potential for audio too.

    In that analogy, GPT might just be like someone arranging 8 gramophones in a circle to mimic the kind of spatial audio experience available in some headphones now. Impressive in many ways, but directionally not the path where potential lies.




  • Blockchain technology hasn’t contributed anything of lasting value, and too much money, energy, and good will has been burned by people trying.

    Its most popular applications are cryptocurrencies, which are used for gambling, money laundering, and for collecting payments from ransomware victims. Someone once bought a pizza with them, but since that time their transactions have become too slow and their value too volatile to exchange them for anything so concrete.

    Various attempts have been made to use blockchain technology for public or shared databases, but it turns out to be worse than all the other faster and much simpler existing solutions in that space.

    Others have attempted to bolt it on to various business and social systems, but it hasn’t provided any practical benefit there either. It remains a slow and cumbersome alternative to every problem.

    Its unique superpower is that it can be used to make contracts between parties that have no trust in one another and no social or legal system of enforcement, so long as your definition of a contract is sufficiently narrow, can be reduced to terms understood by the world’s slowest logic engine, and is perfectly encoded the first time around and doesn’t require any adjustment thereafter. If one or more of those conditions fail, you’ll find yourself turning to the social and legal systems of enforcement you thought you didn’t have.


  • The linked article summarizes the problems in the paragraph starting “I’ve been aware of Lemmy for a long time”. For an alternative view: the Fedi.Tips account on Mastodon – typically a cheerleader for all apps of the FediVerse – shared some more pointed words about them in this thread and reiterated the warning just yesterday after noticing the Lemmy team’s successful recruitment campaign on Reddit.

    I was one of the people they recruited, and ran into problems myself only after signing up at lemmy.ml and being surprised by the amount of CCP propaganda posted there. At first I thought it was strange that I was being downvoted for pointing it out, and that the devs (also admins of that instance) ignored/downvoted me when I flagged the issue for their attention. After researching a bit, I found that Lemmy’s basically developed and maintained by two people, both of whom seem to be westerners fetishizing Mao Zedong Thought – literally to the point of writing lengthy apologetics for the CCP’s human rights abuses including the Uyghur genocide.

    They’re clearly skilled engineers, but I can’t trust or support them, and relying on instance of Lemmy means I’d have to do both.


  • Because they’re both part of the Fediverse, Lemmy and Kbin do federate with each other. You can follow Lemmy “communities” in Kbin, and Kbin “magazines” in Lemmy, and I believe other Fediverse groups (like Frendica groups) also federate.

    I’ve been leaning into this from Kbin, as a way of dipping into communities on Beehaw and other Lemmy instances while keeping my distance from Lemmy’s devs.

    I have one concern. As we’re seeing with Reddit, it’s a huge effort to move internet communities. If Lemmy-the-app becomes untenable even for more reasonably admin’d instances, then the most obvious solution won’t be to fork Lemmy (a huge undertaking) but rather to move to an app that’s maintained by more reasonable people. That’s probably going to involve a messy migration, some data loss, some loss of community, and some dead links.

    I’ll keep using Kbin as a way of tapping into existing communities, but when it comes to building new ones I’d much rather see it done on kbin.social or other Fediverse instances where there’s no long-term dependency on Lemmy’s devs.