• 0 Posts
  • 985 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • My guess is what’s going on is there’s tons of psuedo code out there that looks like it’s a real language but has functions that don’t exist as placeholders and the LLM noticed the pattern to the point where it just makes up functions, not realizing they need to be implemented (because LLMs don’t realize things but just pattern match very complex patterns).


  • Don’t get me wrong, it’s decent entertainment. It’s just disconnected from any kind of scientific or technical reality and a part of me is rolling my eyes for a lot of it. And maybe a bit frustrated because I like thinking about things and analyzing and problem solving. I prefer hard magic systems over soft magic ones because there’s no point in thinking about soft magic systems because they just do whatever the plot calls for when it calls for it while hard magic systems have to build up to it and need to be clever to surprise viewers.

    Tony uses a soft technology system that defies thought.


  • Yeah, Tony was capable of doing whatever the writers wrote him to be capable of, just like every other fictional character. And the writers wrote him doing it in a manner similar to the “programming” in Swordfish or the tech work in NCIS (or whatever show it was that had multiple people typing on one keyboard at the same time). As in difficult to tell if they had any understanding of it at all, sensationalised it for entertainment purposes, deliberately made it unlike any real programming to troll people who do understand programming, or some combination of all those.

    MCU science might as well just be another school of magic. Especially when Tony’s suit could shapeshift and convert between matter and energy because of some quantum mumbo jumbo. He just cast a quantum spell on it.

    Also every movie had multiple impacts in that iron suit that should have been worse for him than most car crashes.


  • Being combatitive with them, deserved or not, will result in them being combatitive right back. Being gracious when they admit they aren’t on the right track might mean they’ll be more open to listening next time around. And, more importantly, it might mean being able to solve this current issue.

    You’re right that it’s bigger than the next 4 years. But it’s bigger than the GOP, too. It’s the latest iteration of a conflict that’s been going on probably since before recorded history: some people want to control and rule everyone else, some are OK with it (or even support it), some want to prevent those people from gaining control and seek that power to keep it out of their hands (and in many cases end up becoming what they wanted to avoid), and others just want to be left alone to do their own thing (which might not hurt anyone or might make life worse for anyone around them). I don’t see any end to this struggle, the only thing that changes is who has power right now and how hot is the conflict.






  • Actually, there is one thing that is an annoyance that I haven’t been able to resolve. I use dvorak as my main layout.

    Sometimes games get the keyboard right and keys are remapped to qwerty layout (and typing still uses dvorak). This case works better than on windows, since playing a game there either required the game itself to recognize keyboard layouts (best case), or remapping the controls (annoying case), or switching to qwerty (frustrating for typing because I’m stronger with dvorak now).

    But sometimes instead it does the opposite and remaps the qwerty bindings to dvorak. As in, even if I swap layouts, wasd are all over the keyboard instead of all together. I need to exit the game, swap layouts to qwerty on the desktop, then relaunch for controls to work properly (and then I can sometimes swap back to dvorak in game and they continue to work). Often, the next time I launch the game, I’ll forget to switch it but it will just work this time.

    And sometimes it behaves like windows did where I can swap the layout in game and keys change as you’d expect.

    I have no idea why it’s inconsistent between these three options or where the “preserve key location despite the layout” feature is even coming from. Anyone have any idea about this?


  • I upgraded my gpu this weekend. Shut down, switched the psu off, swapped the old one out and new one in, booted into bios no issue (to check if I has left pcie on auto or needed to update it), then booted into the desktop (fedora cinnamon). Bam, after login only saw wallpaper, no mouse cursor or other UI.

    Well, at least it’s kinda working. Time to figure out what’s going on. Terminal works. There’s some errors in the log but nothing to do with amdgpu or firmware failed to upload or anything. Software render just shows up as black screen. Reset my cinnamon session and boot back to the same thing. Fuck.

    Then I try moving my mouse way over to the right and it shows up! Oh right. I have my TV plugged in for streaming to it sometimes and it ended up defaulted to the primary display, so my main desktop was only showing up there (and it was off). Right click, display properties, swap my monitor to primary, disable the TV until I turn it on.

    This is about the magnitude of the average problem I need to deal with on Linux. Something isn’t working like I want it to, half the time it’s actually working but I misunderstood something or the default doesn’t match my intent and I need to adjust settings and then it’s perfect or close enough.

    Or the other problem I had yesterday, tried monster hunter world for the first time and it wouldn’t launch. Played satisfactory for a bit instead (new gpu is noticeably smoother yay), then did a quick search, found that a specific version of proton works, switched to that version and it played. That’s the first game that has had such trouble for me.






  • Ah that’s interesting. If you can swap the devices from one pi to another, try powering it all up on machine A, then swap the devices to machine B and power that on. Might tell you if the issue is with on the pi side or with the devices.

    Is latency higher on the first boot than on subsequent ones? I’d be looking into race conditions if you’re seeing a bit of lag cascade out into bigger problems. Race conditions are the worst, especially when the race most often goes the right way and just occasionally goes the wrong way. Though you can force the wrong way by adding delays in your code, if you have an idea of where the race is happening.


  • Or, after weeks of debugging an issue the user has logs proving they are having weird performance issues despite having a strong GPU, it turns out their parents wouldn’t let them take that GPU out of the family PC so they rigged up a PCIe to USB to wireless transmitter that hooks up to a wireless to USB to serial port that exploits a signal leaking from serial port to PCIe bus bug on the family PC motherboard to act as if the GPU is on their own machine, which both impresses and horrifies you.

    And when you try to get approval to drop the issue as unsupported, your manager gives you shit and it takes another week to convince him that it isn’t a use case that you should support. And they only agreed in the end because a more senior technical person happened to overhear you pleading with your manager one day and only had to say, “that’s crazy!” for your manager to 180 immediately on the issue. But it’s still cited as a negative on your next performance review (“you spent weeks working on something we don’t even support!”).


  • Another angle to try is to set the date one day ahead and see if the bug shows up then. Might need to disconnect from network and set it in the BIOS for the test to work properly.

    I could be wrong, but I figure after being off for an hour, all capacitors should have discharged by then, so it’s probably not based on how long the hardware has been unpowered.

    Though one other angle I just thought of, if you have something that runs periodically, maybe the bug is related to that period being missed once or n times. Or it could be related to something that is meant to wake the computer to run some job and then go back to sleep but instead just sets it in a bad state.



  • Could have a system where a government site cryptographically signs a birth year plus random token provided by the site you want to use.

    Step 1: access site
    Step 2: site sends random token
    Step 3: user’s browser sends token plus user authentication information
    Step 4: gov site replies with a string containing birth year, token, and signature
    Step 5: send that string to the other site where it uses the government’s public key to verify the signature, showing the birth year is attested by the government

    No need to have any direct connection with the user’s identity and the site or been the gov and site.