Beefalo

This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

I wonder if it works like IRC. The “plague” this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you’re kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.

Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there’s never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.

Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there’s always going to be a server, even if it’s not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it’s “free” but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There’s always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn’t really need it.

The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user’s machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven’t used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn’t changed, then it also doesn’t support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.

Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they’re pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn’t viable. I don’t know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.

But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It’s not a web app, it doesn’t live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there’s no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.

Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there’s that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else’s unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.

We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that’s what Matrix is.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it’s normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the “business casual” version of Discord. This doesn’t seem to be true, but that’s how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.

I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack’s name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you’re fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.

Sharks have flooded Shark Infested Waters with shark asshole stink but this time the asshole stink is AI generated and Taylor Swift has a billion dollars for lawyers.

Oh well, guess I’m still happy about this magic bag i got for going places I don’t want Google knowing about.

Ah, the late 1900s when you could still pretend that Apple was the choice of the counterculture for no credible reason except for Apple marketing. Slacktivism, my dude. Worthless.

This meme is truly ancient. I bet those little iMacs go for a pretty penny on eBay now after everyone tossed them in the garbage circa 2003.

I’m thinking the mobile users are in the worst spot for this. For desktop all this random spam goes into its own tab that I never look at.

Alas, the spam in my “real” google inbox is all my fault. Shouldn’t have gave substack my email address.

Lemmy needs a community dedicated to pointless debate over which flashlight is best. I’m about to permanently borrow somebody’s ThruNite T1 but it’s too heavy, I miss the mini Maglite I used to carry. Phone flash is fine, yes, but I miss a flashlight/torch without a fucking login procedure involved for fuck sake.

There’s a fella on YouTube who talks about game development and stuff. He has a well-respected game out somewhere, and he dropped a bombshell that you probably need to hear.

They took their game, on a PC and consoles, out to some sort of convention to show it off and get some feedback from potential customers, namely, young children, Alphas, 6-12 ish.

He said that every single one of them ignored keyboards and game controllers, shoving them out of the way, not even understanding what they were for, and immediately started swiping their fingers on the screens, assuming they were touchscreens. So yeah.

They’re expecting you to have a mount for your wall, already installed, even, from the last TV. So the legs are an afterthought, they’re cheap, easy to remove and you’ll probably toss them, they know. So they’re enough to use for store display, no more.

Mighty GabeN is getting pretty deep into his wizard years, I best prepare myself for his passing.

I’ve become more and more convinced that considerations like yours, which I do not understand since I don’t rely on GPUs professionally, have been the main driver of Nvidia’s market share. It makes sense.

The online gamer talk is that people just buy Nvidia for no good reason, it’s just internet guys refusing to do any real research because they only want a reason to stroke their own egos. This gamer-based GPU market is a loud minority whose video games don’t seem to rely too heavily on any card features for decent performance, or especially compatibility, with what they’re doing. Thus, the constant idea that people “buy Nvidia for no good reason except marketing”.

But if AMD cards can’t really handle things like machine learning, then obviously that is a HUGE deficiency. The public probably isn’t certain of its needs when it spends $400 on a graphics card, it just notices that serious users choose Nvidia for some reason. The public buys Nvidia, just in case. Maybe they want to do something they haven’t thought of yet. I guess they’re right. The card also plays games pretty well, if that’s all they ever do.

If you KNOW for certain that you just want to play games, then yeah, the AMD card offers a lot of bang for your buck. People aren’t that certain when they assemble a system, though, or when they buy a pre-built. I would venture that the average shopper at least entertains the idea that they might do some light video editing, the use case feels inevitable for the modern PC owner. So already they’re worrying about maybe some sort of compatibility issue with software they haven’t bought, yet. I’ve heard a lot of stories like yours, and so have they. I’ve never heard the reverse. I’ve never heard somebody say they’d like to try Nvidia but they need AMD. Never. So everyone tends to buy Nvidia.

The people dropping the ball are the reviewers, who should be putting a LOT more emphasis on use cases like yours. People are putting a lot of money into labs for exhaustive testing of cooling fans for fuck’s sake, but just running the same old gaming benchmarks like that’s the only thing anyone will ever do with the most expensive component in the modern PC.

I’ve also heard of some software that just does not work without CUDA. Those differences between cards should be tested and the results made public. The hardware journalism scene needs to stop focusing so hard on damned video games and start focusing on all the software where Nvidia vs AMD really does make a difference, maybe it would force AMD to step up its game. At the very least, the gamebros would stop acting like people buy Nvidia cards for no reason except some sort of weird flex.

No, dummy, AMD can’t run a lot of important shit that you don’t care about. There’s more to this than the FPS count on Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

I’ve got a couple of Youtube channels I follow, ChristopherOdd and Splattercatgaming, who seem to mostly charge through a lot of indy content, giving it a whirl so you can check it out. So that helps to surface anything interesting happening outside AAA studios.

That and just waiting for recs to come from word of mouth.

I’ve been calling it Xitter, sounds like zitter. Gotta call it something, not the dumb thing he made up.

Ooh, yeah, good call, I always forget them when things get dweeby.

I swear, nothing is commie enough for Lemmy. “Linux? Pshhhsshs! Cuck!” Mentions no alternative

The fuckin bong joke is majestic. I assume he was pulling these out of his ass at signings, too. Nice handwriting, Mark.

I could never be famous enough to sign stuff, people would get it back like what the fuck is this? My sig would be all inconsistent, too. Hamill is a pro, though. Even back then.

You know? He handled going from nobody to Luke Skywalker pretty damned well all things considered.

Idunno, I feel like they certainly fathom it to some degree. They have an awful lot of funky little predator evasion techniques for an animal with no fathom.

That whole schooling thing is a bunch of fish going, I know they like eating us, but I’d rather they eat YOU.

I do agree that they have no conception of humanity, just that sometimes their friends get raptured away by something that makes a boat noise.

Oh, yeah, that’s the new normal, I’m a bit surprised they gave you a whole 100MB to call your own.

The modern Dad pro-move for giving the kids a game console for Christmas is to sneak the box open, set it up, do all the ridiculous downloads and patches then sneak it all back into the box nice and tidy so that the kids can just open it and go on Christmas morning.

Bond fund here we come, that’s as ensured as you get now, moneybags.

They definitely think Bill Gates is Jewish.

He’s not. No Jewish ancestry and his current practice is a sort of casual Catholic thing, but he also thinks Dawkins is cool, so about what you’d expect. That’s from a quick Wiki check, but still.

Because if he’s on their poster…

Yep. Some of us remember when it was Fuck Ellen Pao, they seem to like their sacrificial CEOs over there, though I’m sure they get paid too much to be the scapegoat.

That just makes me stop and think about how bad Musk loves being That Guy. The other ones will take the heat and then float away on their golden parachutes, you never really hear from them again. Not him. He keeps making new companies so he can be That Guy at them.