Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)V
Posts
22
Comments
472
Joined
3 yr. ago

    • Venezuela: oil, because renewables are becoming more expensive due to all of the raw materials going into AI-related tech and the US needs a backup plan if shit hits the fan and their bets don’t pan out
    • Greenland: rare Earth metals, because they are the strategic bottleneck amongst said materials, and China stopped exploring them recently and I guess Australia and Canada are harder targets?
    • Can you guess why China is circling Taiwan so hard nowadays? Because they want TMSC in order to overcome their current chip production limits (nm/transistor count)
    • But why is that important? Because of Moore’s Law. We’ve hit the practical physical limits of transistor size vs molecular complexity with current manufacturing methods. We (humanity) are stagnating now, and can’t climb up The Kardashev scale no more.
    • But we can’t stop because our resources and time are limited. Our planet is on a clock right now. So their apparent solution is: secure/stockpile rare Earth metals, sufficient energy reserves, and production means to train AGI, because apparently someone at some point put the idea that AGI would be the solution to the manufacturing problem.
    • But this is all being exasperated by AI training since the start: resources invested, materials wasted, energy spent, planet heated/polluted. Now it’s a recursive problem and a self-fulfilling prophecy
    • And everyone is betting they can solve it first, the will be the ones that’ll win the AGI race, and save us because they’re the good guys and know what they’re doing. Our wise leaders will sacrifice anything to save their citizens, even their own public image (see how noble Trump/Putin/whatever are being?) to save the planet. The end will justify the means surely, and people will forgive them once they realise what was going on all this time. Poor them.
    • Nobody is even stopping to ask: “but what if we (countries) worked together instead of against each other?” because of people like Trump being in power.

    There you go. My current working theory.

    P.S: wonder where the existing rare Earth metals went? Ask the planned obsolescence/anti-repair people and the Phoebus Cartel.

  • If your goal is ease of use and scaling complexity along with your experience, and you’re planning to use Docker like you mentioned, then I recommend Traefic: https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/

    If not, then I recommend Caddy or nginx.

    Edit: ducking autocorrect changed “of” to “if”

    The irony is delicious

  • What would a version with an American neighbour look like in light of recent events? >.>

  • They were mine. People rice their DEs, which I don’t care much about tbh… but I rice my shell even more obsessively.

  • Fish was amazing when I first discovered it, but I found it had too many problems for me to effectively use it. Having to adapt existing bash/zsh scripts was a major problem for me.

    So I went the other way around and managed to get all of the Fish features I wanted working under zsh using atuin, starship, and other misc. oh-my-zsh plugins to fill the gaps.

    Best part: I used a git-controlled home-manager setup to do it so I can activate my entire environment on a fresh machine/server in minutes after I clone it.

  • You’re welcome. :)

    I just overcame my aversion to medium to read your article, then I read the rest. I have to admit I’m very impressed, not only with what you were doing back then, but the fact we were exploring the same corners before modern “data science” was even a thing! My parallel journey was on a different track from NLP though. I was exploring spike-train-based neural net architecture, unsupervised learning, and how to give neural networks “tools” to work with (not tool calls, actual tools like a paint brush and a virtual canvas, etc). Damn… I think I still have ancient videos of that on my YT channel.

    My Intel Celeron(tm) CPU could never handle more than 4 layers of ~512 neurons maybe? I don’t really remember the specifics, but I think that’s why I stopped back then.

    I think that’s why the 2000s were magical for me, although your “grandpa” comments are now hitting me right in the soul. Damn it. :P

  • I don’t “owe” you an explanation, nor do I have to justify my worldview to you. Your excessive use of “quotes” and general tone imply you’re already assuming a condescending stance which would not be conducive to a constructive discussion.

    So I’ll pass on that one. Thank you though.

    And I hope this won’t follow the typical pattern I’m usually confronted with in this situation: the “you’re just evading because you know I’ll prove you wrong/roast you” comeback/argument. Because this isn’t a zero sum game, and if that’s the conclusion then I’m not interested.

  • I used to write articles on medium too, but dev.to was where I ended up because I witnessed it being founded. As for why I mentioned it specifically? Not entirely sure to be honest. I think it’s the first thing that stuck out when I thought of medium because it’s literally the opposite in many ways… less focused on profits and ads. No non-negotiable paywalls for valuable knowledge that I can recall, developer/tech focused with a great and supportive community, easy access/exposure for new authors, and a whole gamut of other small but positive differences that aligned with me personally. These were the first things I noticed from my experience publishing stuff there.

    There are many other sites with communities like that that I’ve come across, for example: writeas.com as an alternative to tumblr/blogger and such, devRant is great as a venting space for developer-specific trouble/humour/jokes and interesting stories. Etc.

    I have a soft spot for small independent sites like that. The ones trying to revive the 2000s internet spirit/experience. No shareholders or algorithms to dictate what becomes popular and what gets buried based on profit-driven logic/metrics to steer the masses or influence opinions for the sake of ad revenue or sales.

  • It’s all about perspective. If we can’t truly see from without, why not nudge the viewport from within a bit? :P

    Creative work and literature (memes also count!) are a great medium for exploration in this regard. Like… look at that Robert J. Sawyer’s book “Calculating God” (he’s one of my absolute favourite authors because of that book and others) and the fire it lit under so many butts in some “intellectual” circles, just by exploring the unconventional and discussing something both sides of the argument aren’t comfortable with.

    I love things like that. Things that require your brain to do some squats and warm up before reading the next chapter.

  • All right, now let me to respond to the other stuff without that misunderstanding looming in the way. :P

    If they do that, it's most likely because it's of comfort to them on some level to have that rather than completely obliterate the foundation of their childhood. There's certainly no logic to deciding something religious is responsible for reality when it's obviously one of the many things we are unlikely to ever know the true reason for - mainly because it's recursive: e.g. if "God" created all this, then how did God come to be? Then how did that come to be? Etc. Etc. Etc.

    Are you speaking of Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem? Sorry if that’s not the correct name. I call it the N+1 problem personally (long story), but the gist is that we can’t observe our universe in its entirety without looking from a higher dimension with at least one more axis.

    I think that’s essentially the recursiveness you’re speaking of: we cannot study our reality because it requires a perspective/view point that’s located outside of it. Correct?

  • No you won’t, because that’d be a knee-jerk reaction resulting from the lack of consideration/understanding of the other, so not so dissimilar to religious zealousness, which you disapprove of judging by that knee-jerk reaction.

  • I did brush up on Buddhism amongst others during my youth, although not very deeply because I couldn’t do that for all religions without dedicating my entire life to that pursuit. Some things made sense, some are more contextual and require a certain lingual/cultural background/upbringing that I lacked, as is the case with most religions (mine included). A lot of nuance is lost in the translation. Not to mention that this was the early Internet and before machine translation was a thing. Most of that knowledge came from forum discussions, irc, and through books.

    As for the Baha’i faith: I’ll admit I’m not very familiar. I might look it up when I have some free time though!

  • They don’t have to. That’s the beauty of it. Some never do. I don’t fault them for it and never will.

    Agency implies choice. So any religion stating that god gave us agency is bound to respect that. It follows that anyone going against this fact or arguing that said agency precludes certain choices does not really understand what free will is, nor the true message being conveyed by their own faith. :)

  • Given the critical mind that led you to your current atheistic beliefs (what I did there? :P), you have to have developed a mature moral code. I’d argue that taking an oath on something at the core of your being would be more binding than taking one based on any external books or faith system. (Muslim here btw but I love philosophy)

    Most people of faith don’t realise how most atheists develop strong intrinsic morality by necessity during their journey. And I’m not saying that all atheists are morally superior! (Humans be humans)

    This is just an observation based on my experiences and discussions with most of the open-minded ones I’ve come across thus far.

    Education beats indoctrination any day. And the well-informed believer has to go through an atheism phase (to varying degrees, so YMMV) to be honest with themselves. Doubt is a perquisite of developing independent morality that confirms faith. At least that’s what I believe.

    Edit: also to anyone reading this, don’t ask me about religious stuff, I’m not an Imam or anything. Just someone who went through some heavy shit and had to think outside the framework to make their life work.

  • I’d really love to read that, but medium is just… not my thing. I hate that site so much.

    Have you considered writing on dev.to? I won’t promote it, extol any virtues, or try to convince you to go there. Just asking if you’re aware of it and others like it!

  • Pro tip:

    Washing: plain soap (organic/homemade soap is best, not that fancy scented/blended and chemically treated expensive shit). Rationale: plain soap doesn’t have additives (or herbal ones you can control/choose), any chemically treated (and factory made) product will have impurities and other random shit mixed in if they mix products on the assembly lines. (Happens all the time even in medicine!), the “advanced” shampoos are an excellent example: low volume/shared production lines. The contamination that makes chemistry teachers weep and build fly swatters from random equipment. And that’s why cheap products made in high volumes are more effective: minimal unintended chemical interactions because of dedicated assembly.

    Moisturising/conditioning/whatever: a light application of natural Shea butter , and one absolute drench once every week or two. The drenching treatment is recommended for the first time though. Rationale: same as the above, plus: Shea butter is what most “good” cosmetics use to begin with (although they most likely synthesise the fatty acids industrially to cut on costs, not sure tbh), but the point is that it has nearly everything your body needs to build healthy hair (though not only for hair, it’s also great for skin care!)

    If you try this, you’ll see immediate results after drying, but see the full effect after an entire week of doing it daily. You can thank me then! :P

    Also don’t overdo it! Once a day/every two days is good enough.

    Rationale: Over-washing/conditioning is terrible for the follicles/scalp in the long term because it prevents your body from building up the natural oils/chemicals it needs to defend you from parasites and microbes that do the damage in the first place! The soap acts like a “reset” button that takes away all the byproducts/dead microbes/skin piling up due to its dual hydrophilic/lipophilic nature that sticks to anything it can bond with, and the Shea butter moisturisation step acts like a temporary replacement for the natural oils you lose in the washing AND gives the body some much needed nourishment/material it can immediately use to rebuild while being absorbed through the skin.

    Disclaimer: this is just an informed analysis/observation from empirical evidence, and it is not based on any actual formalised research that I’ve read or studied. (Which might actually exist, dunno because I have an allergy to academia as it currently stands)

  • I think the last line is.

  • That’s not the problem though. Because if I apply my perspective I see this:

    Someone took a shortcut because of an external time-crunch, left a comment about how this is a bad idea and how we should reimplement this properly later.

    But the code worked and was deployed in a production environment despite the warning, and at that specific point it transformed from being “abstract procedural logic” to being “business logic”.

  • Yeah, but what I meant was: we took a wrong turn along the way, but now that it’s set in stone, sunk cost fallacy took over. We (as senior developers) are applying knowledge and approaches obtained through a trap we would absolutely caution and warn a junior against until the lesson sticks, because it IS a big deal.

    Reminds me of this gem:

    https://www.monkeyuser.com/2018/final-patch/