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Cake day: February 28th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • Half the Boomers didn’t, either. It was they who got everyone started talking about the environment. They also built this fucking thing we’re typing on. Shit, the ability to divorce people if you need to was one of their biggest breakthroughs. I have no business kissing their butts, but you millennials? are fascist about this stuff and it has to end, now. Nobody has the luxury of your bullshit.

    Millennials are what, 40 now? Some freelancers writing sniveling articles about avocado toast 20 years ago does not allow you to desperately look for scapegoats to blame for everything that happens to you. Nobody cares if your parents are bad people, everyone else alive does not pay for that.

    Don’t fucking talk about voting until every last one of you is doing it. Fuck you for refusing to show for Clinton, THAT is on your head, so worry about your own crimes, you killed a lot of people by letting Trump through at the worst possible time, plus slacking off on all the other elections you didn’t even know existed, and if you don’t like that framing of responsibility, then fuck OFF about the baby boomers.

    How many times now have I seen you little bitches no-show? How many chuds have you made wealthy? Rogan and a bunch of these other right-wing fucks becoming wealthy for stupid podcasts is on your generation for listening to them. How many times have you stepped up for anything but self-pity? How many more excuses? I don’t care if you never get to buy a house, shut the FUCK up about it. Welcome to reality for, like, 99% of the global population.

    It ends. The next time I catch one of you talking about your “struggle” making 140k a year in stupid fucking Frisco, I swear to fuckin god. Everyone understands your living expenses just fine, you NEVER shut up about it, across what? 7 platforms? Somebody is making 25k in the same fuckin town, in a restaurant you’re too special to eat at, fuck your whining.

    Scapegoating is a bad, bad, bad habit that your entire generation seems to share, I think it’s a trauma thing. Don’t care. I just got done hoping that COVID didn’t kill me and my whole family over some trash job that exists so you and your family can bang the order button from safety. Fuuuuck you and your victimhood, you expected us to be all cool about that while you decided to have yourself a worker’s rights movement that we weren’t invited to unless we stayed obedient to your ideas for FUCK sake. It’s your responsibility to process your trauma, it’s nobody else’s responsibility to put up with your failure to do so.

    If you expect the millions of people who went under the bus for your convenience to just “get over it” and be all cool, then you will get the fuck over whatever is your problem and STOP trying to build solidarity with each other through scapegoating one group after the other. Who’s next after enough Boomers are dead? We know you won’t just drop that shit, it’s how you are, so who has to be your scapegoat next?

    None of us, globally, are ever going to be free of the conservatism that seems to be baked into roughly half of humanity, that causes all this grief.

    You think Boomers are bad? Some of the people on this Earth, we can’t discuss their evil without getting called xenophobic, good thing they’re all moving to live closer to you, so rise the fuck above, get over yourselves, and prepare your souls for that situation.

    Maybe, with some sort of coherent political will, we might be able to get a fucking leash on the wealthy, who are always at the root of our suffering, but not so long as you and your kind get played like a fucking harp, constantly spewing casual hatred on a generation of people who ultimately had no more control than yours does, and who aren’t anymore or less fashy than you fucks clearly are. THEY show up to vote, YOU bitch and do nothing.

    You’re 40! Fuck sake! This is teenage bullshit. You should have figured this out on your own by now. Enough.

    Get the fuck over it, now. Tell your fucking friends. People are holding YOU personally responsible for the Palestinian genocide because you aren’t doing enough about it, so see how you feel about being in the hot seat over shit you can’t control. Motherfuckers, goddamn.




  • It’s a video loop of cartoon Spiderman grasping at a disappearing mist. I guess it’s a gif but it also has a play/pause function so who knows what format it is.

    It’s hard to tell what will actually function on Lemmy. I think WebP files that aren’t jpegs have been causing grief too, I see a lot of blank posts that are probably that format. A ton of pictures are WebP now even though you’d expect an older format.

    Also I’m on desktop, so if you’re mobile that might explain things.







  • 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.



  • Beefalo@midwest.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlSalmon
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    1 year ago

    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.








  • Yahoo Finance managed to make itself real damn useful, and that’s one of the most lucrative ad markets, if not THE most lucrative.

    When I woke my Yahoo Mail account from its ancient slumber, everything was in Spanish for some reason, and I expect that reason is that they expanded outside the US and have a large user base in South America, where Yahoo probably doesn’t look as dead. “Free email” goes even farther when your country doesn’t get to have the world’s reserve currency. So Yahoo just defaulted to Spanish for accounts until I had to tell it I’m a gringo.

    Americans really do have a hard time remembering the rest of the globe exists, but our companies don’t, so a lot of companies that seem “dead” are just really active outside the US.

    So yeah, somebody is still using Yahoo News. Quite a lot of somebodies, actually. Even Americans. Especially Americans. They hooked us with real nice stock market quotes and such. That’s how you reel a Yankee back in, make it easy to see that revenue trend at a glance.