My fucking CPU comment was not that serious. The projects we were doing were just that. I have a notebook full of diagrams that I understand less and less every year.

It was just a bit shitty that the CPU part wasn’t included with the chip itself. IIRC the nicer ones had hardware CPUs/CPU cores anyway.

I meant it more as “hey I need to do this simple task, better write a processor real quick” which is not convenient. I’m almost certain there are dozens of FOSS RISC cores that could be burned to all of Xilinx’s FPGAs. It’s theoretically hardware agnostic but these are super popular parts.

I was a student and this was the first time I really felt like programmery things were paywalled. I think the licenses were per-deployment but free for education.

I think people who learned about programming in a previous generation may be more comfortable with things being very proprietary, and arguably the newest batches of people learning it in the slop era too. But until that point everything I touched had a free (as in beer) or free-ish equivalent. I remember the professor being very excited about the Chinese less closed down stuff, saying it didn’t matter that it was slower for a lot of applications.

The world of FPGA is full of proprietary hardware and software blocks sadly. I haven’t dabbled since being a student but I remember finding it extremely jarring how on one hand you basically could write whatever hardware blocks you wanted (the freedom is comparable to learning programming all over again but in a fundamentally different way), but also you had super optimized “IP blocks” of software you can pull in like a paid library that you had to license. These blocks make the damn chip much more powerful for those of us not willing to write a fucking CPU, what the fuck do you mean DLC for the chip on my lab table?

Vivado was a bit of a pain but not too bad as far as proprietary software goes. There’s more steps involved than just burning a .hex to a regular microcontroller, the debugging is different, I get it, another program makes sense.

Personally I don’t write much code these days but I find myself yearning for like MS Visual Studio 2008. If I ever want to go back to programming on the side I will probably have to figure out my IDE situation from scratch. VS Community seems nice but there’s a lot of unnecessary features and of course Microslop’s grubby fingers all over it

Seeing this post I had to bang it out, on an old game I have on my phone that I probably bought 15 years ago.

I only missed Cape Verde and Seychelles! Still got it

I wish their stuff didn’t get as widely marketed as it did. They seem like luxury little hardware toys and exactly like something that can stimulate me back into making more projects. But they are universally known as “those hacking things for thieves”, so even importing one can get me into hot water probably.

Nice step up, so this is the Pi Zero one if the Zero was the Pico one (try saying that three times quickly). Cool

I’m aniseed 🥀

I mean this is an extreme case. The booing warms my heart but everyone I know who is in teaching is either 100% on the Kool Aid IV drip or absolutely crashing out over what they feel is the end of organized society.

An old friend of mine was a younger, well liked middle school teacher who was very motivated to get the kids interested in actually wanting to seek out more stuff and to nurture that, since our curricula here are ancient. She quit this year. Outright. Mid fucking year. She says that in French the chatbots are even more repetitive and every student from the most inattentive to the “best” seems incapable to hand in any essay without at least running it through the slop machine for good measure.

The infinitesimally thin silver lining is that I’m not just hearing of AI fatigue online.

But the kids call it lies, they say “that’s AI” to mean that’s a hoax, they call their memes brainrot, so the self awareness is there. Then they completely fall apart on writing and researching. I was a dreadfully unfocused categorically shit student with a bad work ethic at school and even I’m offended

New bit idea: guy who insists he doesn’t have any internalized racism to confront, since he doesn’t have a sexual preference for interracial scenes, he simply believes they are better from a composition and cinematography perspective

“Semantic search” / “semantic indexing”. Yes. Would be a great thing to optionally have. But you don’t need to hook it up to a prompt and have it spit out natural language output.

It could be just like a standard search with search results, just with a backend that looks at more stuff based on meaning not just explicit word matching. And search engines have worked like this for years to be fair.

But I agree, the general purpose chatbots are probably helpful to get a foothold on looking something up when you don’t really know what it’s called or how to concisely describe it. The problem is that the companies that make them have every incentive to feed you their explanation too, not just point you in the right direction and have you leave their service.

Not creating and searching as far as I understand (or as far as I’m willing to allow it to in this case) but more summarizing, truncating, some but not all types of rewording (not technical parts for example).

They’re getting better at extracting information out of a closed set of data, but it’s still literally impossible to guarantee that it won’t generate a contradictory or unwanted piece of text that looks very close to the right thing, based off the training data inherent to the model.

But the “best” case is something closed ended where you know what the output is. So cleaning up a tiny piece of code, summarizing something that you provide in its entirety, translating a block of text, that’s all a good use case. Using it to distill the entire web’s information into a chatbot format? Fuck no

The entire problem is people thinking this tool that can turn text input into soup and reliably pull text back out of said soup is something it just is not.

Most of the models I’ve played with before the boom were not instruct models. So you didn’t prompt them and have them churn out slop that sounds like the answer to your question. Instead you just wrote text (story, article heading, etc) and it would continue the pattern. The results were “worse” in quality, but because we only thought to use it a specific way, it felt like a very powerful new tool.

My enthusiasm for this shit has fallen through the floor in 2022 and presently is about 18% through the earth’s outer crust

I had this exact conversation with an (online) coworker. I will just feel compelled to drink cups of water, sometimes multiple in a row, and feel refreshed. They don’t exactly taste good but we’re wired to find it pleasant.

My coworker said he had to basically remember to drink water. When he’s exercising it’s more instinctual.

Well I was shocked the first time I actually met this coworker, at the Dubai office where he works from. The water there felt wrong! Apparently I was having good tasting water my whole life. I was kind of dehydrated the entire trip. Literally all the water there didn’t feel refreshing, honestly. It comes out of desalination factories, I get it, it’s still water, but it’s something to think about. I’ve appreciated my delicious Lebanese mineral water a lot more since then.

I hope this doesn’t sound out of touch, I understand most people in many countries can just drink tap water safely, and bottled is seen as a luxury and not a cheap necessity like it is here. But maybe try changing the water? All the answers here feel blasphemous to me. Cucumbers? Flavors?

Huh. I picked that up from a used book stand on a whim just based on the tile and skimming it, like ten years ago. I should probably read it.

USian here. My refrigerator expects (and is legally required to have) a dedicated branch circuit of fifteen or twenty amps with nothing else on it.

Does any fridge use 1,800W? Even at peak? A small freeze-dryer? I’m holding off on making cheap jokes at the expense of American cuisine, your fridge might be legally over provisioned for some reason, but it’s not drawing this much power. My entire house idles at about 1.1~1.5A, or about 250~350W, if nothing is running but the absolute essentials. And that’s a relevant number for me, I do solar! I do batteries! Every little bit counts. Fridge is the most important thing to power, and literally everything else comes after.

During the financial meltdown/pandemic people ran their fridges for eight or less hours a day because there was just not enough diesel. That’s the time we decided to splurge on solar. If you want more fun anecdotes, during that time I was waiting in line for 3-4 hours for fuel, and then bribing the attendant more than the value of the fuel to let me fill over 20 liters. Not fun times. And I’m someone who was lucky enough to be able to pay his way through the worst of it.

I’m in Lebanon. I too count my blessings. It’s not culturally mandatory to strand your kids at 18 here, nor culturally accepted to have them dodge bullets at school. So you know. Even at the peak of people being harassed by Hafez’s secret police, people were not getting snatched on the street en masse. I don’t have the mental scaffolding to even begin to grapple with your reality my dear. Using the gas because the microwave is unavailable until tomorrow, temporarily stealing my neighbor’s water, angling for favor with feudal lords’ bureaucrats… Problems yes, but problems I understand.

I hope I’m not being too mean here, the US still fascinates me in a way no other potential new home does, even with everything happening right now. How’s that for perspective.

Where I live most people actually do think of household electricity in terms of instantaneous current draw. The power grid is insufficient, so you get rationed grid power throughout the day depending on what area you live in, with the rest filled in by mob-run local power generators.

You pay a subscription based on the maximum amperage and you have to manage your power use accordingly.

🤓☝️ Um that’s functionally the same as a power limit

Yes, but it’s ampere based because it’s managed by a breaker out on the street, and the ampere limit is colloquially understood. “I’m paying for 5A, the bastard won’t give me more” is a perfectly understandable statement. When I was 7 years old I already understood that “we only have 5 amperes during most of the day” and that it meant the microwave wasn’t available during that time. And since the breaker is out on the street, you learn your limit very quickly, since you have to get dressed and go down a few flights of stairs in the freezing cold to turn it back on. If you have an elevator in your building, it sure as shit isn’t running when the generator power is active.

Annoying when you’re using solar to escape this hell electrical system and everyone has to re-learn to think in terms of Watts/VA. I have a table printed out stuck to the wall to “convert” between amps and Watts at 230V. Do you want to explain to grandma which devices are intuitively at 1kW≈1kVA and which are not? No? Then let her keep using amperes, it’s fine.

Yes, the power generators run off diesel, yes, the diesel fumes and generator noise is a problem, yes, we get price gouged by both the generator mobs and the government grid, yes, I hate dieselpunk and think diesel is the most disgusting fuel. The generators give you a much closer wave to 230@50Hz though, so it has that over the grid. Was solar the most expensive thing we’ve ever paid for? Yes. Does it make me feel like a king with a 24 hour battery-backed microwave? Also yes

…No? I’m pretty sure that was the first massive wave of relatively diverse active users. Lemmy was pretty fringe before that happened. I think there are tens of thousands of us.