• 0 Posts
  • 45 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
Cake day: January 28th, 2026
  • GaumBeist@lemmy.mltoProgramming@programming.dev•I'm OK being left behind, thanks!
    6·
    7 days ago

    I agree with the sentiment, but I do have to argue with some of his points (because it’s fun, and it’s okay to do things just for the hell of it). Excellent point, ineffectively articulated

    I wrote my MSc on The Metaverse. Learning to built VR stuff was fun, but a complete waste of time. There was precisely zero utility in having gotten in early… But I’m struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first.

    You’re your own counterexample. You got to experience the metaverse when it was still alive, which you wouldn’t have if you had waited for just a few years. And you got a Masters Degree out of it, not just bragging rights.

    But I’m struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first. Some early investors made money

    So you’re not struggling that much if you can start of the next sentence with an example of people who earned more than just bragging rights.

    But I’m struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first. Some early investors made money - but an equal and opposite number lost money.

    This grossly overestimates the ratio of successes to failures. You’re muuuuuuch more likely to lose money on the gamble of The Next Big Thing than win; for every HTTP there’s a Gopher and Usenet and a dozen others that all look the same from the outside looking in.

    For every HTML 2.0 you might have tried, you were just as likely to have got stuck in the dead-end of Flash.

    Flash is a terrible example, it ran its lifecycle already, sure, but it was HUGE back in the day. And people benefited from using it; some of my favorite animators and gamedevs cut their teeth on Flash, people’s work got recognized by a global audience, people landed jobs, Flash made it onto cable TV channels, people still light up at the mention of Homestar Runner to this day. People also made money, sure, but there are more benefits to playing with tech than “it makes money happen.”

    Which brings me to my final gripe: this is all framed as if the only benefit of a technology is if it’s productive or profitable. When you discuss your favorite show with friends, are you considering whether the conversation can be converted into capital? When you watch a beautiful sunset, do you fret over whether the clouds will help you achieve your quarterly goals? Out on dates with your SOs, do you have to take a break in the bathroom to worry whether the evening is meeting KPIs?

    Sometimes the benefit of things is just having the experience, instead of treating it as a means to an end. Yeah, don’t let the FOMO ruin your day, but maybe take some time to play around with a doomed technology before it becomes abandoned and the community ceases to be. Maybe you’ll become a recognized expert, maybe you’ll learn some valuable lessons you can transfer to tech with more longevity, or maybe you’ll just have fun.

    And honestly, whats the fucking point of living, working and grinding and suffering, if not for the fun in between it all?

  • GaumBeist@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•out of the loop, what's the problem with signal?
    11·
    7 days ago

    Just looked at Session, and holy shit is that a massive downside…

    From their own whitepaper:

    Through the integration of a blockchain network, Session adds a financial requirement for anyone wishing to host a server on the network, and thus participate in Session’s message storage and routing architecture.

    So you have to pay to self-host, and that’s somehow an upside???

    This staking system provides a defence against Sybil attacks by limiting attackers based on the amount of financial resources they have available.

    Which is a fine explanation in a world where everyone has a relatively equal amount of wealth. This is the epitome of dunning-kruger economics: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

    Firstly, the need for attackers to buy or control Session Tokens to run Session Nodes creates a market feedback loop which increases the cost of acquiring sufficient tokens to run large portions of the network. That is, as the attacker buys or acquires more tokens and stakes them, removing them from the circulating supply, the supply of the Session Token is decreased while the demand from the attacker must be sustained. This causes the price of any remaining Session Tokens to increase, creating an increasing price feedback loop which correlates with the scale of the attack

    So the more nodes a single entity holds, the harder it becomes for other entities to buy nodes and break the monopoly? Did you take 3 seconds to think this through???

    Secondly, the staking system binds an attacker to their stake, meaning if they are found to be performing active attacks, the underlying value of their stake is likely to decline as users lose trust in the protocol, or could be slashed by the network, increasing the sunk cost for the attacker.

    “Assuming every user is a perfectly rational actor, malicious actors would be shunned. This is somehow due to the economic incentive, and not just how humans operate when they’re assumed to be perfectly rational.”

    Also: malicious actors when they find out they might lose their money if they get caught: “welp, I better not do that then. Thanks laissez-faire capitalism!”

    Jesus christ fucked on a pike, these dipshits really drank the crypto kool-aid, huh?

  • GaumBeist@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.ml•I think i am ready to switch from windows and need advice
    1·
    28 days ago

    There’s nothing I can say to convince you Ubuntu is sucky if you don’t personally experience problems with it/have the occasional “I wish I could do this, but I guess it’s not possible” thoughts—spoiler: it’s usually possible, just not with that distro; this is true for all distros though, there will always be things they cannot do that others can.

    That being said, my biggest gripe with Ubuntu, besides canonical’s geologic-paced attempts to make it profit-driven (which was what I was thinking of when I mentioned user-friendliness), is Snaps. I understand the motivation behind them, but the implementation was just sucky for many nitpicky reasons that I don’t really care to enumerate rn.

    I also just don’t see much value in downstream for my needs. I can basically turn Debian into a Ubuntu clone if I want to, and my packages will still largely be supported by upstream maintainers. For bespoke distros it makes sense, but those are usually ill-maintained or hobby projects that update at glacial speeds.

    I’m not saying that Debian >>>>> Ubuntu. It’s better just enough that I’d recommend Debian before I would recommend Ubuntu.

  • GaumBeist@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.ml•I think i am ready to switch from windows and need advice
    261·
    1 month ago

    I had very few issues with a GTX 970 and i7-4790k. The only issues I hear about with either any more is the linux kernel not supporting some of the features of newer GPUs (e.g. I know ray-tracing was a pain-point at one point).

    I don’t like recommending distros based on such a general use case, mainly because every distro can be tweaked and configured to exactly what you want. Instead, you should research the different mainline distros that have been around for decades—Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Guix, NixOS, OpenSuse, Slackware—and see what they’re about, what sets them apart from others, what the maintainers’ philosophies are, and what kind of package management system they work with. Once one sounds better than the others, look into it and try it out.

    #Dos and Don’ts:

    Don’t try a niche distro. They are harder to troubleshoot and less likely to be actively maintained.

    Don’t use Ubuntu. It’s just a suckier version of Debian. It used to be user-friendly Debian, but now Debian is more user-friendly than it.

    Don’t dual-boot with windows. This just solidifies your reliance on windows, especially if you’re the type to give up on problem-solving issues that you didn’t have in Windows. It also can cause issues with making Linux unbootable.

    Do try a live usb with persistence before you commit entirely. It’s not exactly the same as a complete install, but it’s close enough to let you know how the OS feels and what hardware will or won’t work with it. Some people say try a VM first, but that won’t have direct hardware access.

    Do problem solve the little things. Anything that irks you or bothers you or just slows down your workflow. It doesn’t have to be an actual bug or glitch, just anything that could be better. This not only solidifies the feeling of ownership over your OS—you no longer have to settle for anyone else’s lousy design choices—it teaches you the resources for troubleshooting larger issues.

    Do plan around things not being plug and play at first. Want to test if a game runs on Linux? Great, set aside a couple of hours beforehand: first to install steam and set it up, then to figure out Proton, then to troubleshoot the game not even booting up, then to fix any glitches or whatnot, then to get your controller working. This won’t always be the case, but it will irk you a lot less when it is if you expect it. The more you make time for solving these issues now, the less time they’ll take up in the future (either they’ll be gone, or you’ll immediately know how to fix them, or your troubleshooting will be more streamlined).

    Do set aside time to learn about Linux “under the hood.” You don’t have to become a computer scientist, but it will save you a lot of headaches, show you cool things you can do, and make your computer a smoother experience. It especially helps if you take the time to learn as they come up: e.g. installer asks you what “bootloader” you want, but you’re not sure what that is, what it does, or why it’s necessary? Now’s the best time to take a little learning detour.

    Do ask questions on forums.

    Don’t listen to the people who shame you for asking.

    Do listen to the people who try to show you a better way of doing things, even if it’s not your way.

  • GaumBeist@lemmy.mltoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?
    52·
    1 month ago

    What do I think?

    I think anyone who claims to know and understand every aspect of the world as it truly is resides at the top of Mt. Stupid on the Dunning-Kruger graph (yes, I know it’s a disproved theory, but it’s still a useful descriptor of the way some people behave).

    I also think anyone who believes in phenomena with little to know evidence can never actually end up on the right side of the bell curve meme (a curve that is also the result of faulty science, but still illustrative of some humans’ experiences).

    I also think that terms like “ghost” or “magic” or “miracle” have so many connotations and interpretations, that it’s easy for miscommunication to happen if people don’t spell out exactly what they mean when talking about them.

    I think ghosts are real in the sense that I believe people experience things they can’t explain, and so resort to blaming invisible sentiences, and I believe those experiences are real; I have many doubts over their explanations of those experiences.

    I also think that anyone who enters into a discussion holding my stance, but framing it as “ghosts are real,” is looking more to start an argument than have an actual meaningful discussion.