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To date, what do you think is the greatest invention or discovery and why?
  • It's hard to choose, but I would say the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production. It's a miracle of chemistry that almost single-handedly vaporized the population doomers. As much as half of the nitrogen in your body comes from Haber-process-derived synthetic fertilizer!

  • What ever happened to nanotechnology? Seems like it disappeared.
  • I mean... you're surrounded by trillions of perfect nanotech devices. They're called MOSFETs, and they make literally the entire modern world go round.

  • YouTube is finally cracking down on third-party apps like ReVanced
  • We need better alternatives

    We'd need a quantum leap in storage and bandwidth first - orders of magnitude better, if we want competing to be financially sane 😮‍💨

    Maybe when Google is (hopefully eventually) shattered into a million pieces by some US judge, YouTube could be splintered into several smaller companies, each with some portion of the infrastructure and channels/videos - thus forcing competition. Vaguely similar to the Bell divestiture.

  • Deleted
    Do any of you feel tired ALL the time?
  • I suspect I get mild SAD in the winters. Not enough to feel truly depressed, just more of a constant low-level "damn, I wanna nap right now."

    It's probably different from your case, but what helped me was a sunlight lamp (light therapy) and a grab bag of supplements - standard multivitamins as well as magnesium pills and vitamin D fortified milk.

  • Critical Rust flaw enables Windows command injection attacks
  • Oof. Looks like this affected some other languages as well - somebody at Microsoft needs to up their documentation game, methinks.

  • What is the stupidest school rule you've ever had to deal with?
  • Snowball throwing was banned because a nephew of a friend of a friend of a teacher was supposedly blinded by one.

    FWIW, this can actually happen, although I still think that's an overbearing rule. One of my younger siblings had a teacher who was blind in one eye - ice shards from a snowball when she was in elementary.

  • What’s the worst car you’ve ever driven?
  • Chevy Suburban. I volunteered to drive for a university course field trip and it's what I got stuck with.

    • Unresponsive fatass brick of a vehicle. I mean, come on, a minivan has more cargo space and the same passenger capacity without three light aircraft worth of inertia.
    • Dashboard sucked. It took me a solid three minutes to find the button shifts. (I know these can be done well - Honda does them right - but the PRNDL was fucking laid out in a thin row at the side of the dashboard. Huh?)
    • Overtaking damn near anything would redline the (very new, less than 10k miles) engine.
  • Free VPN apps on Google Play turned Android phones into proxies
  • I'm not well versed in the machinations of the Chinese government, but if a relatively "normie" VPN like Nord works in China... it's probably controlled opposition (i.e. they're logging everything to a government server.)

  • What do you think about the Gemini protocol?
  • I understand the sentiment, but... HTML and some light CSS is just as fast and much more accessible. It just strikes me as something that defines itself in opposition to "thing everyone uses" for no good reason.

  • Remember when Google made their assistant worse and we all predicted they were planning on bringing the same features back but using AI bullshit?
  • set timers

    This broke for me a few months ago. It just randomly... won't start, despite saying otherwise.

  • OpenAI introduces Sora, its text-to-video AI model
  • That sounds like more effort than just... writing the code.

  • What's with all the tech layoffs?
  • A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic.

    Tragically, this seems to be the minority viewpoint - at least among CS students. A lot of my peers seem to have convinced themselves that the hallucination machines are intelligent... even when it vomits unsound garbage into their lap.

    This is made worse by the fact that most of our work is simple and/or derivative enough for $MODEL to usually give the right answer, which reinforces the majority "thinking machine" viewpoint - while in reality, generating an implementation of & using only ~ and | is hardly an Earth-shattering accomplishment.

    And yes, it screws them academically. It doesn't take a genius to connect the dots when the professor who encourages Copilot use has a sub-50% test average.

  • Removed
    How is nicotine legal?
  • My guy, see a doctor. Temporary blindness/blacking out is not a normal reaction to nicotine, even in excess. "Nic sick" should just mean nausea/vomiting, dizziness and headaches.

  • What is your favourite font for code ?
  • Can't beat Iosevka in my opinion. I use the Term variant for my shell as well.

  • What decorations are on your walls?
  • A few posters I bought from the campus poster sale at the start of the year. (Specifically, a woodblock print, a solar system map and a Cowboy Bebop poster.)

    I have a huge window with a nice view (in a university owned apartment no less!) so I can afford to skimp on the other walls.

  • Fitbit details app updates to address redesign criticism, dark mode
  • Too late, already moved to Garmin after my third dead Charge 5 in ~1.5 years.

  • do you think the framework laptop is a good long term investment?
  • At least five years. Even if the company goes under tomorrow, it'll be a while before the mainboard is truly obsolete. The main "consumable" would be the battery, which I can probably hack a replacement for if official parts are no longer available.

  • do you think the framework laptop is a good long term investment?
  • I've had mine (first generation 13" model) for over a year now. I'm very happy with it, and I intend to make it last me through university (3 years) and then some. I would consider it a good investment for me.

  • Intentionally corrupting LLM training data?

    Inspired by the comments on this Ars article, I've decided to program my website to "poison the well" when it gets a request from GPTBot.

    The intuitive approach is just to generate some HTML like this:

    <p> // Twenty pages of random words </p>

    (I also considered just hardcoding twenty megabytes of "FUCK YOU," but that's a little juvenile for my taste.)

    Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with ML beyond a few basic concepts, so I'm unsure if this would get me the most bang for my buck.

    What do you smarter people on Lemmy think?

    (I'm aware this won't do much, but I'm petty.)

    12
    Found this blast from the past (2015) on an old hard drive

    I was 11 when I took this screenshot - Ubuntu 14.04 running on my very first (incredibly bad) PC. As I recall, I couldn't install Windows 7 without a DVD drive, and that was out of my budget :p

    Pretty sure I had it riced out with the Compiz cube and everything.

    16
    colonial colonial @lemmy.world

    Your friendly local programmer, uni student and *nix addict.

    Posts 2
    Comments 176