I am curious if they are going to reveal anything about Gideon S. Turner. I can’t entirely tell if Caleb is making stuff up and Tarima is playing along or if Gideon S. Turner has a very strange history.

I was confused by this. It came hot on the heels of a truly excessive number of historical name-drops and references, so I was like “Turner? Was he on…Enterprise? DS9? Did they mean Tucker? What’d I miss?”

It was a funny bit but it didn’t really land for me because of that.

Unrelated, but can you tell me how you set up your Mac OS 8 Platinum theme?

There is certainly a very big amount of fuckery going on right now with nvidia drivers.

“Right now” meaning every year for the past decade or two.

It’s always something with Nvidia drivers. Performance+stability is more the exception than the rule.

That said, AMD drivers have a bad rep too. Personally I’ve had zero issues since I switched to AMD but experiences seen to vary a lot from what I’ve read.

Before that, I don’t think I ever got through a full year without at least one weekend lost to troubleshooting Nvidia bullshit. CUDA is a pain in the ass even on Windows.

Jesus Christ what a dumb take. But at least they didn’t say that millennials are killing the cell phone industry. I guess that doesn’t make for good clickbait anymore.

Reminds me if the parable of the broken window, in which French economist Frédéric Bastiat explains the painfully-obvious truth that breaking windows is generally a bad thing, even though it drums up business for the glass maker.

But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

I blame Apple for setting the standard of $1-$3 for an app with lifetime updates. And also for making it so old apps stop working on newer OSes after just a few years. The business model was broken from the start. It was great at first but the bubble burst in record time.

That was nearly unheard of just 20 years ago.

The problem here is education.

And I’m not just talking about “average joes” who don’t know the first thing about statistics. It is mind-boggling how many people with advanced degrees do not understand the difference between correlation and causation, and will argue until they’re blue in the face that it doesn’t affect results.

AI is not helping. Modern machine learning is basically a correlation engine with no concept of causation. The idea of using it to predict the future is dead on arrival. The idea of using it in any prescriptive role in social sciences is grotesque; it will never be more than a violation of human dignity.

Billions upon billions of dollars are being invested in putting lipstick on that pig. At this point it is more lipstick than pig.

The actual paper presents the findings differently. To quote:

Our results clearly indicate that the resolution limit of the eye is higher than broadly assumed in the industry

They go on to use the iPhone 15 (461ppi) as an example, saying that at 35cm (1.15 feet) it has an effective “pixels per degree” of 65, compared to “individual values as high as 120 ppd” in their human perception measurements. You’d need the equivalent of an iPhone 15 at 850ppi to hit that, which would be a tiny bit over 2160p/UHD.

Honestly, that seems reasonable to me. It matches my intuition and experience that for smartphones, 8K would be overkill, and 4K is a marginal but noticeable upgrade from 1440p.

If you’re sitting the average 2.5 meters away from a 44-inch set, a simple Quad HD (QHD) display already packs more detail than your eye can possibly distinguish

Three paragraphs in and they’ve moved the goalposts from HD (1080p) to 1440p. :/ Anyway, I agree that 2.5 meters is generally too far from a 44" 4K TV. At that distance you should think about stepping up a size or two. Especially if you’re a gamer. You don’t want to deal with tiny UI text.

It’s also worth noting that for film, contrast is typically not that high, so the difference between resolutions will be less noticeable — if you are comparing videos with similar bitrates. If we’re talking about Netflix or YouTube or whatever, they compress the hell out of their streams, so you will definitely notice the difference if only by virtue of the different bitrates. You’d be much harder-pressed to spot the difference between a 1080p Bluray and a 4K Bluray, because 1080p Blurays already use a sufficiently high bitrate.

Does it do that even if you set it to “use device MAC” for the wi-fi network you’re on?

The exact location might depend on brand/OS, but in stock Android it’s in Settings > Network & Internet > Internet > gear icon next to active wi-fi network > Privacy.

The only thing I would use such a thing for is installing an ad blocker for the real world.

Representation…in AI image generation?

The idea that this is something anyone should want is hard to wrap my head around.

If I could opt out of being deepfake-able, I would.

🫡

WHAT in the name of Nelson Bearenstein Mandela’s monocle is this shit?

This can’t be true. I don’t think I’ve seen Bewitched since last millennium, but I guess I need to now.

It’s a very dumb way to say that population decline is predicted.

The birth rate really has dropped below replacement levels in the US. Immigration might not fill that gap. With how actively hostile the current administration is to immigrants, that seems likely.

If you can’t afford backups, you can’t afford storage. Anyone competent would factor that in from the early planning stages of a PB-scale storage system.

Going into production without backups? For YEARS? It’s so mind-bogglingly incompetent that I wonder if the whole thing was a long-term conspiracy to destroy evidence or something.

I’m sure she will take this opportunity to reflect and grow as a person.

Alien meaning “external”.

Electrical interference can come from all kinds of places, near and far. I guess technically you might get interference from other planets but I don’t think that’s what they meant. :) Solar flares are a possibility, though.

Thanks for posting the solution!

If you happen to be using a BTRFS or XFS file system, you might want to try duperemove. It will help you reclaim usable disk space without deleting any files, by using those filesystems’ built-in support for data deduplication and copy-on-write. In other words, it will make duplicate files point to the same data on disk, but still work as individual files. Files will appear and function exactly the same, and editing one copy will not change another (unlike with hard links, for example). That way it won’t interfere with cases like Flatpak or Python virtual environments where you really need multiple copies of the same files.

Oh. Well that sucks.

I think I remember you from before, if you’re the same Stamets. You posted a lot. I’ll join your new Risa then.

I very much enjoyed the start but steadily lost interest.

There’s some good stuff in Discovery all the way through, don’t get me wrong. But they kind of flipped the script in a way I did not appreciate.

Most of classic Trek showed us a future with a largely functional society, mostly full of good people who were ready and willing to deal with occasional corruption.

Lots of newer Trek, and especially Discovery, showed us a future where society is largely dysfunctional and corruption is the norm. Almost everyone in the series who isn’t a main character (plus a couple who are) is a piece of shit. Even the “good guys” frequently encourage or at least tolerate clearly evil behavior as long as it serves their ends. But it’s okay because…friendship I guess?!?

Their heart is in the right place but the writing is generally bad. I think this generation of writers is incapable of imagining a better world, which, sure, is understandable, given how thoroughly corrupt our current society is. But it’s deeply depressing. It lacks soul.

SNW is better in this regard. But you’ll probably want to watch season 1 of Discovery first since there’s some crossover.

Is there something wrong with https://startrek.website/?