wjrii

joined 2 years ago
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[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 25 points 20 hours ago

AI does a perfectly fine job summarizing my boring work meetings, but the entire point of those is to be straightforward and unambiguous and in line with previous similar meetings. You cannot trust generative AI to interpret anything with even a modicum of subtlety or novelty. At best it will give you a slop-rack of a framework you can wrestle into something mediocre but basically usable for a specific purpose.

But a twenty-percent efficiency upgrade with a low ceiling on its quality is not what they're all selling. AI is real, it's here to stay, but good god I can't wait for the bubble to pop so LLMs can settle into the limited use cases where they add value.

[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

Read the updates in the links too, if you haven't seen the developments elsewhere. AD is involved, one mess after another.

[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 63 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

"Language models don't apply to us because this is not a language problem," Nesterenko explained. "If you ask it to actually create a blueprint, it has no training data for that. It has no context for that...." Instead, Quilter built what Nesterenko describes as a "game" where the AI agent makes sequential decisions — place this component here, route this trace there — and receives feedback based on whether the resulting design satisfies electromagnetic, thermal, and manufacturing constraints.... The approach mirrors DeepMind's progression with its Go-playing systems.

This is kind of interesting and cool, and it's not a hallucinating LLM. I've designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.

[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And both are delicious.

 

Fun to see/hear something from before the hobby blew up, but after Model M's were "retro."

[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Thank you. That looks plausible and should keep the mental wolves at bay, LOL.

[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Okay, somebody here has to know of have better image searching skills than I do. What is the Visor prop? It's clearly not a spray-painted hair clip like (the inspiration for) Geordi's, but it doesn't look bespoke, more like some sort of removable support rib from... something. Grrr.

[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (5 children)

I don't seem to hear as much anymore, but for a long time this was me with EVE Online.

[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

I believe the timing works out such that his wife was pregnant during the relationship as well.

 

Can't be a terrible person if you don't also make the playoff.

AAANNNDD… he got arrested. Holy poop.

[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 14 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think there's something about the parasitic nature of it, taking over an otherwise healthy ear of corn. We tend to think of our edible fungi as growing out of the dirt like a plant, or a fallen tree, or at worst sort of calmy sitting on top of whatever it is using for its own food. THe fact that this has invaded kernels makes them very bad corn kernels and triggers something instinctive. Corn smut is one of those "the first person to try this was in a bad spot" kind of foods.

[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 73 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Legitimate? Basically none. Illegitimate? First, lazily fixing a fuckup on putting up strings of Christmas lights where you can't daisy chain them properly, with bonus points for the likeliehood of needing to break off the grounding pin. Second, injecting power from a generator into a single circuit of your house if the power is out.

In one sense, you could argue conductors are conductors and if you think through every eventuality you can mitigate risk, but on the other, if you find you're in a situation where one of these seems useful, you are not the type of person thinks through every eventuality.

[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

I would have preferred my Jags come out of the weekend with a two game lead, but I can find some solace in the utterly inglorious failure of this Chiefs season and, hopefully, dynasty.

Harrison Butker in particular can fuck right off.

[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago

Unfortunate that Indiana Jones got hurt, but I do love seeing the return of OG Jellybean Jag.

 

I had spare PCBs left over from an earlier project. I got the Signature Plastics DSS Honeywell keycaps on sale from a vendor who was closing down. I made the plate design using online tools, then cut it and the bottom plate on my home laser. I designed the 3D-printed case to look like the original terminal keyboards that inspired the keycaps. I used black switches because a heavy linear feels right for something like this. Firmware is QMK/VIAL. More info here. There's much that could be better, but I'm pleased with how it came out.

 

Obviously an insanely imperfect analogy, but kind of fun to noodle on, after having the initial thought actually in the shower. At the simplest level, do you need to cram multiple epic adventure tales, liberally dosed with didactic religious content, into a single human brain? Meter and repetition and tropes become your best friend. Beyond that though, there are still ways that poetic techniques pack more meaning into fewer words than prose, which gets described as "poetic" when it effectively does the same things.

If you find the right turn of phrase, the combination of sound, connotation, and (hopefully) shared cultural touchstones (""Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"?) means you can describe an entire scene effectively without the multiple paragraphs otherwise needed to set out every morpheme of intended communication. Now, as pages of writing become cheaper and more accessible, they also take over the use cases where efficiency of communication was imposed rather than sought, but the toolbox remains there for those who simply like the exercise, or where there is still value, such as in verbal communication tied to a musical arrangement that needs to wrap things up before the audience loses interest. Also like compression, there are libraries that need to be installed and processing overhead involved to decompress the meaning that has been encoded into fewer words than strictly necessary.

Limitations to the analogy I'm already thinking of: Subtext exists regardless of how wordy you are. It might be a false dichotomy to think you can separate poetry from music at all.

 
 

Keyboard from 2010 built by TG3 for a Siemens chemistry analyzer. I cleaned it up, added some weight to the bottom, and converted to USB. Cherry MX Black and PBT Dye-subbed DCS caps. Take a peek at what should be F9 and F10 (and are after conversion), as well as some of the keys above the numpad, which, tangentially, now has 5 keys that do absolutely nothing related to what's written on them.

 

Keyboard is one I first made a year or so ago, but recently upgraded a little. DIY with laser-cut Masonite plate, 3D printed sides, Outemu "mid height" Black switches, and JWA PBT low-profile keycaps with DIY legends. KMK firmware on an RP2040 dev board.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35772689

Putting the cart before the horse a bit here, as I haven’t been writing much lately, but I got this education market ARM Chrome tablet pretty cheap and followed some instructions to get it fully converted to Linux. ChromeOS is gone. It’s running Debian Trixie via the “velvetOS” project. I could’ve just used the Linux container in chrome OS, but everything has such high guardrails that even the most minor of customizations got very frustrating. Anyway, I specifically picked the 10E because it was known to at least mostly support Linux.

Some limitations, as the camera doesn’t work, I don’t think the external speakers work (could be specific to this particular boot image), and on full boot I have to manually rotate the screen to make sure the touchscreen coordinates stay aligned with the display. Otherwise it works surprisingly well.

Firefox is probably too slow on this old MT8183 with 4 GB of RAM, but it is much faster on the EMMC install compared to the USB, and it was not torture to go online and grab a couple of files directly. The word processor is Focuswriter with their green theme tweaked to amber and it runs perfectly. Suspend/resume is working well enough with auto-login that I can just leave Focuswriter up. Battery life is an open question, but before I wiped it, Chrome OS reported it had 96% battery health 🤷. With a mobile-grade SoC, and with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi turned off, I’m optimistic it won’t be too bad.

I also fixed up one of my DIY mechanical keyboards, and I think it’s a pretty nice little writing setup. Right now, I just have Wi-Fi turned off, but I could theoretically strip out the drivers altogether, or (if I remember correctly), even take the Wi-Fi module out of this one. I opened it briefly to short out the hardware write protection on the firmware, but forgot to look for the Wi-Fi card. As an aside, this was by far the easiest I could imagine a tablet being to service — zero glue connecting screen to case.

 

Putting the cart before the horse a bit here, as I haven’t been writing much lately, but I got this education market ARM Chrome tablet pretty cheap and followed some instructions to get it fully converted to Linux. ChromeOS is gone. It’s running Debian Trixie via the “velvetOS” project. I could’ve just used the Linux container in chrome OS, but everything has such high guardrails that even the most minor of customizations got very frustrating. Anyway, I specifically picked the 10E because it was known to at least mostly support Linux.

Some limitations, as the camera doesn’t work, I don’t think the external speakers work (could be specific to this particular boot image), and on full boot I have to manually rotate the screen to make sure the touchscreen coordinates stay aligned with the display. Otherwise it works surprisingly well.

Firefox is probably too slow on this old MT8183 with 4 GB of RAM, but it is much faster on the EMMC install compared to the USB, and it was not torture to go online and grab a couple of files directly. The word processor is Focuswriter with their green theme tweaked to amber and it runs perfectly. Suspend/resume is working well enough with auto-login that I can just leave Focuswriter up. Battery life is an open question, but before I wiped it, Chrome OS reported it had 96% battery health 🤷. With a mobile-grade SoC, and with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi turned off, I’m optimistic it won’t be too bad.

I also fixed up one of my DIY mechanical keyboards, and I think it’s a pretty nice little writing setup. Right now, I just have Wi-Fi turned off, but I could theoretically strip out the drivers altogether, or (if I remember correctly), even take the Wi-Fi module out of this one. I opened it briefly to short out the hardware write protection on the firmware, but forgot to look for the Wi-Fi card. As an aside, this was by far the easiest I could imagine a tablet being to service — zero glue connecting screen to case.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35448022

Belichick's pettiness reaches a new level.

TCU broke his last brain cell. Go Frogs.

 

My current project is a "Writer Deck," a low-powered computer that boots directly to a text editor or word processor (RPi Zero booting to Wordgrinder, btw). Being the weirdo that I am, I also want to use this as an opportunity to try a split layout again, and see if I can get myself used to something other than the "Advanced Hunt and Peck" that I do now and that tops out at 60 or maaaaybe 70 wpm. The deasign I've come up with is a split monoblock based heavily on a Corne, but with a very modest split angle and the thumb cluster (1) shoved a bit farther under the hands and (2) built around 1.25u keys because they can be adapted to switch-stabilized 2.25u or 2.75u (see the green outlines). The whole thing fits in the Pok3r/GH60 footprint.

So, ergo-mech people, is this a completely silly layout? I have always felt that "literally never moving your hands" isn't necessarily as ergonomic for the average typist as has been promoted, and I do like a good nav cluster, but I also wonder if I've compromised too much to hit that footprint, especially with moving the thumb cluster away from the center. The intended use case will be much more prose (journaling and other creative writing) than code, so I'm less concerned about optimizing for programming. I've never had major RSI issues myself, just needing to switch from a mouse to a trackball for a little bit every year or two.

 

NGL, Roll Call is often at least as good as Shorts these days.

Please pay no attention to the fact that Matt Mitchell confessed to being a Florida fan in an interview with PAWWWWLL. That is not relevant to my opinion.

 

It's only been a week, but I kind of hate them. Considering old-man bifocals now.

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