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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • Damn that’s very lucky. Every device with Nvidia hardware that I installed Linux on has at some point during updates or whatever gone to shit. However I must say that it has become way better in recent years. My Thinkpad was the worst because it was my first Linux device and it had an integrated Intel gpu and a dedicated Nvidia GPU and getting it to work was horror. In the end a friend of mine who was better at Linux just forced it to always use the Nvidia card because then at least stuff worked reliably ™.

    But even then it pretty much always died during Ubuntu release updates. I’ve nuked my whole system once because the screen went black (due to GPU drivers presumably) during one and after an hour or so I forcefully turned off the laptop because I couldn’t do anything anymore. After restarting into a tty my laptop was in some sort of limbo between 2 Ubuntu versions and I basically just had to reinstall.

    Ever since I made Linux (Arch btw) my main OS for gaming at the start of this year it has been quite stable though. I did switch to LTS kernels and after that everything has been pretty chill.


  • In terms of performance yeah. Though not every old device keeps working. You’re still vulnerable to driver support for newer kernels. My old Thinkpad no longer functions properly because the Nvidia drivers are not compatible with newer kernels. I can either have an unsafe machine that runs fine or an up-to-date machine that can barely open a web browser.


  • Compared to most of my friends I’m not into food tbh. But not in the way that I don’t care about it. I’ll generally eat whatever and like it. I can enjoy a microwave meal or a frozen pizza. And I get very impatient with people who insist that the rice needs to dry to the air for god knows how long because it makes the taste better. Cooking is something I used to hate, so I’d always go the easy route. Either a microwave meal or something like pasta with pre-cut vegetables and premade sauce from the supermarket.

    Nowadays I have changed to a diet with more vegetables and less overprocessed stuff, so I tend to just grab some veggies and throw them in a pan with some meat (or replacement), some random herbs and spices and a little bit of pasta or rice. Sometimes it’s nice, sometimes it sucks, but I don’t really care because I’ll eat almost anything and I hate throwing away food. Most important to me is that it’s healthy most of the time. But I don’t really care for recipes or spending time to prepare something nice, I have better ways to spend my time. I also really like my rice to be sticky, so I don’t really waste time on washing the rice either.


  • The thing in the top of the image is definitely weird. But honestly I think it’s just a real image. Too many small details like the mesh of the suitcase that I wouldn’t expect gen AI to get right. I think the third wheel on the right makes sense tbh. It’s probably just a suitcase with 4 wheels that’s folded open. Due to the perspective it looks a little offset but that’s reasonable. I’m not a 100% sure tho, it’s hard to tell sometimes these days




  • Fun fact, this loop is kinda how one of the generative ML algorithms works. This algorithm is called Generative Adversarial Networks or GAN.

    You have a so-called Generator neural network G that generates something (usually images) from random noise and a Discriminator neural network D that can take images (or whatever you’re generating) as input and outputs whether this is real or fake (not actually in a binary way, but as a continuous value). D is trained on images from G, which should be classified as fake, and real images from a dataset that should be classified as real. G is trained to generate images from random noise vectors that fool D into thinking they’re real. D is, like most neural networks, essentially just a mathematical function so you can just compute how to adjust the generated image to make it appear more real using derivatives.

    In the perfect case these 2 networks battle until they reach peak performance. In practice you usually need to do some extra shit to prevent the whole situation from crashing and burning. What often happens, for instance, is that D becomes so good that it doesn’t provide any useful feedback anymore. It sees the generated images as 100% fake, meaning there’s no longer an obvious way to alter the generated image to make it seem more real.

    Sorry for the infodump :3


  • I think that when you “poison” your brain with easy dopamine like candy, fastfood, alcohol, drugs, endless scrolling, etc you will shift the internal goalpost of when something feels good. Compared to these easy sources of “joy”, life just isn’t that interesting. The scale changes to the point that normal things cannot longer provide enough jou to be worth it.

    Personally I’ve been trying to constrain myself a bit on these easy sources of “empty happiness”. Things that do give me joy without ruining my brain are, among others: running, music festivals, listening to nice music, looking back at something cool I made, making something cool, playing videogames, chilling with friends (though this usually involves alcohol). These things definitely don’t reliably provide joy, Most of the times they’re just “nice” but definitely not amazing. But every now and then I get hit with that dopamine rush and it’s all worth it.


  • Up until now it was my student time, though I think this depends on personal circumstances and is different for everyone. Childhood was nice, but obviously limited in terms of freedom. Teens where decent, but not 100% great. Student life was easily the best for me, I’d constantly meet like-minded people, there were so many cheap or free activities, and people constantly said shit like “you guys are our future” etc. I also loved having well defined work and goals, limited scope, and lots of depth and interesting challenges. Now that I’m working it’s usually very shallow work in terms of complexity, but with lots of communication and interdependencies. And it goes ever on because agile, no clear quartile or semester goals like university.

    Now that I’m working I have the money, but I lost the easy access to like-minded people and fun activities. Organizing something with friends turned from “let’s grab a drink this afternoon” into “let’s align our agendas to find a free spot somewhere in 6 weeks”. And programming turned from “here’s a algorithm someone came up with that you can implement” to “the customer wants this button to do X, hi spend the next week implementing/testing/finding out its meant to work differently”.

    I’m a bit biased though, because I’m currently burnt out. Work life was decent for a bit, it just temporarily got worse and kinda pushed me over the edge. If anyone has tips I’d love to hear them :3




  • Okay but does that matter? I recently saw a video from Veratasium about teflon and there they mentioned that teflon is too large to be absorbed by the body, it just comes out on the other end. It’s the smaller compounds used for producing teflon that are poisoning our water, bodies, and everything else with PFAS. Companies just dumping this poison into our water supply. If this is false I’m open to learn ofc.


  • Wtf. How did they not at the very least build in a reasonable safe state whenever the thing gets disconnected. Something like “keep current position, disable heating” or return to flat position.

    But the more pressing question is: why does a bed have an internet connection? Who does this help? And why does it NEED an internet connection? Surely a few Back-up buttons for when the service eventually goes down isn’t too much to ask? Who would buy such a thing?!


  • No definitely not. Like, it’s fine if you don’t care for some uncle who’s kind of a dick and who you see once a year. But if you care for no-one but yourself then something is out of the norm. Might not be something you can help, but it’s probably a good idea to run this by a professional.

    Personally I’m kinda extreme in the opposite direction. I can feel intense empathy towards inanimate objects. I’ll feel sad for the slightly fucked apple at the supermarket because no-one will buy it. I struggle to watch movies with too emotional plots because I start to experience those emotions myself intensely.




  • Yeah I also tend to play against the bots. Me and my friends have hundreds of hours against the AI at this point. Nowadays we tend to play against the Hard Barbarian AI. We usually win, but the AI can be very variable and sometimes it just turns on and destroys us. If we manage to expand aggressively in the early game, manage to contest roughly half the map (or have a good choke point), we can survive the early onslaught and out-eco the AI in the late game. Which is the most fun way of winning imo. Chill behind defences and slowly get the upper hand until we waltz over the AI with experimental units. We did ban ourselves from “cheesy” tactics like nuking the AI, target bombing their economy, or aggressively targeting our long range artillery at their economy. The AI just doesn’t seem to sufficiently defend against these and it quickly ends the game in a lame way. Unless we’re losing hard, then everything is permitted.


  • Same. I don’t like playing RTS games the good way. I just like building a cozy little camp and defending it, slowly exploring the map and just building whatever units I feel like building. I enjoy games like Age of Empires and Beyond All Reason because the maps tend to be quite large and random. It usually takes a while before I get overwhelmed if I’m losing I those games, and if I’m winning I can spend a lot of time just messing around without the game being over.

    Games like Starcraft or Warcraft seem to be built too much for quick games where you have to be constantly moving. Expansion locations are very determined and scarce and resources run out way too fast to just turtle in my little corner.


  • At the moment almost every weekend in person, though on average it’s more like every 2 weeks I think. It used to be way more but after finishing my study it became insanely hard to meet new people like myself. I also game with friends more than half of the days in the evenings tho, so that’s nice.

    The main loss since finishing my study is the regularity and spontaneity of meeting with friends. It requires careful alignment of agenda’s and planning ahead for over a month to get something done. I hate planning, but the downside of making friends who are like me is that most of my friends also hate doing so. So sometimes I have to push a bit to get stuff planned. Previously we’d naturally run into eachother and just decide to grab a beer that evening or watch a movie or something.

    I’d also live to make more queer friends where I’m at but every group seems to be for students or elderly or something.