Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years?

The UX is godawful. More than half my feed is just random crap suggestions and ads.

Haven’t heard of Hiren’s BootCD in like 15 years. Good to see it’s still around!

It’s worth mentioning that with a large generational gap, the newer low-end CPU will often outperform the older high-end. An i3-1115G4 (11th gen) should outperform an i7-4790 (4th gen), at least in single-core performance. And it’ll do it while using a lot less power.

I think it helps to think of browsing as a basic form of searching. Everything you can do in a browsing context, you can by definition do in a searching context…if the client doesn’t suck. The information needed to browse is embedded in the tags.

So this strikes me as entirely dependent on your client software. A good client should let you browse by tags. You could add Dewey numbers as tags to start with, so you can browse that way if you want, then add any other tags that might be useful (like genres, for example) on top of that.

The only difference with tags in this context is that books will appear in multiple places.

OP must have it set to the lowest compression level. All levels are lossless, but higher compression levels are smaller, at the expense of increased encoding time. Should be half the size or less in general.

Gotcha. Typically lowercase b=bit and uppercase B=Byte, but it’s hard to tell what people mean sometimes, especially in casual posts.

Come to think of it, I messed up the capitalization too. Should be a capital M for mega.

1mbps is awfully low for 1080. Or did you mean megabyte rather than megabit?

Even if they were trustworthy, nothing lasts forever.

Does anyone seriously think Google Play Movies or whatever they call it is going to be around in 50 years? Audible? Spotify?

Unlikely.

I grew up with access to books that were printed before my parents were even born. I doubt your grandkids will be able to say the same. Not if you buy into DRM-infected ecosystems and vendor lock-in, anyway.

The only consolation is that pirates are always one step ahead. But I wouldn’t want to count on that remaining true in 50 years either.

I would guess that’s not a hard limit. Maybe they decided to undersell it because many 4TB+ nvme drives are physically larger and/or require heat sinks, so they might not fit. I don’t see any details on their web site though.

Given two drives with the same size, same heat output, and same interface, it shouldn’t make a difference.

It’s pretty common to see fake limits like that on spec sheets. I can definitely put more RAM in my motherboard than is officially supported since higher-capacity DIMMs are out in the same form factor now compared to when the mobo was released.

It’s insane how many things they push as Snaps when they are entirely incompatible with the Snap model.

I think everyone first learns what Snaps are by googling “why doesn’t ____ work on Ubuntu?” For me, it was Filebot. Spent an hour or two trying to figure out how the hell to get it to actually, you know, access my files. (This was a few years ago, so maybe things are better now. Not sure. I don’t live that Snap life anymore, and I’m not going back.)

Can you explain what you mean by “visually lossless”? Is this a purely subjective classification, or is there a specific definition or benchmark you used?

For a year? Honestly, that might be worth doing for free just as an experiment.

I mean, look at Project Gutenberg. Easily a year’s worth of top-tier books I have not read.

There’s a ton of great freeware and FOSS games, too.

No idea what the movie situation is like tbh, but if it turned into a year where I just don’t want watch movies, that seems doable. Again, something that might be worth doing for a year just as an experiment.

Oh wait, I misread. It’s formerly paid content that is now free, not including things that were always free? I guess that still includes most of Project Gutenberg but no idea how it affects gaming or movies.

There are none that I know with 100% certainty, but there are a few types of businesses that are generally known to be fronts where I come from (and I suspect in many cities), and there are a few specific ones I’m confident are fronts.

• Massage parlors are commonly fronts for prostitution all over the world, or offer “extra” services. This is so common that many of them have prominent signs explicitly saying they do NOT.

• I swear, there must be more video stores than there are working VCRs in my city. And they seem to have kept mostly the same stock of VHS tapes for the past 30 years. They are rumored to be fronts for, again, prostitution.

• I have strong suspicions about psychic readers. There are a ton of them, and many are open at odd hours of the night in places that are not busy enough to get any legitimate foot traffic.

• Gyms are all fronts for…gyms. I mean, the gym business is corrupt enough that I feel like that counts.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Up and Atom — an educational science channel. She gives plain-English explanations of all sorts of science topics, from quantum physics to computer science and even some philosophical puzzles from history.

TierZoo — a comedy/educational channel. In each video, he looks at animals as though they are playable classes in an MMO, explaining their strengths, weaknesses, and place in “the meta”. It’s comedy because it’s video-game-themed, but it’s also well-researched and based on real zoology. It’s a riot.

Simone Giertz — you’ve probably seen clips of her shitty robots. She builds things for fun, profit, and just because. Most of her projects have an element of absurdity. Some of them work.

Seriously? My Nvidia drivers broke every time I got a kernel update on Tumbleweed. Eventually I pinned the kernel to an old version. Gah.

Maybe my PC is just haunted.

With Lutris, I got stuck on an error about architecture. I tried changing WINEARCH to WIN32, but it didn’t work. Tried making a new systemwide default prefix in win32, didn’t work. Went down a bit of a rabbit hole on Google but I was not able to get the game to even install, let alone run.

With proton, games install and typically run, but not without issues. For example, when Return to Monkey Island launched, it was Windows-only, so I tried it in Proton. It worked for a day, then mouse input just stopped working entirely. Half an hour of trouleshooting later I decided it would be easier to just boot into Windows. That’s the general experience I’ve had with Proton, even for Steam Deck certified games. And then sometimes games run but with unacceptable performance, like Stray.

Until recently I was stuck on the 510 drivers because the newer ones broke CUDA in the Ubuntu repositories. That was recently updated to I think 525, but I haven’t tried any games since updating. But I also had similar problems on Suse with drivers from Nvidia, and the old Ubuntu LTS (18.04 was it?).

If Lutris is going to be so finicky about Wine versions and prefixes, I wish it would just bundle its own instead of using the system wine. I use Wine for other things and can’t easily nuke my whole config.

I’ve basically given up on playing non-native games on Linux. It seems like this is a “me” problem but I can’t imagine what’s so unique about my Steam install. I try to keep as close to stock Ubuntu LTS as possible precisely to avoid these issues, but here I am.

Gaming is the only reason I dual-boot back to Windows. Out of curiosity, what’s your distro and hardware config? I’ve had no luck with Proton or Lutris on Suse or Ubuntu. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to play a game all the way through without issues. Not sure if it’s my distro choices, Nvidia drivers, or the specific games I try to play. Even Steam Deck certified games do not work properly for me.

I remember some years back there was a news story about some chatbot passing the Turing test. The researchers decided to make their chatbot impersonate a young Russian boy, which made its limitations harder to identify as non-human by the native-English-speaking test subjects. So it wasn’t actually that impressive.

That will likely be the first kind of thing we’ll see for an artificial voice-chatbot as well. It’s a big world and many of the people I talk with on Discord (and even IRL) are not native English speakers and not from my country.

I’m not intimately familiar with the accents and speech patterns from everywhere in the world, so I’m conditioned to shrug off a lot of “strange” language. Because of this wide range of human speech patterns, I’m not confident that I could validate voices with a low enough false-positive and false-negative rate in practice.

I haven’t really dug into the latest voice generation AI yet so I’m not sure how capable off-the-shelf programs are. I am familiar with the general techniques, though, and I think adding realistic inflection is within reach. I don’t think it’s possible to automate the entire pipeline yet, at least not with publicly available programs, but the field is advancing quickly so I can’t take much solace in that.

That’s going by a different metric though. It’s not claiming 47% of news articles or social media posts are by bots. It’s talking about cyberattacks, not social media posts.

I don’t think there are any solid numbers on human-presenting bot activity on social media. Honestly wouldn’t be surprised though, especially in political forums.

There are already successfully convincing phone scams with AI. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/22/1165448073/voice-clones-ai-scams-ftc

This will likely get significantly easier, cheaper, and faster in the very near future. Voice generation is relatively easy. We’re going to need a whole new class of captchas and shibboleths to use online, but honestly, it’s such a fast-moving target that I think cutting-edge AI will forever be a step ahead. I think the best we can hope for is to have viable countermeasures for commoditized AI techniques. For now that might include logic problems (which ChatGPT and its current competitors are quite bad at) but I’m sure the big players already have more advanced language bots in development.

I reallllly hate the idea of online IDs but it might be the only way.