duncesplayed

joined 2 years ago
[–] duncesplayed@lemmy.one 15 points 2 years ago

This is what I'm expecting. A year from now someone will mention "reddit" to me and I'll be like "that's still around?" and I'll check it out and it's just turned into TikTok challenges.

[–] duncesplayed@lemmy.one 1 points 2 years ago

Did you watch the video? YouTube Premium lets you watch a video offline if you're online. If you've been offline for 3 days, however, you cannot watch any videos offline, which makes the usage of the word "offline" a little strange.

[–] duncesplayed@lemmy.one 32 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

When you power on a computer, before any software (any operating system) has a chance to run, there's "firmware" (kind of similar to software, except stored directly in the motherboard) that has to get things going (called "Platform Initialization"). Generally the two jobs of the Platform Initialization firmware: (1) to detect (and maybe initialize) some hardware; and (2) to find the operating system and boot the operating system.

We have a standard interface for #2 now, which is called UEFI. But for #1, it's always been sort of a mysterious black box. It necessarily has to be different for every chipset/every motherboard. Manufacturers never really saw much reason to open source it. The major community-driven open source project at doing #1 is called "coreboot". Due to the fact that it requires a new implementation for every chipset/motherboard and they are generally not documented (and may require some reverse-engineering of the hardware), coreboot has very very limited support.

So what AMD is open sourcing here is a collection of 3 C libraries which they will be using in all of their firmware, going forward. These libraries are not chipset/motherboard-specific (you still need custom code for each motherboard) and do not implement UEFI (you would still need to implement UEFI/bootloader on top of it), but they're helper functions that do a lot of what's needed to implement firmware. I just took a cursory look through the source code, but I saw a lot of code in there for detecting RAM DIMMs (how much RAM, what kind of RAM, etc.), which is useful code.

The fact that AMD is going to use this in their own firmware, and also make it available for coreboot under an MIT licence, means that coreboot may* have a much easier time in the future supporting AMD motherboards.

* we will see

[–] duncesplayed@lemmy.one 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Yeah I think it's a good option for a lot of people.

As a counterpoint, I recommend watching Louis Rossman's take on why he recommends people pirate instead of paying for YouTube Premium. His general philosophy on things is that you should pay for things unless you're getting an inferior service to the pirates. In this case of YouTube Premium, he considers it restrictive enough (won't let him watch videos offline) that he cancelled his subscription and now recommends piracy.

[–] duncesplayed@lemmy.one 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Comic Serif just doesn't have the same ring. Times New Circus?

[–] duncesplayed@lemmy.one 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Facebook did too! Facebook Chat was one of the best XMPP servers around, actually, in terms of client support.

[–] duncesplayed@lemmy.one 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Sadly most people CAN'T connect through dial-up, even if both parties have all the equipment. A lot of telcos have redone their entire network in VoIP stuff (with heavy compression) which makes it hard to keep a connection even at 300.

[–] duncesplayed@lemmy.one 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

telnet or ssh (usually telnet)

If you're connecting from a modern computer, you just get a telnet client that does the appropriate code pages/ANSI/zmodem/etc. If you're connecting from a real vintage computer, you get a little dongle that appears to be a modem (and often accepts AT commands, including fake phone numbers), but secretly connects to WiFi and relays through a telnet connection.

Some BBSes do still have landlines, and there's the occasional ham radio BBS, but 99.999% of it is through IP-based telnet or ssh these days.

[–] duncesplayed@lemmy.one 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I have a similar kind of idea. I think if it had been a free/open source/community project that made the headlines I would have been all like "this is so awesome".

I guess what I don't like is the economic system that makes that impractical. In order to build one of those giant GPTs, you need tonnes of hardware (capital), so the community projects are always going to be playing catchup, and I think quite serious catchup in this arena. So the economic system requires that instead of our posts going to a "collective hive mind" that aid human knowledge, they go to some walled garden owned by OpenAI, which filters and controls it for us, and gives us little bits of access to our own data, as long as we used it only in approved ways (i.e., ways that benefit them).

[–] duncesplayed@lemmy.one 11 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Slashdot -> kuro5hin -> reddit -> Lemmy for me.

Any old k5ers on here?

[–] duncesplayed@lemmy.one 55 points 2 years ago (7 children)

I hate when people use passive voice in these things. It's such a slimy way to try and avoid responsibility.

"We have blocked you from using a mobile browser." is the active voice. It includes a subject ("we") and a verb ("blocked"). It says that someone made a decision, executed that decision, and is responsible.

"It looks like ... ", " ... is currently unavailable" is so fucking weaselly and irresponsible. You are 100% a complete piece of shit if you ever say something like that. You are not responsible enough to handle a Wendy's drive-through order, let alone a large organization.

[–] duncesplayed@lemmy.one 1 points 2 years ago

I don't understand the "ct" ligature. I've been trying to write "ct" in a bunch of different ways to see if it would make sense in handwriting to join them at the top, and it still doesn't make any sense to me. How did the "ct" ligature ever make it into typography?

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