I started with Suse 5 when it came out, as something I was interested in fucking about with. I didn’t have internet access at that time, but I did had a couple of books about it (the distro came with a book as well). It was a couple of CDs and a boot floppy disk (booting from CD wasn’t really a thing).

I used it for years for software development and simple tasks like Word processing. Getting my printer working on the thing was a chore, as was basically anything. Especially without internet solving issues was sometimes simply impossible. My scanner simply didn’t work. Getting the desktop environment to run was very hard, I struggled with it for a long time. And once I got it working properly, I got a new videocard and it broke the whole thing again.

The system was very painful to use, it was super cool, but almost nothing ever worked right. And trying to fix shit usually made it worse. But once you did get it working right, it was simply awesome. And the feeling of accomplishment was awesome after finally getting something right. For software development on the terminal it was pretty awesome though. Back then I did almost everything in text mode, as I was used to DOS before that. Going into Windows was something you did only sometimes with Windows 3.11 (and even 95) and I did the same in my Linux environment. The desktop environment used up a lot of memory and was pretty slow, so I preferred the console. It was only later booting into the desktop became the norm (around the Windows 98 era).

I used Suse till version 6.1 (still have that box). I bought version 7 (still have that box as well), but never really used it.

Back then I used Debian to create small internet routers for my friends. I got an old compact computer, put in a floppy with Debian, a couple of network cards and created small NAT boxes like that. This was before NAT routers were the norm, people just had internet on 1 machine, connected directly. But as computers became cheaper, a lot of folk had more than 1 computer in the home. With no real way to share the internet connection between the different computers. Microsoft created the Internet Connection Sharing feature, but that was pretty slow, disconnected often and ate resources on your “main” PC. So my little boxes worked great, I helped people setup a home network, connected my magic box to get every system online. Also helped them setup some port forwarding for the stuff they used.

Because I used Debian a lot, I switched over to Debian for my main rig when Suse 7 released. Used Potato, Woody, Sarge and Etch a lot. Switched around between Debian and Ubuntu in the Lenny and Squeeze era. Have been using Ubuntu ever since, never really had a reason to switch. Debian compared to Suse was so nice, I really liked the way Debian did things. It made a lot more sense for me in my head compared to Suse.

As I fucked around with computers a lot, I always had both Linux and DOS/Windows machines running and even had a couple of dual boot systems. For any kind of gaming DOS/Windows was required back then and I did love to game. I do think Windows 10 will be my last Microsoft OS, since Windows 11 absolutely sucks (use it at work, I hate it). Work stuff has become less and less of an issue to get stuff done on Linux just as well as on Windows. And gaming has come leaps and bounds due to the work on the Steamdeck.

So hope to fully ditch Microsoft in the near future, even though my first ever computer in 1984 ran Microsoft firmware with Microsoft Basic being the default user interface.

Robots that dress up in a maids uniform, but are actually only used to fuck: Check

What country is that?

Very well, let’s agree to disagree. Perhaps I am wrong. But I am in no way right wing or spreading misinformation.

The people I’ve spoken who work in the nuclear field bitch about unneeded red tape all the time. Some of it is important for sure, but a lot of it can be cut if we wanted to without safety becoming an issue. The price of nuclear has gone way up the past 20 years, whilst the knowledge and tools have become better. This makes no sense to me. We should be able to build them cheaper and faster, not slower and more expensive. And there are countries in the world, that can get it done cheaper, so why can’t we?

I’m all for renewables, I have solar panels. But I’m not 100% convinced we have grid storage figured out. And in the meanwhile we keep burning fossils in huge amounts. If we can have something that produces energy, without fucking up the atmosphere, even at a price that’s more expensive than other sources (within reason) I’m all for that. Because with the price of energy from coal, the money for fixing the atmosphere isn’t included.

Thank you for answering in a respectful manner.

Please share oh enlightened one

I have never heard being pro-nuclear is the anti science stance and it being on the rise among right wing political parties. All the right wing is talking about it more coal and less things to be done about the climate.

The people who I talk to who are pro nuclear seem very well informed and not anti science at all.

I believe nuclear can help us get to the future we want and we should have done it a lot sooner. Nuclear doesn’t mean anti-renewable, both can exist.

Nuclear is by far the safest form of energy production. Even with the big accidents, the impact hasn’t been that big.

Chernobyl was by far the biggest, but that was 40 years ago, in a poorly designed plant, with bad procedures and a chain of human errors. We’ve learned so much from that accident and that type of accident couldn’t even have happened in the plants we had at the time in the west. Actually if the engineers that saw the issue could contact the control room right away, there would not have been any issue. In 1984 that was a problem, in 2024 not so much, we have more communication tools than ever. The impact of Chernobyl was also terrible, but not as bad as feared back in the time. In contrast to the TV series, not a lot of people died in the accident. With 30 deaths directly and another 30 over time. Total impact on health is hard to say and we’ve obviously have had to do a lot to prevent a bigger impact, but the number is in the thousands for total people with health effects. Even the firefighters sent in to fix stuff didn’t die, with most of them living full lives with no health effects. And what people might not know, the Chernobyl plant has had a lot of people working there and producing power for decades after the disaster. It’s far from the nuclear wasteland people imagine.

Fukushima was pretty bad, but the impact on human life and health has been pretty much nonexistent. The circumstances leading up to the disaster were also very unique. A huge earthquake followed by a big tsunami, combined with a design flaw in the backup power system, combined with human error. I still to this day don’t understand how this lead to facilities being closed in Germany, where big earthquakes don’t happen and there is hardly any coast let alone tsunamis. It’s a knee jerk reaction that makes no sense. Studies have indicated the forced relocation of the people living near there has been a bigger impact on people’s health than anything the power plant did.

Compare this to things we consider to be totally normal. Like driving a car, which kills more people in a week than ever had any negative impacts from nuclear power.

Or say solar is a far more safe form of power, even though yearly hundreds of people die because of accidents related to solar installations. Or for example hydroplants, where accidents can also cause a huge death toll and more accidents happen.

And this is even with the non valid comparison to the current forms of energy where we know it’s a big issue. But because the alternative isn’t perfect, we don’t change over.

Agreed, dealing with the waste is a thing. But for me a solvable problem and something that doesn’t need to be solved right away. We currently store a lot of nuclear waste in holding locations till we figure out a way to either make it less radioactive or store it for long enough. The alternative however is having coal plants all over the world spew all their dust (including radioactive dust) and CO2 straight into the atmosphere. This to me is a far bigger issue to solve. It isn’t contained in one location, but instead ends up all over the world. It ends up in people’s homes and bodies, with a huge impact to their health. It ends up in the atmosphere, with climate change causing huge (and expensive) issues.

The amount of money we need to handle nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude lower than what we are going to have to pay to handle climate change. And that isn’t even fixing the issue, just dealing with the consequences. I don’t know how we are ever going to get all that carbon back out of the atmosphere, but it won’t be cheap.

Agreed, building a nuclear facility takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. However… This doesn’t need to be the case at all.

A lot of the costs go into design, planning and legal work. The amount of red tape to build a nuclear plant is huge. Plus all of the parties that fight any plans to build, with a heavy not in my backyard component.

If however a country would be prepared to cut through the red tape and have a standard design developed for say 10 plants at the same time, the price and construction time would be decreased greatly. Back in the day we could build them faster and cheaper. And these days we build far more complex installations quicker and cheaper than nuclear power plants.

The anti-nuclear movement has done so much to hold humanity back on this front. And the weird part is most people do think nuclear fusion plants are a good thing and can solve stuff. But they have almost all of the downsides nuclear fission plants have in terms of red tape, complexity and cost.

Dude looks to be tarnished already, he doesn’t have a choice in this.

I prefer to think of it like there is some fake Europe wannabe out there and the poster wanted to make sure people knew he was talking about the real Europe.

I’d recommend reading this if you are interested in why making assumptions when designing a system is a bad idea (but often necessary): https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

Especially the one on names: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ And the one on time: http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time

The problem is those blocking extensions are based on timestamps. Those timestamps are added by the users, it’s a crowdsourced thing. But the ads a single user will see differ from what another user will see. It’s likely the length of the ads is different, which makes the whole timestamp thing a no go.

Along with the timestamp, there needs to be a way to detect where the actual video begins. That way at least an offset can be applied and timestamps maintained, but it would introduce a certain level of error.

The next issue would be to then advance the video to the place where the actual video begins. This can be very hard, as it would need to include some way of recognizing the right frame in the buffer. One requirement is that the starting frame is actually in the buffer (with ads more than a few seconds, this isn’t guaranteed). The add-on has access to this buffer (depending on the platform, this isn’t guaranteed). And there’s a reliable way to recognize the right frame, given the different encoding en quality setups.

And this needs to be done cheap, so with as little as infrastructure as possible. A database of timestamps is very small and crowdsourcing those timestamps is relatively easy. But recognizing frames requires more data to be stored and crowdsourcing the right frame is a lot harder than a timestamp. If the infrastructure ends up being complex and big, someone needs to pay for that. I don’t know if donations alone would cut it. So you would need to play ads, which is exactly what you intend on not doing.

I’m sure the very smart and creative people working on these things will find a way. But it won’t be easy, so I don’t expect a solution very soon.

Isn’t Banjo the one where all the girls have massive tits? And the witch turns into a total hottie as well. Need to get me some of that Gruntussy.

You’ve quoted them stating they used LLMs while claiming they did not use a LLM? What am I missing here?

This is pretty dumb, machine learning algorithms (fuck off with calling it AI) are especially good at seeing signs of disease in data such as xrays, CT and MRI scans. It’s the one place they really help save time and prevent mistakes. And even if it’s just to flag shit for a second opinion by a doctor and not to replace the doctor, that’s still super useful. Pattern recognition is hard and these kinds of algorithms are very good at them if provided the right source data to work off.

If only the media and big corps would stop claiming LLMs are general AI, then maybe people would stop using them for stuff it’s clearly not good at and not meant for.

For those not in the know: The big issue with quantum computers is decoherence. This is (simply put) noise produced in the system, which interferes or overwrites the calculation / signal we want to get out of the computer. A large part of this is thermal energy, all that energy bouncing around destroys any chance of reading out the signal. So the solution would be to cool the machine within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero, which is hard but not impossible. Then there’s also EM radiation coming from all around us (wifi and cellphones, but also things like radio), this is relatively easy to shield against. A bit of a pain, but still something that can be done. But then there’s cosmic rays, there’s a real chance a cosmic ray hits with enough energy to disrupt the calculation within milliseconds. Milliseconds isn’t enough to do a useful calculation, so that’s a problem. Shielding against this is also pretty hard, since cosmic rays can have a lot of energy.

Then there’s the issue of measurement itself, measuring automatically means putting in energy to the system. This means it’s very hard (or maybe even impossible) to read out the results, without destroying them. Even if you get the damn thing stable enough to do a useful calculation.

The more qubits in a system, the more powerful it becomes, and you need quite a number of them to do anything useful with the machine. But the more qubits the bigger the decoherence issue.

This is why some people (me included) don’t believe the current form of quantum computers we are researching can actually work in the real world. We need some kind of big breakthrough on this to create an actually useful quantum computer system. With all the cooling and shielding requirements we certainly won’t be using them at home any time soon.

But of course as with anything these days the marketing department and media runs with everything they can, spouting out nonsense about quantum computers becoming mainstream any day now and all the amazing things they can do. This can make it hard to figure out what the actual level of development is right now. Plus anybody working on this is putting in billions of dollars and sure as heck won’t share anything with anybody. So maybe someone has already made a breakthrough, but I doubt it.

And good direction.

You’d be surprised how much a concrete pillar holding up an overpass can actually take. They don’t break like in the movies, they are specifically designed to take big truck impacts and not fail. Anybody crashing a Cybertruck at highway speeds into one of those is instantly turned into red colored mashed potatoes.