Years ago I concluded (wrongly or rightly) that most people are neutral, a small handfull are actually good people (willing to sacrifice their personal benefit for people they don’t know with no expectation of gaining from it, even in the form of social approval) and a small handful are assholes, but the assholes do such a disproportionate amount of damage that they end up having a massive impact on everybody else.
The stuff in computer games that makes NPCs move around the game world from point A to point B has been called AI for ages (and in this case specifically, is generally the A* pathing algorithm which isn’t even all that complex).
It’s only recently that marketing-types, salesmen and journalists with no actual technical expertise have started pushing AI as if the I in the acronym actually meant general intelligence rather than the “intelligence-alike” meaning that it has had for decades.
Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.
Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.
The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.
Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.
Yeah, but that happens only once per person, whilst the other one happens every day.
Yeah, but today is always the first day of the rest of your life.
I think the problem is because CRT displays didn’t have pixels so the uniform noise which is static was not only uniformely spread in distribution and intensity (i.e. greyscale level) but also had “dots” of all sizes.
Also another possible thing that’s off is the speed at which the noise changes: was it the 25fps refresh rate of a CRT monitor, related to that rate but not necessarily at that rate or did the noise itself had more persistent and less persistent parts?
The noise is basically the product of radio waves at all frequencies with various intensities (though all low) with only the ones that could pass the bandpass filter of the TV tuner coming through (and being boosted up in intensitity by automatic gain control) and being painted along a phosphorous screen (hence no pixels) as the beam draw line by line the screen 25 times per second so to get that effect right you probably have to simulate it mathematically from a starting point of random radio noise and it can’t be going through things with pixels (such as 3D textures) to be shown and probably requires some kind of procedural shader.
Why waste time and fuel going all the way to the location of a black hole (not to mention that all the radiation near it isn’t going to be good for the ship) plust the delta-V to reduce their speed until they actually are not in orbit anymore and fall down into it?
Best just jettison them out of the airlock without a suit in the middle of nowhere.
By the way, the picture illustrating the post isn’t actually displaying the real thing - the noise in it is too squarish and has no grey tones.
It’s definitelly an analog over the air TV thing.
The way digital works you would either get a “No signal” indicator (because the circuitry detects the signal to noise ratio is too low) or squarish artifacts (because of the way the compression algorithms for digital video are designed).
Soon Twitter will complete its transition to Nazi Bar of Social Media.
And for those on the other side of the Atlantic, there are several computer shops that will just put a computed together for you without an OS.
Here’s a random example “configure your own computer” from a computer shop in France. In this one the OS (Système d’exploitation) is not included and you have to pay extra for it.
In my experience with custom assemblies like this the OS is never included.
When I live in the UK at some point I’ve even used of these kind of stores there to get a custom notebook.
It’s basically an “assemble your own computer” for people who don’t know how to do it and aren’t confident enough to try (understandable given that the parts value of a whole desktop PC adds up to at least €1000 so there generally is some fear of fucking it up if you’ve never done it before).
I don’t think the sensors really matter for a server but the rest makes some sense.
Still, 80 bucks will buy you quite literally a Mini-PC (a really crummy one, granted) which can run more server tasks because it has as much or more memory and storage and isn’t hindered by there being an Android OS layer there doing nothing useful, and which is absolutelly and 100% under your control because it boots into your OS of choice.
Half than that will buy you a crummy SBC which probably de facto has as much capability to run server tasks as that Oneplus (it’s weaker but doesn’t have Android there eating up resources) though in my experience those things tend to be a bit finicky.
I don’t think it’s actually worth it to spend $80 on an used phone to use as a server (unless you do need UPS-like features or built-in mobile nertwork access) since you quite literally have better options brand new for that money, but if you have one around it can make sense even if it’s a bit more work getting it going and is not fully under your control (unless we’re talking about something jailbroken where you can install Oxygen or Lineage on, so a Pixel would probably be a better choice).
That said, there is a certain technical elegance in the whole notion of repurposing an Android Phone to be a home server.
I think you’re seriously overestimating the technical prowess of the average law enforcement officer…
Except the price, which is much lower for the SBC, way much lower if one uses one of the lower end Orange Pi or Banana Pi SBCs.
Also you can put Linux on the SBCs (which always come unlocked) hence do way more with them as servers than if one has to use Android as the OS.
I mean, I can get it if people with the technical chops, love for technical challenges and an old and pretty much worthless Android phone, configure it as a server if only because “why not?!”, but it’s not exactly a great option considering that a 40 bucks SBC can do the same, only better, more easily and with far more possibilities (given that it will be running Linux rather than Android).
PS: Actually somebody below mention mobile network connection, which, thinking about it, would be a good reason to use an old Android phone as a server since it has built-in support for 3G (unless it’s quite old) whilst the SBC needs it add to it which might be a problem for the cheaper SBCs (just wondering about how I would get around to do it, I think you need to connect a USB dongle to it and it has to be something compatible with Armbian Linux)
I’m truly, totally, completely shocked … that Windows is still being used on the server side.
There are gamers and there are gamers.
Some gamers prefer not to have the level of noise of a jet engine taking off right next to them to get a couple percent more frames per second on a game.
I would say there are at least two quite different markets amongst PC gamers who have different preferred balances between performance and the downsides of it (noise, heat, power costs), a bit like not all people who enjoy driving want muscle cars.
Lying and misportraying themselves in social media is nothing for a country were most people are fine with murdering tens of thousands of children because of their ethnicity.
This is nothing given the depths of their depravity.
It’s the most boring thing of the technical side of the job especially at the more senior levels because it’s so mindnumbingly simple, uses a significant proportion of development time and is usually what ends up having to be redone if there are small changes in things like input or output interfaces (i.e. adding, removing or changing data fields) which is why it’s probably one of the main elements in making maintaining and updating code already in Production a far less pleasant side of job than the actual creation of the application/system is.
Portugal has exactly the same system (I’ve lived in both countries) which has actually even more features (such as letting you pay yours bills at any ATM) than the Dutch one.
I think that at least in Europe the countries were ATMs rely on VISA or Mastercard for inter-bank withdrawals like in the UK and US are the exception rather than the rule.
Well, that’s the second part of my theory but I didn’t went into it to avoid muddling the point I was making:
So in present “Greed is good” (very much a Sociopath slogan) times with mainstream media and a large section of the Culture production and distribution (in the form of TV, but also TV Show and Movie making) in the hands of extremelly wealthy people and when those we are told we should look up to are people like Musk (well, him specifically maybe not anymore) and Bezos, the “neutral” majority has shifted significantly towards the asshole side of things.
The World would be a lot different if our “heroes” were Scientists and Environmentalists.