“Generalized Anxiety Disorder carefully helping one kid win his little league game while giving a different kid bone cancer”.

!memes@lemmy.world

10yr+ DevOps career (the entirety of it having been dedicated to creation and maintenance of NDA-wrapped systems that don’t even exist anymore (so the “proof” became “poof!” thanks to legalese prohibiting me from having it as “live portfolio”) because corporations don’t GAF about how much of our own soul we put upon coding something as programmers), incomplete bachelor degree for reasons too long to get into detail, started coding during my late childhood, 2 yrs (and counting) of unemployment and, sincerely, utter disillusionment with the winds of all fields of human endeavors, especially the enshittification of tech… Even though I’m not a junior, sometimes I widened my search to include junior positions as well (“you shouldn’t be too picky” as I heard a few times, as if job positions were the only ones granted the divine right to be “picky” about who they should hire), so I can quite relate…

It’s been some time since I gave up doing pointless searching, and all of this makes me wonder if my next job will be “in-situ quality test inspector of six-feet-under diggings”, “afterlife consultancy” or “personal secretary of Ms. Rosa Caveira”, because I have no expectations (nor the will) of being “repositioned” within the “job market”, especially because I don’t want to be a ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini nanny, which seems to be the case for most, if not all, DevOps jobs nowadays.

At least Ms. Caveira doesn’t require experience, the job requires no paperwork, it’d be instant start, and I feel like She’d the best employer ever (e.g. I wouldn’t be a fungible number in Her spreadsheet).

!memes@lemmy.world

So far, it has been just one book. It’s a physical book, a Portuguese translation of an originally anglophone book/grimoire. This book has been the only book I ever read from cover to cover.

Back when I read this book, I used to take it to this public place which I’d describe as a mall of pubs surrounded by a green park. I used to prowl around until I found a place to sit down, be it a public cement bench or some table from an empty pub, preferably the latter, and preferably away from people. I’d then open the page I last read, sometimes going back a few pages earlier so to re-read something, then I’d spend the rest of the night, or until I had the urge to leave, reading several pages of it. I rarely consumed beverages as I’d prefer reading while fasting, but when I did, it was often a beverage with vodka and redberry, or a malzbier.

Sometimes I’d also take it to the subway, but I’d be less likely to afford a nice reading as I’d rarely find available seats. Or I’d take it to the shopping mall, preferably somewhere in the terrace or somewhere as devoid of people as possible.

A few times I’d also take it to a cemetery; I’d sit in a bench, or a random tomb if no benches were available… but, then, it wouldn’t take long before I’d get up, wander somewhere else in the cemetery to carve Her sigil/seal somewhere in a dirt patch and light up a incense stick and a red candle I’d bring to the cemetery.

I rarely read it when I was home. And yet, when I got to myself, I realized I managed to read it all. Almost 200 pages in total. Yeah, it’s quite short, but it’s very deep. It’s the only book I keep visible, in my altar. Sometimes I catch myself reading it again to seek specific information.

I bought other books (e.g. Kybalion), but I’m yet to find a book which I’d read as obsessively as this one. Sometimes I guess my next book, a physical book, would be either Liber Al Vel Legis or whatever book She points me.

While I do hoard and read some e-books randomly (but not as cover-to-cover as I did), I prefer physical versions because, well, physical books have no batteries, no telemetry, and they can literally outlive me. The only thing I miss from physical books is having a Ctrl+F to search for a specific word/phrase.

!nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

Good to see it’s not just me. I kept receiving heat (pun intended) whenever I criticized these “Proof-of-work anti-bot solutions”, now I finally know I’m not alone.

Like an unskippable Youtube ad, we’re supposed to sit three minutes while these “solutions” dangerously burn our CPU regardless of whether it’s an old CPU, and without asking our consent beforehand (!!!). At least Youtube ads don’t (usually) burn the CPU the same way.

And, no, it’s nowhere close to being infuriating to the supposedly intended targets of Anubis. OpenAI and the alike are likely laughing of Xe Iaso while they all burn more coal and increase the hyperscale data centers, with Anubis being just a pesky, insignificant pebble inside businessmen shoes. Meanwhile, we, the human users caught in this crossfire, including me with my poor decade-old Acer ES1-572 laptop, we can’t afford a new machine should Anubis, Cloudflare and other similar “anti-bot solutions” end up “weighting” our CPU too much it finally makes its way to the underworld with no one being legally liable for the physical damages caused by such algorithms.

If only Anubis, supposedly “different” from Cloudflare’s corporate nature, had a “Proceed or Leave” button or checkbox to start the “weighting your heart” thing, I wouldn’t be complaining or actively boycotting websites using “PoW anti-bot solutions” (I made myself a Firemonkey userscript to speedrun a window.close() for pages whose title is one of the “Just a moment…” or “Making sure you’re not a bot!”, because neither Xe Iaso nor Matthew Prince nor the webmasters using their “PoW anti-bot solutions” would buy me a new laptop if mine eventually died from facing heavy cryptographic computing while my CPU was already struggling with a Blender rendering process in the background). But, no, it’s no different than the corporate they swear to be fighting against (“something something one who fights with monsters should be careful lest they thereby become a monster themselves”)…

!mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world

After countless experiences of having settings reverted back to defaults upon updating, and having updates always coming with surprises like a Kinder Joy Surprise in the 00s, I doubt something wouldn’t end up smuggled like soldiers (“Agentic agents!”) inside a seemingly innocuous wooden monument. For example, the Waterfox version I’m using as of now (6.6.10) doesn’t seem to ship with the “Firefox’s VeRy HeLpFuL AgEnTiC bRoWsEr™ features” which can’t exactly be prevented from eventually bleeding through its forks, and this includes Waterfox. If it didn’t yet, it’ll do eventually as soon as Googl… I mean, Mozilla, makes it part of non-removable binary blobs within the upstream.

At this point, my only browser update will be when Servo browser finally debuts as an usable browser for daily web browsing affairs.

!memes@lemmy.world

As a Brazilian, it’s such a very useful search engine for me! /s

Now, seriously, it’s a good thing I don’t update software as regularly as I should. I’m using an old version (6.6.10) of Waterfox and, if it’s going to change search engines, I’m likely going to stick with this version. Tech can’t help but enshittify.

!memes@lemmy.world

When the “someone” mentioned in the second panel is a mental health professional and the question from the third panel, after my hour-long infodumping about current geopolitics, current technological enshittification, spiritual beliefs (i.e. my hatred against Demiurge, my devotion for Lilith), the ongoing anthropogenic climate and ecological catastrophes, the human history going back all the way when some hominid fell from a tree during a heavy storm and stumbled upon the fire from the lightning strike back in Paleolithic, etc…, is a dismissive “But have you been eating and pooping regularly? How’s your sleep?”.

That’s why I stopped taking my existential issues to psychiatry and psychology.

!memes@lemmy.world

I’d say a mix of both. There’s inertia, but there’s also the gravitational force when the cube gets to the other side.

!lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world

cobol

Cobol seemed like an interesting programming language, it looked like a funny flavor of BASIC. I managed to get hands on BASIC and its spiritual successor Visual Basic (VB6), but for some reason I’m yet to understand, I wasn’t able to get into Cobol.

Before the house fire, he had at least 20 towers, bags of parts, a closet full of monitors, keyboards and mice.

Oh… Really sorry about the losses 🙁

It was trippy to see the growth of technology from windows 95 to now.

A growth to certain extent; sadly, much of the technology got enshittified roughly after 2015-ish, so it feels to me like tech had this mesmerizing growth from 95 to 2015-ish, before technology started declining nowadays.

Adding to the replies, uppercase letters have lower hexadecimal values than lowercase in the ASCII table. For example, 0x4C is uppercase L, while 0x6C is lowercase L.

Mathematically, uppercase + 0x20 = lowercase.

Alphabetically, 41 to 4f = A to O, then 50 to 5a = P to Z; 61 to 6f = a to o, then 70 to 7a = p to z. (Believe it or not, I’m typing this from meat memory, as I kind of managed to memorize it and I can even 74 79 70 65 20 6c 69 6b 65 20 74 68 69 73 as if it were a second language; it’s thanks to mnemonic shortcuts such as alpha and Omega A to O, “PTZ” p to z, among other crazy pattern matching my ND brain often does).

Back in the DOS/MS-DOS times, RAM and (floppy) disk were very small (a floppy disk had <2MB, and I’m talking about the “modern” floppy disks from the 2000s), so there was this thing called “code golfing” in which programmers used to do some arcane math-magick to conjure as many bytes as possible from inside a single byte. Things like “packed” game sprite channels, side channel data (wonder how compression algorithms got created?), etc. They wouldn’t and often couldn’t “throw more hardware at the problem” like we’re used to nowadays. Sparing the 3rd most significant bit (01x1 1010, Z if x = 0, z if x = 1) would allow for side-channel data such as visual formatting (e.g. whether the character is selected in a terminal emulator).

This all likely played a role when they got chosen as the default interval for alphabet letters back then. Also, decimal numbers, 0x30 to 0x39 (resp. 0 to 9) are closer to the uppercase letters than to the lowercase letters, and so are most of the punctuation (which I didn’t get to memorize yet, but I remember they’re scattered across 0x21 to 0x2f then 0x3a to 0x3f then 0x5b to 0x5f).

This legacy kind of still lingers nowadays, for example, in PC keyboards whose key codes for alphabet letters (afaik) map to the 0x41 to 0x5a range when it gets to the HID driver. Then there are also devices in which program logic is burned into IC chip, such as “old” digital cameras and camcorders, so they ended “frozen” in a time where the file extension was conventionally uppercase.

(And, no, I’m not a millennial, although I’m almost one, sitting at the very cusp between them and Zs, two generations who saw the transition from analog to digital tech during our childhoods/teens).

!nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

As far as I could read from the code you sent and as far as I could run it here, it’s procedurally generating a sword from primitive shapes (mainly CylinderGeometry), instead of using an external mesh/asset like games often do.

However, this procedurally-generated sword is being coded by an algorithm that have no spatial reasoning capabilities. LLMs (e.g. Claude) weren’t trained on 3D assets, so they can’t truly conjure 3D assets as they’re able to (roughly) conjure code.

Also regarding spatial reasoning: if you watched the video I sent you (I’m not quite sure, given your quite dismissive reply), see that moment when I set the initial size for the primitive cylinder that I later sculpted? I literally keep a real, physical, touchable tape measure next to me while I’m on PC; I literally derived the measurements from pulling the tape roughly up to a length that I saw in front of my physical me and thought “yeah, this is a good size for a sword I guess” upon comparing it to my own hands. Oh, did I say hands? That’s another point to take into consideration: LLMs have no hands (yet), LLMs have no physical bodies (yet) to derive measurements from.

On the other… hand (pun intended)… I have to say: even though LLMs have no spatial reasoning, the sword it generated is pretty… okayish to me. I guess you would like to tinker with the values for bladeHalfW and shoulderLen to get a better, more sword-ish shape. Also, the LLM hardcoded all the sizes involved in the grip, so you may also want to tinker with the first two parameters in const grip = new THREE.Mesh(new THREE.CylinderGeometry(....

Finally,

…and why do you guys think this is easy to do?

…you’re welcome, Mr./Ms. Ungrateful!

I’m not going down the “AI? Ew, boo!” avenue like the average Lemmy user. I literally took several minutes of my day recording a video with a free-as-in-free-beer crash course, which you seemingly didn’t watch, and several other minutes to read and parse an AI code so to try and help you as others are mostly mocking you due to your reliance on AI tools (a reliance of which, if you read my reply, I didn’t mock).

I leave you a phrase for you to reflect on: Anthropic can take away the Claude you’re using, OpenAI can take away the ChatGPT you’re using, Alibaba can take away the Qwen you’re using, Google can take away the Gemini you’re using, and so on so forth (whatever LLM you’re using)… but nobody in this world can take away a skill you developed for yourself to yourself, no matter the level of this skill, it’s up to you.

I tried to make my part on this, literally giving away part of my ephemeral time, a act you’re rarely going to see here in the Fediverse.

Now it’s on you.

Good luck with your game project.

!support@lemmy.world

sword look like a twisted cone, a boat paddle, a house, the blade base is perpendicular to the sword hilt… No one will be winning any wars with these kinds of sword.

Hello @PGamesDeveloper@lemmy.world, because you mentioned 3D… got 3 minutes to learn how to make a sword in Blender, without needing to rely on an AI for doing so? It’s free, and I’m giving this lesson for you (and anyone else willing to learn from a crash course of sorts) for free (and I’m not even a professional, I’ve been tinkering with Blender for mere three/four months).
(of course, the sword I made is very, very basic; I could end up with a better sword if I were to spend more than 15 minutes on it, unfortunately I’m already working on something else)
(As a bonus, a 3D sword would allow you to have a 2D asset as well, because it could be rendered from any perspective)
!support@lemmy.world

Anubis, tho the transaction is so quick I can’t 100% confirm that, but I think they do

The amount of time which Anubis and other PoW-based algorithms take to solve a cryptographic challenge will depend on several factors, namely: the challenge level (depending on the webmaster’s settings, the level can be increased if site traffic has increased), the CPU clock speed and amount of CPU resources available for your browser (and, by extension, for Anubis’ ServiceWorkers), as well as… luck. It’s dealing with randomness, after all.

retro-fitted two pretty powerful, not your standard, fans in the old PC to mitigate some of that heat, along with the stock fans that I used to build it

Not to mention how a desktop CPU, even when old (and especially when old, as it likely means a standard big ATX rather than a mini-ITX), has lots of surface area to dissipate heat, and a metal PC case built for radiating the heat away while allowing for better internal circulation of air (contrasted with the non-conductive plastic case from cheap laptops such as the one I own).

Whereas your laptop generally utilizes one fan

Yeah. And in my case it’s a very inefficient, old fan. One that makes louder noise (akin to a car engine idling or cranking) as soon as it gets faster trying to keep up with the CPU heat… Oh, and I forgot to mention this in my previous replies: I also know when my CPU temps raised because the cooling fan becomes more noisy.

I don’t know, but it intrigues me so I’ll keep a closer eye on it just out of mild curiosity.

We often underestimate how much computing power the Web have been demanding from our personal devices. Web browsers have became full-fledged Operating Systems inside whatever Operating System the user uses, and some websites are massive in terms of CPU and RAM requirements. I mean, nowadays we have video editors, graphic suites, 3D suites, even 3D games, running entirely in browser…

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

however, as someone who watches temps closely on my server and especially on my old PC, I can’t confirm that a site causes a dramatic rise in temps

I use a KDE widget (System Monitor sensor) seen in the screenshot. It’s kept on my primary screen, right next to the clock, so I can watch the CPU temps as closely as possible. I also have a secondary widget at the drawer, displaying the CPU usage, as well as RAM and swap usage.

Notice, in the screenshot, how I’m running Blender and, yet, my CPU temps are somewhere around 35-40C. Partly because it’s currently winter here in Southern Hemisphere (and it’s quite cozy-cold around here where I reside), partly because it’s just Blender and a couple of lightweight websites opened in Waterfox. Even Catodon, the Misskey-fork platform I use for interacting with the Fediverse, is quite lightweight, especially because I turned off heavy JS animations.

But this scenario would change if I was faced with a sudden Anubis or Cloudflare. Because I watch the temps and they update each second, I can readily notice the temps increasing as Anubis/Cloudflare do their shenanigans.

Sometimes I’m browsing the Fediverse while awaiting for Blender to finish the rendering of an animation/scene. The rendering itself doesn’t warm my CPU too much, as I can adjust the thread count for Blender, but SharedWorkers in JS can take as much cores as they want because they can be instantiated multiple times, e.g. one for each CPU core. So, if Blender is opened, the temp increase can be higher, because there would be two simultaneous heavy computations competing for CPU cores. And, as I mentioned in my previous reply, the situation gets more dangerous during summer (although I avoid putting my laptop into heavy computing situations during summer).

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

is there a reason people dont like cloudflare

I hate Cloudflare especially because it’s slowly becoming a monopoly (if it didn’t become already). Webmasters are giving too much power to a single corporation to rule over who can access online content and who can’t. Old browsers and privacy-oriented browsers (e.g. Librewolf) are known to be more likely to be refused by Cloudflare, and this is a form of prejudice.

Also, and bringing Anubis to the loop too, there’s the lack of user consent. As a guest/user, I’m unable to consent with the heavy computations (and potential damage to my decade-old laptop from overheating) before these happen.

What I mean about “lack of consent” can be better illustrated by the “This site uses cookies” message: it often offers buttons so the user/guest can choose to either “accept” or “reject”. Have you wondered why every website must give these options nowadays? Because it’s a literal law. Neither Cloudflare nor Anubis have a “we’ll need to validate your browser, do you consent? Proceed with verification / Leave the website”. Something tells me Cloudflare, and Anubis as well, are literally illegal pieces of code in European Union, given the lack of user consent, although this wasn’t tested in courts yet. I’m not European (I’m Brazilian), but it would be quite entertaining to see this tested on an European court.

Finally, these things can cause literal harm to a device. Yes, because when any kind of computation happens, the CPU gets a little warm, and when said computations involve cryptomining-like behavior, CPU temps can raise a lot. And for devices such as mine, an i5-7200U laptop whose fan isn’t good (and I can’t afford a new one), the CPU can easily get to 90C, to the point of damage, if the computations take long enough. Given a PoW relies on randomness, there’s a literal chance that a challenge would kill my laptop if it took several seconds during a Brazilian summer (>42C almost wet-bulb). And I doubt the webmaster would be liable for the material damage their website caused to my personal device, so I’ve been speedrunning my way to close websites as soon as I see “Just a moment” or “Making sure you’re not a bot” as their title, I even made myself an userscript for doing so.

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

the very forum you posted to utilizes Cloudflare

The difference (and the bright side of the Fediverse) is that Fediverse is decentralized so, while some instances can have Cloudflare or similar algorithms (e.g. Anubis) in place, other instances without said algorithms can still interact without having to go through said algorithms. The OC’s instance does neither use Cloudflare nor Anubis (lemmy.ml used to use Anubis, but the admins seem to have turned it off).

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

Not sure about Calckey’s development, because it’s been some months since I migrated to Catodon and have been rarely accessing my Calckey account. What I know is that Catodon is being actively maintained by Panos, who’s been implementing several nice features and doing the necessary updates to the platform in a quite frequent basis.

!lemmy_support@lemmy.ml

At these resolutions, I’d rather use OpenEXR or TIFF, because it’s very likely something beyond usual photography or casual internet pictures, such as astronomical/medical imagery or 3D scene imagery/textures, both of which benefit from multichannel and full precision multilayer capabilities due to being likely a composition of different wavelengths for the first or different aspects/passes for a 3D scene (diffuse light, roughness, emissive light, etc).

memes@lemmy.world

I was once diagnosed (by the first psychiatrist I ever consulted with) with GAD, back when I was developing burnout from my first job developing. A decade later, I still get GAD crises sometimes, although it’s been milder than in the past.

It used to manifest as numbness on face, hands, stomach/belly and feet; an imminent sensation that “something will bring about the end of the entire world today”; a sudden, paradoxically simultaneous agoraphobia (fear of open places) and claustrophobia (fear of enclosed faces), intense vertigo/dizziness; gastrointestinal reflux, hyper salivation, an urge to drink water; tachycardia, verging the arrhythmia, and high blood pressure (easily went past 160 per 90 mmHg). I used to have it while I was working, or taking the bus to the university. At the time, the psychiatrist RX’d me Paxil, which kind of worked to curb the GAD, but worsened other things such as depression and lethargy. Eventually, after several years under treatment with Paxil, I took a calculated risk and stopped on my own because, I thought to myself, I can’t be reliant on a medication that took away my productivity and made me unemployed.

Nowadays, with no ongoing psychiatric medication, I have rarely felt the “numbness”, but the other symptoms can manifest. The whole GAD thing only happens sporadically, generally triggered by heavy emotional and situational contexts.

While I have headaches, it’s more of a migraine, happens days after I suddenly start “seeing” an uncanny face through my inner eyes, and began happening after COVID-19 so I suspect mine has something to do with a post-COVID luggage. But, then, everyone’s organisms and symptoms may differ. One thing I recommend is taking notes of when and how frequently it happens, gauging your blood pressure to check if it’s raising, and, if you can afford it, seeking a general practitioner (is this the word for “clínico-geral”, the kind of doctor who redirects the patient to the proper medical specialty? I rarely use this word outside Brazilian Portuguese contexts). And, most importantly: do not self-medicate, medications can be damaging if taken without proper and well-studied prescription from a doctor.

!nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

asking easily googleable questions

Meanwhile, Google:
-> “Here are some ways to make cheese stick to the pizza: add glue to the sauce”
-> “There are 2 'm’s in the word Gemini (G-E-M-I-N-M-I)”
-> "The number of USB ports on a motherboard depends on the model, but most have multiple USB headers, typically ranging from two to six or more. One Reddit user says: “(a literal criminal phrase that appeared in a real original Google answer that I am not going to reproduce verbatim here in this comment for ethical and legal reasons)”

Indeed it’s very E-Z googling nowadays! /s

!nostupidquestions@lemmy.world