• 0 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 4th, 2023

help-circle
  • But maybe I’m just using it so much I don’t recognize the sharp edges as much anymore.

    Nah. I used to think that GUI git clients were The Way. But they all fall short, especially when the ***slightest ***thing goes sideways. Once you get your head around the paradigm, the git CLI is how you get real shit done and quickly. If anything, the GUI clients are all sharp edges and half-measures; the only reason I pull out a GUI client is to get a visual on all the branches in progress/already merged.


  • Gwenview is a new one on me. Thanks for the tip! Downloading it now.

    Raster as background and marking up as vector graphics on an overlay.

    There are lots of use cases for exactly that, like certain graphics tasks my partner does for her employer (flyers, t-shirt designs). with an existing raster image as background in Inkscape. For what I do, that workflow would be serious overkill.



    • Audio configuration: I just install DRS in Win10 and it works, as does all of the GPU integration*. My DAW also just works, no fiddling with the buffer to get rid of the crackling or to get it recognized.
    • FL Studio: It’s not really FLS that I’m missing but rather I have a couple VSTs that absolutely won’t work in Linux, plus a huge amount of patches I built in those instruments. However, Bitwig kicks so much ass that it’s been worthwhile to try to rebuild those sounds inside Bitwig’s Grid.
    • Inventor and AutoCAD: I hate Autodesk with the fury of a 1000 suns, but I know these apps cold and have a huge library of parts and assemblies. FreeCAD just ain’t there yet, and the new workbench menu has been an annoying learning curve. Inventor can handle enormous assemblies on my (previously running Win 10) laptop; FreeCAD still crashes when the object tree gets over a certain depth even on my burliest workstation. Assemblies in FreeCAD are a total mess too. I want to love FreeCAD and have great hopes for future versions.
    • Suspend: one of my laptops won’t suspend correctly. Sometimes it reboots, sometimes it suspends, sometimes it goes into a weird middle state running at full throttle but the screen is dark and the keyboard is unresponsive even to REIUSB. I just always shut it down now, no BFD.

    And despite all that, I don’t miss Windows at all.

    *DRS was actually painless on Aurora Linux with my big workstation that only has a dGPU. All my computers with both iGPU and dGPU were more fiddly. I mostly blame Nvidia on this issue. I’m pretty sure the suspend problem is also an iGPU/dGPU thing and also blaming Nvidia for that.




  • I don’t really get all the hate on the comments.

    Agreed. “Oh no! Not an ETL!” I wish more applications were backed by MySQL, MariaDB, Mongo, etc. Give me the option of encryption at rest, and when it’s time to change apps, I have granular control over everything.

    On the other hand, the advantage of all the hate is everyone presenting their faves and providing their reasons. So …net win for the audience?





  • Anecdote: (a little background) I don’t typically deal with narcissistic people; I’m not troubled by narcissists in my life. My tech life is pretty well locked down, but it could always be better (working on it). And my YouTube suggestions are tightly, carefully curated to topics pertinent to my professional and personal projects.

    I had an utter piece of shit contractor working for me on a project; he was a grifting, conniving, manipulative shitbag. When I outright fired his ass, he first got all self-righteous then tried to play the victim, but I wasn’t playing any of his games. My phone was sitting on the workbench next to me.

    The next day, I opened YouTube because an engineer I know told me he dropped a new video on software we recently discussed. There among my suggestions were a bunch of videos on how to deal with narcissists. So somehow, in only talking with the contractor (he doesn’t use email, text, or other electronic communications), YouTube decided I was curious about dealing with narcissism. I’m morbidly curious how YouTube made that decision, and whether it was audio or “we know you’re associating with this guy who we identify as a problematic narcissist and here are some resources.”

    Now, I’m just some douchecanoe on the internet and you should probably dismiss me based on that alone. But GODDAMN, the data points sure do pile up quickly on how deeply we’re being surveilled.




  • Different financial institutions (FI) will all have different appearances, because of the nature of how MX is implemented, and whether on desktop or mobile. In the case of my credit union, it’s right here:

    The interface of MX Platform on desktop looks like this:

    You might see something like this in your online banking home page:

    There are two ways that MX can get data from other accounts which you have to explicitly link in your bank/CU interface. The first method is through Open Banking protocols, which are mercifully obfuscated from the end user. Seriously, if you’re having trouble sleeping, try reading some of the Open Banking specifications. :D One selects their FI from the list, and enters creds and 2FA challenge. The other method is screen-scraping, but again this is abstracted away from the end user.

    One of the features where MX slaps more than anyone else (for now) is identifying the source of debits and classifying them. Underneath the hood, debit and credit card transaction strings are chaos. But even if MX gets it wrong, you can manually re-classify your expenses, and it will apply that to future transactions (optional). I already mentioned the burndowns, but if you have an idea for a saving schedule, MX will provide reminders and factor in your growth. Platform will also provide reminders for almost everything.

    Let me know if you have any other questions.




  • As others have said, a spreadsheet is the simplest. If you do your banking with a credit union, chances are they make MX available to you in your online banking. A lot of banks use MX too. Their software provides the projections and forecasting you seek, as well as Open Banking connections to all of your other accounts. If you have loans, it also has burndowns of outstanding debts. Extra bonus: MX doesn’t sell your data.

    Disclosure: I used to work for MX.




  • By the same logic, raytracing is ancient tech that should be abandoned.

    Nice straw man argument you have there.

    I’ll restate, since my point didn’t seem to come across. All of the “AI” garbage that is getting jammed into everything is merely scaled up from what has been before. Scaling up is not advancement. A possible analogy would be automobiles in the late 60s and 90s: Just put in more cubic inches and bigger chassis! More power from more displacement does not mean more advanced. Continuing that analogy, 2.0L engines cranking out 400ft-lb and 500HP while delivering 28MPG average is advanced engineering. Right now, the software and hardware running LLMs are just MOAR cubic inches. We haven’t come up with more advanced data structures.

    These types of solutions can have a place and can produce something adjacent to the desired results. We make great use of expert systems constantly within narrow domains. Camera autofocus systems leap to mind. When “fuzzy logic” autofocus was introduced, it was a boon to photography. Another example of narrow-ish domain ML software is medical decision support software, which I developed in a previous job in the early 2000s. There was nothing advanced about most of it; the data structures used were developed in the 50s by a medical doctor from Columbia University (Larry Weed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Weed). The advanced part was the computer language he also developed for quantifying medical knowledge. Any computer with enough storage, RAM, and the hardware ability to quickly traverse the data structures can be made to appear advanced when fed with enough collated data, i.e. turning data into information.

    Since I never had the chance to try it out myself, how was your neural network and LLMs reasoning back in the day? Imo that’s the most impressive part, not that it can write.

    It was slick for the time. It obviously wasn’t an LLM per se, but both were a form of LM. The OCR and auto-suggest for DOS were pretty shit-hot for x386. The two together inspried one of my huge projects in engineering school: a whole-book scanner* that removed page curl and gutter shadow, and then generated a text-under-image PDF. By training the software on a large body of varied physical books and retentively combing over the OCR output and retraining, the results approached what one would see in the modern suite that now comes with your scanner. I only achieved my results because I had unfettered use of a quad Xeon beast in the college library where I worked. That software drove the early digitization processes for this (which I also built): http://digitallib.oit.edu/digital/collection/kwl/search

    *in contrast to most book scanning at the time, which required the book to be cut apart and the pages fed into an automatically fed scanner; lots of books couldn’t be damaged like that.

    Edit: a word