sudoreboot

sudoreboot, 6 days ago

I preferred the Chinese version. Hollywood’s take didn’t have the same atmosphere and the pacing was weird.

They never let you soak in any particular moment, time, or place. Every little plot line or detail that could be cut, was. It felt to me like a very long tldr or a string of trailers glued together. So many trailer-style corny one-liners.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some parts that were actually enjoyable, but I feel like I wouldn’t have missed out on anything had I not watched it.

sudoreboot, 10 days ago

A partial answer to your question is that there’s a minimum amount of heat necessarily radiated when doing computation, given by the Landauer principle.

Furthermore, I also do not think that we will detect dyson spheres, because if a civilisation wishes to hide, they won’t radiate heat uncontrollably by extracting all possible energy, but rather send that energy elsewhere, for example by dumping it into a black hole. But I could be wrong and such a civilisation might care more about energy than remaining undiscovered.

sudoreboot, 10 days ago

Reversible computing can not work around it because one simply can not extract information without irreversibly affecting the system. This is a fundamental constraint due to how, in quantum mechanics, once an observer entangles themselves with a system they can never unentangle themselves. I believe that from that single fact one can derive the impossibility of reversible existence.

sudoreboot, 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

This comment tells me that you do not fully understand reversible computing, thermodynamics, nor what I am trying to say. The snark does not motivate me to be patient or pedagogical, but I’ll still give it a shot.

By interfering with a closed system as an entity outside of that system (for example by extracting information by performing a measurement on any of its component subsystems such as the position or momentum of a particle), you are introducing a dependency of that formerly closed system’s state on your state and that of your environment. Now, by state I mean quantum state, and by interfering I mean entangling yourself (and your environment) with the system, because our reality is fundamentally quantum.

Entanglement between an observer and a system is what makes it appear to the observer as if the wave function of the system collapsed to a (more) definite state, because the observer never experiences the branching out of its own quantum state as the wave function of the now combined system describes a superposition of all possible state combinations (their (and their environment’s) preceding state × the system’s preceding state × the state of whatever catalyst joined them together). The reason an observer doesn’t ever experience “branching out” is because the branches are causally disconnected, and so each branch describes a separate reality with all other realities becoming forever inaccessible. This inaccessibility entails a loss of information, and this loss of information is irreversible.

So there you have it. You can never extract useful work from a closed system without losing something in the process. This something is usually called “heat”, but what is lost is not merely “heat”: it is the potential usefulness of the thing of interest. But it really all boils down to information. Entropy increases as information is lost, and this is all relative to an observer. Heat dissipation represents “useless information” or “loss of useful/extractable energy” as it concerns an entity embedded in a quantum wave function.

sudoreboot, 10 days ago

Not to mention the problem of what life is even supposed to do beyond a certain point of development. The depressing fact is that there is a finite amount of knowledge to be gained, a finite amount of resources to harvest, a finite diversity of life to contend or thrive alongside with. Once a pocket of life in this massive universe begins to run out of things to do and stagnates, then what? What is there to think about; to feel; to experience?

There’s little point in exploring space if one know how this universe works. One knows the rules, knows all the ways it can play out, and there’s no surprise waiting on the other end of any venture one can imagine embarking on.

That’s my theory. The Great Filter is just depressive boredom. We don’t see other life because by the time a civilisation is able and ready to spend thousands of years travelling through deep space, they’ll have already lost any motivation they might have had to do so.

I suspect that there’s at best a very short window wherein a species is both knowledgeable enough to dream of space exploration and technologically capable of sending any significant amount of artificial constructions out there.

Not to mention that anything an alien species might send into interstellar space is unimaginably unlikely to be recorded exactly at precisely the moment they pass another lump of matter - especially if the window is as short as I fear.

sudoreboot, 10 days ago

Complaining about technology eliminating the need for certain labour is glancing over some much deeper issues that result in displaced workers suffering all of the consequences.

sudoreboot, 21 days ago

That is a different car brand, though?

sudoreboot, 25 days ago

Maybe what they’re trying to describe is a torus

sudoreboot, 25 days ago

tl;dr:

Peter Schauss at the University of Virginia says the wave packet is such a well-understood component of quantum theory that the findings of the new experiment are not surprising – but they do show that the researchers had a high degree of control over the processes used to cool and then precisely image the atoms.

I’m not entirely sure what they mean by having images of their waviness, because that is not how it works. You can not measure a quantum wave, because it isn’t a “particle” wave but a wave-like distribution of mutually exclusive measurement outcomes. Taking a picture is the same as entangling yourself, which embeds you in the quantum wave function such that it describes all possible combinations of you ending up with every possible outcome.

sudoreboot, 25 days ago

As I understand it, they are making measurements of an otherwise single isolated particle as it moves about in a controlled space, and the measurements confirm (yet again) that the measurement outcomes match the probabilities given by the Schrödinger equation, which means that it interferes with itself.

The language used may lead some to think that we now have images showing a wave-like particle, but again, that’s not something that can ever happen. What we have are boring old images of a single classical-looking particle, but the patterns they display tells us that quantum mechanics is very much at play in between the takes.

sudoreboot, 26 days ago

Same problem, 1070, NixOS Plasma

sudoreboot, 1 month ago

That argument extends to any realistic recreation of events. It’s not wrong, I’m just not sure what could be done about it.

sudoreboot, 1 month ago

Global population? You say “the”, so you obviously mean the one we have in common.

sudoreboot, 1 month ago

Don’t do that.

sudoreboot, 1 month ago

Am mildly curious to know what circumstance and economic policies might have contributed to this. Always good to study successful recipes.

sudoreboot, 1 month ago

While it’s possible that this is the case, we don’t actually know that because the people with the right skills aren’t spending a lot of time and resources on experimenting with new ideas and concepts unless there’s profit to be made from it.

Chances of coming up with an idea for a new kind of OS that will bring great return on investment in terms of profit and market share are very low, so entrepreneurs are spending their time thinking about more lucrative ventures.

If we lived in a post-scarcity Communist society where everyone is free to do what they feel is important and fulfilling to them, we’d be more likely to see new and novel ways of interfacing with computers (and technology in general).

But we don’t.

Edit: Also, operating systems are a lot of work.

sudoreboot, 1 month ago

Not well, apparently.

sudoreboot, 1 month ago

Yeah, I don’t know why anyone knowledgeable would expect them to be good at chess. LLMs don’t generalise, reason or spot patterns, so unless they read a chess book where the problems came from…

sudoreboot, 1 month ago

In general I don’t use properties as much as I could. Mostly to set tags, alias, and sometimes icon, but there are some exceptions where I have custom tags. For blocks I never think to use tags. Not sure what the use case is, but I’m sure there are some good ones.

sudoreboot, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

As soon as it works. A recent update included Plasma 6.0.2 (on NixOS unstable/24.05) which apparently defaults to wayland, but it just exits to login right away. I’m not in a mood to tinker, so for now I plan to simply wait for things to Just Work. When I select “wayland” and things work and look the same (or better) is when I’m happy to rid myself of the horror that is X11, because as horrible as X11 is, it simply isn’t giving me trouble these days - my system is stable and I like keeping it that way.

Edit: perhaps important to mention that I’m using a GTX 1070.

Edit 2: I realise that I’m sort of contradicting myself with how I worded the above. I don’t mean to imply that I’m not willing to sacrifice anything to embrace Wayland; just that as it stands I don’t think the benefits of Wayland outweighs my ability to use this computer the way I need to.

sudoreboot, 1 month ago

I think the Xorg vs Wayland situation is not too dissimilar to that of Windows vs Linux. Lots of people are waiting for all of their games/software work (just as well or better) on Linux before switching. I believe that in most cases, switching to Linux requires that a person goes out of their way to either find alternatives to the software they use or altogether change the way they use their computer. It’s a hard sell for people who only use their computer to get their work done, and that’s why it is almost exclusively developers, tech-curious, idealists, government workers, and grandparents who switch to Linux (thanks to a family member who falls into any subset of the former categories). It may require another generation (of people) for X11 to be fully deprecated, because even amongst Linux users there are those who are not interested in changing their established workflow.

I do think it’s unreasonable to expect everything to work the same when a major component is being replaced. Some applications that are built with X11 in mind will never be ported/adapted to work on Wayland. It’s likely that for some things, no alternatives are ever going to exist.

Good news is that we humans are complex ! Technology is always changing - that’s just the way of it. Sometimes that will lead to perceived loss of functionality, reduction in quality, or impeded workflow in the name of security, resource efficiency, moral/political reasons, or other considerations. Hopefully we can learn to accept such change, because that’ll be a virtue in times to come.

(This isn’t to say that it’s acceptable for userspace to be suddenly broken because contributors thought of a more elegant way to write underlying software. Luckily, X11 isn’t being deprecated anytime soon for just this reason.)

Ok I’m done rambling.

sudoreboot, 1 month ago

Thanks for the suggestion. sudo cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset indeed prints N, so I’ll try adding that to my system config.

sudoreboot, 1 month ago

I finally got around to restarting my system after adding hardware.nvidia.modesetting.enable = true; to my NixOS config and it works perfectly! Thank you for the suggestion. I likely wouldn’t have figured that out on my own any time soon.

sudoreboot, 2 months ago

According to my local news, the draft did not call for a ceasefire and that is why it was vetoed.

sudoreboot, 2 months ago

There’s another thread just like this one posted 2 hours earlier in this same community, fyi.

Just gonna copy my comment from there:

The Isle is honestly pretty bad in many respects. In fact, it’s such a mess that I need to clarify which version I’m even talking about, because there is an OG version and an on-going complete rewrite, prompted by them having fired their only coder and no longer being able to understand their own codebase.

The OG version was special. It was very simple, quite buggy and in a constant, obvious state of plans-and-hopes (being EA), but it had a unique atmosphere - the only true survival-horror to date, as far as I’m concerned/aware (only rivalled by some of my experiences playing DayZ, back when it was still an Arma 2 mod).

Playing a herbivore, resting/hiding in a bush in the pitch-black darkness of night with only limited night-vision letting me see my immediate surroundings and footprints on the ground, the sound of a massive, rumbling carnivore sniffing for traces of food was quite a thrill. Not to mention the moments after when a pair of jaws around my size suddenly emerge out of the darkness.

That kept me playing.

Then they stopped working on that and began their rework from the ground up. The rework (which they call EVRIMA) has (or had) no day-night cycle (always daytime), went from being set in an arboreal environment to tropical jungle, and had two playable dinosaurs (one herb- and one carnivore) of about equal size. No creepy nights, no asymmetric gameplay, no horror elements, different feeling in both how it feels to play and how it looks, and it also ran like crap on any device.

They’re slowly working on it; it has some more dinosaurs now etc, but last I played, it still didn’t feel the same and it was still buggy and severely incomplete. What emergent horror elements one might get out of the reworked version I feel are but shadows of what could have been.

And yet there’s none other like it.

Edit: I believe the current version does have night-time, but it doesn’t (or didn’t until recently) have night-vision and IIRC the nights are not as horrifying.