technology

My modded minecraft was stuttering and eventually crashed, figured it it was either not enough RAM or an issue with the pack. Turns out it was HUNDREDS of duplicates of OmenInstallMonitor.exe eating up 99% of my 32gb of RAM. Thankfully other people had already figured out the fix so that wasn't too hard but it's just kinda crazy that such a thing can happen.

EDIT: Not a scam, see git's comment below.

So I downloaded the No Thanks app, which claims to be a barcode scanner app to tell you whether a product is BDS-compliant. I heard about it after it made the rounds under the narrative of "zionists are mobbing this app with bad reviews saying it's a scam, download it and leave a positive review!"

However, after using it I suspect it might actually be a scam app. Here's why: if you scan a product it tells you whether it's on a boycott list or not. If it isn't on a boycott list, you have the option to press a button to tell them it should be. Then the possible scam kicks in: it pops open a browser window taking you to the gmail web login. Not OAuth, not opening the system mail app with a template mail, straight to the gmail web login screen where you are expected to input your username + password + 2FA. I got all the way to putting in my username + password before being prompted for 2FA and realizing what I was doing was fucking stupid. Changed my gmail password immediately afterward.

Does anybody have any info on whether this thing is legit? It seems like it would make a pretty obvious zionist astroturfing target. Also I scanned a container of tahini that literally said "Product of Israel" on the side and it said it was fine (which precipitated the above sequence of events).

Take it directly from the horse's mouth (some silicon VC):

In September 2023, I published AI’s $200B Question. The goal of the piece was to ask the question: “Where is all the revenue?”

At that time, I noticed a big gap between the revenue expectations implied by the AI infrastructure build-out, and actual revenue growth in the AI ecosystem, which is also a proxy for end-user value. I described this as a “$125B hole that needs to be filled for each year of CapEx at today’s levels.”

This week, Nvidia completed its ascent to become the most valuable company in the world. In the weeks leading up to this, I’ve received numerous requests for the updated math behind my analysis. Has AI’s $200B question been solved, or exacerbated?

If you run this analysis again today, here are the results you get: AI’s $200B question is now AI’s $600B question.

Other interesting parts include the admission (honestly less of an admission than "the thing these people say repeatedly") that I first read in Peter Thiel's book Zero to One that capitalists aren't seeking out competitive markets, they're seeking out monopoly markets:

In the case of physical infrastructure build outs, there is some intrinsic value associated with the infrastructure you are building. If you own the tracks between San Francisco and Los Angeles, you likely have some kind of monopolistic pricing power, because there can only be so many tracks laid between place A and place B. In the case of GPU data centers, there is much less pricing power. GPU computing is increasingly turning into a commodity, metered per hour. Unlike the CPU cloud, which became an oligopoly, new entrants building dedicated AI clouds continue to flood the market. Without a monopoly or oligopoly, high fixed cost + low marginal cost businesses almost always see prices competed down to marginal cost (e.g., airlines).

One final interesting quote:

Speculative frenzies are part of technology, and so they are not something to be afraid of. Those who remain level-headed through this moment have the chance to build extremely important companies. But we need to make sure not to believe in the delusion that has now spread from Silicon Valley to the rest of the country, and indeed the world. That delusion says that we’re all going to get rich quick, because AGI is coming tomorrow, and we all need to stockpile the only valuable resource, which is GPUs.

Didn't know this was an actual mindset in the industry, god damn.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/major-retailers-are-backtracking-self-checkout-rcna160234

This week, Adam talks with journalist and influential tech critic Ed Zitron of wheresyoured.at to discuss the impending burst of the AI bubble, the hubris of Silicon Valley, and how we suffer under big tech's "Rot Economy."

The Busy Beaver numbers are how long a Turing Machine of some size can run and still halt. There are different ways of formulating them, but the most common is the number of steps a 2-symbol, N-state machine can run before halting. These numbers go 1, 6, 21, 107, 47176870.

The 6th number is already known to be higher than 10⇈15.

Adult content 🤔

With ever more Supreme Court fuckery going on I'd like to help comrades in my local org be better secured against potential breaches.

Ideally I'd like to recommend 1-3 options that meet these needs:

• Easy to use
• Can be used on phones as well as mobile devices
• Doesn't retain any network traffic data

Any ideas on what options we have?

Do you want to relieve the late 90's Tamagotchi craze? Now you can with your own v-pet! This free software emulates how the toy acted, right down to pulling out the strip to turn it on.

RIP to my old Minecraft world from 2019 on this 2.5 inch HDD I now use as a mirror for shaving

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/28/bill_gates_ai_power_consumption/

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-hires-ai-startup-adepts-212217362.html

text here

"Privacy" for normies is.... Weird. You should use FOSS software... NOW!!

We literally wrote "don't create the torment nexus" as a cautionary tale and you went and built the torment nexus

So, I'm pretty much a layman when it comes to modding, game development, coding, etc. With that said, am I correct in thinking that creating a small to midsized mod for a game like Stellaris is a much smaller/easier undertaking than even a simple indie game?

If I want to get started in that direction, creating a small (functional) Stellaris mod might be a good idea?