At one point recently I bought a two pack of USB Blu-ray burner drives for $25. Optical media is so dirt cheap now that the readers are BOGO. Gave one to my partner, the other is still serving my physical media needs very well.

Because the bots/trolls/feds have shifted over to driving a wedge between leftists to keep solidarity from occurring. Thus “tankie” is being thrown around heavily, people constantly bring up early Soviet support of the nazis as a reason to say “tankie=nazi” while ignoring that tankies (sue me, it’s a real term that has uses) is a broad term for all “authoritarian fascists,” many of whom came after the nazis, were very anti-nazi, and like all historical figures often had a mix of good and bad qualities.

Certainly its funny to harp on tankies while America falls to literal fascism. Who ever could benefit from scape goating and demonizing communists? Who historically, poetically even, is the famous first victim of fascism due to the strong threat they represent?

Zune and iPod at Tangara.

Walkman, when the Napster fell!

Steve Jobs, his turtle neck raised high.

(Looks pretty neat, been thinking about getting a dedicated music player again!)

!egg_irl@lemmy.blahaj.zone will ultimately be looking for this.

I went in and disabled that, haha, I’m here to fight EVIL!

Plus I still apparently have a lot of muscle memory for emacs commands. I sat down to it and was like “what are my hands doing? How are all these buffers opening?”

I’ve seen clouds ☁️ usedsometimes, usually with an up or down arrow in it, obviously for cloud save, but sometimes confusingly for upload/download.

Likewise, I’ve seen down arrows with a line ⤓ also used recently. (In xed text editor, came with Mint for me.) That also to me is more of a down/upload symbol.

I find the desktop skuimorphism pretty tiring anyway, especially after like 25 years of it. Will computers always and forever be an extension of the office?

I saw or read something recently talking about MS Bob, the ancient origin point for the much maligned font Comic Sans. But what’s lost is what Bob was, why comic sans was made for it. It was a different view of the OS, the home PC, as a digital, animated home. You clicked the wall calendar to open your calendar, the TV to watch video, etc. Its also where clippy came from, originally a dog (who was a clippy option) that acted as a guide and buddy to the new system.

Squeak Smalltalk is also built different. Instead of folders and files everything is objects (years before Java claimed this). If you’ve never tried it, its a very different way to think about computing. Text documents aren’t just files requiring a text editor, they become extensible objects with behaviors attached and definable. Smalltalk blurs the line between user, programmer, creator, and so on. It encourages you to look at the computer and the data on it playfully.

It isn’t just the save icon or “files and folders and desktops” its every part of the computing landscape is constantly being defined by the worst, most boring, money-over-everything people. Computers are so much better when they’re fun.

I just moved to Proton before this while debacle and it definitely put me properly back on edge about who to trust in tech!

I’ll probably stick with their email and calendar for now. (Though I’m curious what hosted calendars might be out there I could use alternatives for arranging events with friends.)

I had started on Keepass before, briefly tried Proton Pass, and now have completed moving to Keepass. I keep my database in my syncthing folder and have it on all my devices. With browser plug-ins and the KeepassDX app on Android, the experience is basically identical, except entirely private and self-hosted. A win all around, I’m real happy with this.

For VPN I’m using surfshark right now and haven’t had any real issues. Not sure what the prevailing sentiment about them is though. I do sometimes find their endpoints blocked by various sites (catbox.moe is oddly very picky about this).

For drive, I’ll probably end up getting a seedbox and a lot more hardrives in the near future anyway, so that’ll be a problem/solution for me then.

(I had to dig these from the back of a kitchen drawer, so not “favorites” exactly.)

Hard same, big fan of big spoon!

Hah! I win my shitty personal bet that he wouldn’t make it a week without getting back to fucking golf! God how I hate that bloated, predictable shitbag

And now, it’s time for 12 straight hours of the same catchy 30 second clip from this song you overheard in the grocery store!

I haven’t gotten to the finance part yet but his discussion on the state of AI currently is excellent. I’m going to post something later about my experiments with DS-R1 in offline form and playing with “the big model” through their apps. The differences are pretty interesting and the big model is quite impressive.

Are you making any investment decisions today? I was thinking it might be a good day/week to “buy the dip” assuming NVidia actually is still a valuable company and will likely experience some overcorrection in the opposite direction. It’s been jittering all day but the downward trend continues for the moment.

Edit:

Wanted to add that I also read this today and he has some different insights to DS as well. In particular, he thinks DS is being honest in their costs, and does some analysis on how their optimizations make their claims of computing on a lot of H800 chips plausible.

He also talks about how DS-R1 uses a somewhat different chain-of-thought/reasoning model than ChatGPT o1. They used RL (no HF!) to have DS “teach itself” how to reason. To me, that’s maybe the most alarming bit. I’d been confident this approach wouldn’t get to AGI but with these techniques… I dunno, maybe we’re much closer to bootstrapping and the AGI revolution than expected? Like…within 2 or 3 years maybe?

Ah, the OP also mentions this:

With R1, DeepSeek essentially cracked one of the holy grails of AI: getting models to reason step-by-step without relying on massive supervised datasets. Their DeepSeek-R1-Zero experiment showed something remarkable: using pure reinforcement learning with carefully crafted reward functions, they managed to get models to develop sophisticated reasoning capabilities completely autonomously. This wasn’t just about solving problems— the model organically learned to generate long chains of thought, self-verify its work, and allocate more computation time to harder problems.

An impeccable classic as well!

This movie?

Uhm aktchewally, its the GNU-Linus Tech Tip system, a complete free software advice and content engine