Once you’re replying to me, someone who’s said their sure Earthwormjim’s comment was specifically referring to a specific kernel patch, you’re in a conversation about that specific kernel patch, whether or not I’m right about that original comment being about that specific kernel patch.
Most of this particular comment chain (and it’s the post-Earthormjim comment chain I said was referring to that one patch, not the whole thread) has been you replying to me after I started talking about it, so it’s been the topic whether or not it’s a non-sequitur from the thread as a whole. When one of the participants in a two-person dialogue thinks something’s the current topic, that’s enough to make it the topic.
It’s been headline news (at least by Lemmy standards), so it’s a safe bet that Earthwormjim91 was alluding to it when he initially brought up Torvalds, and I was referring to it when I initially brought up optimisation. It wouldn’t have been clear to you if you hadn’t known about it already, as no one linked an article or said explicitly that that’s what they were referring to, but for someone who did, it would have been obvious. You wouldn’t expect someone to explicitly say they were referencing Shrek if they said that something had layers or something was sacrifice someone was willing to make when it clearly would only affect other people, and you wouldn’t expect someone to explicitly say they were referring to Trump’s infamous COVID-era press conference if they mentioned injecting bleach.
This comment chain is specifically referencing a single LLM-assisted patch that Linus Torvalds posted to the mailing list for review a few days ago that solves a longstanding performance problem that interacts with enough things parts of the kernel that there are only a handful of people in the world qualified to deal with it, and that none of them have had the time to investigate and fix properly until just now. https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linus-torvalds-posts-his-first-llm-assisted-patch-to-the-linux-kernel-after-issuing-clear-pro-ai-directives-the-bossman-makes-use-of-ai-tooling-himself
It’s not really gaming the algorithm. There’s no karma here, no one buying high-karma accounts for advertising, and no one chasing attention when the maximum attention a Lemmy post gets isn’t very much because there aren’t very many users, so there’s no point trying to artificially boost engagement. People are just posting things when they’re online and not posting things when they’re offline, and there are few enough users that it doesn’t take many to create a pattern, and it sounds like you just happen to check at a similar cadence to a few anime fans, so keep seeing things right after they’ve browsed and upvoted what they like. I just checked the All Communities Hot feed on lemmy.world with no communities blocked, and only see one anime-related post in the first five pages, so they’re clearly not constantly at the top. Considering the demographics that would typically use Lemmy, that’s a really low number.
It only needs to save a few hundreds of seconds on one computer, or one second on a few hundreds of computers, or a tiny fraction of a second on the number of computers that actually run Linux to save trillions of cycles. A trillion cycles isn’t very many at all. A hundred-word prompt on a frontier model running on GPUs in a datacentre burns much more power than a trillion cycles on a CPU, so for a large Linux kernel patch, trillions is the wrong number by many orders of magnitude. There are also a lot of computers spending a lot of time running Linux, so it kind of balances out. There’s only one Linus Torvalds, and he’s very busy, so it’s likely that if he’d not used an LLM to get this work done, it simply wouldn’t have happened, even if someone had been willing to fund a different human to do it.
Either way, the original point of the post was that LLM-generated code is always shitty (even when it’s not immediately obvious to whoever’s responsible for it that it’s shitty) and so having any amount of it already makes things worse, even ignoring the huge environmental cost. With that context, it is the case that there’s a huge difference between Timmy and Torvalds as Torvalds is famous for having very high standards, so if he’s using it, he might be able to make something that isn’t shitty.
The default sort prioritises posts from within the last few minutes above posts that are hours old with far more votes. If one anime fan posts a handful of things right when another checks their feed, there’ll be anime posts at the top for half an hour or so, as they’ve got the most votes per minute.
Both things are going on at the same time, as Torvalds and Timmy are both paying Sam Altman to pour oil into the river as a byproduct of the service he’s providing. For something as important as the Linux kernel, it wasting fewer CPU cycles as a result of LLM-aided optimisation work might even be net beneficial for the environment once you take into account that it’ll affect billions of computers for years to come. If the end product is shitty, though, there’s no question that it wasn’t worth the environmental damage.
Some Markdown renderers interpret two dashes as an en dash and three as an em dash, so on some Lemmy clients, that might show up as a real en dash.
Matrix is fine with an alternative client. I use Commet, and it’d pretty much serve as a total replacement for Discord for me if not for the fact that nearly none of the communities I’m in are bridged there.
This is a common misconception. Trans people actually have a directional air dash.
When governments print banknotes, they can sell them and get money to do things at face value, instead of having to get loans and issue bonds where they’d have to pay interest or charging taxes where their citizens would object. In fact, in countries like the EU, UK and USA, despite normal people and normal companies using cash less and less, for the past couple of decades, the amount of cash printed has increased rapidly because as long as people buy it, there’s a big incentive for governments to print it. Bigger face value notes mean more money for less printing, so are the best thing to issue, as long as people are buying them.
That leaves a big question of who on earth is buying more banknotes each year than the last. The obvious thing that can be best done by banknotes is storing a large value in a small space with the ability to be moved around without traceability or counterfeiting, which really only matters to money launderers. Things like bank transfers and cryptocurrencies can be traced as long as someone knows who owned the money at some point, but if you buy your bitcoin with cash from someone who doesn’t keep records of who gave them the cash, then your crypto wallet is totally opaque to the authorities.
The people involved range from minor things like spouses hiding money in a divorce to tax dodgers to drug dealers to people traffickers to sanctioned governments, and when that’s all added up and funneled through opaquely-owned shell companies so it doesn’t look like it’s Russia or Iran’s money buying the cash, there’s enough demand for governments to justify building new money printing facilities and issuing higher denomination banknotes.
If you want to learn more, there’s quite a lot more detail in Everybody Loves Our Dollars by Oliver Bullough.
Technically it was the Free Software movement that was a form of Leftism, and Open Source was Capitalism’s attempt to subsume it once it became apparent that it was capable of producing better software.
And unlike the original Star Wars film, which made the parallels to the Vietnam War paint the US in a bad light, the latest Star Wars film riffs off the helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now!, but instead of presenting napalming the shit out of people as a bad thing, presents it as a good thing.
Depending on the context, it could just be who’s doing it. Star Wars was originally specifically an allegory for the Vietnam War, which was a war of Western imperialism because the two countries making it a war rather than a country gaining its independence were France (who’d conquered Vietnam as part of their empire and weren’t happy that the Vietnamese didn’t want to be in their empire) and the US (who wanted to stop communists gaining power anywhere), both of which are Western countries. It was about that war in particular rather than imperialism in general because that war in particular was the one that was a big deal for the target audience at the time - if Lucas had been Japanese and making the film decades earlier, maybe he’d have made it an allegory for something else, but he wasn’t, so he made the film he made.
You’ve probably created something that would be considered a DRM circumvention device under the DMCA, so possessing it would be illegal unless it’s covered by one of the exceptions. If you think it might be, then you’re probably in a legal grey area as there isn’t case law settling whether the exceptions override the parts about DRM circumvention, but it’s fairly widely accepted that they probably do - DRM-era console emulators like Dolphin rely on it being legal to bypass the games’ DRM in order to interoperate with other computer systems, and no one’s been brave enough to sue them for that interpretation yet.
If it is illegal, the most likely outcome is just that someone does a DMCA takedown request and GitHub would take it down and that would be the end of that, which is pretty much the same thing as would likely happen if anyone didn’t like it but it was legal, as it’s easy to submit takedown requests, but hard to appeal them if they’re unjustified.
Someone sent me a link to a file through Limewire today. That had its heyday so long ago that I think this is actually the first time I’ve ever used it.
You need to explicitly grant the script admin access or have totally disabled UAC, which already punches a large hole through Windows’ security model. Malware that’s in that situation doesn’t need to block Defender to do harm.
To add to this, when forks do succeed, it’s typically because they’re either making very few changes which can easily be reapplied to new versions of the original project, or because a significant number of the existing developers disagree with the project lead and are just doing what they were already doing before the fork, just without having to obey one specific person.
Just replies to this two-comment-long chain where we’re now talking about elephants. Did you know that it’s theorised they’re the largest surviving land animal mainly because they’re the only large land animal that co-evolved with humans, so had appropriate fear and awareness to avoid being hunted to extinction, whereas other similarly-sized creatures wouldn’t see humans as a threat, so would be vulnerable.