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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 4th, 2025
  • It’s pretty clear that robotics hardware has advanced way beyond the software. Do a backflip? No problem, that’s a predefined routine with good secondary control mechanisms to handle the variation between requested movement and actual movement.

    Pick up a dish? Well, that’s going to take vision, control, understanding of how the grabber and various materials interact, and then fuse all that data into an expected result and a plan of action, then control of unexpected things like the plate slipping or the floor being slightly wet.

    It’s amazing how far we’ve come and how much it has highlighted how far we have to go.

  • Obviously I don’t know your setup, but Linux is far easier for printing in most cases. The drivers are built in, and just work. No third party driver packages full of spyware and ink ads necessary.

    Hardware support, in general, has always been a struggle for Linux, but in the last few years, two things have happened to tip the scale:

    1. Technology kinda stopped advancing. Products are, more often then not, a rehash of last years model with no major changes. This means if Linux gets support for last year’s device, it’ll probably work with this years with minor to no changes.
    2. Growing Linux popularity has increased the profile enough that companies are at least trying a little to support Linux, even if it is mostly just making sure Linux developers have documentation on the device.
    3. And secret number 3, the tools and systems for reverse engineering USB devices have gotten better and more understood.
  • AI is finding bugs, which are getting fixed. That’s great, it means a more secure and stable system. As these vulnerabilities are patched out, they are gone forever(regressions not withstanding).

    Theoretically, Linux could become perfectly secure. It’s not going to stop people from doing insecure things, but it could mean there are no unintended security weaknesses. We could hit a point were an “LTS” copy of Linux never receives a single security patch, because as long as the code isn’t changing, there’s nothing to fix.

    Of course, this is all theoretical, and assumes that new classes of attacks or bigger chains for attacks are never found, but vulnerabilities should be a finite resource in a static codebase, and once that resource is fully exhausted, the code is now fully safe.

    Ideally, open weights or open source models catch up, and this can all be done without paying a ransom to OpenAI or Anthropic, and is available through the whole stack, not just kernel level.

  • There are definitely still ads, I’m not talking about the creator inserted ones, but there is a banner that loves popping up that says “view products”, directing users away from the video to a list of products where Google gets a cut of the sales. And lately, I’ve been getting ads for Paramount Plus videos in the middle of my feed. Oh, and then there is putting “Member Only” videos in my feed attempting to upsell me on memberships to creators.

    Those are all 100% controlled by Google.

  • They do far better today than they did three years ago, but they still get stuff wrong constantly. I’ve had it give me the source for claims, and the source says the exact opposite of what it claimed. This isn’t a quantized to hell model running on my own hardware, but Opus from Claude.

    My go to is to get people to ask it something they know a lot about, and see how bad inaccurate it is. If it gets something you know about so wrong, how wrong is it for everything else?