I own some laser tag equipment that’s amazing hardware and has absolutely shitty software. I rebuilt the entire server side of the software stack using a local LLM (Qwen3.6 35B A3B) running on my laptop. I’m very happy with the outcome, I never could have done that myself.
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BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•Why are so many people still fine with using "The C Word" despite it being officially a derogatory slur towards women?English
231·9 days agoHas anyone ever taught you about the dysphemism treadmill and euphemism treadmill?
Banning words, or trying to reframe them as bad has never worked. It just pushes people to use different words that end up with the same meaning.
Sexism, Racism, Ageism, all the isms… they will always exist as long as more than a handful of humans exist. Humans in large groups are pretty terrible. We didn’t evolve to be particularly nice.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•What are the most important things to teach a child that they're not going to get in school?English
1·10 days agoThe answer to that is yes… Everyone should be able to do a little bit of plumbing.
However you don’t need to a plumber every time you use the toilet so that’s a bad example.
The concern is scale, Someone cooks your food every time you eat. One person can only cook for a limited number of humans. It only takes a dozen people to actively provide water to every house in a city.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•What are the most important things to teach a child that they're not going to get in school?English
1·11 days agoThe problem with your argument is that humans need to eat somewhere between 2 and 5 times a day. Nothing else on your list comes anywhere close to that level of frequency or importance. Just because you learn how to cook doesn’t mean you have to cook every meal either. You should still just know how to do it.
That being said, there is an economic line where this matters. If you make $100 an hour, and have the opportunity to work overtime, cooking is a waste of your time unless you’re batch cooking or just doing it for enjoyment. However, If you’re making $12 an hour, the time cooking likely saves you more money than you would make working and then using that to pay for meals out. The actual tipping point will change depending on your wage and the cost of food.
I’m a bit of a wierdo in this, I have not once in my almost 40 years of life ever ordered food delivered to me. I’ve gone out to eat, I’ve picked up takeout myself, but I have never had food delivered to my home. I make enough for that to make sense, but I just don’t.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•"You can't out train a bad diet" and "you can't out earn bad spending habits" what are some other true clichés along the same lines as these?English
2·12 days agoSo many exceptions to that one that it’s useless. You absolutely can overpower bad technique in a lot of situations.
Go watch idiots break car windows in rescues. If you smash it hard enough, it will eventually break. Whereas a small tap with a sharp object in a corner can crack it with almost no force at all.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•"You can't out train a bad diet" and "you can't out earn bad spending habits" what are some other true clichés along the same lines as these?English
7·12 days agoExcept this one is actually false, you can in fact polish a turd. Here’s the Mythbusters clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•what do you think about biocomputing?English
1·12 days agoYou’re right, chemistry was not your strong point. The sugars produced by photosynthesis are the ones that get turned into coal and oil. Plant respiration actually is the reverse of photosynthesis (it’s essentially human respiration) and is done for exactly the same reason that humans use it for, to produce energy for use by the plant. A plant just does more photosynthesis than respiration, which causes it to grow over time as it accumulates carbon based molecules and stores them.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•what do you think about biocomputing?English
1·12 days agoIf you take the holistic view, servers are already powered by photosynthesis. It just happens that most of them are powered by photo synthesis that occurred millions and millions of years ago.
I’m running Qwen 3.6 35B A3B (the MoE model) on an 8GB Vram Nvidia GPU with 32 GB of ram, with tweaking (and Turboquant) I’ve got it up to 30-40 Tokens per second and a 260k Context. It’s very usable. I’ve seen people report success with Dual 3060 Cards, but you’re still talking $1000-1500 for that kind of setup even if you have parts of it already.
Slammers were metal, pogs were not.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•Would "third world" pricing absolve the CoL crisis in the first world?English
4·24 days agoThe best way to fix the cost of living crisis in the first world is to tax the absolute shit out of land value (not property value, land value which doesn’t include the building)
I’m talking like a 10-20% tax per year on the value of the land. So if a house is worth $1.6 million, and $1 million of that is the land, the tax per year is somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000.
Now you might think, there’s no way anyone could afford that… and you would be correct.
The point of the tax is to do two things A) reduce the value of the land (which in turn makes the tax cheaper) and B) for pieces of land that are still extremely valuable, force them to be developed into dense units (which don’t increase the tax since it’s on the land only) and spread the tax out among more people to make it reasonable.
The tax amounts collected should be returned to everyone via a basic income and/or income tax reductions.
This makes it so that say a family of 5, living in a reasonable amount of house for them, gets enough back to not pay more at the end of the day. While that retired couple with a 5 bedroom house practically downtown gets very little back and a high tax bill, pushing them to sell that to a family or even a developer depending on the market there.
It hurts people who take up too much valuable land, and rewards people who choose to live in condos or townhomes if they want to be in town, or to live further out if they want a detached home.
Side effect, it also entirely fucks over property speculators. Developers can still keep doing their thing, just better because now they don’t have to pay a stupid amount for the land up front. They just have to build at a reasonable pace to reduce the tax bill, rather than holding a project in limbo while the values all go up around them.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why is AI dialogue so fucking bad?English
5·24 days agoBecause it hasn’t been trained on significant amounts of dialogue as a primary source for speech patterns. It also isn’t meant to be distinct unless the instructions make it distinct.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Should hate speech be protected under freedom of speech laws?English
313·26 days agoCanada restricts hate speech, as does most of Europe.
Yet its the US with the speech suppression issues going on right now.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
Programming@programming.dev•What We Lost the Last Time Code Got CheapEnglish
21·1 month agoA medicine dispenser application for a nurse is still just CRUD operations for the most part. There’s nothing innovative about how the code would be written in an application like that.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
Programming@programming.dev•What We Lost the Last Time Code Got CheapEnglish
71·1 month agoYou’re both correct, and also wrong.
A lot of code already exists. Or at least in a close enough form that it can be easily adjusted to address a new situation.
When someone comes up with an idea for a new App at this point, it’s almost never because it’s an entirely new branch of computing. It’s very likely just CRUD with a visual design, and then a small more complex algorithm to mix the data around behind the scenes.
What’s the difference between a dating app and an automatic meal plan builder? The algorithm doesn’t care about whether or not the recipe swiped back when it matches it up to you.
You’re right that they’re not going to be inventing entirely new things most of the time, that’s just not what’s needed of them most of the time.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•What is with the pro-AI posts lately?English
134·1 month agoBeing concerned about at technology and being against that technology are not synonymous.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•What is with the pro-AI posts lately?English
83·1 month agoCompanies and programmers who are using it for real world development don’t care about $1000. A good programmer will run a company $10k or even $20k a month for their salary. If they can add even 50% to the output from that programmer they will throw $2000 a month at it and not even blink an eye.
The Anti-AI folks don’t talk to that kind of person much. They’re not running in the same social circles.
Meanwhile, I have a working application I built to replace a shitty corporate android app for a product I own that’s used for my side hustle. Built using an agentic harness using a local opensource LLM. Coding such a thing myself was beyond my development skill level, and it probably would have cost $100k-200k to pay a programmer to rebuild it to the level that it’s currently at now.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.cato
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•What habit do you possess that seems very normal to you, but would seem odd to anyone else?English
91·1 month agoI only park in one specific aisle at Costco. I will wait for someone to walk back to their car just to get a spot there.



Different people like different things. Even despite my super busy life I still read a lot. It allows me to slow down a bit.
Try different types of books. I’m currently reading a lot of litrpg which is a fun genre related to fantasy.