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  • 47 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 21st, 2023
  • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.detoTechnology@lemmy.ml•The head of the US Copyright Office has reportedly been fired, the day after the agency concluded AI companies' use of copyrighted material does not fall under existing doctrines of fair use
    4·
    7 days ago

    If America as it is known survives this, massive reforms will have to take place.

    Random things like:

    • The absolutely useless “impeachment” process will have to be replaced with something closer to Parliamentary “vote of no confidence” - no “trial” to be held by one section of one branch of government. It is nothing more than a sham process. If business boards of directors have figured out how to oust CEOs, the government should have a similar mechanism.
    • President can’t have God-mode powers nor sign executive orders anymore. The President’s power should be severely limited. No one person should be a king. Not sure how we managed to do that one thing completely wrong. The position should be nothing more than a communications filter between government branches, nations, states, people, to push policy and steer governance.
    • President could be allowed emergency declarations for 15 days, but their action is limited to deploying aid and resources and nothing more. Congress must then convene in 7 of those 15 days to decide how to proceed, in- or out-of-session. They can get off their lazy butts and work for once.
    • President should be allowed to be jailed, and no member of government should ever be above the very laws they control.
    • Presidential position could also be restructured. Pres and VP are just pres and pres. They both have to agree for any action to be taken. Why having one person with the final decision was ever a good idea when trying to remove kings makes no sense.
    • Supreme Court ideally should be disbanded as it was only created to appease the rich, but in lieu of that, it should be completely refreshed. Possibly size expanded to 20 or some arbitrary number that helps break a focused pile of power by a few. All justices removed, replaced with non-partisan justices. If any justice seems to show partisan decision-making, they are audited by (some auditing body) that is probably not the other justices, like how an FAA flight crash incident is audited by a board of retired pilots. Justices will be term-limited. Justices should also be age-limited. Again, borrowing from FAA, if ATC controllers have to retire at 56, we can age-limit every governmental position. This gerontocracy has to stop. Old rarely means wise. Mental fitness should also be a factor, if you’re a Reagan or a Mango or a Feinstein where you don’t even know where you are half the time, you’re out.
    • All government positions are term- and/or age-limited, but a staggering rule has to be initiated so there isn’t possibility of a 100% turnover in any given period of years. (Boards already have this concept.)
    • Some mechanism should be put in place that makes it more commonplace for states to weigh in when the Federal government is doing something wrong. And one for individual citizens. Voting processes should be standardized and modernized to make every citizen’s vote more powerful.
    • To toss the Libertarians a bone, states rights. The power distribution has to be restructured. Things like “state pays Fed x money, so state can receive y money” goes away. The state sends some money to the Federal government and keeps more internally so they can self-manage. The economies of each state would need balance as there are many welfare states that need the money in the Federal government to survive. Regardless, each state’s economy should be structured so that the Federal government is more of an afterthought. Federal government standardizes processes, roads, specifications, etc. so that interstate trade travel and movement is made easier. Basically though, to limit the scope of power the Federal government has. Not to demolish or disband it, just to make it so even if somehow, in the new system, someone tries to play king, they’re but king of very little, and can’t threaten states to bend the knee by trying to cut off their precious money. (Which alone should be made illegal.)
    • All the obvious money in elections and money in politics and political donation stuff all has to die, for good. Codified into the constitution. Each candidate is given y amount of timeslots on various media, and z amount of campaigns, funded by taxpayers equally. No other money can be used. (Funded by the taxpayers so it’s all an even ground and some CEO can’t come sail in on his space yacht and run a fancier campaign.)

    And at the end of it, governance should be made boring again. One shouldn’t get into the job to be Lauren Boobert the reality TV trash soundbite handjob star. It should be a paper pushing position that keeps the country and its “economy” going.

    Probably some other stuff this ramble forgot to add.

    It’s weird how business, boards, even HOAs seem to have a better set of checks and balances than the US Federal government.

  • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.detoTechnology@lemmy.ml•The Death of Affordable Computing | Tariffs Impact & Investigation | Gamers Nexus
    1·
    25 days ago

    RAM speed is going to be negligibly different in daily use, and on-die RAM will compensate for that slightly slower clock on the ARM computer. Intel’s hyperthreading is much less a performance advantage than it used to be. Intel chips suck anymore though, full stop, and generate heat like mofos. I wouldn’t be surprised if this computer uses that generation of Intel chips that randomly dies, gen13 I think?

    Worse, that Beelink will be using Intel embedded graphics which is basically the worst on the planet - I’d take Qualcomm Adreno before Intel embedded.

    It’s also listed on Amazon as frequently returned. Not worth $869. Could get an Asus (née Intel) NUC that would serve much better, I think there are at least some AMD variants now.

    The Beelink might make a dandy headless server if one got lucky though, if GPU isn’t needed for AI/ML or other GPU-based acceleration/calculations.

    Beelink also wins points for having actual hard drive and RAM slots as well. Still probably not worth the money versus anything else.

    Really can’t wait for some computer companies that aren’t Apple to start pumping out ARM mini PCs and laptops with decent chips.

  • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.detoTechnology@lemmy.ml•The Death of Affordable Computing | Tariffs Impact & Investigation | Gamers Nexus
    6·
    25 days ago

    FWIW, and not trying to be an apologist as I find their pricing insane, they at least seem to be using good SSDs. I’ve found over the last 10 years that SSD life can vary wildly. Just some light-access databases destroyed some consumer-grade SSDs and hybrid drives’ SSD portions. A couple in less than a year.

    Have a dev mac that I absolutely constantly murder the SSD on daily over the last 3 or so years. I’m talking gigabytes of data written daily 5 days a week. Available spare sectors is still 100%, and percentage “used” (which granted, is a vendor-specific life metric) is 5%.

    That being said, I’ll still be hating on them for soldering the SSD to the motherboard. That is the real crime.

  • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.detoTechnology@lemmy.ml•2D Chip Breakthrough: 6,000 Transistors, 3 Atoms Thick
    3·
    1 month ago

    Intel was technologically cooked when the first AMD Athlon came out, architecturally, and business-wise. They should have kicked true r&d into high-gear and didn’t, really. The Core processors were something, but more of a nudge than something to stay relevant in the 21st century. If Apple can finally crack modems, Qualcomm will be next, although their mil/gov stuff may keep them in business as purely a contractor. Cisco is pretty close too, but they’re too skilled at acquisitions as a method to keep staying relevant.

  • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.detoTechnology@lemmy.ml•Google 'playing with fire' by acquiring Israeli company founded by Unit 8200 veterans
    3·
    2 months ago

    Don’t feel like you have to race. It took about a year to shift e-mail addresses last time I did it. Keep the old one as a harvesting point until you move over what you want. Then just leave the old one around to use up space on Google’s servers if you really want to softly be a dick. (They eventually close them after some period of inactivity.)

    Basic steps for a slightly more thorough method that also preserves old e-mail:

    • Do a GDPR/Google data dump of your gmail to mbox file(s).
    • Install Mozilla Thunderbird on a computer and use ImportExportTools NG to import the mbox file(s) into Thunderbird so you can access all your old e-mail.
    • Delete all e-mail from Gmail.
    • Turn off all mail rules on Gmail so everything just comes to the inbox.
    • You can forward to your new address if you want to, or, just let email collect in the old account and switch addresses from time to time as you use various services.
    • After a time, delete the account if you so choose, or leave it dormant until Google deletes it.