#tech ramble

[earhartsease]

technology history story:

it's 1989, and we're unexpectedly making big bucks working for a small startup dealing with databases (and mapping software) for museums and environmental organisations, which was tonnes of funne

our friend has coded a routine to import millions of records for a bird demographics project originally input into some terrible software, and he can't understand why his routine is performing so slowly

we take a look at the code, and at the progress display onscreen, and then we rewrite a few lines and the code runs almost 100x faster

he thinks we've performed magic but guess what the bottleneck was

his code showed the number of records imported on the screen of a laptop, and updated for each record imported - and the screen refresh rate was the bottleneck, because early laptop screens were slow af, so it literally took many times as long to update the screen as it did to import a record, and some bad buffering shit going on meant this also slowed down the whole import loop itself

we just tweaked the code so instead of showing number of records imported, it only updated each time the percentage done rose by 0.1% so the user still had something to ogle

we feel like there's some point to telling you about this and it's not just ooh weren't we clever - okay we were but only because we were autistic and thought sideways - but maybe the point is something about information saturation not being the best way to get shit done

and it still amazes us that we went from "never used a computer" to "in charge of an entire large museum's computer needs" in like three years, and being autistic and interested was how that happened (nobody taught us, we just read manuals like they were enchanted turkish delight), and then we landed in that company and learned to program in LISP in like three days because someone was on holiday and something needed writing in a hurry - and it's nice to remember we had a brain once, now that ME has fucked it for us and hmm okay reading this paragraph we guess sometimes info saturation is the way to go but anyway

[nunuslab24]

I’m a firm believer that the world would be very advanced in technology if it wasn’t for people who put pineapple on pizza

[timelineofaninternet]

Really pays to be open and flexible about your opinions and way of thinking.

Lately I’ve been pondering how we solve the issue of ai and using works/content without prior consent for the dataset (is this the right word here???)

What I totally forgot to consider was the human element in this equation until I saw someone on here point out that WE, as people, also do this. We’re constantly using other’s people works/content without any prior consent. Especially in our art and culture. It would be unwise to require regulations involving prior consent for works/content. (I hate using the word content for the record, but I’m lacking the vocabulary at the moment on how else to describe it)

So there is a question on how we regulate ai that uses works/content created by other people. How do we prevent monetized content created by ai without affecting (effecting ??) ourselves??

Obviously the clear statement of the now is people need to be protected from ai. Ai needs to be regulated before it gets even worse. Anything made by ai needs to be marked as such. How do we do all this?

I’m rambling here, these are just my rambling thoughts.

[bayster]

can we just talk about what happened with lenovo for a second? They used to be a really average, decent tech company and now they're just the absolutely cheapest shit possible with their brand slapped on it.

If you own an Android tablet by them, I'm sorry your caretakers only spent the bare minimum in an officeworks for you. It won't be able to multitask or watch videos properly or play anything more advanced than best fiends.

Their laptops, are pretty much chromebook specs, running Windows.

Their phones are like their tablets. In a fully negative way. And I'm saying this as a person who has lived on a phone that was branded by the carrier and was bought from a supermarket.

Not even mentioning how I'm now getting TEMO ADS FOR LENOVO WIRELESS EARBUDS? THAT'S GONNA SOUND WORSE THAN A FUCKING RAYCON.

[s-vortex]

Guys I just want to say, this video right here is killing me, it's getting me more excited than anything has in a long long time! 

I mean what they have done is basically take the concept of 3d graphics and instead of loading graphics into memory and then calculating what's displayed on screen from active RAM, they've made a hyper efficient search algorithm that will load the file on a per-pixel basis as needed from the hard drive, even slow hard drives, or even directly over a network. So when they say they now have unlimited graphics potential, they are absolutely right! I mean, if you take a 4k monitor and do what they do, you are still using less active memory viewing a hyper-realistic 3d atom based environment than you would playing a common video game because you're loading things only as needed, as a video game loads everything into memory to display just those few pixels your screen uses. 

Now of course it's still limited as they'll need to extend everything much further to do collisions and graphic effects and tons of other things so it's still a generation or two or more from the main interactive computer industry but they seem to have made an incredibly efficient system and it's just amazing. I mean computers nowadays are very powerful, we're bottle-necked by just inefficiency in many places. This technology in the video is superb for static environments, as the camera, like I said, pulls data only as needed to satisfy the goal of pushing something to the screen. To do collision, dynamics, animation, everything done with modern games and things, they'll need to have a much more potent version of their system as every aspect, animation collision and everything else, will need to pull the points from the computer as well to calculate. 

But even so just this amazing display of efficiency where we had none is amazing. 

And of course I've just been reading and watching this stuff for about an hour as I discovered it not long ago at all so I could have a few things wrong and I guarantee that in three hours I'll have a much more accurate idea of what this is all about so if you look into it and see something I'm not correct on that's why! 

But regardless this is exciting. Of course something like this, to be monetarily beneficial for them, will almost guarantee that it'll be closed source. I hope they release something for us to learn from at least ^^ 

[lindsayanne123]

So I got the original Sims Complete Collection for christmas today and I can't use it yet because I have freaking Mac OS X Lion (thank you very much apple). So I've ordered Mac OS X Snow Leopard and hopefully, I will be able to download that onto a separate partition in my mac and be able to run Sims through that software! Crossing my fingers. I miss my Sims so much!