Random Article of the Day...

[revelator]

you can actually cast it to your tv if the screen feels to small works much the same way a playstation does.

[taffernicus]

On 6/19/2024 at 6:08 AM, revelator said:

you can actually cast it to your tv if the screen feels to small works much the same way a playstation does.

how on earth did i forget screen mirroring/casting...

Glad to see linux gaming is gaining traction

Edited June 20 by taffernicus

[datiswous]

Quote

Turn your computer into an AI computer

100% Open Source

Our core team believes that AI should be open,
and Jan is built in public

https://jan.ai/

Looks interesting, haven't tested yet.

I'm just very interested in free open source chatgpt alternatives.

 

Edited June 21 by datiswous

[revelator]

Hehe yeah sometimes forget it myself

[taffernicus]

While i am not a gamedev myself , i enjoyed every bit of this article :

"1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond"

https://web.archive.org/web/20180719170411/https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_on_a_288_network_.php?print=1

I remember there was also a similar article about the game Serious Sam. Can't remember the website name but it’s on the tip of my tongue

On a different note, all things involving raw socket make me fascinated (yeah looking at you sock_raw, sock_stream, sock_dgram, af_inet, af_packet and so on)

 

Edited July 27 by taffernicus

[revelator]

im probably not alone in this thought but the internet has become a monster fueled by advertising, data mining, and questionble practices from certain big companies. search machines are now geared 100% to wring out your last buck and finding what you were actually looking for is now a pipe dream (yeah them smokes are guuud). tbh im disgusted by our governements actually allowing behaviour like this from the big tech corps.

i grew up with the internet and initially it worked as a second home, you could allmost allways find what you were looking for and if not there were places you could ask other users for advise. these sites are now largely gone and replaced by shit that just points you to the nearest shop which incidently does not have what you need but is happy to sell you something (anything) else even if it is totally unrelated to what you were searching for.... at said shop, hey i need an advisement on vector mechanics in C++ sorry sir we dont sell that here but we do have these tools you might want to fix your bike. me omg do i look like a bike mechanic im trying to fix some code ffs .

sadly even people who dicth google for some other search machine it wont help since they are all based on the same algorithms and rely heavily on datamining  to build user profiles for this insatiable beast.

Atleast theres movement now in class acts to rein in the surveilance by said companies but since much of the problem stems from political sources (yeah they actually allowed the unmitigated data mining profiling and monetizing user data) which is now biting them in the proverbial nether regions, it will probably take as long to reain in as the internet has existed.

and now we have AI...

[Zerush]

On 7/31/2024 at 8:37 AM, revelator said:

im probably not alone in this thought but the internet has become a monster fueled by advertising, data mining, and questionble practices from certain big companies. search machines are now geared 100% to wring out your last buck and finding what you were actually looking for is now a pipe dream (yeah them smokes are guuud). tbh im disgusted by our governements actually allowing behaviour like this from the big tech corps.

i grew up with the internet and initially it worked as a second home, you could allmost allways find what you were looking for and if not there were places you could ask other users for advise. these sites are now largely gone and replaced by shit that just points you to the nearest shop which incidently does not have what you need but is happy to sell you something (anything) else even if it is totally unrelated to what you were searching for.... at said shop, hey i need an advisement on vector mechanics in C++ sorry sir we dont sell that here but we do have these tools you might want to fix your bike. me omg do i look like a bike mechanic im trying to fix some code ffs .

sadly even people who dicth google for some other search machine it wont help since they are all based on the same algorithms and rely heavily on datamining  to build user profiles for this insatiable beast.

Atleast theres movement now in class acts to rein in the surveilance by said companies but since much of the problem stems from political sources (yeah they actually allowed the unmitigated data mining profiling and monetizing user data) which is now biting them in the proverbial nether regions, it will probably take as long to reain in as the internet has existed.

and now we have AI...

 

I completely agree, luckily there are also some devs that develop good countermeasures (uBO, inbuild ad/tarckerblocker and page permissions in Vivaldi, scripts with an Userscript Manager, etc)

Nowadays, using the main and best-known search engines, Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., is equivalent to distributing your data through the network to all the advertising companies and having the results full of ads and SEO crap and 90% of pages that have nothing to do with what was searched, or showing results with a bubble filter, that shows what you would like to see, based on the previous searches they logged, like asking someone who always agrees with you, despite be wrong.

 

Now they are using also LLM, but mostly biased and showing results poorly trustworth or put by the company for commercial or political reasons. But there are also excepcions, the first search with AI was released long before all others by a small startup, which also hate the practice of these big companies, with a own LLM, used as search assistant, 100% private, anonym, free, protected with random proxies in the searches in trustworth sources, no ads or logs, Andisearch, which I use since almost 2 Years as main search (1). It has some capabilities as ChatBot, it's not what it was made for, but as search assistant with excelent results and capable to summarize and explain contents, own reader mode right in the search result without the need to access the page, watch Videos of YT in the search results without ads, and more. Way different to all others I tested.

(1) 

https://andisearch.com/?query=%s

 

Edited August 2 by Zerush

[revelator]

not only ads but most search engines are now mostly useless (atleast in europe) because of censorship leaving only useless results that dont have even marginal relevance. sadly most of these are for shops urgh...

and then when you are actually looking for something a shop might have they cant even agree on what said item shoukld be labeled as groan... yesterday i searched for some nuts and bolts for a tv stand and the first 500 results were everything from health shops selling every variety of nuts !!! to something as obscure as a ligtning bolt . even finding parts for my lawnmover proved to be tricky as hell , guess how many names exist for a recoil starter (yeah the thing you pull to actually start the damn thing).

as to some of the old usefull sites -> insideqc still exists if your into games, coding, tools, etc. but the site is getting hammered daily by bots trolls and other unsavory individuals because they refuses to allow advertising or logging user behaviour. as a result the site has had so many patches to brick up the walls that it is barely functional anymore. there is also not alot happening there anymore as people have moved on from colaboratively working together but the old grunts are still around if you need a hand with something.

[ChronA]

I really hate how large language models are being conflated with search, and especially the lack of transparency in how these new services get to the results they put on screen. If you think the problems with censorship, bias, and adversarial SEO are bad now, just wait. Imagine how bad it will be when every site is trying to overwrite the search LLM's instruction and context prompts with instructions to exclude the sites you are actually searching for.

[taffernicus]

with this fatiguing AI craze, personalized ads, exploit-ridden,over-commercialization by big tech companies, excessive internet telemetry usage and tracking technologies taking over the internet, for the past 6 months I started to revisit the history of how the internet (i mean TCP/IP operation and development in particular) was created and when the internet was still in its experimental stage and was for academic and research purpose. I am doing this just to reminisce the painful birth of the internet , what we take for granted and to know how it got to where it is today.

here are interesting things from the long gone days of experimental internet : circuit switching to packet switching invention(The key people are Kleinrock, Louis Pouzin and Paul Baran) , ARPANET IMP router and NCP protocol ,a person who coined "datagram" term, van jacobson compression and congestion control, the birth or early protocols like FTP , ARPANET EMAIL and TELNET, initial root server system , the very first RFC request, vint cerf & bob kahn and early tcp/ip written on TOPS-20 OS(this is why i love a now defunct company like Digital Equipment Company. I also like the backstory of DEC LanServer bridge and fuzzball router running on DEC PDP ), BBN-ARPANET contract (including early BBN tcp/ip code on BSD OS prior to 4.2BSD ), history leading to 4.4BSD and CSRG & AT&T lawsuit and the story goes on.

When you see the long journey of the internet development in retrospect, internet protocols were developed with no security aspect in mind. Internet wasn't built with security by design from the start.  SMTP,HTTP(without S), Rlogin, Rsh, Telnet and something in that vein doesn't have encryption at all. Even BGP can be hijacked.

Then protocol wars happened : DECnet, IPX/SPX , banyan vines protocol , Xerox Network System(XNS), appletalk, IBM SNA joined the party. In the end, TCP/IP, which is an open standard and more superior, leave them in the dust. You had to pay extortionate sum of money to use those proprietary protocol.

Fast forward to the year when HTML , browser app and HTTP were already mature (enough), IMO this is what started it all. The widespread of HTML allowed web to incorporate audio , image and video instead of just pure text. But at that time, there was not enough processing power and bandwidth to place ads and include other things like data mining, targeted ads , running AI models, browser fingerprinting ability on the modern web.

Regarding search engine, we've are familiar with SEO engineer and optimization boom in early 2010s, aren't we? why the SEO is getting worse, why are we keep shitty personal coaching blogs, business blogs, cypto blogs, technical forum URL aggregator sites, and other rubbish site? Why do I have to append the word 'reddit', or add double quote ("") and minus operator/symbol(for the sake of eliminating out irrelevant results ) at the end of my search query to get relevant results?

 

I thank w. richard stevens (excellent author, R.I.P) and charles kozierok for their tcp/ip book. I'm halfway reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet (1988)

Edited August 3 by taffernicus
typo

[revelator]

i find i might actually return to IRC after a decades long hiatus as that old dino might actually be were the real answers are , and to the above commenters i can only say YUP.

[revelator]

oh btw denmark is one of the most surveiled country in the world, we actually have more cameras logging our daily lives than china and north korea... last count put it at somewhere around 1.5 million, while its illegal for commoners to have surveilance cameras that log anything outside there own premisses and there are plans for even more.

the danish government is obviously scared shitless at losing control of any and all information that is not stamped and approved so they filter any sites material for things that mean they cant tax you for it, even if that is something as non serious as repairing your own tools. its also illegal to have a pocket knife on you and you face jail time if the police stops you with one unless you can prove its for work... well if i wanted to stab someone a screwdriver does an admirable job of the same, and my old cast iron pan can easily break a skull .

you can get around some of the internet stuff by using a public DNS provider like cloudflare but the filtering is somewhat harder unless you pay for a VPN.

its getting silly here sadly.

[Zerush]

7 hours ago, ChronA said:

I really hate how large language models are being conflated with search, and especially the lack of transparency in how these new services get to the results they put on screen. If you think the problems with censorship, bias, and adversarial SEO are bad now, just wait. Imagine how bad it will be when every site is trying to overwrite the search LLM's instruction and context prompts with instructions to exclude the sites you are actually searching for.

Agree, and most AI searches lacks any transparency, allthey use LLM like OpenAI and others, made, controlled and biased by large companies, but as I said before, Andi is different from all others and the excepcion with a own LLM and the first ever used in an app, former known as LazyWeb. Made by 2 devs which say the same of what you said *, trying to combat this type of evolution. It does exactly for what it is made, searching and finding relevant results from trustworth sources of your question, not more and not less, summarize and explaining correctly the content if you want, actively protecting your anonymity, no ads, logging or tracking like others do. It's a very valid tool, at least as a complement search.

*

Quote

 

We're a small team of two founders (Angela and Jed) and some friends. We're on a mission to unbreak the Internet and save the world from spam, misinformation and ad tech.

Search is broken because of misinformation, SEO spam and ads, and surveillance capitalism. It hasn't changed in 20 years. Things are getting worse. The rise of GPT-based chatbots that confidently generate accurate-sounding "BS" with made-up sources is driving misinformation through the roof.

 

 

[taffernicus]

Old news but it slipped through my attention. i am getting quite irate over this. i will take a tiny step to be a part of /r/datahoarders movement considering i have much bookmarks that mostly contain niche websites, old documents , papers and old manpages(mostly in .ps or postscript format) that i can no longer access and not all of them are covered by archive.org...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/google-search-kills-off-cached-webpages/

anyway i found this interesting article and number 42 keeps racing through my mind :

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02969-8

I also just heard 2 days ago that duckduckgo was blocked in my country, it's interesting to see these 'competent' people working in the ministry of communication and informatics. The reason behind the decision is laughingstock. Truly /r/upliftingnews material. I love Dns Over Https so much because i use it to circumvent censorship

*edit : great they are tightening up their deep packet inspection firewall, DoH is ineffective as of now.  VPN is the only option this very time.

 

 

 

 

Edited August 7 by taffernicus

[Zerush]

AI has reached video game development. The current model is capable of recreating DOOM in real time while playing.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/08/new-ai-model-can-hallucinate-a-game-of-1993s-doom-in-real-time/

https://gamengen.github.io

In the near future, daily a new TDM mission autogenerated?

 

I remember in the past the game Rise of the Triad. Very nice FPS of 1995, similar to DOOM. But apart of the normal levels of the game, it included also an generator capable to create with an click any number of random maps and an Editor to create maps by hand

A remastered version on Steam €19,95, the Demo version for free (10 maps, I think)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1421490/Rise_of_the_Triad_Ludicrous_Edition/

 

Edited August 29 by Zerush

[taffernicus]

Symbolic LISP Machine Museum

 

Fuzzing the TCP/IP stack

Edited September 26 by taffernicus

[revelator]

ah lisp great language, nasa used it in the voyager missions because it is light easy to learn and generally stable.

still used to this day to great language for automation.

its also the second oldest programming language only fortran is older.

[revelator]

in retrospect one could call lisp the first AI language or atleast one of its descendants like mlisp.

actually pretty fantastic when you think of how little capability the voyager probes had (less than a current day calculator).

back then the true "super" computers were still monsters the size of a football field like univac.

one thing that made me smile was some of the first ram modules which were handcrafted and basically consisted of a wire mesh with tiny magnets called magnetic core memory -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory

[taffernicus]

On 9/29/2024 at 8:05 PM, revelator said:

in retrospect one could call lisp the first AI language or atleast one of its descendants like mlisp.

actually pretty fantastic when you think of how little capability the voyager probes had (less than a current day calculator).

back then the true "super" computers were still monsters the size of a football field like univac.

one thing that made me smile was some of the first ram modules which were handcrafted and basically consisted of a wire mesh with tiny magnets called magnetic core memory -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory

Neural network implementation in LISP and https://turtleware.eu/posts/Controlling-the-terminal.html (Controlling the temrinal with common lisp) were the real reasons why i dug up about LISP but never jumped in to learn it in-depth

As for voyager, i am still intrigued why it is still capable of operating 5 decades later and how the imaging subsystem and other scientific instruments can be handled by radiation hardened microprocessor made in the 1970s, not to mention the intricacies behind the design of voyager's dual-redundant computer systems. That really casts the pinnacle of engineering marvel during its time. Voyager is probably the system that has the highest uptime ever(discounting remote system resets/restart events)

 

[taffernicus]

Whenever i hear space probe, The Whale Probe(year 2286) from Star Trek IV : The Voyage Home and Friendship 1 (2067) from Star Trek : Voyager immediately conjured up in my mind. This is the trivia behind the sad story of voyager 6 in Star Trek : https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Voyager_6

Edited October 1 by taffernicus

[taffernicus]

uhh i shouldn't anthropomorphize inanimate object like space probes but i can commiserate over voyager space probe loneliness/lonely journey in the outer space. I hope there is a thing out there that can alleviate voyager's loneliness

i'm imagining what's inside voyager's mind and its inner conversation :

' i used to knock around with my buddy, voyager 1. Where is he now ? '

' I brought bulky photos and golden records from the old days, is it possible that the vibe is the same as the intelligence creatures out there who see the condition of the earth from a distance but the visual obtained is the condition of the earth in the past?  '

' where is soviet venera probe, has it kicked the bucket this time ? '

' why it's so cold here and why am i so stone-deaf in space ? '

' bloody hell, i am so scared smashing or colliding with space objects here '

 

Edited October 1 by taffernicus

[revelator]

venera i think survived about a few hours on venus before the atmosphere kicked the living daylight out of it . quite an achivement in itself as venus atmosphere is about the most lethal environment in our entire solar system .

temperatures hot enough to melt lead, atmospheric pressure as dense as if you were 3 km below the ocean, and it rains sulphoric acid yikes.

well in space nobody can hear you scream (no air) sound does not carry in a vacum despite what several sci-fi movies would lead one to think. its dead silent out there well unless you can hear radio waves then the noise is truly mindboggling.

its also not nessesarily cold in space, the temperature on the moon ranges from freezing my ass off in splinters to charbroiled. deep space is cold however due to heat dissipating quickly when there is no medium and the distance to the stars.

little known fact, the snow you see on old analog tv's not tuned in to any station is actually the background noise from the big bang.

funny thing you can do with old radios on short wave tune a bit and listen for something that sounds like fast thumbing that my friend is a neutron star you hear , they come in several variants to. some actually sound more like ratatata thats how fast they rotate.

[revelator]

Allways loved star stuff, as a youngster i wanted to become an astronaut. Newer managed due to some complications with my eyesight which truth be told newer bothered me (i have a slight color seperation issue in my right eye) it has newer hindered me but it ment i could not go through the training .

Instead i took a radio technician education and got shafted because when i was done most places who needed one had turned the key due to cheap electronics. Made little sense to repair it because it easily cost more than just buying a new one. So i got 1 year working as a tech then 3 years as a salesman for said tech then it all went to online shops... and from then on i just worked with whatever.

Still got the passion and if need be im one of the last techs educated in tube powered amps in denmark.

Im not a genious but i was immensly curious as a child so i learned a good deal, i diagnosed my first taperecorder at age 4 and the guy who owned it was completely bummed when the tech told him i was right . Said curiosity also had some downfalls, i been electrecuted so many times i should be glowing in the dark .

[taffernicus]

On 10/2/2024 at 4:26 AM, revelator said:

venera i think survived about a few hours on venus before the atmosphere kicked the living daylight out of it . quite an achivement in itself as venus atmosphere is about the most lethal environment in our entire solar system .

temperatures hot enough to melt lead, atmospheric pressure as dense as if you were 3 km below the ocean, and it rains sulphoric acid yikes.

well in space nobody can hear you scream (no air) sound does not carry in a vacum despite what several sci-fi movies would lead one to think. its dead silent out there well unless you can hear radio waves then the noise is truly mindboggling.

its also not nessesarily cold in space, the temperature on the moon ranges from freezing my ass off in splinters to charbroiled. deep space is cold however due to heat dissipating quickly when there is no medium and the distance to the stars.

little known fact, the snow you see on old analog tv's not tuned in to any station is actually the background noise from the big bang.

funny thing you can do with old radios on short wave tune a bit and listen for something that sounds like fast thumbing that my friend is a neutron star you hear , they come in several variants to. some actually sound more like ratatata thats how fast they rotate.

What i found to be a mistery is a peculiar Fast Radio Bursts(FRB) from far-off galaxy and how it differs from man made or atifical radio waves

[revelator]

Ah yes that one was indeed interresting havent heard much since so i dunno what to think ?.

There was actually one FRB from somewhere nearer to us some 2 decades ago but it newer repeated.

If i remember correctly this was about the time when several scientists pointed out the dangers of telegraphing our location with such abandon (i guess one theory sprang up from this short message ? that they might have been exterminated by a type 2 or 3 civilization).

a type 1 civillization is close to where we are now (except climate control etc.)

a type 2 is a hell of a lot more advanced and might control a stars energy output to some degree (using something like dyson spheres. hello star trek).

a type 3 civilization is where all bets are off, they are capable of harnessing the energy directly from the home galaxy they live in and are most likely permanent space dwellers.

so what makes these so dangerous ? well maybe nothing or maybe they see our little blue planet as a free for all and us as the ants that need squishing .

probably aint going to end so well as independence day hehe.