keimevo

u/keimevo@lemmy.world
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Those came later (late '90s-early '00s), and ran mostly on Windows; believe it or not, at that time there were people that used Linux or Mac (I dual booted, Wintendo for games, everything else on Linux).

And most malware came from shady sites. Again, if you were careful, you rarely got it (rarely, not never). If you were not careful, well, it usually was obvious because even if your Windows was not infected with a virus or trojan, your browser would be full of toolbars and the PC would run like crap.

I also used gopher, usenet, uucp, archie and all that in the early '90s. And if you were just a little bit careful, catching a virus or trojan was very rare.

Now, everything is monetized. You're under constant surveillance on a scale it was unimaginable at that time, and being careful amounts to nothing (unless you're super paranoid) because your security depends completely on how others secure your data, assuming that they're trying to secure and not sell it.

In this respect, now it's much, much worse than it was, even if in some other ways it's somewhat better.

Peak internet was around 2005-2010, IMHO.

In the '90s we used to put public info there, kind of like a blog. The .project and .plan files (what we were working on and what we planned to work on, work or life-related), PGP key, geek code, etc.

Some people put their work contact information (not many), but the '90s were a very different time, specially before the Eternal September, and publishing contact info like a phone or email was not too big of a deal back then (remember the white pages).

Of course, finger is now just a curiosity from the past, considering its security issues and that the most healthy way of using the internet now is not to show yourself but to hide yourself the best you can.

Just in the observable universe there are around 2 trillion galaxies. Our galaxy (pretty average as galaxies go) has more than 100 billion star systems, each of them with their corresponding planets.

Even if the average density of life is just 1 planet per galaxy (which frankly speaking, would be ridiculously low), you'd have a couple of trillion of planets with life. Intelligence of course would be scarcer, but I don't think it's that anomalous in the large scheme of things.

Yup, it's strange that's so unpopular when it's mostly what current science points to:

Massive universe => It's pretty much certain that there's life, even intelligent life, out there.

Light speed limit => It's highly unlikely that we will meet each other.

Hard disagree, so take my upvote.

The line between science fiction and fantasy is blurry, but the difference is not about how well the systems are explained or about the quality of the story.

There are very good scifi stories with "laws of the world" that are not terribly well designed or explained (a lot of stories from the sixties, like the ones from the "Dangerous Visions' anthologies or from more poetic authors like J. G. Ballard). And OTOH, there are many really good fantasy stories with well defined systems, like the Mistborn series, as you mentioned.

I don't remember where I read it exactly (it was more than 30 years ago), but there was a story/explanation of the difference that stayed with me. It was something like guy A (a fantasy writer) is talking with guy B (a scifi writer) in some room and guy A suddenly exclaims "Look over there, there's an alien walking upside down on the ceiling! It's green and has a spacesuit with a flowing cape that reaches to his boots!". Then guy B asks "If the alien is upside down, shouldn't the cape be flowing down to the floor, instead of his boots?" and guy A replies "That's why you're a scifi writer and I'm a fantasy writer". I think guy A was Ted Sturgeon and guy B Asimov, but I'm probably wrong.

  1. 8 years ago, compatibility and ease of use weren't quite there. This has changed a lot in the last 3 or 4 years, I would say (having followed linux gaming for around 30 years).

  2. That is true, but there's a difference now; for the first time in history Moore's Law has reversed: instead of doubling compute power at the same cost every X months (depending on the part), we're now having less compute power at the same cost than the previous Y months (we as in we consumers, not the hyperscalers, of course).

Windows has always been resource intensive, but it's the first time that new computers, at the same price, have less resources to run than new computers the year before. Of course Linux is affected too, but as it runs well on pretty much everything with some tweaking, it's a much better choice now for every 12 year old kid that likes to play games and does the technical support in the family.

It depends on what criteria you use for high quality. In the case of art, I would consider that creativity and novelty are important factors for high quality, and GenAI, by its nature, can't be novel or creative. The fact that it has won awards tells more about the contests than about the art itself.

GenAI computationally generates stuff based on its training data and it cannot go beyond that training data in significant ways. For tasks that require this kind of "mediocrity" and predictability, like for example language translation, it's competent. For tasks that require creativity or intuition, it sucks.

The sad thing is that is being pushed as a replacement for everything, which it's clearly not.

It's not like that. Tokens are an inherent computational property of how a model calculates the probabilities and such to generate text.

Having said that, what a token means in terms of computation varies wildly between models and is not directly comparable. So attributing a money value to tokens in general, independently of the model, is weird by nature.

And even within a model, the number of tokens needed to generate a response is very variable too, depending of the model itself and the parameters with which it has been configured (thinking mode, temperature, etc.).

So yeah, companies can pretty much set any price they want and there's not much anyone can do about it.

They frequently broke, but they were very cheap to make compared to "cooler" weapons and didn't require as much maintenance.

And most importantly, spears are one of the easiest weapons to learn to use at a basic level (for war), and as most armies in the past were composed of a majority of regular people, not professional soldiers, spears were very popular.