Indeed.

Last time I checked, it was way easier in Windows to have a VM running Linux just for Python, than to get Python to reliably work nativelly in Windows.

It really depends on whether that SQL is the standard one (such as SQL92) or with the database specific extensions (such as PL/SQL).

The latter often adds up to a “real” programming language (were you can define your own functions and everything), depending on the database.

But yeah, the rest not so much.

An this was back in the 80s where there were only 8 programming languages…

Almost 30 years into my career as a software engineer, I’m now making a computer game that takes place in Space and were planets and comets follow Orbital Mechanics, so I’m using stuff I learned at Uni all those years ago in Degree-level Physics, since I went to university to study Physics (though later changed to an EE degree and ended up going to work as a software developer after graduating because that’s what I really liked to do).

I’ve also had opportunity to use stuff I learned in the EE degree for software engineering, the most interesting of which was using my knowledge of microprocessor design during the time I was designing high performance distributed systems for Investment Banks.

(I’ve also used that EE knowledge in making Embedded Systems - because I can do both the hardware and the software sides - though that was just for fun)

Also, pretty much through my career, I would often end up using University-level Mathematics, for example in banking it tended to be stuff like statistics, derivatives and integrals (including numerical approach methods) whilst game-making is heavy on trigonometry, vectors and matrices.

So even though I never formally learned Software Engineering at University, the stuff from the actual STEM degrees I attended (the one were I started - Physics - and the one I ended up graduating in - Electronics Engineering) were actually useful in it, sometimes in surprising ways.

At the very least just the Maths will be the difference between being pretty mediocre or actually knowing what you’re doing in more advanced domains that are heavy users of Technology: I would’ve been pretty lost at making software systems for the business of Equity Derivatives Trading if I didn’t know Statistics, Derivatives, Integrals and Numerical Approach Methods and ditto when making GPU shaders for 3D games if I didn’t know Trigonometry, Vectors and Matrices.

And this is without going into just understanding stuff I hear about but are currently not using, such as Neural Networks which are used in things like ChatGPT, and Statistics are invaluable in punching through most of the “common sense” bullshit spouted by politicians and other people played to deceive the general public.

Absolutely, you can be a coder, even a good one, without degree level education, but for the more advanced stuff you’ll need at least the degree level Maths even if a lot of the rest of your degree will likely be far less useful or useless.

His support for Israel is so unabashedly racist (it’s all about the etnicity of the dominant majority in Israel) that anybody who is against racism really needs to ponder if somebody so profoundly racist (it’s harder to be more racist than to, because of their etnicity give weapons to a bunch of people currently committing Genocide against along etnic lines) as Biden in any way form of shape represents them.

Even before the current Genocide, the etnostate of Israel was already as bad or worse than Jim Crow’s America.

Well, my NAS before was in the same style as yours and I moved it to that Linux Mini-PC (that by then had already replaced both TV boxes) because it has much better performance as a NAS (my router could only share using SMBv1 which has less than half the speed of SMBv2 and above, and there are even benefits for Kodi that is in that same machine to access the media directly via the filesystem rather than mounted shared, both because it’s much faster doing full scans and because it will actually do proper incremental scans - i.e. only and quickly check files with creation dates newer than last scan data - when scanning my NAS for new media files.

As for shared MySQL synch, if I remember it correctly from when I read about it on the Kodi website, that’s just having that MySQL set up as a standalone database server in a place accessible by all potential Kodi client instances and then configure your Kodi clients to use that standalone database instead of the internal database of each Kodi client.

This is just a traditional client-server structure were the “server” is the standalone MySQL database and the clients are the Kodi instances: pretty run of the mill way to have a server doing something for multiple client applications if they’re all on the same network so lots of corporate software works like that.

The most obvious way of doing this is having that MySQL database on the Linux Mini-PC (even in professional settings, putting your database on a Linux machine is almost always the best choice) by installing it as a package (for example, with apt-get) and then you do have to initialize it and load it with data from an existing Kodi instance (again, if I remember it correctly, you export the data from the internal database of your Kodi instance and import it into that standalone database) and then point the Kodi instance (and any other present or future Kodi instances you want to use that shared watch history) to that standalone database. From looking at it (and given my experience with making server side software), I believe the instructions on the Kodi website for this are correct and complete even if they seem a little daunting at first.

Personally I didn’t do it because I have no need for it and hence couldn’t be arsed.

Enshittification is the result of the user not being in control: markets have a natural tendency to become dominated by a few companies (or even just a single one) if they have any significant barriers to entry (and said barriers to entry include things like networking effects), and once they consolidate control over a large enough share of the market those companies become less and less friendly and more and more extractive towards customers, simply because said customers don’t actually have any other options, which is what we now call enshittification.

At the same time Linux (and most Open Source software) is mainly about the owner being in control of their own stuff, not some corporate provider of software for your hardware or of a hardware + software “solution” (i.e. most modern electronics) provider.

So we’re getting to see more and more Linux-based full solutions to take control of one’s devices back from the corporations, not just Linux on the Desktop to wrestle control back from an increasingly anti-customer Microsoftw, but also, for example, stuff like OpenELEC (for TV boxes) and OPNSense (for firewalls/router).

Having recently setup a cheap Mini-PC with Linux and Kodi as a TV-Box + NAS + VPN client end, replacing both TV box of my ISP (around here Fibre Internet Access tends to be bundled with TV using a TV box from the supplier, which has become progressivelly more shit) used for live TV as well as a separate TV box I had for personal digital media, I now think that Linux is the Best Way to avoid the Enshittification Nightmare much more broadly.

Granted, for decades already I’ve very purposefully avoided using hosted services that locked me into a 3rd party (such as for example having a Google e-mail address or hosting my files “on the cloud”) which in recent times have become increasingly enshittified (as I expected: my tendency for avoiding 3rd party lock-in comes from experience as in IT professional were I saw how invariably said 3rd parties would end up shafting customers once moving out from their “solution” was very hard) and for which Linux has long been a solution, but it’s been a pleasant surprised to find out that at least for some of the modern electronics Linux is also the solution for taking back control.

Frankly I’m just waiting for some kind of decent Linux distro for my smartphone and table to ditch Android (in the meanwhile I’m using custom ROMs to somewhat control it and avoid the enshittification).

PS: On the desktop side it’s also nice that, right when MS is going fully enshittified, Linux for Gaming has become a very viable option, since gaming was pretty much the only thing keeping me on Windows at home.

You can also get a Celeron-based (for example with a N100) fanless mini-pc meant for use as DIY routers like these and install something like pfSense on it.

Personally my really old router still does what I need so I’m leaving it be, though I’ve replaced my media box and my NAS with a similar device running Lubuntu but can’t really make it also be the router since it only has 1 ethernet port.

All I see there is a pier still serving the purpose it was always meant to serve: supporting for the “we tried to help Palestinians” fable from the Biden Administration and other Zionist allies.

Most of Mankind is not American and even in a perfect Democracy (which the US is not, not even in the same universe as one) the leaders only ever have a duty towards the citizens of that Democracy - i.e. the voters - not the rest of Mankind.

Basically, for any person who lives outside a big and military powerful country, that country is just as bad being a Democracy as it is being an Authoritarian regime because both kinds of regimes don’t give a rat’s arse about outsiders. I mean, the leaders in the Democracy will naturally use beautifull words and say they “really do care” - because they’re politicians trained to talk a pretty talk in order to win elections - but when it comes what they actually think and do they care just as little as the Authoritarian ones.

The only reason why Democracies are a bit safer to be around of is because, if they’re real Democracies (i.e. have the interests of all of their citizens as top priority rather than being “vote for which agent of the oligarchs you would like to have” like America) they’re way less likelly to initiate wars without significant upsides because it’s not in the interest of that country’s citizens to suffer due to War, whilst Authoritarian regimes will happilly sacrifice their population in a War if that is good for the leader(s).

So the reality is that for Mankind it’s unclear if the end of Pax Americana will be a good thing, a bad thing or just a change of assholes.

These are their Western Values…

… same as 19th century Russia and early 20th century Germany.

That was hilarious!

Thanks for the link.

Yeah, true.

If you train you LLM on exclusivelly Nazi literature (to pick a wild example) don’t expect it to by chance end up making points similar to Marx’s Das Kapital.

(Personally I think what might be really funny - in the sense of laughter inducing - would be to purposefull train an LLM exclusivelly on a specific kind of weird material).

simply say “I can’t fix it, deal with it”

That’s pretty much the business model of Tech Giants and AAA game makers.

As somebody who uses what has long been called AI in game making (stuff like pathing algorithms and steering behaviours) I would rather we don’t stop calling those things that just because a bunch of greedy assholes are misusing the term for the purposed of getting a bunch of hype-trains going for maximum personal profitabiliyty on the backs of techno-ignorant “investors”.

I’m still pissed of at how the greedy assholes fucked up the Internet from what it was back in the 90s.

The problem is that given the way they combine things is determine by probability, even training it with the greatest bestest of data, the LLM is still going to halucinate because it’s combining multiple sources word by word (roughly) guided only by probabilities derived from language, not logic.

Yeah, I’ve learned Neural Networks way back when those thing were starting in the late 80s/early 90s, use AI (though seldom Machine Learning) in my job and really dove into how LLMs are put together when it started getting important, and these things are operating entirelly at the language level and on the probabilities of language tokens appearing in certain places given context and do not at all translate from language to meaning and back so there is no logic going on there nor is there any possibility of it.

Maybe some kind of ML can help do the transformation from the language space to a meaning space were things can be operated on by logic and then back, but LLMs aren’t a way to do it as whatever internal representation spaces (yeah, plural) they use in their inners layers aren’t those of meaning and we don’t really have a way to apply logic to them).

LLMs trained on shitposting are too obvious for it to be quality misinformation.

For quality disinformation they should train them solely on MBA course-work and documents produced by people with MBAs.

Sure, the rate of false information would be even worse, but it would be formatted in slick ways meant to obfuscate meaning, which would avoid the kind of hilarity that has ensued when Google deployed an LLM trained on Reddit data and thus be much better for Google’s stock price.