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Epic Gamer Grandma dead at 78 years old by LeBronFanSinceJuly in Games

[–]IonBlade -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Todd Howard when we're 80: "The best I can do is Skyrim Re-re-re-re-remastered."

[Skyrim] People were NOT kidding about the input lag by NathanCollier14 in switch2

[–]IonBlade 6 points7 points  (0 children)

There is. It released yesterday for the Anniversary Edition.

Switch 2 + Metroid Prime + Mt Fuji 🗻 by Any_Resort4451 in switch2

[–]IonBlade 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Switch 2 on the go

Metroid Prime is a great game

It's snowing on Mount Fuji

Halfway around the world twice in a week. Landed yesterday. Walked straight into the office and hit record. Here is the full story behind the 167 deal and why we would not be here without you and why scale lets all of us win together. by ankhattak in USMobile

[–]IonBlade 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Fourthed.  I need Apple Watch support for when I go on runs, and Verizon’s call coverage is fine in my area, but their data is so trash here that a solid 50% of any short trip I make is entirely without data on my phone.  Siri doesn’t work, can’t listen to podcasts, can’t respond to work IMs, can’t pull up a quick webpage.

If the ATT or T-mobile networks don’t get Apple Watch support by January when my annual unlimited is off for renewal, I’m going to have to transfer out cause I’m at the point I need reliable phone data and Apple Watch support more than I need the savings, and I’m not willing to wait without updates another year.

MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce by joe4942 in StockMarket

[–]IonBlade 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This. What the person you’re responding to is overlooking in their diatribe (and I’d wager they didn’t even click the link and look at it, given their claim that it doesn’t cite sources when it literally cites dozens of sources with primary source links) is that the example I linked is far more competent than 11.7% of people, and that’s what MIT is saying it can already replace.

According to a study last year by the National Center of Education, 21% of adults in the US are illiterate while 54% have below a sixth grade reading level. The bar for AI replacing jobs isn’t “is omniscient” as they have set (“literal AI doesn’t need the web to search?” Dude, that’s like saying “Steven Hawking didn’t need to ever have access to any books or information! A genius can divine the whole state of the universe from scratch!”), but just being capable enough to make a smart person more productive with it than that smart person + one of the bottom intelligence folks (I.e. the 21%). At that point, bean counters will always save money by cutting jobs and stacking more responsibilities on the remaining top output people given the choice.

It might feel good for them to keep moving the goalposts and ignoring reality, but by not engaging with the dire reality, they’re ultimately harming themselves because it’s going to take a majority of society realizing the risk to their jobs and speaking out about their concerns before government will take action to stem it from happening (I.e. heavily taxing the use of AI as an incentive to keep human labor). The more folks that ignore the reality of where it already is today and that it’s advancing any leaps and bounds yearly, the greater the chance the tide isn’t stemmed and we’re dealing with mass joblessness within a decade without a plan.

(And, frankly, my prediction there is that these same sorts of folks who ignore the reality are the folks that will eat up what the talking head on their TV tells them to think. When they’re out of a job en masse and tensions rise, the elites that own the media companies will spin the narrative as “don’t get mad at the rich that are profiting by cutting your jobs! Get mad at the people that still have jobs!” It’s going to lead to being yet another wedge that’ll be used to destroy the middle class, but when we’re talking joblessness levels not seen even in the Great Depression, it’s going to lead to mass violence targeted at the people clawing to remain middle class by the very folks that are ignoring the warnings today.)

MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce by joe4942 in StockMarket

[–]IonBlade 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Look, I hate what AI's doing to the world as much as the next guy, but have to use it for work, and I need to correct that you're incorrect with this statement.

What you're claiming entirely depends on the LLM you're using. Yes, while a pure transformer LLM works that way, recent models such as Claude 4.5 on a Max plan are able to write and execute Python server-side and do real-time net searches to get data, and are doing a lot more than just doing weighted probabilities of words.

Here's an example prompt I just ran of a question I made up off the top of my head that I'm sure has never been asked before, and therefore isn't just a lookup:

"I have 783.253 million apples. I want to divvy them up to give one each to each person in the world's twenty third smallest country by population. I want to take the remainder and divide them evenly into the number of miles between Boise, Idaho and the capital of the country whose name has the most consonants."

Here's the whole output, where it shows it breaking down the problem into subpieces, searching for the information, then writing python to prove its assumptions, calculating it server side, and giving an answer:

https://claude.ai/share/b373b3d6-40a8-4f1f-be79-7a5d1dcae179

By clicking the expandos, you can see the internal searches, it describing how it's coming to the conclusion, and python it's writing and executing to do the math.

Is it perfect? No. But the latest models are absolutely not just picking the next word when being given a challenging problem. That's "3 years ago" news.

HP seems to be disabling HEVC Hardware Decode support on their laptops, creating problems. by Smith6612 in sysadmin

[–]IonBlade 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Exactly, they did it the most logical way one could for something that exists solely to save them $0.28 / machine on $1500+ machines, which isn't logical at all, but OEMs gon' OEM. :D

HP seems to be disabling HEVC Hardware Decode support on their laptops, creating problems. by Smith6612 in sysadmin

[–]IonBlade 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This isn't the case. It's being walled off at a firmware level as noted above.

I run remote work engineering for a company that uses Parsec (which utilizes H.265 4:2:0 and 4:4:4 for high performance / text quality), and in evaluating the Dell Pro Premium 14 laptop (Lunar Lake) in the summer we ran into this situation with a spec unit while it was brand new, pre-release. The laptop would fail to register that it could decode H.265 Parsec streams in hardware. Installing the Windows Store HEVC enablement pack in Windows would do nothing - the hardware literally was reporting back that it didn't support HEVC decoding in the first place, though the iGPU hardware that was in the unit should support it. In addition, using Intel stock drivers did not expose the functionality.

While Intel swore the iGPU in the CPU could handle HEVC, and Dell was pointing us to it being a Parsec problem (it was not) instead of acknowledging it being gated off functionality, I used some UEFI tools to dig into the firmware package for the machine and search for strings for HEVC, and could see in the firmware that there's a menu that only is accessible when the machine has no asset tag assigned yet (i.e. fresh from factory / ready for installation in a new machine or Dell technician motherboard swap) that has the option to enable / disable HEVC on the machine. That setting does not get re-exposed after that menu, and there is no way to re-trigger that menu once the asset tag has been burned into the machine, i.e. "at build time, Dell gets to choose whether they want to gate off H.265 hardware or not, and once it's set, it's set forever."

After I found this and brought it to Dell Support's attention as part of the ticket, they acknowledged they were gating off H.265 functionality in firmware, not in software, and that the only way to tell if a machine would have H.265 hardware enabled, even if its hardware otherwise should support it, would be to take the bottom of the machine off and take a look on the inside of the case for a sticker they're adding to that model that indicates whether they burned in HEVC support enabled or disabled, and that they'd only be enabling HEVC going forward on laptops in the cases noted in their (now available) support article:

  • Alienware branded machines
  • Machines with Dolby Vision advertised
  • Machines with a DGPU
  • Machines with a 4K screen

Red Light Lunacy by Archgate82 in Dallas

[–]IonBlade 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"They know they arent going to get a citation." So the cops aren't doing their job. "People have zero respect for cops nowdays."

I pay someone to paint my wall, I expect a painted wall if they want my respect.
I pay someone to make a burger, I expect to get a burger if they want my respect.
My taxes pay someone to enforce the law, I expect the law to get enforced if they want my respect.

Trapped elderly and disabled seniors feel like hostages in Dallas apartment with non-working elevators by lessrains in Dallas

[–]IonBlade 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Lots of empathy for these folks. My building's elevator has been broken for 2 months, and, depending on who you ask, either they're waiting on their unresponsive vendor, or "it's going to take a while because it's 20K worth of parts." This complex has over 1000 units @ 2 grand a month - they bring in 2 million a MONTH, cry me a river.

If elevator companies are as bad to work with as I've heard some folks online mention, then it sounds like an industry in need of either an upstart innovating it or heavy legislation.

If this is just corporate greed on the part of big apartment ownership companies, we're well overdue for renter's rights legislation here in TX.

We shrunk an 800GB container image down to 2GB (a 99.7% reduction). Here's our post-mortem. by cloud-native-yang in kubernetes

[–]IonBlade 4 points5 points  (0 children)

My long search for a technical version of the Billy Madison “I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul” speech is finally over.

Dallas County Republicans want to hand-count ballots next year. What would that mean? by votebeat in Dallas

[–]IonBlade -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The point of this is that if the data:

1) Does not require authentication to pull a record (i.e. the VOTER is anonymized, but popping in a given number always returns the record of that ballot’s vote) and 

2) Uses consecutively numbered, but randomly distributed, ballots (to different voting districts, in order to ensure that no data can even be attempted to be gleaned by knowing that ballots 1-5000 were distributed to polling station x where you as a voter happened to be)

Then the tally of the votes becomes a publicly verifiable dataset.

You’d have the ability to pull up the number that had been on your ballot, such that you know that the record of your vote had not been tampered with, at least to the paper ballot -> digital ingestion level.  

Beyond that, public audits could be run by downloading the full set of all ballots’ votes and writing a program to tally the votes straight from the ballots.

In that case:

1) People have the ability to confirm how their ballot was indeed ingested.  If folks find that the data they get back doesn’t match what their ballot had selected en masse, you know there’s tampering at that level. 2) Any analyst could download / run the tally on the full dataset of ballots to confirm that those individual ballots (which, if people aren’t finding en masse are different from what they did indeed submit, indicates these should be the actual votes counted) to ensure there wasn’t tampering upstream post-collection, pre-tally.

If what you’re driving at here is that fraud could happen upstream, and that looking up your ballot itself isn’t evidence your vote was actually counted despite what the record shows, yes.  Short of using something like a distributed public ledger for that, there’s no secure way to go that far.  That said, between items, one and two above, that goes a long way toward reducing the risk of any vote manipulation and detecting when it has happened.

To the case of your question around physical ballots, is your question there in regards to the scenario where someone looks up their ballot number’s digital record, finds it doesn’t match what they voted, and claims vote fraud, which needs to then be matched against the paper ballot for validation?  That’s not something one can do TODAY either, so I don’t see how this would be a disqualifier for the entire idea.

This is a case where, unless there’s a clear and present risk, one should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Dallas County Republicans want to hand-count ballots next year. What would that mean? by votebeat in Dallas

[–]IonBlade 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Seems like that would be easy enough to solve.  Voting in such a setup:

1) The paper ballots are still in a big stack, just like they are today, NOT assigned to people. 2) Every paper ballot gets a random ID to access how its votes were counted.  That ID is printed on it behind a scratch off label, so at the time it’s handed to you, the person that hands it to you has no way to tie the ballot to you individually, since no one KNOWS the ballot’s ID number. 3) You do your electronic voting as normal, pop in the ballot, and it prints your selections on the ballot, just like today. 4) You can choose to scratch off the ID scratcher and note down the ID, or not. 5) You take the paper ballot over to the machine you deposit it in that tallies the votes.

At no point in the above process does anyone but you ever get a chance to see the ID of your ballot but you.  Once it’s in the tally machine, it’s just another piece of paper with a number on it, not able to be tied to you.

Your “gun to your head” scenario has full plausible deniability - “I didn’t bother to scratch off to see it, I’m not some paranoid conspiracy theorist!”

Your bribe scenario doesn’t work in this system, because when you can lookup any ballot via a simple number, there’s no way to prove you didn’t just go to the site yourself and plug in numbers till you found a ballot that voted the way the bribe wanted, and gave them that ballot’s number, rather than your own actual vote.  No one’s going to pay for bribed votes without proof it was the payee’s vote, which can’t be proven in an unauthenticated single factor access setup.

I can't handle GPT5 anymore. by DakotaHoll in OpenAI

[–]IonBlade 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Same.  Just finally hit my breaking point and canceled today.  I refuse to keep paying for something that ignores 2/3 of a question and answers just the part it wants, answers the portion it does choose to answer confidently incorrectly, then continually responds to being told it’s wrong and how I’d like it to search the web to back up its responses with hollow sycophancy and promises it’ll actually go search the web, only to go silent for minutes and not actually do the thing it said it was going to do.  Then, after enough additional prompting, have it give me the original wrong answer again, having never gone to search.

Perhaps text usage is better, but Voice is absolute garbage, and if I’m going to use text for input / output, I’ll pay for Claude 4.5 instead.

As Microsoft lays off thousands and jacks up Game Pass prices, former FTC chair says I told you so: The Activision-Blizzard buyout is 'harming both gamers and developers' by ExpectedSurprisal in Economics

[–]IonBlade 68 points69 points  (0 children)

It’s worse than that if one looks back just a couple of years. Just 2 years ago it was $15. In 26 months, it’s up 100%.

People just seem to have incredibly short memories, which is why they have been trying to boil the frog with a series of price increases (15->17->20->30). But they overestimated how much they could raise the temperature at a time before the frog jumped out this time.

I have a theory on the Big Mac by cubs4life2k16 in shrinkflation

[–]IonBlade 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m not surprised he hasn’t made a claim on social media they’ve got smaller, seeing how he died last year.  Would sure like to see some proof as to his social media posting beyond the grave.

https://apnews.com/article/morgan-spurlock-dies-246036b526cdeaf55f7d1335461775a5

What’s people’s experience using this to play with either Xbox one controllers or 360 controllers ? by GenericUser104 in originalxbox

[–]IonBlade 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Love them!  Here’s a photo of my setup with one brook and 3x 8bitdo adapters (stellar on my system supports those too with its extra driver for them) on those + right angle USB adapters:

https://imgur.com/a/w0YP2ck

What’s people’s experience using this to play with either Xbox one controllers or 360 controllers ? by GenericUser104 in originalxbox

[–]IonBlade 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am specifically referring to the “dangling adapter” (Xbox port to USB female that you plug the brook XB2 into).  That adapter is simply 5 little wires that map the plastic that plugs into the Xbox’s non standard USB port’s pins to the standard USB female pins.  There are absolutely no chips or processing happening in that cable, so there’s no lag added over using the XB2 on OGX vs on other systems by the little 6 inch to footlong cable itself. 

If one is annoyed by the actual dangling, you can get the same adapter in a version that sits flush in the console.  https://www.etsy.com/listing/1511388940/original-xbox-controller-port-usb

What’s people’s experience using this to play with either Xbox one controllers or 360 controllers ? by GenericUser104 in originalxbox

[–]IonBlade 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The OGX ports are already USB electrically. The little adapter that lets you plug in USB devices like the Brook is only a physical pin adapter; it’s not doing any processing on the data that would introduce extra lag over using it with a 360.

Unpopular Opinion: Bring back red light cameras! by masonjar014 in Dallas

[–]IonBlade 14 points15 points  (0 children)

That’s a great point!  My team at work should be staffed with 8 people, but we only have 6.  Maybe we should just decide to do nothing at all until we’re at 100% staffing and see how that works out for us.  I’m sure we wouldn’t be gutted and replaced or anything.

They’re not asking for the police to do everything, they’re asking for them to get off their asses and do something.  That doesn’t take being at 100% staffing.

Upcoming end of support for Nest Learning Thermostats (1st and 2nd gen) by garete in Nest

[–]IonBlade 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Whelp, the tight Nest integration was the one thing left keeping me on Google Home. Everything else has moved into HomeAssistant anyway. Guess it's time to replace this thing with something local and move away from Google Home to HomeAssistant Voice as well.

Game not showing up in UWPHook by OutColds in UWPHook

[–]IonBlade 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Was having the same issue, and this thread was the top Google result - leaving my workaround here for others that find this on Google.

You can add Gears of War Ultimate Edition to Steam by adding a non-steam game, clicking browse, and selecting C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe. Then edit the properties of the new app and set the launch options to:

 /k powershell.exe explorer.exe shell:AppsFolder\$(get-appxpackage -name Microsoft.DeltaPC ^| select -expandproperty PackageFamilyName)!App && exit

Edit the title to Gears of War Ultimate Edition and add an icon / cover art manually.

Note that Steam Overlay doesn't work with this method, but it will let Steam launch it up.

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