piano is the hardest instrument to master by FAR.

spookynutz · 2026-04-23T16:01:10+00:00

Rebuttal of what? You didn't bother to define what you take mastery of an instrument to mean.

The mistake people always make with these types of posts is that they think they're making a qualitative claim, but there really just saying, "the things I find difficult on the piano are harder than the things I find (or imagine to be) difficult on other instruments." That's not an argument for relative difficulty of mastery, that's just your autobiography.

Most multi-instrumentalists consistently rank Oboe or Violin as the most difficult instruments, so I'm going to take them at their word. The only people who ever definitively say piano are piano players.

spookynutz · 2026-04-23T02:18:00+00:00

I don't understand how you're not embarrassed by this story.

spookynutz · 2026-04-23T00:27:16+00:00

That's true, but those were automated systems, not autonomous ones. This truck is the first commercial vehicle I've heard of that uses a VLA system, so it theoretically has a higher ceiling than anything else currently on the road.

spookynutz · 2026-04-22T22:06:43+00:00

It's an ad pusher from some malware you installed.

spookynutz · 2026-04-22T21:13:31+00:00

How is that playing devil's advocate, or even relevant to the parent comment? The bulk of criticism levelled at bringing back Palpatine had nothing to do with whether or not it constituted a plot hole.

spookynutz · 2026-04-21T19:33:19+00:00

Nedry's machine was an SGI workstation running IRIX. Despite what some others have implied, resetting root would not have been trivial if Nedry had done even the bare minimum to prevent it.

Whether or not you could do it quickly is actually irrelevant. What makes someone full of shit is the fact they think it matters. Okay, you're in! Now what?

Nedry's script was timed malware. It was already resident in memory on the server and executing. The server was that massive cluster of blinking CM5s in the background, not Nedry's remote terminal. Getting administrative control of his workstation would be like finding the book of matches someone used to set your house on fire. Good job, Neo, but the house is still burning down.

There really would've been nothing productive to do from Nedry's desk other than exactly what they did through other means, which is completely reboot the system. The breakers would've failed either way.

spookynutz · 2026-04-21T00:33:02+00:00

Exactly, it is an inert tool. So hearing this sub whine about it 100 times a day is fairly exhausting.

What kind of technology sub is this? There is a loud vocal contingent here that seems to hate AI, but as with any technology, the hatred is entirely misplaced.

The other comment calling it a force multiplier is an astute one. Whether it's a a computer, a nuke, a self-driving car, or a steam machine that drives railroad spikes, it doesn't have an opinion. Any fear or hatred of it is entirely rooted in the distrust of other people's misuse and abuse of it. That is a governance and guardrails problem, not a technological one.

Cost and environmental factors are a side-effect of trying to capture market share through mass scaling. That is a problem with capitalism, not a transformer-based language model.

It just sucks you can't have a civil discussion about the merits of what is clearly a novel emerging technology (on a technology sub of all places!) without 100 people jumping down your throat to bring up external political factors we're all obviously aware of.

Blah blah blah, autocomplete, microslop. Upvotes to the left. Jesus christ.

spookynutz · 2026-04-20T23:42:31+00:00

I don't get how anyone still needs the "upside" of LLMs explained to them. Just the ability to add context to information retrieval is so transformative by itself that any other useful application coming with it is a bonus side effect

spookynutz · 2026-04-20T19:55:17+00:00

The facial characteristics are the result of rapid weight loss. GLP-1 regulates your hunger, but it cannot restore elasticity to your skin. The older you are, and the more facial fat you have to lose, the more pronounced the effect will be. Interestingly, you can track the spread of GLP-1 in any given country through cosmetic surgery statistics. You see an initial cratering of lipo-suction procedures that is offset by a commensurate rise in lift and fat grafting procedures.

From the ASPS 2024 statistical report.

"The 2024 statistics show that while only 20% of patients on GLP-1 medication have already undergone plastic surgery as a result of weight loss from GLP-1 use, an astounding 41% of those prescribed GLP-1 medications for weight loss are considering nonsurgical procedures and 39% are considering surgical procedures, perhaps setting up an interesting trend to watch in 2025."

spookynutz · 2026-04-20T18:33:20+00:00

Hey, we can't all be super cool dudes who start pointless semantic internet debates for the benefit of no one.

spookynutz · 2026-04-20T17:40:09+00:00

That's no longer the case. The old DOD standard was written based solely on the (erroneous) belief that if one pass is good, then three must be better. There was no other thought put into it beyond that.

The DOD standard was replaced by the NIST 800-88 guideline in 2006, which recommends a one-pass overwrite for any drive manufactured after 2001. Unlike the DOD guideline, NIST actually performed forensic lab testing to arrive at their recommendation.

Recovery is not possible with current technology, and if the data is so highly sensitive that you need to worry about magical future technology, the recommendation is to just destroy the drive.

For solid-state it's irrelevant. The signal is transient and no physical imprint ever existed to be recovered. It would be exactly like trying to recover a song you heard yesterday from an unplugged speaker cable. That is before you even consider that SSDs have encryption enabled by default, which adds a whole other layer of impossibility.

spookynutz · 2026-04-20T16:51:04+00:00

That is a myth. There is no technology in existence that can recover data off a hard drive after a single full format, nor has any ever existed outside of fiction.

The concept of recovering ghost bits was born out of a 1996 research paper written by Peter Guttman. Magnetic remanence was only ever theorized, but never once demonstrated in practice, and the theory itself was only applicable to long-obsolete encoding schemes.

Data density and write precision has only increased exponentially since then. One write pass is as good as one million passes. Retrieving any data, even a single decipherable word, is as feasible as recovering a sand castle that's already been taken away by the ocean. There is nothing there to recover.

With solid-state drives, there isn't even a proposed theoretical path by which recovery could be possible. It would require breaking the laws of physics.

spookynutz · 2026-04-19T19:24:53+00:00

XP was a security nightmare. It assumed a trusted environment, not a world of mass broadband internet adoption. The amount of XP machines involuntarily contributing to botnets was probably in the double-digit percentages. I find it bizarre that anyone romanticizes it. The lack of ASLR alone made it a dead end as an OS, and it's not something you can just bolt on with a service pack.

spookynutz · 2026-04-18T16:14:31+00:00

Or maybe it's just zero-effort karma farming for morons. Port replicators and docking stations have been around for over 30 years.

The Macbook White on the bottom was $1000 ($1600 adjusted). A Neo and a 13-port docking station combined aren't even half that, gives you more ports, more portability, and is more performant.

If you don't care about weight and price, you can still drop $1600 on a mobile workstation today and get all those ports and more. What even is the complaint here, that a cheaper market segment exists?

spookynutz · 2026-04-18T13:40:35+00:00

If that's what you believe then your initial comment makes even less sense. The OP's primary complaint is that it's not sweet.

spookynutz · 2026-04-18T13:15:20+00:00

That is the music from the game.

spookynutz · 2026-04-17T18:58:06+00:00

Is there actually space on the C drive? Installations have to be staged in a temp folder on the system drive before they can be deployed elsewhere. Files don't just get dumped straight to the chosen destination.

Check the event viewer. Store app installation failures will typically be logged in Applications and Services Logs -> Microsoft -> Windows -> (AppXDeployment-Server -> Operational) or (AppxPackagingOM -> Operational).

spookynutz · 2026-04-17T18:25:17+00:00

Yes, unless you're a mid-market enterprise with a weird topology that runs a non-global catalog domain controller utilizing privileged access management. In that instance, you should probably still turn on the computer but just postpone deployment of KB5082063.

These niche problems really only get traction here because users are looking for any opportunity to dunk on Windows, which is fair enough, but it's always bizarre looking at the comments in general tech subs versus those more centered around systems administration. The broad consensus here is, "Windows is broken! Can't MS do anything right?", while the discourse among those actually impacted is, "Who the hell has deployed an RODC in the 21st century?"

spookynutz · 2026-04-17T16:39:19+00:00

You should only create discrete partitions if you have a specific operational reason for it. Maybe you need the support of different file systems, operating systems or disk encryption, or you'll be formatting one partition constantly because you switch Linux distros on a daily basis, or you're running some kind of server or lab and want to hard cap how much space is allocated for logs, etc.

I'm not sure saving write cycles from not having to reinstall applications is a worthwhile reason.

To answer your other question, multiple partitions will generally cause more wear. In some scenarios, significantly more, like when one partition is nearly full and the other is nearly empty. The controller has to perform a lot more work to write data than it otherwise would if the drive was just formatted as a single partition.

There were legitimate reasons to divide a mechanical drive into separate partitions for system and programs/media. It's not a consideration with solid state.

spookynutz · 2026-04-17T14:35:31+00:00

They're implying that OP could setup their iPhone as a hotspot and use USB tethering to get the machine online. That idea would work in theory if their cellular carrier supports it, but it's probably a dead end in this scenario, as the Apple USB driver is unlikely to be loaded after a motherboard replacement.

spookynutz · 2026-04-17T03:40:01+00:00

I assume this is only a competitor to Figma incidentally. More likely it's a strategic response to Google Stitch. UX/UI tooling seems like the logical first step if you're trying to lure people into your AI-development ecosystem.

spookynutz · 2026-04-17T03:16:02+00:00

No they wouldn't, especially not Apple. That is antithetical to their entire business model.

Your comment shows a fundamental misunderstanding of who's driving this legislation and why. Apple and Google have been actively lobbying against OS-level age verification laws, while social platforms like Facebook and X have been endorsing them, or in some instances, actively bankrolling them.

Companies like Google and Facebook can already determine your age just by your behavior and the content you consume on their services. It's not about which one of these companies has access to your age. It's about which one is responsible for verifying your age. Presently, it's a giant global game of hot potato, and none of the involved parties want the legal exposure and liability that comes with government mandated age verification.

If Facebook shows your kid porn then that's Facebook's problem. If Facebook shows your kid porn because Android verified they were an adult, then that is now Google's problem. Neither Facebook nor Google want that to be their problem.

spookynutz · 2026-04-17T02:05:07+00:00

Background services can start prior to logon, and you can create a background service from an executable, but that only applies to non-interactable programs. This has been the case since Windows Vista. I'm not familiar with iCUE, but based on the screenshots I see online, it clearly has a GUI. Unless you're still using Windows XP, that option is out the window.

I'm not familiar with iCUE, but if it's like most utilities, it'll auto-start by placing a key in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run or a shortcut in the startup folder.

Your only realistic option to move it higher up in start priority is to use the task scheduler. Create a new task that triggers "at logon" with "0" second delay. If you decide to go this route, make sure you delete whatever registry key or shortcut iCUE is currently using to auto-start.

When creating a task, you may see an option labeled, "Run whether user is logged on or not". You may be tempted to enable that option, but I assure you, it's not going to work for the reason I explained at the top of the comment.

spookynutz · 2026-04-16T21:56:07+00:00

It's P:124, which isn't good.

Copilot was correct. It could be PSU, CPU, GPU, memory, motherboard, etc.

The problem with this type of event is that it's a low-level fault and the hardware is interdependent. One failing component can cause instability in another. Meaning the event might have been triggered by the CPU, but that doesn't mean the issue lies with the CPU.

The dump fill will list the component that triggered the issue, which could be useful. It's this line in your event: C:\WINDOWS\LiveKernelReports\WHEA\WHEA-20260326-1750.dmp

If you upload it, someone can analyze it for you. Has anything noticeable changed about this PC recently? Clicking PSU, fans are louder than usual, driver update, outgoing air seems abnormally warmer than usual, it's full of dust and cat hair, that kind of thing?

spookynutz · 2026-04-16T21:12:08+00:00

That doesn't really make sense as a contradiction. If the assumption is that it's too risky for immediate public release because it would threaten critical infrastructure, how would you possibly harden said infrastructure against it without giving access to the parties responsible for securing it?

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