Khrux

I finally got round to a significant upgrade to my PC last week. I’ve been running the same PC for 10 years, and it’s really been dying. Fans and HDDs were failing, and it couldn’t play new games at all.

I haven’t replaced my GPU (still on a GTX 980ti) but I jumped to some decent DDR4 RAM, a better CPU, and moved into an SFF case, but I have no confidence any prices are set to stabilise, so I just gave in and built what I could.

TLDR: I think AI is coming for teaching (for better or worse), but not coming to replace us, because the teacher:student ratio is already as poor as can be.

I’m a teacher. Giving a serious answer, AI is likely going to be very involved in this industry over the next decade, purely for it’s ability to track and scaffold individual learning better than one adult doing the same for 30 people, but that would require a shift to even more digital learning, which takes the “how” of teaching out of the hands of a teacher in a way it currently is not.

That said, I don’t actually think it’s coming for my job precisely because there is 1 teacher to every 30 students. If you compare us to how cashiers have been replaced by self service tills, teachers have already been stripped to a minimal coverage of the classroom, and you cannot have 30 students independently working, because children and teenagers are predominantly motivated to avoid working. I’m this regard, it can only supplement our job, as they can’t meaningfully cut the adult to student ratio further for safety reasons.

Also, although I think it’ll start to be seen in the next 10 years, I’m not sure where it would come in. State schools do not have the budget, energy or time to experiment with individualised AI learning support, and private schools prefer to maintain older styles of teaching for a long time, as they prioritise the development of attitude and trust over academic scores as not only does it supplement academic scores, but it is what the corporate employers of privately educated students seek above merit.

Funnily enough I actually have Firefox open by default whenever I boot up my PC.

I have no taskbar or desktop items. I always default to a specific workflow of pressing the windows key (or whatever we call it for Linux), and searching for everything. I have since early windows 10.

I realised that 90% of the time, I was opening Firefox, so now it just opens. I have a pretty minimal toolbar setup for it, so it’s basically just an address bar that automatically focuses when I start typing.

One day I’ll set up something where I have multiple search hotkeys for web search, file search, application search, music etc, that will sort of replace this.

I’m guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.

If it’s something that Wikipedia can help me with, that’s still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.

Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.

Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.

I’m guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.

If it’s something that Wikipedia can help me with, that’s still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.

Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.

Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.

I mean it’s been heavily filtered for the better part of a decade. I never really minded some of the filtering, which at first was just quarantining the far right, but then nsfw subs got hidden, etc. Pretty quickly it was the old standard front page with a bit of chaos.

Also strangely enough, when I first started using Reddit around 2011, everyone just went straight to the frontage for everything, and the defaults in the front page dominated the app, it was probably around 2015-2016 that people actually pivoted to /r/all after the defaults of the front page were bland and stagnant, and from then on, the admins have taken steps to make /r/ all bland and stagnant too.

When I was still using Instagram reels, I was always amazed how quickly the algorithm figured me out. If I hesitated for even a second on a reel, it would amend my next ones immediately. I assume the real trick is comparing it to the average time spent on a reel, everyone spends longer on a wall of text reel, but when I stop on a Linux reel for an extra second, I’m immediately in the 1% for engagement.

I read something years ago about how your phone keyboard tracks your recommended words, it knows if you’re more likely to type apple or Apple, or if you type soup more than average, and any app that gets that data and compares it to the baseline has an instant, in depth profile on you.

I do agree entirely. If I could use the internet of 2015 I would, but I can’t do so in a practical way that isn’t much more tedious than asking an LLM.

My options are the least rancid butter of the rancid butter restaurants or I churn my own. I’d love to churn my own and daydream of it, but I am busy, and can barely manage to die on every other hill I’ve chosen.

Compared to crypto and NFTs, there is at least something in this mix, not that I could identify it.

I’ve become increasingly comfortable with LLM usage, to the point that myself from last year would hate me. Compared to projects I used to do with where I’d be deep into Google Reddit and Wikipedia, ChatGPT gives me pretty good answers much more quickly, and far more tailored to my needs.

I’m getting into home labs, and currently everything I have runs on ass old laptops and phones, but I do daydream if the day where I can run an ethically and sustainably trained, LLM myself that compares to current GPT-5 because as much as I hate to say it, it’s really useful to my life to have a sometimes incorrect but overalls knowledgeable voice that’s perpetually ready to support me.

The irony is that I’ll never build a server that can run a local LLM due to the price hikes caused by the technology in the first place.

I heard a theory (that I don’t believe, but still) that Deepseek is only competitive to lock the USA into a false AI race.

I mean as a first language speaker, it is.

As much as I don’t disagree, I think the “Apple is closest to Nazism” comment touches on something different. Other massive American companies have awful practices but they don’t care particularly how their way of making money looks. Apple wields a specific aesthetic power that generally dictates a hegemonic uniformity, that strays the line of being to their detriment at times. I don’t think any other big tech company would care in the same way if not for their desire to copy Apple.

It’s interesting how Discord absolutely nukes its own trust by pretending to be more than it is. I loathe discord, to the point I’d use a competitor (not teams) just to evade it. I’m sick of finding a hobby group using it as a Frankenstein forum / chat / info hub when it’s only built for chat.

Discord is fine for this use, but I’m getting used to the distrusting it so often that it blends into reasonable use.

Blurry photos is fine to make an stylistic choice. The 2019 movie The Lighthouse stylistically looked like a 1920s film, before modern music intentionally used bitcrushing, it used vinyl cracks, boomer shooters made in this decade intentionally look like 1990s Doom clones.

When a medium’s shortcoming is patched by technology, it ultimately becomes an artifact of the era where it was accidental. Once a few years have passed, it becomes more synonymous with the era than the mistake.

It’s not necessarily nostalgia, Gen Alpha and the younger half of Gen Z never grew up without smartphones, so they don’t miss the era of poor film photography. Although every generation does this simulation of forgotten mistakes, it’s particularly poignant now, where the high quality, perfectly lit, professional feeling photos convey something artificial, i.e. smartphone software emulating camera hardware, faces tuned with filters or outright AI generated content. Even if it’s false imperfection, the alternative is false perfection.

Art using deliberate imperfections that were unavoidable in the past is romanticising something perceived as before commercialism, and that’s admirable.

I’m trying to make my own smart watch as a hobby experiment at the moment, and one of my most important features is NFC payments. It’s a nightmare, although I understand why. Currently my plan is to buy another smart watch or smart ring and take the NFC chip from it, which is maddening, but more or less my only option due to contactless payment security.

To do contactless payments, your bank must effectively permit the specific device, otherwise go through GPay or Apple Pay, who in turn just do the permitting themselves. Anything outside of the standard ecosystem just gets overlooked.

The best workaround while avoiding these companies is to find a smart watch or ring that has compatibility with a proxy card, such as Curve. But beyond halving the price of the accessory, this is pretty much an arbitrary decision.

And sometimes just super plain ones. I remember getting my favourite Skyrim potion texture mod from there specifically.

Gal Godot.

I’m very impressed with Lemmy here for not doing what Reddit would have and naming a long list of women. That being said, if I didn’t feel a moral obligation to boycott Gal Godot, she is so talentless that she hasn’t made anyone else’s list because it’s such a low hanging fruit.

She’s very typecast, but she can act. If she actually got a role where she could show strong emotion, I think she could rise to it well. She’s good in Challengers and great in Euphoria.

He’s the only actor I can think of I actively boycott other than Gal Godot. Aside from his violent racism and American nationalism which is all well documented, I just absolutely loathe the type of character he likes to play; the macho snarky asshole who feels like he got kicked out of basic training and makes being a veteran his whole personality.

There’s few archetypes I hate more than the “former soldier who could kill a man, harbouring some deep unnerving instinct”, or the “American in a truck who loves the flag and is just a hard working guy”, and somehow he always plays and glamorises both, despite not actually being either.

This was my hometown’s team. It’s super strange having it put on the map, where basically everybody knows this story, and before then nothing at all.

It’s absolutely just a random investment in a potentially very lucrative industry. 21st century football is massively swayed by who can spend the most money, especially below the very top level where the money becomes too ridiculous. Wrexham had the oldest active ground in the UK and the ground itself is particularly goodnfkr the level of play. Wrexham had dropped from 3rd division to like 5th, near 6th when he bought it (I think). But Wrexham as a city isn’t small, it’s the largest population centre in North Wales, and before it gained city status in 2022, was a larger town than many of the cities near it. All it really needed to do well was investment, where it had the facilities to be tenfold more successful if anybody actually paid for it, it’s the same for probably a dozen other teams across the UK.

But the investment worked of course, and the team has done amazingly well since then. But don’t consider this anything but an investment where two celebrities used their image to aid it’s success.