I will take on the responsibility of starting the first discussion.
What do you guys think about the Free Software vs Open Source movements?

To set the stage, the Free Software movement, formulated by Richard Matthew Stallman is more philosophical in nature, and is concerned about the rights (and freedoms) of software users. It posits that users of software should have certain freedoms and rights regarding the software they use, and that creators of of software should not deprive the users of those rights.
The freedoms include doing whatever you want with the software, being able to study its source code, modify it freely and redistribute it at will. Which means that software should never do things without the user's consent or understanding, and should never limit what the user can do with it. A lot like how physical property actually works. It deems it unjust that a software developer can simply force the user to put up with behavior that they might not want, either because of IP laws, or because the software is obfuscated and practically impossible to modify (most software is compiled, meaning you get code that a computer can understand, but a human will have difficulty parsing without the source code) More here:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

The Open Source movement (which is maligned by RMS himself, and the Free Software movement in general) is more, let's say, "pragmatic" in nature. It is more concerned about the practical benefit of having the source code of a program available, and the ability to accept fixes and contributions from the public. Compared to the user-centric nature of the Free Software philosophy, I feel like it's more programmer oriented. As in, the benefit of having the software be open source is that it results in better software, and it's not as concerned about the rights of the software user. Open Source is seen as simply a better way to manage and develop programs, rather than a philosophical stance. It is not necessary for Open Source software to allow the user to modify and redistribute it on their own, only to study the source. In that sense, it is more commercial.

I also need to mention what "Proprietary software" is. Simply put, it is software that is closed source, owned by a company or an individual, and has copyright and IP law restrictions associated with it. You are expected to use the software, but not have the right or opportunity to see how it works, or modify it. Basically, most mainstream, big software from corporations like Microsoft or Adobe.

_
The reason I find this particular discussion interesting, is because I am split on the issue. I find it noble and A Good Thing(tm) to care about the rights and freedoms of software users. But I have observed that the Free Software movement, like any ideology, sometimes fails in practical domains. Sometimes the the Ideal thing to do is not practically viable.
But the Open Source idea, while often commercialized and frankly sometimes a way to get free work out of people without giving much back, gives more authorial control to the programmers, or at least, is pragmatic enough to care about the quality of the software, rather than rights of random users. And I do tend to believe that authorial control, in most areas of human activity, is important. Ideas don't make things, people do.

Another reason it's interesting is that Linus Torvalds, the founder and BDFL of the Linux Kernel, and Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU operating system, fall somewhat on the opposite sides of this divide. For Stallman, the ethics of software is most important. For Linus, it is the quality of the software, and its future that is most important. You can see a general overview of Linus's opinions here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU .

What do you guys think?

>>48741

>We also have separate threads for hardware, software, technology in general, all of which don't get much activity.

Great idea for a thread, but I guess if we create another one, activity be even lower ):

>>48743
My opinion that software should public their source if is not seriously compromise security measures, maybe not directly, but over time. The company can public it under a license that preventing others from commercial use, but it should be available to the public, or at least, to the software owners.

Also, for this thread, an interesting possible topic might be Quantum computers.

>>48774
Fuck off nerd

>>48776
May we finally ban Americans and the news thread, please?

Im learning Linux and its making me feel like a retard. I am fucking around with CentOS on a virtual machine at the moment, just following along to shitty tutorials i got from Udemy. Might swap the distro over to Ubuntu or something just to change things around and experiment.

t.learning difficulties from internet addiction, pornography burnout and teenage drug abuse on a developing mind

Habe ich drei wochen wochenlang zu beginnt lerne ein skill. German obviously won't be it so maybe it shall be some computer shit. Is there any path you'd recommend a low iq ritart go down?

>>48777
Very bad idea. Admins shouldn't rangeban whole territories like the US, Russia or Germany just because of a manageable amount of bad behaviour. Also, I think there are many very good contributions of US origin on EC, and the board would be worse without them.

>>48778

> learning Linux

What is there to learn? I'm curious? Point and click isn't that hard, even Windows users can manage that.

>>48777
It would be a noble sacrifice I'm willing to take for the greater good tbqh. You would still have German shitposters though.

>>48774
The main problem with them will be cooling ultimately. We are a looong way off from those ever becoming a reality but hey, we went from ultra expensive IBM mainframe computers to something way more powerful fitting in your pocket within just 50 years so I guess it is possible, albeit not until we're old men/dead.

>>48743
you can't make good software without money or at least without an intention to share/achieve knowledge in the process. Additionally no one asks you to contribute, you can keep your own fork and do whatever you want with it. That's not an issue, the software is still there. The beauty is immesuarable, purely altruistic sharing of knowledge - by reading the code you learn as well, let alone it can get you a higher paying job.

>>48783

>What is there to learn?

depends on what you are trying to achieve. It takes quite a while to get yourself running in this new environment. Maybe your aim is to build your own Minecraft server, then you're going to setup firewall rules, learn how to harden your ssh config, etc.

>>48816
None of that is really useful since at least CentOS comes with very sane defaults.

The first thing you should learn is to never # curl -O https://veryinnocentlookingurl.fun | sh -

But fuckadoodledo, almost every "tutorial" uses that.

>>48743

>What do you guys think about the Free Software vs Open Source movements?

Well, basically I think Stallman is right that we need free software as in the word freedom and that this is a requirement for a free society.

>>48778
Well, I think it's good you try out new things besides Windows and Mac OS as one can find much joy in GNU/Linux. It's a more secure operating system. You can customize it much more, there are even distributions where you can configure the software to fit your hardware perfectly! Why did you choose Cent OS? It doesn't seem like a good "beginner distro". I'd always recommend Ubuntu as it is easy to use and can be a good first distro to go on from there. Also: Ubuntu is right of the bat usable after installation. If you want to dive deeper into Linux, I'd recommend watching tutorials about the file systems, the terminal, commands etc. I think another good way to learn is installing Arch in a VM. You don't have to use it or anything after this, but going through the installation process can give you much valuable insight into the workings of Linux.

If you use Linux, which distro and which DE/WM do you use? Also: what's your favorite distro and de/wm in general?

I use ArcoLinuxB with dwm since recently and I'm quite happy with it. Maybe this is even my favorite distro as they make the Arch experience so much more accessible. My favorite DE would be GNOME or Cinnamon, but GNOME is a bit bloated. Favorite WM is definitely dwm because of its minimalist nature.

>>48860

>which distro and which DE/WM do you use?

Arch with i3wm. Arch is very impressive in terms of software accessibility due to the AUR, and I've installed it many times, so I know what to do and expect. i3 is the first tiling window manager I've tried and it hasn't broken once since that time. I'd love to try out dwm/st, but I find myself too lazy to setup own PKGBUILDs and keep them updated.

>what's your favorite distro and de/wm in general?

I think this combo works really well for my use case (studying/coding), however I'd want to switch to Wayland as soon as possible, if only sway/wlroots could work properly with it on Nvidia cards

>>48861

>Arch is very impressive in terms of software accessibility due to the AUR

That's true although the point that you have to compile all those packages is a problem for people like me that have not good hardware specs as it takes ages.

>I'd love to try out dwm/st, but I find myself too lazy to setup own PKGBUILDs and keep them updated

Well, there's always the possibility of a VM, but I mean, if i3 works for you, there's no reason to switch really.

>however I'd want to switch to Wayland as soon as possible

Why?

>>48827

>I think another good way to learn is installing Arch in a VM.

Did exactly that not so long ago, and I kinda doubt that it will teach you much, simply because there are tons of step-by-step guides (including ArchWiki) which you could follow brainlessly and get a more-or-less working system in the end. The only things I learned are very basic skills of using fdisk and the fact that Arch doesn't install DHCP by default (which still puzzles me; I mean, why?). Then again, I've been thinking of installing Linux on my laptop (my desktop PC still needs to use Шindows because it's sort of a "gayming" PC), and get a bit deeper into it. I figured that since I only use the laptop for downloading torrents and occasionally for playing indieshit and old console games on emulators whenever my parents drag me out to dacha, it doesn't really have to run on Шindows. Both indieshit and emulators work on Linux, and I can use Samba to share files with the Шindows machine (and it would probably do a better job than Шindows itself: they somehow messed up shared folders in 10, while in 7 everything worked fine). I'm also thinking of buying a smart-TV or two in the near future, and I believe it would be easier for them to access files on Linux than on Шindows. Well, in the not so near future I would probably even buy a NAS to use as a home media center, but they still use some Linux derivative as far as I know, so there will be "opportunities to learn" either way, heh.

Speaking of which, does anyone have an experience of using NAS? Is there a point of using it at home?

>>48867

>simply because there are tons of step-by-step guides (including ArchWiki) which you could follow brainlessly and get a more-or-less working system in the end

Yes, this is one possibility, but you can also use it as a training or introduction into Linux. He stated that he wants to learn Linux, so I guess he would really look into the commands and try to understand the concept behind them.

>>48867
I have built my own data server about 11 years ago and am still using it (continuosly updated the hardware); it's been used as the data storage backend used by my HTPC (an old laptop connected to the TV). Over the years I have gathered a lot of experience and I can say that even though I am a tinkerer by nature I have very rarely broken anything about my setup. That data server has been running 24/7 pretty much for 10 years with the only exceptions being reboots due to updates and a few times where hardware was replaced.

The thing that surprises people the most is that it's been running Arch linux since 2009 (back then I was pretty much a Linux noob) and the thing has an availability of more than 99.9999% across 10 years. It's stable as fuck.

My recommendation for NASes is: Do it yourself and ask others for advice. It's well worth it to look into FreeBSD/FreeNAS rather than Linux btw.

>>48878

>That data server has been running 24/7 pretty much for 10 years with the only exceptions being reboots due to updates and a few times where hardware was replaced

Don't you have an enormous electricity consumption and thus an enormous electricity bill? Is that kind of setup thus really feasible for a private user?

>>48878

>My recommendation for NASes is: Do it yourself

You mean like turning some old PC into a server? Dunno, I've been thinking of just buying something like this: https://catalog.onliner.by/nas/qnap/qnapd2 – putting a couple of HDDs into it in JBOD and enjoying it without much headache. It should work fine as a torrent downloader/file storage.

>>48882
Total usage is between 20 and 45W for the entire server, measured at the socket with a voltcraft energy meter. The CPU is an intel i3 with 15W TDP , each HDD is optimized for running 24/7 with a low power consumption (eg. 5900 RPM max) and the PSU had the highest possible efficiency at the time of buying (and was also the most costly component :D). Currently it has 4 drives and one SSD. If it was purely for serving data I'd replace the SSD with a pair of SD cards to get an additional SATA slot.

Drives are encrypted via dm-crypt (meaning I'm using the kernel module for efficient software encryption). They are in a RAID5 using mdadm and the filesystem ontop is plain old ext4. The read speed has consistently been above 100MiB/s (That is megabytes, not megabits) and the limit is the ethernet port of the mainboard (1Gbit intel controller).

Remember lightbulbs before everything was LED based? They had 60W for typical ceiling lamps. The water boiler below the kitchen sink eats 1,500W for about 5 minutes when heating in energy saving mode. The thing that heats running water (shower etc) eats 35,000W.
I can assure you, the server is barely noticable at the end of the year :D

I have 3 other servers running that are even more energy efficient (between 7W and 15W each). You just have to know what components to buy, really.

>>48887
Yes, common PC hardware, though as energy saving as possible, see the previous post.

I don't know qnap, but the main reason for me to prefer self-built systems is the control I have over the software. If you're able to assemble the hardware yourself, you should take a look at freeNAS, which is pretty much a plug&play solution with a very solid base. All of it is open source and you can install new software (eg. different torrent client) at will.

>>48907
Thanks for the explanation!

>>48909
Modern technology is fucking space heaters powered by nuclear plants. I've seen Linus reviewing 3090's in SLI mode and he was warming his hands like at a campfire from fucking a meter away. We're talking about 400w GPUs now, and if you're still getting Intel for God knows what reason I've seen the fucking things needing to run 325w through the board on overclocks. You can easily jump up to actually needing a 1000w PSU these days if you're buying tech today (actually paying for an IOU until January but whatever) and running a rig that's juicing 700w from the wall nonstop actually is going to eat up your power bill over a given period of time. Granted just running some dinky server with a bunch of HDDs in RAID probably won't do that but still, it's a worthy consideration at this point.

>15w TDP CPU

HOW

>>48914
I'm sorry, I made a mistake there: The data server that draws between 20 and 45W does not have a 15W TDP CPU, it's 35W TDP: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?productIds=53423

But the 20-45W were correct, I've looked up the measurements that I've taken and can give you the details even: Peak was 55W during boot, after that the system never exceeded 45W (I've rounded the values to the nearest integer), with 20W in idle and an average of 28W over 3 days of regular usage (file server for the LAN, mostly used for streaming to the HTPC; backup server for 7 computers, automated using borg-backup with encryption and compression (which is the most CPU taxing thing happening on this server); and various other minor things like ftp, torrents, reverse proxy to mirror package repos, etc)

If you find 15W TDP impressive, check out the AMD A4-5000 series. I've got an A4-5050 set up as communication server and SSH tunnel and it's pushing 1gbit data streams with proper encryption (ed25519 curve + poly1305 stream cypher) without fully saturating one of it's cores; it's drawing less than 10W in that case. It has 15W TDP officially, but I've not measured more than 18W for the entire server (and that was during boot only).

What many people don't think about is that very few use cases actually require much processing power. The absolute worst offender here is badly software design, mostly concentrated around web pages today. I do low level programming close to the hardware in my daily routine and I assure you that no matter how hard I try, I won't be able to give you a clear and accurate picture of how terrible the situation with browsers, javascript and almost all pages actually is. It's... frustrating. A SNES from 1993 is able to render text faster than your webbrowser on a $2000 laptop from this year - not slightly faster but TWICE as fast. And it has nothing to do with fidelity, this remains true even if you lower your resolution to NTSC and read the twitter fron page as a bag of pixels.
If you don't play games using UE4 or Unity and you don't run a webbrowser with javascript enabled, you will be fine using a 15W TDP CPU from 5 years ago. You will actually hardly notice a difference 99% of the time.

>>48860
Fedora with Gnome. KDE has yet to have good Wayland support. I would love to try Enlightenment again when they have acceptable Wayland support. Sway is nice too and if you run i3 consider switching since it has excellent Wayland support.

> bloated

Haha poor souls who think that. "Oh my DE is optimized to the max" starts firefox

Gets me every time.

Gnome is not bloated.

>>48942
Gnome is just sluggish, leaks memory and crashes sometimes. The simpler system - the more difficult is to break it, this is a direct example of the principle

>>48867

>Arch doesn't install DHCP by default

my guess is that in a server oriented environment ip adresses are assumed to be allocated statically, eliminating the need for a DHCP server/client

>>48862

>to compile all those packages is a problem

AUR doesn't enforce you to install all the packages from sources, it takes 10 minutes on my old two core laptop to build several big packages. Of course, it's dumb get such a machine to build Chromium

>the possibility of a VM

I think you misunderstood what I wrote. I need to be able to comfortably use dwm with an i3 like experience. I must port my i3 config and modify dwm's source code to achieve it, both would take an impressive amount of time

>Wayland as soon as possible. Why?

Wayland solves so many problems once and for all. When on Xorg you need to google about how to calculate the DPI manually to get crisp fonts from HiDPI, it all just werks™ on Wayland

>>48942
Two pieces of unoptimized software are still worse than one of them. So having to deal with browsers is not a good reason to also have to deal with Gnome.

Disclaimer: I don't think that Gnome is bloated, just arguing for the principle here. I wouldn't want to use Gnome due to wonky performance at times and because it is actually less responsive than using most WMs without a DE.

>>48949

>I need to be able to comfortably use dwm with an i3 like experience. I must port my i3 config and modify dwm's source code to achieve it, both would take an impressive amount of time

Hey, I have that problem the other way around: I've been using the same bspwm setup that I've crafted almost 7 years ago and I know that I will eventually switch to i3 due to sway, but actually doing it means days of work to port my custom setup…

>>48950
I don't mean to offend, but why do you (read: anyone) argue for performance on such systems? It's not like you could play games or do serious 3D rendering. I don't think that with current hardware prices you really need elegant softwae even though it would be nice to have of course.

>>48949
Could you maybe share your i3 (and i3blocks?) configs? I'd like to take a look at how you customized it for inspiration.

>>48950
>>48949
This is were people stops being reasonable.
You see Gnome and Firefox use many of the same systems and libraries. So when you have to upload a file, for example, it pulls in GTK. So it is already loaded. Consistent theming is also something that people just don't think about when hurr durr optimize, having programs pull in images and other shit twice or more also isn't effective.

Also people just can't keep big and bloated separate. Gnome is an DE and for that it is expected to have certain things like a file manager and themes and point and click settings. These things take resources but are they bloated when they do what they are supposed to and does not pull it QT? I would argue they are suited to the task at hand in the environment they are meant to be used.

I used to run an WM, forgot its name now, but it was small. But it was sluggish and tried to do clever things and didn't use resources well. Although smaller and "lighter" then Gnome I would argue that it was bloated.

Bloat is Electron apps. Rage all you want but it is true.

Also if you want "bloat" you should try Enlightenment with animated backgrounds. Some of those are quite big. Looks pretty though so still wouldn't do without them.

>>48942

>Gnome is not bloated.

How do you define bloated? Is there another DE you'd consider bloatware?

>>48957
>>48958
Ok, you just answered it. Then nevermind.

>>48956
ahem, something like this https://hastebin.com/eqepepexul.sql

Keep in mind that I prioritize performance over crazy features. I ditched polybar and other bars for a reason.

>>48957

>Bloat is Electron apps

Exactly, this is why the only Electron app I use is VSCodium.

>Also if you want "bloat"

You ignore the fact that fully fledged DEs introduce a certain level of unresponsiveness to them. From all the DEs I've tried only xfce and lxqt compete with tiling managers in terms of responsiveness. And when ADHD kicks in, I want my system to be blazing fast.

>Consistent theming
>~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini
>~/.gtkrc-2.0
>QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE

>having programs pull in images and other shit twice or more also isn't effective.

Do you know about caching and paging? Once a program is loaded once, it'll keep the libraries cached automatically.

>>48972
Thank you very much!

>>48826
I agree that Stallman is right in absolute terms. The problem I have with Free Software is that it ensures a minimum threshold for abuse, but does not guarantee that abuse won't happen.
What I mean by that is that all authority/control is a result of raw power, and corporations, today, have the most power. Or the most relevant types of power.
The license allows you to, by means of the law, to leverage the power of the state. And although the state has a monopoly on violence, there's other kinds of power. And corporations have some of them in abundance: labor, and currency. The most used tactics of control by corporations, in the "open source" space, today, are those of labor saturation. What they do, is that they will take control of certain parts of open source projects, by sheer manpower of their labor leverage, then perhaps obfuscate some parts with cryptic code, and practically chain the rest of the project to their authority, even if "legally" they are disposable. And that's one of the many tactics of asserting control that they have in their disposal.

So, I think, in some cases, we might need something better/stronger. In case of the Linux Kernel, I think it works so far because we have a BDFL, and a very principled group of core kernel contributors. But without that, who knows what could happen?

My proposed method of social pressure is mail bombings, by the way. While mortality is an irreversible process, violence is still the strongest vector of asserting power.

On an unrelated note, this is why I don't care for demonstrations, flash mobs, activism and other forms of "soft power". Playing by the rules of the system (legal gatherings) doesn't do shit. Either kill your local senator, or shut up. I, myself, know I don't have the balls to plant a bomb in the parliament building, but I'm tired of the people who pretend they do, but still do nothing other than assaulting their fellow proletarians sometimes.

>>48942

>Fedora with Gnome

Is Fedora comfy? Want to try it out.

>>48983
I agree that there is the risk of abuse by certain profit driven powers, but I don't think this is a big problem. That's so great about FOSS. It's free and open source, so the code is available to anyone. The suppression and appropriation you mentioned are happening and will happen, but the original code will still be free and open source and can be continued or modified in such a manner. Both models will coexist and in the end it's the decision of the user which he will support. Of course, the side with money is much more powerful, but right now there is still the possibility to expose their doings and many people like RMS do exactly that. For example many Linux users don't like Canonical very much and thus use another distro. Your suggestion of terrorism I have to reject. I don't think terrorism is any means to achieve real societal change. Yes, it is an outburst of violence, sometimes a quite powerful one, but in most cases those represent the actions of an individual or a small group, not of the whole people. How is that any better than having powerful corporations? Neither represent anything. I agree that conventional political activism won't result in anything too, although as I stated terrorism won't either. The hierarchical structure of society will remain at the core of human society, no matter what political system there currently governs. There was an Ancient time without artificial hierarchy, but back then we were a different kind of people. Bringing any political or societal system of the past back is not possible. I don't see a future for us where we are liberated. Sorry.

>>48985
It's good. Like it way more then Debian. While I understand Debian it is stuck, no unified /usr last i checked, systemd rage wars, a pain to create your own .deb and so on. Fedora is were things happens more or less. Queue Red Hat is evil and wants to take over Linux. Also new interesting stuff like homectl and other nice things. I know there are looser, yes I will call them looser when they can't criticize it beyond Lennart is the devil, who would disagree but I find it nice and refreshing. And if you have ever configured network on Debian and Red Hat you will appreciate systemd-networkd. LACP was almost easy to set up using it.

>>48972
Oh I know about caching. It is just that people who go full BLOATED SHIT have no clue about computers in general.

> responsiveness
> blazing fast

I don't use shit hardware and it is usable even on a Raspberry3, not award winning but usable.

>>48986
Ok, super autistic and controversial opinion to follow (please forgive me):
I don't like the word "terrorism".
I think the only reason "terrorism" doesn't work, is because democracy doesn't either. Like, if I was a perfectly rational agent from a country currently getting bombed by western powers, and I believed in democracy, I'd sure as shit massacre "innocent" civilians. Why? Because in a democratic system, the civilian nominally holds the most power. The only reason this doesn't actually work is because democracy doesn't either. The average civilian never exercises their democratic power, they just want to coom, consoom, and "live their life".
In fact, there's no such thing as an "innocent" in a democratic system. You hold political power, however intangible? Well, you are responsible. If you live your whole life unaware of the fact that your government is bombing foreign hospitals and writing it off as "collateral", you're fucking responsible, whether you realize it or not. Do something about it, or don't be surprised if the aforementioned people getting bombed treat you as a valid target and an enemy.
Like, imagine the cognitive dissonance of believing that you have actual political power as a "voter", and then getting surprised that enemy soldiers you're at war with treat you as a valid target. The very word "terrorism" is a massive spook. There is no such thing as "terrorism". Those are legitimate acts of war. Why? BECAUSE YOUR COUNTRY IS CURRENTLY AT WAR, DUH

Now, all of this only applies if you truly believe that your """vote""" gives you political power.
So let's analyze that. Do you really, truly believe that it does? I don't think so. So, what argument do you have against the claim that your government and "national identity" (that you don't participate in because you're "living your life") are not, in fact, parasitic entities that hold the symbols (flag, name, coat of arms) that represent your "people", but don't, actually, in fact, represent them in a real sense? (because you don't actually have any fucking representation). I don't think you have any. States are parasitic entities that pretend to be the representatives of a "people" or a "nation", but aren't actually controlled by the populace. They're no different from corporations.
And if that is true, then WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? Just "living your life", huh? Well, excuse me if I bomb, you, then, "innocent bystander". Can't have your cake and eat it, too. You either have political power, and it's ok to bomb you, or you don't and you're just standing by, watching a rogue group of mercenaries don the symbols of your nation to bomb foreign peoples.
Well fuck that shit either way.

The difference between third worlders and westoids is that third worlders KNOW that they don't have any power, nominal or otherwise. They walk into the central square, they get shot or imprisoned. Westoids, on the other hand, allow themselves to be deluded, thinking they have real power, yet are surprised when arms are used against the supposedly "powerful" "bystanders". Pathetic.

Now, what am I getting at? I'm getting at the fact that terrorism would work, if only the targets were chosen deliberately, rather than out of desperation. Walk up to the main contributor from Microsoft to the Linux Kernel on the streets while he's on his way to McDonalds, with an ordinary hammer in your pocket. Give him a good whack on the forehead, instant death. Problem solved. Same applies to any person of relative importance. Nobody is ever safe, no matter what your precautions are, if someone puts their mind to it, and doesn't care about consequences (as any good terrorist should), they CAN kill you. Why does this never happen? Why is it that the innocent are those who suffer? I don't know. It frustrates me too.

Maybe because subjectively, our individual suffering seems to heavily outweigh the imaginary suffering of others, however small, but millions of them, because we can't directly feel it. How many mass shootings could be prevented if 5 brave ones stormed the shooter, instead of huddling in the corner? Yet it never happens. And I know why. Because I'd cover in the corner like a pussy as well, I know it. That's the tragedy of it all. Humans are weak, humans are shit. We deserve all the suffering we get. Flush it all down the toilet. I'm ready, coach. Do it.

>>48995
Way to hijack your own thread on computer technology, mang.

>>48995
I don't think that it depends on the targets for terrorism to work. It will never work. Those people are replaceable. Every human is replaceable as we live in a system and not as individuals. We are only as much individuals as the system lets us be. But in the end we are cogs of the great machine. So I don't think it matters if you kill this or that guy, he will be replaced anyway. And yes, my friend, the human was born as an imperfect being. But instead of improving his perfect and genius sides, his imperfection and weaknesses developed more and more. Since the Agricultural revolution our societies are based on the weaknesses of man. That's why we will vanish in the end to be replaced by something much greater.

>>48999
Technology is politics.
plus I'm drunk, I have an excuse.

besides, like, don't you value having an ebig discussion over staying within some arbitrary OCD constraint of a thread topic? this is my main problem with small message boards, conversations can't flow naturally, everything has to be compartmentalized in autistic way.

>>49000
I don't like the idea of deferring agency to invisible processes. Be it claiming that capitalism is "natural", therefore irresistible, or to natural selection, or any other "larger than life natural process". There are so many industries in the market, where the way business are run, are run that way only because of some technically "irrational" expectations, standards and ideologies that customers hold. or societies in history that seem bizzare to us because the people inhabiting them held completely different "irrational' beliefs. I think in reality, in any system, what the people believe in, goes. And it is for that very reason that "the system" tries to convince the populace to defer their agency to various entropic forces.
"muh economy is comprised of 100% rational actors playing the prisoner's dilemma". Yeah fuck that, I'd rather be a big dick chad who will act upon irrational, illogical and arbitrary impulses for no other reason that I feel like it. Rationality is for gay homos and small peepe brainlet smol brain autismo hylics. LOW INHIBITION GANG RISE UP.
I reserve the right to believe in the power of human will.
Even if it doesn't count for shit. Gotta believe in some god.

>>49004

>Rationality is for gay homos and small peepe brainlet smol brain autismo hylics

good point, by doing things irrationally on purpose we are proving to be human, rather than robots with a predefined utility function.

>>48999
This ):

>>49006
And answer to yourself.

sighn I feel like EC turned in a bad direction lately. Maybe with this, I'll finally quit imageboards.

>>49007
You have really high standards.

>>49007

>sighn I feel like EC turned in a bad direction lately.

To counter any narrative of the silent masses agreeing: I think the exact opposite. EC turned into a very good direction lately. And for the "answer to yourself"-topic: You might have missed that post: >>48979

>I have to announce that beyond the first two posts in the Technology General thread, none of the bricks have been me. Sure, I loved basking in the brief period of feeling truly anonymous on this website for once, but I have to say this to avoid any misunderstanding.

So very likely he has not. Also: I completely agree with the statement in >>49004:

>don't you value having an ebig discussion over staying within some arbitrary OCD constraint of a thread topic?

I think keeping as close as possible to the thread OP topic is an unnecessary restriction to the development of threads, especially if you consider that even the OP can't foresee every development a thread can take, so maybe everyone (including OP) likes it. If not, there is always the opportunity to just say so.

>>49007
lol wot, there are two bricks on EC at the moment. I've come tired of other imageboards. Let me tell you something: if you disagree with an argument in a discussion, you have to provide your own opinion, rather than mindlessly making false statements.

>>49012

>EC turned into a very good direction lately.

Into Kohl-pol?

>>49018
I think the worst thing about EC in the past week has been an increase in one-line quip posts that contribute nothing, and are only meant to apply some kind of peer pressure or express disagreement with no further elaboration. Which is what you're doing.
I think that's worse than actual discussions in every case, even if the topic of the discussion is bad.

>>49052
I should write a poem about poltardism in every second thread or what?

>>49060
If it really is that bad why don't you try to counter it and actually make some effort posts and commit yourself to some threads? But you don't that, do you?

Does anybody know a good VPS provider?

>>49062
Is privacy an issue? The radio for example is hosted at cryptoho.st, which is reasonably priced, quite reliable, has good admin tools and accepts bitcoin payment. The company resides in St. Tome and Principe somewhere off the shores of West Africa, and the server location is Romania, which should provide a reasonable amount of privacy.

>>49064
Thank you, that sounds very good indeed! Will check it out.

>>49064
But you still have to share a (real?) name and (real?) address, right?

>>49066
You need to enter a name, but it doesn't matter if it's real, you need just a valid E-Mail address. At least it was like this when I signed up 16 months ago. Or I was just veeery lucky that there actually lives an Ernst Iwan in Hambacher Forst :DD

>>49067

>Ernst Iwan in Hambacher Forst

:D

>>49067
Do you know what kind of virtualization software they are using?

Hey is there some kind of way I can use a Raspberry Pi as my burner phone and then firewall it off from so much as being detected by every home network within 500 meters? Because I wouldn't want them to even be able to detect my device. Would this have to go through the same cable modem? If I used a cable splitter and installed a second cable modem could I get a separate IP or somehow make it look at the physical level like I am two separate home networks? Because afaik using a Piphone would require some kind of a LAN or whatever to work properly and I couldn't just bounce it off real cell tower masts (which themselves would triangulate me).

>>49088
They use KVM virtualization. I'm not sure, but I vaguely remember being able to choose between different virtualization types and definitely between different OS. We use CentOS7 by the way.

>>49093
Mmh, I see, thanks. I personally probably wouldn't use CentOS as I'm not familiar with its package manager etc., I've seen they also provide Ubuntu and Debian.

>>49090
Um what?

Pleas explain what you are trying to achieve?

>>49066
Regarding that, if you also want to register a domain without giving your real name, I can recommend freenom.com to get a .tk domain pseudonymously. Got a domain there in 2018 and it's been working perfectly fine for over two years without me having to pay a cent.

t. Ernst Mohammed from Samarkand/Uzbekistan

Which Linux is closest to OpenBSD right now? I just want a Unix as a backend for Emacs but OpenBSD/Emacs (or OpenBSD + Emacs) has gotten slow over the years on my x200 and I don't want to buy a new laptop. I just want a stupid simple Unix that is easy for me to understand and set up and wont get in the way of me using my computer as an Emacs system. I need wifi so Guix is out, what's left, Devuan, Alpine, Void? Are those the go to ones right now?

>>49158
Why is OpenBSD slow for you? I think it's your fault then and not the fault of the OS.

>>49158

> OpenBSD

Slackware 8.1 maybe. If you need to ask you probably shouldn't be using OpenBSD in the first place. Nowadays OSX is Unix so you need to get your priorities straight.

>>49169
I mean every Linux/BSD is the same basically. It depends on what you make of it.

>>49171
Yea they are mostly the same. Most sane people use bash or nowadays zsh in BSD too. So no difference there. The only reason for using BSD is to try something different. It is just like very old outdated Linux distribution if you not going to use it for what makes it special. And if you are going for Devuan, Apline and whatnot because "not systemd" then you are retarded and better use BSD since that would at least buy some cred.

For X fans.
https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server.html

> You can only apply so much thrust to the pig before you question why you're trying to make it fly at all.

For systemd haters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo
That is a BSD guy talking.

>>49158
OpenBSD is not slow on an x200. Has it gotten slower with any upgrade? In 2018 they disabled hyperthreading and various other things by default due to spectre/meltdown. Try turning those on again.

Oh and if you aren't using OpenBSD for the security that it provides over other systems and you really mostly want to use emacs, then Alpine linux could work for you. Though I have no idea about its WIFI support. Hardware support is pretty great with Arch and setting up WIFI is well documented in their wiki, as are all the steps for the initial setup you need to get from zero to emacs. Do you use X11 at all, or are you using screen/tmux from TTY0?

>>49182
what makes bsd """secure"""?

>>49185
OpenBSD primary reason for existing is that it is considered more secure then anything else, mostly by its developers.(It is also very much against the GPL-license and consider it the spawn of satan. Also Apache v2. They have some good projects that are developed under the umbrella of OpenBSD like OpenSSH that people then take and rewrite to make it work on other operating systems.)

But the primary reason for it being secure is that the base install does not allow you to do anything. They also have home brewed security features that is unique to OpenBSD for various reasons. The firewall they use is not bad and is ported to the other major BSD variants and Linux new nftables is i believe partly inspired by it, at least syntactically. They also supposedly review code better then anybody else in the world.

>>49186
You say that with so much spite, my friend.

The truth about security is that you have to make it a priority and commit to it, nothing else works. The developers of OpenBSD do exactly that and because of that their system is one of the most secure ones. It's not magic, just dedication.

>>49218
I say it with much spite because I'm fucking tired of hearing that OpenBSD is so secure when you can fuck up anyway. It isn't magic and it isn't that much more secure. Sooner or later you need to do something with it and then you need to activate more code, more code running = more attack surface. It is only the base system that is scrutinized more than pornhub videos. The ports isn't.

Also one of the reasons that it is considered secure is because the only the ones who can be arsed to install it and then take the time to configure it are people who are interested. Random Ubuntu users would fuck up.

The truth about security is that is basically what are you protecting from whom?
It doesn't matter if your shit dildos wordpress site runs on OpenBSD because it is going to get owned anyway. It might even be more secure running it on CentOS because there are tools that handle the ass of internet that is wordpress on CentOS.

I'm not against OpenBSD, I'm against the blind hurr durr secure thing. If you truly want security look at for example https://www.qubes-os.org/ and read the discussion and white papers. Hint, security is fucking complex.

>>49228
Forgot to say that Intel sucks.

>>49228
I know that security is complex. And I've talked face to face with two of the people behind QubesOS. I've also had some very interesting irl chats with many of the people behind gnunet and the main developer of gpg. Not trying to brag, just make clear that I'm not the right audience for lectures by an opinionated grumpy-man ^_^

>>49243

> Not trying to brag

No, of course not. You are simply trying to boost your arguments with namedropping. I too talk to people, I just don't see the relevance in telling you who they are.

Are there any eggsperts here on virtual phone number services for text verifications?
I know they exist, but I don't know if they'r reliable, or if there's any pitfalls.

My country requires ID verification for SIM cards, and I want to avoid it.

>>49337
I'm not really an expert, but I think, if you want a reliable one, you have to pay for it. I don't think there are any free legit number services. Are you willing to pay?

>>49340
Yeah, why not.
I already pay out the ass for my data plan. My concern is that the service will be unresponsive, locking me out of my shit at crucial moments, or even go down completely, forcing me to go through tech support to get my account back.
I don't intend to call with it either, just use it for SMS confirmations.

>>49341
But why won't you just buy a prepaid SIM? This should be much easier than finding a good virtual number provider.

>>49342
Well, the premise of my post here >>49337 is that in my country, all SIM cards require ID verification. As in, you have to register your citizen ID with the telecom provider. A new premaid SIM will just request you to send your ID via USSD before it allows you to use it.

>>49337
VPN? Because you can just go into nearest convenient store if not.

I'm thinking about making a career transition to becoming a network admin or something of that sort. any helpful links or recommendations?

>>49391
Save money for therapy sessions. Also you need a company sponsor for all those certificates. Hardware can fail and will fail.

Maybe just don't would be a better advice now that I think about it.

I've not managed to set my computer to sleep, hibernate, or shutdown or restart without having to hard shutdown by holding the power button for a week now. I sadly had this crap happen right around the time I got another fucking Windows update which I think got installed when I had some system crash or another, which was also right when I updated my Radeon drivers. I thankfully got an actually nice motherboard which has got the debug LED and which has been cycling through what seems to be an either memory or PCIe device based issue, which idk fucking why I updated my Radeon drivers when it worked fucking fine as it was before, thus lulling me into a false sense of security about randomly taking every update that I likely didn't clean install either.

As such I've finally gotten fed up enough to not-clean install the previous version or what I assume to be the working version of Adrenalin on top of that and am now hoping it will fix whatever driver conflict I assume to be having between new Windows version which Windows also offered another update I took and didn't help the issue. I can open the CD trays this time when the LEDs went off on my mouse and flash drives but otherwise the PC is unresponsive, the fans start whirring hard, GPU fans stay off, monitor display is off, but the system does not shut down. It's like it stays stuck in some boot down cycle. Everything else works perfectly fine I just can't turn it off, restart, or put it into any sleep or hibernate modes without it going into that hang/freeze state on shut down which last time gave me 0d code after it's previous loop went like
54
4d
14
15
92
CB
B3 -> 54, 4d, 14 etc repeat

So here's to hoping that the next time I try to power off cycle it I don't need to hold the button down again because I know it's going to break Windows someday doing that. Worst case scenario, I mean I can't fuck my board's BIOS doing that to shut it down can I, right? I'd clear CMOS but I am so incredibly lazy and don't feel like fucking with all my BIOS settings again. With any luck it really was just the newer version of Adrenalin 2020 and not some other fucky problem which I can't diagnose, like with it being some new RAM based issue or that I had not foreseen that'll require way more effort than I'm willing to give to something which has just become a super annoying "quirk" than something actively fucking with my use of it.

Now fuck where I do put this video, in Society or in Art/Internet? Because fuck, someone died with all this lordnazirusso stuff

A tag system is booooring to implemeeeent

>>49629
have a pair of glorious videos too

Is there a new public repo for Phutaba?

What's up with GPUs right now? I want to build a new PC but GPUs seem to be way overpriced do to low stock. Is there a good source for informations around that topic that's actually informative?
Most stuff i found is "low stock, high prices" stretched to a 5min read.

The most important question i have is probably: When is it possible to buy without going at least 200€ over MSRP

>>50681
Yes I can give you a rundown on any angle of that just give me a bit to respond more I'm kind of tired and distracted.

First of all what is your budget and what is your build? Is it new PC or upgrade? What are you looking for it to do for you and at which resolution? I would strongly advise against going over MSRP. How long can you wait? And would a used card or older gen card be acceptable or are you looking more towards latest and greatest? I am currently running a 1440p monitor off a high end 5700XT for $400 and it generally works great. I can try to answer objectively and without bias which cards from which gen and company depending on use cases.

>rundown

Not terribly quickly or in written form. Spent many, many hours watching different tech channels over the year so it helps to mentally compile a more balanced view than one person who's possibly a fanboy like Linus/LTT is nvidia fanboy and HardUnboxed AMD fanboyish.

Tl;dr need budget; resolution; use cases like rendering, streaming, video editing, gaming etc.; preferred gen or newness; and features such as NVENC, raytracing, overclocking, etc.

>>50682
I was considering upgrading my CPU only, but since my 1070 already makes weird things from time to time i decided for a complete build.
My SSD is pretty old and from an early generation, so i get a new one as well and take my old one as secondary drive.
Since the only thing i would actually re-use is the ram and the fans i will probably end up making everything completely new and keep my old PC as some kind of office PC.

I don't think i need much information about the hardware itself and more about when i can buy without overpaying like i would right now, but if you insist:

Budget: I hope to stay as far under 1500€ as possible.

GPU: My last GPUs were the 470, 670 and 1070 and i was happy with them but i'm not a fanboy and would be willing to buy an AMD card, right now it just looks like they aren't that far ahead in terms of price/performance and fall way behind Nvidia when it comes to Raytracing. Also DLSS.
At the moment i think i stay with Nvidia and it will probably be a 3060ti or a 3070.

CPU i really don't know yet. I have a i7 6700k right now which is still a decent CPU but you see its age in CPU intensive applications and it would be a bottleneck to new GPUs anyway.
I will most likely go for a 6 or 8 core CPU but i have no idea if AMD or Intel yet.

Oh, and i have a 1440p monitor and mostly think about playing games.

Since this thread is still alive, I would also like to inquire about graphics cards.

I want to upgrade my PC I built last year with a new graphics card. It needs one HDMI port and preferably three Displayports. Currently I have a RTX 2060, but I want to get away from RTX if possible.

Rest is a Ryzen 7 2700X, MSI B450 Carbon Pro Gaming Mainboard, 16GB DDR4. It will most likely (apart from maybe a CPU upgrade) be the last time I will ever upgrade my computer. I realized there really isn't any game anymore I am excited for, so I will probably give up the gaming hobby (as in "buy new games") in the near future anyway and now I am trying to find a way to futureproof my system as much as possible.

Can anyonre recommend a good GPU and/or CPU?

>>50693

> futureproof my system

No way to do that sorry. The state of consumer hardware today is laughable. We are tricked into buying expensive shit, well not shit but more expensive then it needs to be.
Also we are withheld features that are becoming more important, see Torvalds latest rant on ECC and Intel for example. Fuck x86 and its ecosystem.

>>50693
Well first of all, which games or for what reason would you even be upgrading that if you're convinced you won't be gaming much anymore and at what res? Because while it's still not the greatest card that's still just one generation ago and if you were at 1080p it should be fine for a few more years in theory. Non-super right?

>2700x

Well I do know that AMD allegedly made it so that you can upgrade afterall to Zen3 but my honest answer actually would be to either JustWaitTM for 5700x or get a 5600x. I'm pretty sure the 5600x should be fine and work on your board with the right BIOS updates. It wouldn't necessarily be "future proof" but if you're only looking to upgrade one last time anyway it should be plenty. For GPU I'd tell you largely the same thing as other ernst, which is just to get a 6800XT when you are able, or an RTX 3080.

>get away from RTX

There's three things you could mean by this, not use the proprietary nVidia RT, not use raytracing, or not use an nvidia RTX series card, any of which I'm not sure what you'd mean by that, but in that case a 6800XT would be your best bet because it's got enough VRAM, slightly cheaper, around the same performance as the 3080 but does RT a bit more poorly and a card like that while expensive should last you quite a few years, like probably 5-6 at least before it's really got issues running the newest stuff which it sounds like by then you'd not care or only play older stuff once in awhile.

>>50695
While this may be true there's something to be said for getting upper-middle of the road rather than just getting the cheapest shit imaginable and having it break down on you or not perform well enough and needing to replace it. But this is quite true particularly with the expensive as shit GPU crap we've had to suffer the last several years, which I suspect was fueled partly by those damn crypto miners who in turn enabled GPU makers to boost prices tremendously and they've simply never lowered them as some shitty new normal. $800 is becoming the "new standard" for GPU prices and it's abysmal.

>>50693
shit oh right and in terms of display wait a minute are you running a multi-monitor setup? Well I'd stick by saying checking out 6800XTs. I've got a 5700XT taichi that's got 6 separate ports (4 DP and 2 HDMI iirc?) but of course that's better than yours but not by much, or certainly not enough I'd ever recommend the upgrade within the generation ideally you should skip at least one gen before upgrades, or if you don't, buy next gen at least one tier up, like say you'd go from 2060 to 3070 or 2060 to 6800XT or something like that. I would however definitely not recommend the 6800XT Taichi because it's not way too expensive compared to others of its ilk but it's got only 2 DP, 1 HDMI, and 1 USB C.
Would be a good card but
https://www.newegg.com/sapphire-radeon-rx-6800-xt-11304-02-20g/p/N82E16814202391?Description=6800xt&cm_re=6800xt-_-14-202-391-_-Product
oh holy Christ are you not kidding. These were $200 cheaper the last time I looked. Jesus.

ayyy lmao forget what I said before if you're going to buy at these prices
https://www.newegg.com/asrock-radeon-rx-6800-xt-rx6800xt-tcx-16go/p/N82E16814930050?Description=6800xt&cm_re=6800xt-_-14-930-050-_-Product
this used to be the most expensive card. The Sapphire Nitro+ Ultimate is now $1,030, this is $935 which is $100 more expensive than it was which was nearly two hundred over the base model's MSRP.
Eh I dunno man
https://www.newegg.com/msi-radeon-rx-6800-xt-rx-6800-xt-gaming-x-trio-16g/p/N82E16814137621?Description=6800xt&cm_re=6800xt-_-14-137-621-_-Product
I personally think that you should hold off on even trying it since you've got a newish card, unless you're already having trouble running games. The market is even more fucked now than the last time I checked.

I mean alternatively you could just buy older gen but that market will also be completely fucked and 2080ti owners are going to try and get their investment mostly back, which fundamentally wouldn't be worth paying over $600 for one of those cards, and it kinda sucks because before this generation AMD really didn't offer anything super high end unless you go back far enough that their "high end" cards wouldn't beat a low to midrange card last gen and possibly come with its own problems.

You may just be saddled with having to autonotify something like this
https://www.newegg.com/msi-geforce-rtx-3080-rtx-3080-gaming-x-trio-10g/p/N82E16814137597?Description=rtx%203080&cm_re=rtx_3080-_-14-137-597-_-Product

Alternatively you could try scoping out a 1080ti and see if there's anything cheapish. It's just barely better than the 2070super and 5700xt but comes with more VRAM which should help your card's longevity, and the Pascal series of cards is famous for being one of the best generations ever created making the 1080ti thus one of the best cards ever made even if it is much older now, so it really wouldn't be futureproofing at all in that sense.

I will however agree with what Sweden said in that futureproofing essentially doesn't exist in tech, and the degree to which there's diminishing returns per dollar spent makes it foolish for anyone not an oligarch to even try it. Whatever performance or capacity you're getting now for $2500 you'll get for $800 a few years from now, and within a decade some shitty $140 thing would beat it. I remember Linus showing off a what was it, $5,000 or something tricked out gaming PC from ten years before and the thing couldn't even run modern games, in fact I think it struggled with something like Anno oh ok it was Anno 1800 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNo7qoLRtkQ to be fair he's trying to run the thing at 4K which I'd forgotten about, but still.

IMHO the smart thing to do is get midrange stuff and hold off upgrading until you literally need it. This is 10 times more true if there's something affecting the markets like, say, a bitcoin craze or global pandemic. Buying one now is stupid if you don't have to, but in normal times you'd just wait until it cannot actually run something you want it to and then upgrade, which usually by the time you need that upgrade it'll be something like 4x as powerful as what you had for the same or cheaper cost than what you paid for the aging hardware.

Want to hear a story about what i did the last few hours?
I decided to overclock my CPU, so i went from 4000mhz to 4300mhz, which isn't such a high jump.
I booted it up, did a stress test and checked the temperatures. The PC ran without any noticeable problems but the temperatures went up to just over 90°C which is tolerable in a stress test but since the PC was kinda dusty i felt i could do something to bring it down.

I opened the PC and couldn't find my pressure air spray so i took a ventilator on full speed to blow some dust out. Also a vaccum cleaner.

Put everything back together, turn the PC on, all fans start to spin, hard drives turn on (external ones as well) and... nothing. No signal on my monitor, LEDS from keyboard and mouse don't shine up but i got a constant red light on my mainboard where it said "dram_led".

I took the GPU out and put the display port in the mainboard: same thing
cmos reset: same thing
using only one ram in different slots: same thing
cmos out again while i already start to look for new hardware to use with my old GPU for around 1 hour: Everything works fine again.

I really hate computers sometimes.

>>50709

>are you running a multi-monitor setup?

Nope

>oh holy Christ are you not kidding. These were $200 cheaper the last time I looked. Jesus.

Yep, hardware prices jumped extremely in 2020 and i don't even blame manufacturers.

>Alternatively you could try scoping out a 1080ti

Nah, i really want to make a bigger jump from my 1070.
Also, i think i might wait a few more months, hopefully we see the first DDR5 compatible CPUs and Mainboards by then.

>>50695
>>50709
Yeah, by "futureproofing" I meant "get a new system that will be able to keep up for a few years", with how consoles are holding everything back and such.

The reason I want to get away from RTX architecture is because one of the last games I enjoyed was Hitman 2, but there's some bug with RTX cards that makes the game crash all the time, and it's not the only game.

And meriball, you're right in that I run a multi monitor setup. 3 monitors, plus one VR headset. But since my current card has only three ports in total (oversight when I bought it, was a real quick shot without much research) I had to put one monitor to sleep and now it just stands on my desk taking up place. But 3 monitors are way better than 2, so I want to get back to that setup. And preferably with all monitors using the same connectors, as it's really obvious with the colors when passing the signal through different types of cables.

But thanks for the recommendations, I will check them out.

>>50691
tl;dr probably two months

>1440p
>$1500 budget give or take
>brand new build -RAM
>GTX 1070 settis

Actually the irony is you've pretty much got the same cardpower as the other guy, more or less. Maybe slightly slower, missing a couple featuresnot that DLSS 1.0 and RT with a 2060 are much to write home about but still but still around his performance, in which case my advice to you would still be something similar. I guess I'll just keep going with the GPU riff

> 470, 670 and 1070
>thinking about a 3060ti or 3070

I'm detecting a pattern here lol. Welp my first question to you is, how much do you think you can wait? Because I thought that the situation might be better now but I guess it's worse than ever. Not sure why because you'd think enough people wanting to upgrade got one and that scalpers had been somewhat dealt with although I routinely see some fuckass in my area trying to hawk 3090's for $2500-3000. I'm guessing the pandemic spiraling out of control hasn't helped but am not sure why manufacturing capacity seems so shit still.

So I'd again ask, how much can you hold off on it? Because if you didn't want to spend over $1500 you're clearly not loaded enough to spend on price gouged cards, but I also ask this because what I'd personally have gotten would be a 3070ti probably. And I mean, it works, but we're already reaching the point where certain games can blow past 8gb VRAM and at least the ti will have 10gb, which at your resolution you may want the extra headroom. Sadly due to supply shortages I cannot recommend anything above that which even to get a FE card or AMD base model at MSRP would normally kill close to half your budget. Oh btw were you oh nvm you said you're turning it into an office PC so you're probably not reusing case or anything but then where are you getting the RAM from?

I have no clue when the 6700XT would come out anyway, but you said you're thinking nVidia and seem to know what you want although I would say if you can't wait to either waiting for a 3070ti, or strongly consider a 3080 instead huh weird just got bad deja vu
anyway
https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-DisplayPort-Axial-tech-Protective-Backplate/dp/B08L8LG4M3
fucking yeesh

I dunno man. At this point with how skyhigh GPU prices are I'd probably just suggest to keep chugging on your system as long as you can. I ain't paying over $900 for a fuggin RTX 3070 I'll tell you that much, and somehow they're still sold out which given the global situation, eh. Well you seemed to indicate the real crux was more the when than where or what, but it'll probably start dialing back to normal within a couple of months at which point you'd basically be only a few months more away from 3070ti release.

And you are right btw, AMD has been erasing their p/p advantage steadily as of late. I'd say that if you're just going to use it for gaming, you should still consider just getting Intel instead regardless what AMD fanboys tell youI am practically an AMD fanboy because moar cores doesn't typically translate well into game performance and Intel still takes the crown for boost clocks, which it also doesn't matter so much since AMD seems likewise sold out everywhere and the 5800x is kind of a joke while the better value 5600x means you're dropping down to only 6 cores. I will say however I'm rather dismayed by Intel's lack of PCIe4 support while their boards inexplicably cost more than AMD's despite having the exact same or fewer features. I'm just really unimpressed with Intel prices tbh, but AMD jacked theirs for Zen3 and then stopped including the coolers afaik which were the two main reasons I switched from Intel to Zen2. However, PCIe4 NVMe's are still pretty expensive, and you can get a pretty cheap NVMe pcie gen3 for ultimately not that much slower performance.

Oh and lastly

>Also DLSS.

Well, I hear it's much much better for 2.0, but considering you've got a 1440p monitor I feel like I can safely presume that high visual fidelity is a thing for you, so in that case I'd see it more as just having the option to switch it on. For me personally I see it as irrelevant because it still impacts visual fidelity which seems senseless to me to care about raytracing when in order to use it at good framerates I'd need to turn something on that fucks with it. Like I still see shit at 1440p where I wish it looked smoother and finer in some titles and can't stand looking at 1080p in games now so I've gotten snobbish about that.

>>50710
Oh you replied before I was done posting. And even then

>DDR5

OH FUCK that's right that's the thing I was trying to think to say. Yes, Rocketlake iirc and DDR5 were said to be coming up the pike, so I mean just generally this is the absolute worst possible time to be building a new PC. I mean, I did it over the summer, but that was because I was on pic related. Eh I guess it would be ok to upload this. So I mean yeah as you can see I pretty much had no choice at the time which back then was more a "we have no PSUs" shortage problem which is why I went and got a 750w gold rather than a 850w like I initially wanted, although to be fair it's seemed pretty trusty and reliable so far knock on wood and did everything I wanted it to which I haven't got any plausible near future needs for more wattage anyway. Well that and the fact that I'd just gotten enough money to build one and hadn't felt like even waiting around for Ampere and RDNA2 to launch, and boy am like fuck glad I didn't actually decide to do that instead Jesus. It'd be January and I'd still probably be waiting around on some part before just going fuck it and getting something I didn't even want, but it does bug me slightly that I'm going to still be stuck on DDR4 whenever 5 launches much the same as I'd been using DDR3 even up to a year ago.

>Nah, i really want to make a bigger jump from my 1070.

Good plan and I agree fully. However when I say "last time I checked" I'm talking about just like three weeks ago or something like that, which means whenever those cards shot up to something ridiculously obscene like "prices for clean water and a pack of cigarettes after the bombs dropped" tier gouging it was super recently. I distinctly recall seeing cards at MSRP back in early December or whenever it was, they were simply sold out. It was just on ebay/craigslist/wherever that people charged that much over MSRP not that long ago.

>>50712

>how much do you think you can wait?

I was reading ddr5 is supposed to hit mid 2021, so I guess i try to keep it going for half a year. By then there will probably be a new cpu generation and some new gpus, let's wait and see.

>>50715
Man, if I had waited just oh. That's like, a year. Nah fuck it it's just disappointing becUse I really wanted to futureproof my build after having something that was upgradeable but oh well still got muh PCIe 4.0 with a clear upgrade path towards Zen3 and plenty of space for more and faster RAM. Really I just fell in love with my board though, which is an x570 Taichi. Ironically I gravitated towards it just because the gears was one background in win8 that didn't annoy me and it went from there but everything else about that bad was great.

I was probably more excited by that board than almost anything else and spent $300 on just my motherboard because I wanted it to last me 8 years and for once have no foundational hardware limitations. 8 SATA port minimum was a must and I slapped two optical drives into it. I'm pretty happy with the GPU too it's just that my monitor is 75hz I mostly play shit like crpgs and 4x games and next to no FPS so it made sense to not care about anything more but someday I might to 144hz but even still I have caught a couple of games dropping into 60ish averages and can tell that it's not going to last me, but hence the fixation on upgrade path. Literally all I could do then was stick a couple ddr3 DIMMs with slow as shit RAM and a 3770k which was barely a CPU upgrade. That thing was EOL and didn't even have 8 pin plugs.

So I just built a new one and think it's in a pretty great place because I can still get a third NVMe drive when prices drop and I somehow need it and can go up to 5900x from 3700x to extend its life along with a new GPU or two across its span. I'm planning to have it chugging along beautifully when I turn 40 provided the country doesn't collapse first. Damn I love that board. What case do you have if I may ask?

>>50720

>What case do you have if I may ask?

Sharkoon BW9000

I think Sharkoon products aren't that well known outside of Germany.
They make really cheap but mostly good quality stuff like cases, keyboards, mice and stuff like that.

https://en.sharkoon.com/product/BW9000-W

Nice case, not so fancy but everything I need.

>>50721

https://www.fractal-design.com superior

>>50710
Seems like my story has a part 2 (and probably a part 3 and 4).

Today i came home from work and wanted to turn on the PC.
I pushed the power button, the fans started but no mouse or keyboard LEDs and no monitor signal and a red dram_led on the mainboard, same thing as before.

I took the GPU out so i can get to the cmos batterie, i make a cmos reset and.. nothing.
It seemed to help last time so i tried again and again and again but nothing.
I took out 1 of my 2 ram bars and... it turned on. Why? I did not change a thing in the bios (not even the time) and will now uninstall all the software i installed recently but i am 100% sure i will have the same problem tomorrow and then it will turn on after i unplugged an HDD, the DVD-Drive or whatever.

Anyone any idea what it could be? Maybe i should get a cheap, new mainboard to see if that might be the problem.
Not having a gpu only half the ram sucks.

>>50728
No.

>>50728
I really don't like anything made by fractal design beyond the aesthetics of the front panel. After weighing a bunch of options I narrowed it down to three, a Rosewill case and Cougar Panzer Max iirc, and finally the one I got which was the Phanteks Enthoo Pro something or other. I would've rather had it with half glass front initially but I'm now pretty satisfied with the mesh front cover for bottom half and a bunch of 5.25" drive bays and I/O panel up top. Getting that was happiest I'd been in awhile and I gave the UPS guy a $5 tip. I'm still pretty darn happy with the thing honestly it's one of the best things about the build and what ties it together. I know you're supposed to be super excited and happy more for GPUs and CPUs and stuff like that but really I'd had an EC tier fondness for other parts like mobo and a good case.

>>50744
Faulty RAM?

>>50744
Your mainboard is kill.
Maybe RAM too.

>>50744
Put the ram sticks in a different order

>>50766
>>50772
Why did it work the first time without changing the ram? It turned on normally yesterday, if it turns on today I'm going to plug in the ram again and see what happens. Would be good if it's only that.

>>50744
Welcome to part 3 of this story full of action, suspense and a little bit of erotic.

I came home and turned the PC on, it worked perfectly fine so i plugged in the gpu and the second ram stick and same shit but the ram led on the motherboard didn't light up.

I took the maybe good ram and tried it in other slots and same problem, it didn't turn on.

Right now i'm sure that the problem is that everything just stops working whenever it wants and then later works again.
To make sure i ordered 8gb of Ram to see if i come up to 16 again.

Sadly i couldn't find the exact same ram for a reasonable price, so same specs and manufacturer have to be enough.

Next week we know more.

>>50795
Do you have any error codes? Why not just leave GPU in? It really does sound to me like either your board is fried or you've got some weird RAM thing but it should power on with just one stick. Have you tried fucking about in BIOS settings?

>>50797
I have it in now, it's just that my GPU blocks the way to the cmos batterie so i left it out until i'm sure it's not related to any mainboard settings.

No error codes, only the dram_led signal on the mainboard.
There's nothing weird in the BIOS.

I just leave it the way it is now and hope it starts again tomorrow, then i can see what happens when i get the new ram stick next week.

The new Ram came faster than expected.
I plugged it in, knowing the fans are going to spin but there won't be a signal on the monitor because that's how i roll.

The fans started to spin and... signal on the monitor, how can this be? That's too easy!

Computer boots, everything works fine, i look into the task manager and.. oh.. only 8gb of Ram detected.

I turn the PC off and use every possible way to plug the ram sticks in and every time the fans spin but no signal. Even when i go back to the first way of plugging them in: Fans spin but no signal (why?).

I took the new Ram out again and everything works fine again. Guess i go with 8gb of ram for the next few month because i won't buy a new mainboard.

After building new pc last march i just keep on thinking about downgrading back to the old hardware. Old one just worked (not really, i had to fix it spending around 100usd) and had enough performance and i just made quite impulsive purchases that i feel guilty about.
Also the performance difference is not that high, especially with the way i use pc mostly (games, web browsing), definitely not as high as the price difference. After playing some recent games, that i played just to test the system i lost interest in them. I wish i had at least some tasks that would require the high performance, but i don't. I had some ideas for game development, but i always wanted to make games that would run perfectly fine on older hardware too.
I like discussing different pc hardware, maybe using it, but definitely not spending money on it.

>>50836
What was your old HW and what are your new specs?

>>50836
It sounds to me more like you fell for the hardware trap, which is just because you can still means you probably shouldn't, which is to upgrade something just because you want to and not because you actually need to. You really should only buy computer parts when it literally can't do shit you want it to do unless you're an oligarch because those improvement gains are so minimal compared to how easily noticeable the hole in your wallet now is.

Never buying a xiaomi router again.
Fucking garbage.
I like their other products, like their phones and earphones, but their routers are fucking atrocious.

Why do I have to look at overpriced server hardware to get a product that matches its advertised throughput? 1gbs my ass, the thing barely pushed 40mbps while periodically disconnecting the wifi.

>>50873

>I like their other products

I dunno, I bought Redmi 4X several years ago and I'm not exactly satisfied with it. Not only it didn't accept calls properly before I rooted it and turned the noise suppression off (well, sometimes it did work, but often people just couldn't hear me while I could hear them and then the call just dropped), not only I had to deal with a myriad of small and not really significant but still annoying things, but they also very aggressively pushed me to registering in their cloud service, giving personal data etc. When I'm gonna buy a phone again, I'll just opt for some other chinkshit instead, like Huawei or something. And when I think about it, out of four phones I had (Sony-Ericsson K610i, some Samsung touchscreen smartphone (forgot its name; it was really small, and I bought it because I naively thought that smaller is better), Lenovo P780 and Xiaomi Redmi 4X) Lenovo was the best by far.

>>50875
I mainly like the price vs features ratio.
I am android savvy enough to know how to neutralize most bloatware, and get a neutral phone in the end that runs fdroid shit. I've grown out of rooting my phone (too much hassle for my tired ass), so I just put all default bloatware in their separate folder named "garbage", and use my fdroid/foxydroid apps as defaults.
Best trick is to change your country in the settings to france. Since they have very strong privacy laws, you automatically avoid ads embedded in default software.
What I like about default xaomi ROM is that it allows you to make a virtual account, so you can essentially have "containers" for various activities. And there's lots of other QOL features I miss on my Samsung right now.
I've lately come to the conclusion that phones have become disposable household items, and it's better to get a new cheap one every 6 months or a year or so. It's just easier.

I so wish I could have a stock android ROM with zero bloatware that I can install all my frdoid shit as default, but LegacyOS is very limited in the models it supports, and some models randomly stop being supported once te maintainer gets bored. So it's not an option for me.

Sounds gay, but I'm thinking of getting a Google phone next time. They own the Android ecosystem after all, so I'm guaranteed to get mostly defaults, and they're the only android company that rolls out updates to their phones past 1 year.
I won't touch Apple with a ten foot pole not because they're expensive (but that too), but also because once you get an Apple product, you're completely locked down into their walled garden infrastructure, and have to play by their rules.

>>50849
It is like you need to wait until games and software become near unusable on your current hardware to feel the changes after upgrading your pc. This is what i made in the past and i mostly liked what i got.
>>50844
It was haswell 4/8 cpu (not really, it is was an enthusiast (lol) build with laptop crystal well cpu remade for lga1150 that i managed to break down, so only one memory channel worked, so i planned to buy a used 4/8 haswell xeon e3-12somethingV3 for about 100usd) and rx 480.
And now i got 3700x and 5700xt. At least 3700x was a waste of near 150usd on useless for me 2 cores, because i could get ryzen 3600 and get same performance in whatever i use pc for (i could get near same performance with haswell cpu too in games atually with gpu bottleneck anyway). Also i got a 144hz monitor, so i actually can see difference with new gpu in demanding games. But i'm not that much interested in new games, right now at least.
I plan to sell this now, and i might manage to get near same money i spent on buying, because of the prices on gpus now. But it requires some free time and i live not in big city, but near it, so it is harder to sell hardware here.

It losely fits the bill of this thread I think:

I notice some years ago while hovering with the cursor over a picture on Facebook, that there was poping up a description of what was going on in the picture. Just know I had the same phenomenon on the webpage of DHL. What is this?

>>50879
Well yea nowadays there are no reason to upgrade that often. I entierly skipped everything between lga775 and moved directly to lga1151v2 and skipped whole era of 1080 gaming right into to 4k from 900p.

And I'll buy new gou only when raytracing become something standard and affordable, not 9000$ cards which become obsolete after a year.

>>50880
HTML alt attribute, the idea behind it is that when the image can't be displayed you'll at least see the text instead. Also supposed to help blind people.
Fb etc. probably use ML algorithms by now to fill it out.

>>50883
Almost same as my settis. I went from 768p with an i5 3000 tier to 1440p with x570 chipset Zen2. I'm not even planning to upgrade CPU for ages which at the highest end is enough of a boost by the time it's affordable to get a 5900x that's years down the line and will probably have either RDNA3 or some kind of 4070ti or 4080 or whatever if nvidia gets its shit together.

Right now though I literally cannot shut my computer off, restart it, or put it to sleep without holding the power button down. Idk if I didn't clean install drivers or what the problem is but the fans whir up and mouse and keyboard all other LEDs go off on peripherals it's almost like it hangs at shutdown and has one last step it will not do to power down. This is becoming a problem and I only haven't ripped out all drivers because I have too much shit I'd have to manually reset in the driver control panel if I deleted everything.

Meanwhile Total Warhammer 2 keeps crashing when I try to play Von Carstein in Mortal Empires. It's getting to the point where I think I should just figure out where all profiles are and manually copy the Adrenalin 2020 files before using driver cleaner software to see if that fixes anything. Otherwise it was a flawed Windows update. Not sure what the problem is.

>>50885

>probably use ML algorithms by now

Thanks, that what I was wondering about, if there is some kind of machine vision involved to get what is shown in the image.

>>50891
Nowadays maybe there is some kind of machine vision but my guess is that they look at the text and make guesses from what people write about the picture. Finding faces in a picture is standard stuff today but figuring out what is going on in a picture is a hard problem for a machine.

>>50893
The algorithms might be using the text as well, but the object recognition etc. have improved quite a lot in recent years so I'm pretty sure they mostly rely on that

>>50849
I feel sames.

I wanted a PC upgrade so bad, but now that I'm working, I barely use my computer any more.
And I don't play games other than a few old titles or halo multiplayer on saturday evenings.

I think I just need a better monitor because mine is about to give up the ghost, and that's it. All my software works fine, I don't do 4k video editing or render anything more complicated than mockups.

My complaints about the PC itself are more about convenience based. The giant old case takes up too much space, and because my CPU is old generation, it runs pretty warm on idle, and the tiny stick fan generates a constant noise.
I'd really love to have one of them slim cases that are the size of a shoebox but manage to fit an entire gaming PC, but such cases cost about the price of a ryzen CPU themselves. Oh well, such cases.

t. fox and the grapes.

>>50893
Sounds like you're missing the developments that happened in the last two years. Here's a taste of something that is extraordinary at both recognizing and drawing objects: https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/

>>50895
>>50897
Object recognition isn't the same as figuring out what is going on in the picture. You can identify a group of people and you can identify objects and you can make guesses that if there are a lot if signs and a lot of people they might be at a protest rally. But it could also be that they are building a house out of leftover protest signs.

Yes I'm not extremely updated at what the current state is simply because there is so much bullshit and hype about it that I just don't care to listen to all the "ZOMG AI" shit. Right now you just slap AI on everything and watch the numbers in your bank account go up. It just sounds sexier then machine learning. It is interesting but in the end, right now it is just a lot of data getting mangled in various ways. But maybe that is intelligence.

>>50900
I agree there is a lot of hype shit and I'm often unsure about what really is special.
>>50897 Dall-E for example looks interesting, it can created quite eerie pictures I guess.
What I'm interested in really is what all these kind of operations will lead to in the future, I mean the business hype speak obviously won't cover developments that cannot really be anticipated. Talking of revolutions won't make them, but ofc there are some grains in it that will transpire into a future present, but I guess the real revolution will be somewhere else and less loud.

I read extracts from a book that deal with machines and their operations that have their on sensation/sensibility which is a sensibility in its own, often times being able to sense what is subliminal in human cognition/perception. These machines then would be able to augment via mediation the human experience. In a way like the chrono photography around 1900 that made possible to perceive things humans weren't able to perceive and experience, media that make time-axis manipulation possible would be one example at least but other media for messuring/quantifification and basically all sorts of capturing/recording media. Ofc the topic of surveillance and control is just around the corner, but is the potential of it besides 1984?

>>50901
It is interesting. Although it is like a very very advanced version of the thing you used to do as a kid. You took verbs nouns all those other classes I can't be bothered to remember now and randomized sentences from it. Now you take input and mash it through an neural network and get a picture from it. Call me when the computer gets bored and starts drawing dicks or tits instead, then we might have an AI. Not saying it isn't cool, just saying it isn't an AI.

>>50908

>Not saying it isn't cool, just saying it isn't an AI.

Yeah, I think that is problem over all and tackles what my post was also about but indirectly: The image of a new intelligence that will be on par with humans or even more intelligent, whatever that means anyway, is loud and virulent but takes attention from other more pressing issues that will be more relevant in the future yet are ofc less glossy and apocalyptic but more penetrative for daily life in the end. All those talks about the end of humans or them getting thrown of the throne of intelligent species, is a) not new and b) takes attention away from things that will more likely be "revolutionary"

>>50910
Yea. The thing is we can't really define intelligence as in are we humans "intelligent" whatever that is.

Also the thing you pick up while just being bored and surfing interesting sites.
https://njal.la/blog/toast-ai/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09665.pdf

>>50910
If you want revolutionary by the way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhND7Mvp3f4

>>50936
It's somehow creepy, like ofc it's firstly impressive that they exist and operate in that way (though it will take some years until they really have the speed we want I guess). The creep comes in when a machine performs so humanly. The thing with the hockey stick, I mean you expect every minute, that the robot gets in a rage at the man, acusses him or even attack him, shouts at him. It really is strange, but I guess even when it is so humanly, it is so very different, what the machine is sensing is fundamentally diffrent to what we sense I guess, what kind of mediation will do it best for a "shared experience" given that we will never align it 100% anyway. The machine is pure operationality, so what is the human, ofc a human can be grasped as a systen that operates, but yet there is a difference, no? Conscioussnes e.g.

>>50919

>The thing is we can't really define intelligence as in are we humans "intelligent" whatever that is.

That's a trope. There are many, many definitions of intelligence and the main misinterpretation is that a single one of them is the right one to capture us humans.

The fact that the word "intelligence" is used to wildly in different contexts doesn't mean it all describes the same thing. In biology intelligence is well defined under the terms of the evolution, but that is not what you are talking about. In psychology there are various flavours of intelligence (eg. emotional intelligence, abstract intelligence, etc) and some of them can be measured through rather exact tests (think of IQ) while others are measured very vaguely.
And there are also definitions of intelligence in the field of mathematics and computer science, which have to do with very specific problem solving abilities and information processing.

It's a mistake to capture "all that was humans do" with a single term and then try to explain that it is inexplainable.

Rather than thinking that intelligence as a whole isn't well defined, I suggest you try to come up with a destinction of the following terms:
Consciousness, Sentience, Awareness, Intelligence, Narration and Concentration.

If you are curious about the structure of consciousness, which might be the hardest nut to crack here, I can recommend to read Gödel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter.

>>50969
This thread is about "Computer technology". Stop shitting up the thread.

>>50971
It concerns AI which is usually associated with computers/computation...

t. different German