I hope this meme never dies, but I fear it’s already reaching obscurity

I thought that AMDs move with Ryzen being heavily multi core architecture was dumb, and that they’d fail like bulldozer

The YouTube channel Red Letter Media has a series of videos on Star Trek and Star Wars. Mostly review/satire/comedy stuff. If I recall correctly, it was in the one of the Star Wars videos was criticizing a part of Star Wars credit to a guy named Rick, but on screen they showed a picture of Rick Berman.

Cue dramatic pause, then the lines “That’s the wrong one. What is it with these Ricks”

My theory and point was that by thinking about that computer as a console, in the average consumer mindset it should be priced like a console. From a pure hardware product perspective there is no difference

Valve is thinking about it as a computer, and has stated they intend to price it like one and not like a traditional console

I think the problem is Valve lost control of the messaging, which led to bad expectations.

At least in the US, a computer hooked up to a TV to play games means it’s a “console” and not a computer. Maybe we can blame Nintendo back in the 80s for going out of their way to avoid calling the NES a computer (despite it’s name in Japan being Famicom, Family Computer), but the distinction exists today despite technologically no real difference. You know this, I know this, Valve knows this. So Valve wants to make a computer you hook up to your TV so they can get you to use their money printing machine Steam in the living room too.

If you read Valve’s marketing material on the Steam Machine, they don’t use the word “console” once. It’s always either by name or the terms PC, computer, or system. They likely don’t mention the word “console” because to date, video game consoles follow a different business model, one where the model subsidizes the shit out of the hardware and then make money on the back end with game sales/licensing.

Current “console” hardware starts in the <$500 price bracket, and with so much third party media marketing calling the Steam Machine a console, that got people’s mind set on pricing expectations of that market.

Yeah, US and JDM cars are predominantly gasoline engines. Engine start current draw is similar between the two engine architectures but gasoline engines with their spark plugs would certainly cause noise on the ground line during normal operation which is probably the biggest reason for the dedicated ground line. The digital electronics would also be sitting behind a down regulator that I’d be willing to bet isolates the ground as well.

I still lean towards the original topics failure mode being electrical based not software. Software faults tend to be highly repeatable and almost always persist across full power drains since, assuming no underlying electrical issues exist, computers execute software instructions perfectly every time. Given the exact same set of inputs and the exact same timing, they’ll get back to the same state. And that would have been happening since the factory.

Degraded electronics could be feeding new or unexpected inputs into the computers that trigger different software state transitions that then lead to unintended or unexpected behavior, but things would have to be going pretty off the rails for the system to pass all of its built in tests and not realize something has gone wrong.

Another possibility is the mechanic found loose harnessing, connectors, did a few different unplug/plug cycles and then only told you about the battery.

Not necessarily

In electrical engineering floating just means there is nothing forcing a particular conductor one way or another. All a battery does is try and force its two terminals to be ~12V apart, what happens coming off the battery terminals is a different story. If you had a bad connection to the terminals a resistance could have been there, itself driving a voltage difference depending on the current passing through it.

Interesting that your car routes all return through the chassis, I’ve never seen that before. Admittedly I’ve only ever worked on US or JDM cars, but the ones I’ve worked with typically have separate return lines for the electronics, a dedicated thick one for the engine and then the engine is what connects the chassis to battery return.

No disappointment, just a fun interesting problem and learned something about European cars.

That’s not software, that’s almost certainly purely electrical. More specifically, disconnected/floating ground/return lines. Car computers need 0 Volts to look like 0 Volts and 12V to look like 12V, but floating grounds can cause 0 to look like -4 and 12 to look like 20.

Strong chance that the battery terminal connections were corroded or not tightened down enough to get good contact and that by disconnecting/reconnecting the new connections were better.

– spacecraft software/electrical engineer who cosplays as a backyard mechanic

Seems like this war is going to take longer than expected

I can’t tell for sure, but it looks like a Lenovo y510p. Or at least it looks very similar to the one I owned back in the day.

There was a vent in the hinge, and these things would absolutely cook themselves with the lid closed

It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.

If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.

tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care

raving lunacy of a rant

Hey now, words have meaning. Lunacy implies there’s a brain there that can be in the state of “insane”. That entire thing was probably shit out by a LLM which is why it makes no logical sense

I’m genuinely curious, how often does spouting off random bullshit work for you? Nothing you listed backs up your argument that the problems around AI are a result of it’s infancy and first cut implementations.

Also, half of what you say is either untrue or disingenuous as all hell. “programs use unstructured jumps and were hard to follow”? What the fuck are you talking about? Please, find me a computer that didn’t use something like a branch statement and didn’t go in numerical sequence of instructions. I’ll wait while you learn this so called “Instruction Set Standardization” of yours doesn’t exist

Working in the aerospace industry has given me a lot of insight into the different ways engineers rationalize the potential for harm that they cause. The most common is wilful ignorance or straight up denial. No, the products I work on can never hurt anyone, it’s just xyz I know personally engineers who work on weaponry and fall heavily into that camp and it blows my mind.

Lol whoops yeah, ARRL. I work in aerospace where we love our alphabet soup and I brainfarted AFRL.

I wasn’t trying to say that the band plan doesn’t exist for a reason, it absolutely does, some reasons which you pointed out exactly. I’ve definitely been around guys who treat the band plan like it is the law, and I imagine the original commenter had the misfortune of running into one of those guys and believed him at face value. Imho it’s one of the reasons ham radio has been dying as a hobby.

Nothing legally stops you from listening. To transmit, you are legally required to have a callsign (which you must broadcast during transmit) and your callsign must be licensed for that frequency.

If you break the law, it’s highly unlikely that the FCC themselves will hunt you down and fine you. If you’re using it to talk to others on the HAM bands, they’ll likely get pissed at you for not being licensed but actually tracking you down is difficult. Using it for your own personal projects, friend groups, etc, it’s unlikely anyone would notice you at all.

A license is like $15 for life (just need to occasionally tell the FCC you’re still alive), the test will teach you some stuff, I don’t see it as that onerous to play by the rules so I’d recommend following them.

A HAM license realistically is for two things:

1 the test teaches you major items you should know about how radio works 2 how to not fuck shit up for everyone else

For the bands allocated to HAM radio in the US, as long as you’re not fucking shit up for everyone else the FCC doesn’t really care. A good example of that and my personal favorite rule is the power transmission rule of “only enough power to complete the transmission”. Functionally it’s so vague that I doubt anyone would ever actually get their license suspended over it.

The group AFRL ARRL has a pretty restrictive “band plan” that I think is where the above comment’s salt is coming from. A perception I have and have heard others talk about is the HAM community has a tendency to be borderline hostile to newcomers and are very gate-keepy, which ARRL in my experience embodies.

I have a license purely to play by the rules from a legal standpoint when I’m out in the rocky mountains hiking and camping with friends, makes communicating with different groups way easier

Edit: formatting, typoing ARRL

May I present to you:

The Marriam-Webster Dictionary

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artificial

Definition #3b

I don’t think the term AI has been used in a vague way, it’s that there’s a huge disconnect between how the technical fields use it vs general populace and marketing groups heavily abuse that disconnect.

Artificial has two meanings/use cases. One is to indicate something is fake (video game NPC, chess bots, vegan cheese). The end product looks close enough to the real thing that for its intended use case it works well enough. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, treat it like a duck even though we all know it’s a bunny with a costume on. LLMs on a technical level fit this definition.

The other definition is man made. Artificial diamonds are a great example of this, they’re still diamonds at the end of the day, they have all the same chemical makeups, same chemical and physical properties. The only difference is they came from a laboratory made by adult workers vs child slave labor.

My pet theory is science fiction got the general populace to think of artificial intelligence to be using the “man-made” definition instead of the “fake” definition that these companies are using. In the past the subtle nuance never caused a problem so we all just kinda ignored it

I think a better definition would be “achieve something in an unintended or uncommon way”. Fits the bill on what generally passes in the tech community as a “hack” while also covering some normal life stuff.

Getting a cheaper flight booked by using a IP address assigned to a different geographical location? Sure I’d call that a life hack. Getting a cheaper flight by booking a late night, early morning flight? No, those are deliberately cheaper

Also re: your other comment about not making a reply at all, sometimes for people like us it’s just better to not get into internet fights over semantics (no matter how much fun they can be)