I’m starting to think part of the problem was her needed some kind of mental help if this is how she’s getting days off. This is not a healthy mind.

Yeah, I think that’s what she’s complaining about

Yep, this is it. I volunteered for my school’s IT department in high school, this was basically the logic. The laptops are cheap and easy to manage/administrate. Whether or not they were Linux was a non-issue.

Edit: also, since chromeOS is basically just a browser, there wasn’t much that could break, and if something did break everything was stored in google drive anyway, so you could just factory reset the device and hand it back to the student without needing to buy any kind of higher-level support contract.

the internet in general kind of sucks these days. Reddit has burned down a lot of the things that made its search results so useful in the past. Every forum post more than a few years old is a forest of broken links; the top of basically any internet search whatsoever is an ocean of SEO spam. And that’s before you get into the sheer amount of information that isn’t searcheable at all because it’s on platforms like discord.

I’ll tell you why I haven’t deleted reddit – aside from tech-heavy discussion here (Linux, Reddit, tech generally, that sort of thing), there isn’t a fediverse equivalent to things like the sports or food subreddits I follow.

I agree iscussions on lemmy are higher-quality and friendlier, for sure. But for a lot of the things I use reddit for they just don’t really exist here yet.

SSDs are very cheap these days

Who proposed doing that?

Agreed. If verbal agreements and handshake deals can be legally binding contracts, I don’t see why emoji wouldn’t be.

I can tell you with confidence that DACs can only convert digital sound data into analogue, and that’s due to the audio jack being older than digital audio.

Right. But the principle is the same; hardware that isn’t compatible with pre-existing systems has a control circuit, and a digital interface. The digital computer sends instructions to the controller, and the controller carries out the instructions.

An analogue device isn’t compatible with a digital device, much like how digital sound data (songs, audio tracks in videos, system sounds, etc…) and analogue audio don’t technically work.

Correct. That is why there is dedicated control circuitry designed for making analog and digital systems talk to each other – as there will be for optical analog computers and every other type of non-conventional computing system.

It’s true that conventional systems will not, by default, be able to communicate with analog computers like this one. To control them, you will send the question (instructions) to the control circuitry, which does the calculation on the hardware, and returns an answer. That’s true for DACs, it’s true for FPGAs, it’s true for CPUs, it’s true for ASICs.

Every temperature sensor, fan controller, camera, microphone, and monitor are also doing some sort of conversion between digital and analog signals. The light being emitted by the monitor to your eyes is a physical phenomenon that can be measured as an analog value (by taking a picture of your computer monitor on film, say). How does your monitor produce this analog signal? It has a control circuit that can take digital commands and convert them into light in specific patterns.

Using an analogue device to accelerate something requires at least some information to be lost on translation, even if the file size is stupidly large.

I don’t think you’ve understood what analog computers are used for (actually, I’m not sure that you’ve understood what analog computing even really is beyond that it involves analog electrical signals). Analog computers aren’t arbitrarily precise like digital computers are in the first place, because they are performing the computation with physical values – voltage, current, light color, light intensity – that are subject to interference from physical phenomenona – resistance, attenuation, redshift, inertia. In other words, you’re really worried about losing information that doesn’t exist in a reliable/repeatable way in the first place.

A lot of iterative numerical methods need an initial guess and can be iterated to an arbitary degree. Analog computers are usually used to provide the initial guess to save iteration flops. The resolution just is not that important when you’re only trying to get into the ballpark in the first place.

In other words, this computer is designed to solve optimization problems. Say you’re getting results based on the color and intensity of the light coming out of it, right, like you might get values of tides based on electrical voltage on an old desktop analog computer. It’s not that relevant to get the exact values for every millisecond at a sampling rate of a bajillion kilohertz; you’re looking for the average value that isn’t falsely precise.

So if you were designing an expansion card, you would design a controller that can modulate the color and intensity of the light going in, and modulate the filter weights in the matrix. Then you can send a digital instruction to “do the calculation with these values of light and these filter values”. The controller would read those values, set up the light sources and matrix, turn on the light, read the camera sensors at the back, and tell you what the cameras are seeing. Voila, you’re digitally controlling an analog computer.

it would be the same way expansion cards work now; it would have digital control circuitry that can communicate with the analog circuitry.

We already have expansion cards that can do this. Audio cards are an example of an expansion card that convert between digital and analog signals.

Even things like graphics cards, ASICs, or FPGAs; it’s not a different type of signal, but it’s an architecture that isn’t compatible with the rest of the computer because it’s specialized for a certain purpose. So there’s control circuitry that allows it to do that and a driver on the computer that tells it how to.

I’ve been very happy with Pocket Casts. Their subscription is pretty cheap (not one-time though, unfortunately), and it has automatic sync between the android and desktop apps.

can only speak to Germany, but it definitely is pretty common to tip here. Just less across-the-board and less money than in the US, usually 1 or a couple of Euros.

honestly, part of the reason I made a lemmy account at all is because it feels a little like reddit when I first started using it – pretty niche, and less toxic and low-quality because of it.

reddit in the last few years has become very toxic. The smaller communities are still okay, but on all of the main subs it’s just page after page of the same snarky jokes and tired memes.

so while more growth would be nice, I’m fine if most of reddit stays on reddit in the short-term. the fediverse can be its own thing.

2023, year of the linux desktop?

if nothing else, you could make a pretty fun digital treasure hunt or geocaching thing with it

but sorting by active results in stale

yep, the default sorting makes it looks like nothing has been posted for 3 days

had that subreddit not already moved offsite by that point? or do you mean that they only had enough momentum to carry a substantial userbase off-site because reddit dragged their feet for so long on doing anything about it? if the latter, I agree.

will reddit care that much? posting pictures of steam is still pageviews and engagement, which is really all they care about

This is very cool.

the thing is, this is an awful strategy for getting people onto a platform. The reason for reddit’s success was that there were forums for pretty much anything you could think of centralized in one place.

99.9% of people don’t care that much about which app, which instance, which server, whatever, they’re just there for the content. The fact that so many reddit users are up in arms about it is a legacy from when it was a much more niche platform than it is today. But in general, this confusing mess of federation, moderation philosophies, defederation, it doesn’t matter which instance you choose because they federate, but actually it does matter because some of them don’t, a wall of text needed to explain what happens when the mods of two different servers have a disagreement and how the federation protocol works, it’s just not a good strategy for getting people onto the platform.

the biggest thing that I would use it for would be individual blogs, I just only have 3 or 4 of those that I follow.

For the others, it doesn’t help me that much to centralize them. Like with the hacker news rss feed, I can’t comment or interact from the rss reader, so I might as well use the website. With twitter, all of my twitter follows are already centralized on twitter; same with youtube, reddit, or lemmy – they already have feeds, and I can’t interact from my feedreader.