Hah! Google did Snow Crash’s Earth (well, not exactly, as in Snow Crash, there were streaming video feeds available as a data source, and Google Earth only uses static tiled images, but…)

It’s a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case he’s not already conspicuous enough, he’s wearing a suit. Hiro starts walking toward him. Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider, these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.

Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter. wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro’s cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.

—Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson had it be ostracized.

I generally don’t think that old PCs are that useful. I don’t usually make much use of mine. That said:

• If you don’t have a server and need one that doesn’t require latest-and-greatest hardware to do something, I think that that’s probably a good choice. You already know the hardware. All kinds of things that one might do, fileserving, home automation, whatever. I’ll also mention some less-obvious options below.

• Reserve PC. If you have the space to store it and only have one PC, having a second for if something goes horribly wrong on the first can be helpful. Not so bad these days, since most people have a smartphone, and it’s not so hard to find a computer.

• Alternate OS machine. If you want to maybe use another OS on bare metal, another machine can be a way to do that.

• Print server/3D print server/pen plotter server. A lot of newer printers have their own print server built in, but not all do. I was looking at pen plotters from Bantam Tools the other day. They don’t. Especially with 3D printing and pen plotting, elaborate tasks may take some hours. You don’t want to have to reboot your attached computer, and you might want to put noisy hardware in another room from your main PC.

• Security camera server. Detect motion, log images, maybe notify you. Don’t want to have the load on your main PC.

• Whole-house music PC. Maybe run something like mpd, which has good support for remote control Hook it up to your fancy sound system.

• Guest PC. Most people do have a smartphone or laptop these days, but it might be useful to have one available.

• Router. I’d probably get dedicated hardware for this and run OpenWRT, but you can use a PC for it, if you equip it with suitable hardware.

I don’t on the couch, but occasionally I do on my bed. Not stuff like first person shooters, but less-frentic mouse based stuff.

I have a USB trackball and a USB trackpad, and I’ll use one of those.

I am not as accurate or quick as I am with a mouse with either of those, but both work fine without a rigid, level surface.

EDIT: My problem for use on a bed isn’t really the mouse, but the keyboard. I have used a split ergo keyboard, with one half on each side, but even that isn’t amazing. I don’t have a reasonable way to do much typing if you’re not sitting up.

Clearly someone from five years in Semisimian’s future just gave him the inside scoop.

Probably, but I’d just charge more. More people than Venice wants? Crank up the entry fee. Venice benefits and tourism decreases.

So, thanks, but…that was PugJesus’s alternative community. He’s the only mod, and he appears to have quit the Threadiverse a couple weeks ago.

CLS’s stock price will increase by 3,860.57% over the next five years.

!noncredibledefense@lemmy.world

C’mon, we don’t need YouTube for this.

Russia might amplify it, but I saw a Telegraph article submitted here with a dire headline along those lines, which I imagine was aimed at getting Conservatives riled up.

It is kinda interesting to see how much tech has overwhelmed the top rankings. I mean, “tech in the US has doing well” has been a thing all of my life, but over the years, it’s really crept up there. Almost everyone there is self-made wealthy in tech.

• Musk: manufacturing, fintech
• Page: tech
• Dell: tech (personal computers…again, manufacturing, not pure software)
• Bezos: tech (well…again, Amazon is also logistics now, though I do kinda think of it as a dot-com, not to mention being a cloud services provider)
• Brin: tech
• Zuckerberg: tech
• Ellison: tech
• Huang: tech (hardware, not software)
• Ballmer: tech
• Buffet: finance
• Ortega: fast fashion (and not in the US:Europe)
• Walton: retailing
• Arnault: luxury goods (and not in the US:Europe)
• More Walton: retailing
• Slim: Varied (and not in the US)
• More Walton: retailing
• Gates: tech
• Zhao: fintech/cryptocurrency (not in the US:China)
• Peterffy: fintech
• Bloomberg: finance, fintech

I mean, outside of Musk not fitting into pure tech, Waltons doing retailing, Buffet being a famous investor, and maybe Bloomberg, depending upon how you classify him, being finance, it’s all tech now. Like, that’s where the big economic growth has happened. The non-tech stuff is outside the US: two Europeans in luxury goods and retailing, and a Mexican in a huge conglomerate.

And in the US, only the Waltons are on there due to simply inheriting a shit-ton of multigenerational wealth.

That was one thing that I wondered about for a moment, like, maybe you have people working very specific types of fields—I’d seen some papers in, like, psychology and stuff talking about human-AI interaction, and maybe this is a really hot thing to be doing to be doing in that field—but this survey was specific to “companion” uses, which I don’t think that would likely include professional use the way it was defined here:

The people who have used LLMs for social, emotional and personal purposes are known as “AI companion users” and a representative sample of 1,000 of them were surveyed to discover how they use their social bots, the nature of their relationships and the impact of their encounters with these systems.

I am pretty confident that that post-dated 1959.

searches

Yeah. Older than I would have guessed, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Magic_Wand

Availability: 25 April 1968–present

You could use a case that puts the motherboard in a horizontal orientation rather than a tower!

These are some wild numbers, looking at them together.

So, basically, it’s heavily disproportionately loaded towards high-education users. 25% users have post-graduate degrees.

https://www.ccdaily.com/2025/09/datapoints-educational-attainment-in-the-u-s/

This has 14.9% of the US age 25 and older falling into that group.

But it’s also disproportionately loaded towards black and Latino users. This has 30% of the userbase being non-Latino black.

https://blackdemographics.com/black-population-in-the-u-s-reaches-51-6-million/

That’s 12.7% of the US.

I wouldn’t blink at either one of those statistics in isolation.

But…both black and Latino groups, particularly black, typically have lower levels of educational attainment in the US.

I would expect that to mean that there is either some really high concentration in one area—like, a exceptionally high level of black users with graduate degrees are using AI, enough to throw the numbers that far from overall proportions in society, or you have different strong “clusters” of different groups using AI—like, there is a really high level of black AI users and a really strong cluster of high-education users.

considers

It does say that users are disproportionately below 50, and that would explain some of it. Younger generations are both more educated and less white than older ones.

searches

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/07/30/most-common-age-among-us-racial-ethnic-groups/

Would need to go dig up demographics for each cohort to figure out what proportional numbers would be, but just glancing at that, that’s definitely not going to explain nearly all of that. The groups are roughly equally-sized for younger age cohorts, so that’s be a fair bit of that on age, but there’s still gonna be a substantial education split.

searches

https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72

For the 2021-2022 school year, this has whites being granted about six times as many masters or doctorates as either black or Latino students, so that’ll be a pretty big educational gap even for younger age cohorts. Yeah. Huh.

drums fingers

Well, I dunno. It’s an interesting pair of figures, though.

39% said they occasionally tell AI things that they would not tell other people.

I would be a lot less concerned about this were it not for the sneaking suspicion that most users (a) probably are using cloud-based LLMs rather than local and (b) have no idea what the rules on data privacy regarding their conversations on said service are.

To clarify: you’re talking about the Android onscreen keyboard? If so, in what way has it gotten worse? Less-accurate predictions of words?

I don’t really feel like this constitutes an open-ended question. There may be a forum for this, but it probably isn’t this one.

Asklemmy is one of the larger Threadiverse communities. That does not mean that it should be used as a dumping ground for whatever people feel should get more visibility. If you’ve got a data privacy issue, you might start somewhere like !privacy@lemmy.world.

I’d guess that there are probably utilities to export the world file to POV-Ray or Blender or something. They might be able to scale better.

What the actual fuck does a package manager do?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_manager