MudMan

I’m not of the opinion that more simulation and more “realism” are always better, but I would absolutely take a System Shock 2 remake, especially after the System Shock one (1 one?) turned out great.

Kind of overrated? I mean, it was cool to see a bit more of a palatable cinematic presentation in real time to go along with the late 90s PC jank, and that theme did kick ass, but it’s less groundbreaking in context than I think people give it credit for. And it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as System Shock 2, in my book.

I wonder, too. Pro-EU centre-right parties and social democrat parties still hold a majority, so on these things I’m not sure we’ll see a major shift, but I genuinely haven’t checked the voting record to see if the far right parties generally take a different stance on the more pedestrian consumer protection regulations or not. I probably should do that.

Oh, yeah, it’s ALL handwavy bulls#!t. It’s a 60s sci-fi TV show. A great one, but… you know.

I’ll say that the transporters are some of the most consistent pieces of tech they came up with, though, at least as they get explored over time. They need a beam, they are disrupted by shields and interference, they turn people into a data buffer “pattern” that seems to follow the way data would behave, in that they can add and substract to it. You need to assume they don’t use them as full-on cloning machines because of regulations, rather than tech limits, but it mostly makes sense.

Unfortunately the version that makes sense is the most disturbing interpretation, so they still need to handwave the crap out of it.

Yeah, I think in canon the curvy bit at the front of the ship (or the nacelles, sometimes) is just gathering dust to then burn into energy. It gets trickier with the transporter, because in theory the dust is going into a matter/antimatter thing, but if the transporter is fueling itself from the body it’s disintegrating… well, where’s the antimatter?

I think in their minds the transporter isn’t doing that, and is instead taking energy to both turn a person into a pattern and then build the pattern back into a person. Seems like a waste, but I guess the raw matter isn’t the real concern here.

But we know that’s not how transporters work. If that was the case you wouldn’t be able to get “accidents” where you end up with two copies of the same guy. The transporter must work like the replicator, not the other way around.

Also, that doesn’t work with some of the stuff they say, like how they don’t replicate anything alive, and so food does taste noticeably different. Plus… you know, no massive farm deck anywhere on the Enterprise and no transwarp to beam that in from a planet, so… we’re going to have to accept this stuff may be just handwavy bulls#!t at some point.

I’m a bit shocked that nobody has pointed out the obvious:

The economics of Star Trek are super inconsistent and make no sense because multiple writers had a crack and they each liked and believed different things.

Sometimes it’s a post-scarcity socialist utopia where money is obsolete. Other times, Picard invites someone out on a date and she answers “you buying?”.

This is obvious enough that multiple people have tried to fix it, which as always in franchise worldbuilding only makes things less consistent and more complicated. So now some things just can’t be properly replicated. Sometimes it’s because of regulations and laws, other times it’s because of technology limitations. Sometimes the Federation doesn’t use money but they still have it for trade, other times they use money, just for random commodities.

The middle of the road for Trek seems to be some form of socialdemocracy where you’re provided with anything you need and labor is largely vocational, but out in space there is enough variation over time and different areas that there is still a bit of a pseudo-capitalist economy even in regions where Federation-level post-scarcity tech is still available. Go into any more detail and the whole thing breaks down.

This goes for other political elements of the series, too. Picard gets super mad at the notion of endorsing religious beliefs in a prewarp society because he finds it barbaric. Meanwhile, Sisko is out there becoming Bajoran Space Jesus and everybody is just cool with that.

It’s almost like Rick Berman’s, Ronald D. Moore’s and Gene Roddenberry’s political beliefs were different from each other’s, huh?

You know the irony of this interpretation? By canon, replicators are energy to matter conversion devices. Basically a 3D printer using relativity to poof atoms into existence from an energy source.

Replicators are straight-up the most expensive way to make anything. Using that technology to make you a cup of tea is the most inefficient use of any resource put on screen in media history. It’s absurd. The notion that instead of heating up water you would go ahead and make the atoms out of energy is so much worse than just filling in a space station’s worth of water and carrying it with you into space just to keep Picard’s Earl Grey habit going.

It’s not the replicator at all that drives the post-scarcity, it’s whatever nonsense antimatter generator stuff dilithium is enabling where they get infinite energy forever. Although we know dilithium is a limited resource, since they don’t seem to just replicate some when they need it, so… somebody should do the math there and figure out how expensive all those Janeway coffees actually are.

Hi.

That’s called “socialdemocracy” and it’s been around for centuries. It’s actually older than the marxist concept of socialism, if you’re gonna get pedantic about it.

I get that Americans have completely sandblasted off any remaining meaning in the word “socialism”, first by having conservatives use it as an insult and then by having weird US lefties get all purity test about it, but most of the world has a pretty clear picture of socialdemocracy, it’s not that ambiguous. Most socialdemocrat parties across the planet are called some version of “Socialist Party”, “Labour Party” or “Worker’s Party”. It’s a thing.

So no, it’s not a bad habit. It’s just… what that’s called. It does get easy to mix up with the Marxist concept of socialism, which is likely why most marxist parties advocating for a socialist society are called “Communist Party” instead. The bad habit is to not challenge the fundamentally conservative, deliberate confusion between the two that any range of neoliberals and protofascists continue to use to pretend milquetoast socialdemocratic policy is some form of revolutionary action.

Man, US politics are so weird.

I don’t do that with anybody, normally. People of all genders will sometimes give you a hug here if it’s been a while or if they’re happy to see you. Cheek kissing is mostly a women thing, though.

I guess that depends on the use case and how frequently both machines are running simultaneously. Like I said, that reasoning makes a lot of sense if you have a bunch of users coming and going, but the OP is saying it’s two instances at most, so… I don’t know if the math makes virtualization more efficient. It’d pobably be more efficient by the dollar, if the server is constantly rendering something in the background and you’re only sapping whatever performance you need to run games when you’re playing.

But the physical space thing is debatable, I think. This sounds like a chonker of a setup either way, and nothing is keeping you from stacking or rack-mounting two PCs, either. Plus if that’s the concern you can go with very space-efficient alternatives, including gaming laptops. I’ve done that before for that reason.

I suppose it’s why PC building as a hobbyist is fun, there are a lot of balance points and you can tweak a lot of knobs to balance many different things between power/price/performance/power consumption/whatever else.

OK, yeah, that makes sense. And it IS pretty unique, to have a multi-GPU system available at home but just idling when not at work. I think I’d still try to build a standalone second machine for that second user, though. You can then focus on making the big boy accessible from wherever you want to use it for gaming, which seems like a much more manageable, much less finicky challenge. That second computer would probably end up being relatively inexpensive to match the average use case for half of the big server thing. Definitely much less of a hassle. I’ve even had a gaming laptop serve that kind of purpose just because I needed a portable workstation with a GPU anyway, so it could double as a desktop replacement for gaming with someone else at home, but of course that depends on your needs.

And in that scenario you could also just run all that LLM/SD stuff in the background and make it accessible across your network, I think that’s pretty trivial whether it’s inside a VM or running directly on the same environment as everything else as a background process. Trivial compared to a fully virtualized gaming computer sharing a pool of GPUs, anyway.

Feel free to tell us where you land, it certainly seems like a fun, quirky setup etiher way.

Yeah, but if you’re this deep into the self hosting rabbit hole what circumstances lead to having an extra GPU laying around without an extra everything else, even if it’s relartively underpowered? You’ll probably be able to upgrade it later by recycling whatever is in your nice PC next time you upgrade something.

At this point most of my household is running some frankenstein of phased out parts just to justify my main build. It’s a bit of a problem, actually.

I was telling someone else in a different thread that I would pay good money for a Framework device in tablet form with a detachable keyboard. Just mush entires 2 and 3 on that list. I’ll pay way more than it’s worth. Like, Surface Pro money for Kindle hardware. Just give it to me.

Alright, alright, just because I got myself excited. Top three gaming laptops, rating for sheer cool factor with no regard for practicality or value for money, but in no particular order:

1- MSI GS65. It could be the Razer Blade, which is the OG, but the GS65 was legitimately the best of that first batch of thin and light gaming laptops that looked classy without looking tacky. It had a 1070 in it, it could run every contemporary game just fine and it made you look downright stylish working on a Starbucks. So cool.

2- ASUS ROG Flow Z series. Asus put a dedicated GPU. In a tablet. Like, up to a 4070, you can get in one of these. It’s fat, it’s clunky, it’s underpowered for the hardware, it’s heavy, it sounds like the speaker in your first smartphone… but guys, 4070 in a tablet, are you kidding me? How cool is that?

3- Framework Laptop 16. It’s a modular laptop with a dedicated GPU module and a bunch of random configuration options. Gaming laptop lego. Again, how cool is that?

I love both. And handhelds. And consoles.

I just like videogames and things that can run videogames. Videogame tech is cool.

I genuinely don’t get why people have such a grudge against gaming laptops. It’s like they got stuck regurgitating talking points from the mid 2000s. There have been so many super cool gaming laptops in the past couple of decades. Big, chonky powerhouses, sleek stealth workhorses, quirky nonsense builds… It’s awesome.

No, I did. I can see it.

Welcome to the Fediverse, where me attaching a picture and you seeing the picture are not necessarily the same thing.

Hey, I am an equal opportunity criticiser. Fedia/Kbin/Lemmy suck at this.

I added a text link, at least, but that’s already way too far to go for that joke.

OK, but why?

Well, for fun and as a cool hobby project, I get that. That is enough to justify it, like any other crazy hobbyist project. Don’t let me stop you.

But in the spirit of practicality and speaking hypothetically: Why set it up that way?

For self-hosting why not build a few standalone machines and run off that instead? The reason to do this large scale is optimizing resources so you can assign a smaller pool of hardware to users as they need it, right? For a home set of two or three users you’d probably notice the fluctuations in performance caused by sharing the resources on the gaming VMs and it would cost you the same or more than building a couple reasonable gaming systems and a home server/NAS for the rest. Way less, I bet, if you’re smart about upgrades and hand-me-downs.

This is hilarious.

I love the faith, too. Like, of Microsoft, of all people. The “your Xbox is your cable box now” Microsoft. The “Here’s mandatory Kinect, the Wii killer” Microsoft. The Windows Me Microsoft. The “Windows 8 is now a touch OS” Microsoft.

I gotta say, you guys really give tech companies the benefit of the doubt. I’ve seen too much, perhaps.

In that vein, let me propose a more accurate picture:

For the record, MS also had stated that users can exclude specific applications from Recall and devs can exclude specific screens or content from being recorded.

I’m not sure that “Apple already indexes and has unfettered access to all your granular data” isa good defense, either. That’s… worse. Although for what it’s worth it does seem like this AI thing is way more intrusive than Spotlight, in that it’s not just searching keywords inside files it can parse, it is connecting data from multiple sources to generate context about you, some of which is being processed off-site. I don’t think it’s as easily expoitable as the 1.0 version of Recall MS described, but if your concern is with an AI or a corporation having access to information, or to compromising information being accessed through easy search by anybody with local access… well, yeah, it’s all degrees of bad here.

Didn’t you and I already litigate this in a different thread? I’d rather not rehash that.