SkyNTP

@SkyNTP@lemmy.ml

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SkyNTP ,

Don't forget the cost of lower and higher education in your "need for living" calculation!

Also, you'll still need a system to determine what products and services are valuable for society.

SkyNTP ,

Real answer: power density. Pound for pound, gas still contains more energy than our best batteries. The weight of energy storage is still a massive deal for anything that cannot be tethered to a grid or be in close practical proximity for frequent recharging, from rockets, planes and cars (sometimes) to chainsaws and lawnmowers (sometimes).

Edward Snowden releases new message: "You have been warned" ( www.newsweek.com )

Edward Snowden wrote on social media to his nearly 6 million followers, "Do not ever trust @OpenAI ... You have been warned," following the appointment of retired U.S. Army General Paul Nakasone to the board of the artificial intelligence technology company....

SkyNTP ,

Alternate explanation, from the normies: it's a purely speculative claim with minimal argument.

'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement ( www.theatlantic.com )

As soon as Apple announced its plans to inject generative AI into the iPhone, it was as good as official: The technology is now all but unavoidable. Large language models will soon lurk on most of the world’s smartphones, generating images and text in messaging and email apps. AI has already colonized web search, appearing in...

SkyNTP ,

The benefit of AI is overblown for a majority of product tiers. Remember how everything was supposed to be block chain? And metaverse? And web 3.0? And dot.com? This is just the next tech trend for dumb VCs to throw money at.

SkyNTP ,

Other than making sure to be wearing your glasses if you are near sighted enough that your local licence requires it, glasses are an irrelevant factor. It's not like you are going into active combat duty...

Series: Conservatives of Lemmy: What do you think has gone awry in modern society and how might it be constructively addressed?

I'd like to start a series seeking viewpoints from across the political spectrum in general discussions about modern society and where everyone stands on what is not working, what is working, and where we see things going in the future....

SkyNTP ,

"Conservative", "right", "left", are meaningless, political relevative terms we should stop using. Instead, we should just describe our values on a select major view points, including power, economy, and social structure.

SkyNTP ,

Conservatism is a distinct political ideology that basically says not all change is for the better, nothing more--it's in the name: conserve. This is a separate concept from authoritarianism, which is all about how power flows. It's possible to be conservative and liberal at the same time if society is losing its liberal values.

US republicans are fascists through and through that wear a disguise of conservatism on select issues to convince people to relinquish their political power so that they can do whatever they want.

SkyNTP ,

They are neither ham nor steamed, unless that's exactly what they are having over there? Wouldn't compare it to a hamburger though... (A hamburger being a Hamburg steak, as in the German city)

SkyNTP ,

Rescinding an award named "Service to America" for calling out a wanna be dictator is rich. De Niro should get a second one for this alone.

SkyNTP ,

You could make the same chart, in reverse about progressives hoping Trump will ever be held accountable for his many crimes.

A conviction is about as close as we have gotten, but it's meaningless if there is no jail time served or some other meaningful penalty to prevent more criminality.

Netanyahu and Putin are both waiting for Trump ( www.washingtonpost.com )

Netanyahu reportedly met this month with three foreign policy envoys working with former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump — who could yet win the election despite being convicted Thursday on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in his New York state hush money case....

SkyNTP ,

Left, right... These are meaningless labels when progressives / social democrats / libertarians have to join forces against authoritarian trash of any kind.

SkyNTP ,

that government should have zero to do with marriage

Uhh... Marriage is a government affair before anything else. It's a legal status, that comes with default clauses on a wide range of issues, from wills, property ownership, parental rights, taxes, power of attorney... All secular stuff. I think you mean to keep the church out of the government's affairs?

SkyNTP ,

Bring them here so they can see how we are taking for granted their sacrifice? Hell no, this is our shit to clean up.

6 Reasons So Many Movies Are Struggling At The Box Office In 2024 ( screenrant.com )

With ticket sales down and newly released movies hitting streaming and video-on-demand (VOD) services in record time, it's not surprising that films are struggling to make it big in theaters. For comparison, 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road grossed a whopping $45 million over a non-holiday opening weekend, which ultimately led to an...

SkyNTP ,

2015's Mad Max: Fury Road ... Meanwhile, Furiosa,

Maybe make something original for a change? We're tired of these mega franchises. Where are the Princess Bride masterpieces, with actual soul and charm? Not looking for another formulaic cash grasp with a thin veneer of woke posturing (looking at you, Barbie).

SkyNTP ,

"Favourite numbers" is just another way of saying model bias, a centuries old knowtion.

There's no ethics in journalism. That's the real story here.

SkyNTP ,

Just wait till the advertisers find out the eyeballs they are paying for are also just AI sock puppets. Enshitification strikes again.

SkyNTP ,

Unfortunately, the US political system does not have a feature to "dislike" all the candidates. Not without a major, probably bloody, revolution, anyway. Your choice is to support and pick one candidate, or let everyone else pick the candidate for you.

Coming to terms with no longer having privacy and control over my technology

I miss the days of VHS and DVD shelfs in homes, for example. If you bought the tapes and had them in your home, no corporate entity could alter those tapes without your consent, monitor how many times you watch them, sell your data to whomever they please without your knowledge, roll out new mandatory conditions to a 'user...

SkyNTP ,

Reject the temptations of short term convenience and adopt sustainable consumption.

Demand ownership of goods. Demand offline-first.

SkyNTP ,

To be fair, none of these countries look like places where the current world order is particularly favourable for them. Why should we be surprised by maps like this?

If Reddit had a soul/conscience, I think it was us, and we're all on Lemmy now...

As a little background, I didn't actively use Reddit for months following the blackout. I still barely stop in over there and if I do I'm never logged in our contributing to the communities there (where I was previously a daily poster/commenter)....

SkyNTP ,

Agreed. Some (mostly different) positions here are arguably more entrenched, or at least absolutist, with just as much reactionary down voting instead of nuanced debate.

SkyNTP ,

A financial, legal, or even just a tit-for-tat incentive is realistically all it would take. You assume that some utopia that has shed those ideas is the only one capable of such technology.

In reality, it's greed and self-preservation that is running this show, and this is all that is needed to produce awe-inspiring feats.

SkyNTP ,

Sue for what? No self-respecting CEO would accept a position that creates personal tort liability if the stock price doesn't go up.

SkyNTP ,

A very real risk of punishment by the state if you happen to get caught is what prevents theft. Your argument conveniently left that important part out and presented a straw man argument.

The rest of these comments talk about unenforced theft like white collar crimes and other class war-like theft. Which just reinforces the idea that only state-executed enforcement of law is actually any good at preventing theft.

SkyNTP ,

The Design of Everyday Things

SkyNTP ,

I'm pretty sure Windows is a key part of their "cloud stuff" strategy. You are right that consumers are not the direct focus of Windows, since they are not the direct paying audience, and that shows in the direction Windows is going, but getting consumers to use Windows is a big part of creating corporate buy in for Microsoft cloud services. Corporate environments will shun Microsoft cloud services if employees can't use Windows, or Windows features run afoul of corporate policies (like blanket LLM bans).

SkyNTP ,

Are we still pretending like the SCOTUS has any legitimacy?

SkyNTP ,

Lemmy lacks niche interest communities, beyond stuff like Linux.

SkyNTP ,

Back in my day, the government wasn't in a constant state of nearly shutting down. Thanks Republicans.

US sues Apple for illegal monopoly over smartphones ( www.theverge.com )

The US Department of Justice and 16 state and district attorneys general accused Apple of operating an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market in a new antitrust lawsuit. The DOJ and states are accusing Apple of driving up prices for consumers and developers at the expense of making users more reliant on its iPhones.

SkyNTP ,

Smarter Americans in that past recognized that freedom, including the free market, doesn't just happen of its own accord, that it has to be defended, legislated. That is how antitrust laws came to be in arguably the most capitalist nation on earth.

Apathetic Americans now have lost sight of the importance of protecting their freedoms.

"Illegal" is not just some hypothetical moral absolute. It is the politics of defending one's values. Americans clearly no longer value either their freedoms or the free market.

SkyNTP ,

Biden should just take these rulings and do his own Jan 6. Suck on it Trump and MAGA sycophants, time for you to reap what you sow.

SkyNTP ,

You are confusing the Internet and the web. You should look it up.

SkyNTP ,

Democracy doesn't work when centralized powers build tools like TikTok or Facebook to influence people's thoughts with bias and other psychological hacks.

If it were me, I would ban all social media platforms larger than 100,000, and create task forces to reign in on predatory marketing and social media collusion.

People just can't be trusted to see how they are constantly being manipulated by companies with deep pockets and foreign governments. Children and adults alike. It's not people's fault either.

Either that or we need a widespread social repudiation of these platforms, a wake up to the fact that our minds are constantly being poisoned, like Tobacco was reigned in.

SkyNTP ,

Never, ever, ever, ever volunteer personal information, for any reason, on a call you did not initiate, with a number you haven't verified from a trusted source, like a brick and mortar branch, or your online banking account.

SkyNTP ,

These freedoms are a strength indeed, but they are also a vulnerability that can be exploited by foreign powers. Freedoms remain free so long as the people exercising those freedoms do so responsibly. I think a lot of people in the US do not exercise this freedom responsibly. I think a lot of Americans are being manipulated into voting in autocracy. Ironically.

Complete and total freedom is just anarchy, and anarchy collapses on itself and turns into autocracy.

SkyNTP ,

The SCOTUS and other institutions will not save democracy.

This bears repeating. The SCOTUS and other institutions will not save democracy.

Institutions are corruptible. SCOTUS has been corrupted. That is where the US is.

Only citizen action can safeguard democracy.

SkyNTP ,

With some exceptions, enthusiasm in technology is in decline in general. We are peaking in terms of rate of progress across the board, from computer speed to smart phone innovation to TV specs. When's the last time ordinary folks got excited about a new phone release? Who cares about a TV larger than 60 inches? It's not like most people can even afford a wall big enough to put it on. Who cares about anything more than 4k on a tiny screen?

Meanwhile, the cost of living is only increasing, and consumer trust in product life support is in decline. Stories about TVs listening to private conversations, or holding your device hostage for forced TOS updates, anti-right to repair, the mountain of e-waste and micro plastics, pervasive DRM, enshitified services, subscription hardware...

Should we be surprised? No.

The only thing that gets me excited about tech any more is repairability and offline/local networking.

SkyNTP ,

All that is left is letting people without a watch history default to seeing their subscriptions instead of a blank page. That's the whole point of subscribing: I want my own curated experience. I don't want to watch BS YouTube thinks I want to watch.

It was a mistake letting YouTube decide on behalf of everyone that recommendations was a better experience than letting the users decide for themselves what to watch. The recommendations are no less of an echo chamber. Worse, the recommendations are gamed with churned, garbage content. It's the same problem as google search.

We need a return to form of user-curated content. Down with algorithmic recommendations.

SkyNTP ,

You wouldn't do this with a stranger's device, so why insist you do it with your employer's device? Just don't.

If you have a workstation and want to use the same monitors/headsets/peripherals with both the company device and your personal device try one or two KVM switches.

ajsadauskas , (edited ) to DeGoogle Yourself
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?

Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.

These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.

Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.

Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.

Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.

(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)

By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.

Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.

And for a time, it worked.

But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.

And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.

My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?

Do we really want to search every single website on the web?

Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?

Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?

At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?

And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?

@degoogle

SkyNTP ,

I think you are mostly right, except Lemmy and reddit are not organized.

Why are Denis Villeneuve's Dune movies loved by audience and critics?

When watching movies, I always try to differentiate between my personal enjoyment and the inherent merits of the movies. There are a lot of bad movies, which I totally and thoroughly enjoy watching, and some really great movies, which I don't enjoy that much, but still can respect/appreciate....

SkyNTP ,

Lord of the rings comes out

"Oh look, another movie about elves and dwarves."

SkyNTP ,

Now do one where you A) normalize this to the same trip distance (not speed, so that these choices for a single trip become meaningfull) and B) convert the kWh into CO2 emissions, including the emissions in growing and transporting the various power and food production methods used (coal to solar, locally produced veggies-air shipped beef)

SkyNTP ,

The measure of productivity of transportation is distance traveled, not speed (unless this were some time race). Comparing kw/speed tells you nothing about the kWh used to make the same trip as alternative modes of transportation.

SkyNTP , (edited )

More importantly, the KWH used to go the same distance. Sure a car uses more power... It's going faster, and gets to its destination faster, therefore using power for less time.

Energy is measured in KWH, people. But yeah, your point about normalizing to the same speed to make the comparison fair is good.

SkyNTP ,

Communication is a two way street. You aren't wrong about listeners making an effort to look past mistakes, but you'll also find readers will appreciate you more if you take the time to use clear language.

SkyNTP ,

People have access to more information, but less access to tough life lessons, and therefore less experience (ranging from survival skills, to applied political science, etc.).

Is being "enlightened" mean you have more (possibly fake) information, or does it mean having more life experience? You decide...

SkyNTP ,

It depends on the law really. There is no one rule.

For example, owning lockpicks is in many places not illegal, but owning lockpicks with the intent of bypassing a lock is.

Some laws are very specific about the severity or testability of a crime where as others are not. In that case a judge has to interpret the criteria for legal tests, either from previous case law or by building new case law.

In any case, being charged for something or not is a completely separate issue. Things are no less illegal just because the state has no resource or will to execute the law.

Also, being charged does not mean you broke the law either. Nor does judgment determine it (although it's a very strong hint) since a latter appeal could acquit you of chargers.

The determination of guilt is in the facts of what happened. And that's the whole point of the legal system. Being charged, getting judgement, appealing. It's all a process to determine guilt or not. It is not itself the mechanism of guilt.

The idea of a "guilty conscience" enshrines this idea in expression.

SkyNTP ,

The absolute rate didn't go down, but the proportional rate did. Because our energy consumption has increased.

It's kind of like arguing that there are more pirates today than there were 400 years ago. Yes, technically correct in absolute terms. In fact there's more of everything today. But that doesn't mean we are living in the age of piracy (the naval kind). And it shouldn't mean the current deployment of renewables is making no progress.

SkyNTP ,

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

https://opensource.org/osd/

Paradoxically (or not), restrictions on selling software is a fundamental violation of freedom. When the OSS movement says free, it means freedom as in free to do what you want, not free as in free beer. Of course, that freedom also includes the freedom to give it away.

So in practice, that usually results in exactly what you lament: free software with a business model on top to support its development and pay programmers so they can eat.

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