anachronist

@anachronist@midwest.social

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anachronist ,

This is depressing as hell and a statement about the time we live in and the corporate overlords who control our lives.

Jimmy McGee made a great video about it last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJoGm8c523M

anachronist ,

The one big law about lending out digital copies of books you own is that you only lend out as many as you physically own.

That is not what the lawsuit is about, and that was not what the plaintiffs or the judge argued. Their argument is that if you can not take a physical copy and digitize it.

If you want a digital copy to lend, you must beg the publisher to allow you to have a digital copy to lend and you must accept their terms. If they don't want to provide you with a digital lending option as a library, then you can not lend it. If they want to make you use their DRM software you must use it even if it spies on your patrons and charges you per-lending fees, or even "expires" the book after so many loans, or "blacks out" or "embargoes" lending of titles you are supposed to have in your catalog (these are all features of publisher-backed digital lending schemes).

anachronist ,

I mean we're sitting here on the lemmyverse having a conversation..

But yeah creators should upload to peertube but they won't get any meaningful viewership there. The only way to break the network affect stranglehold google/youtube has over video content on the internet is making sure that if you do produce that content it's available via other channels.

anachronist ,

baby murdering killers

As opposed to Israel?

anachronist ,

Yeah they were attempts to either fool the Javelin's sensor and make it fly too high or serve as improvised spaced armor to reduce the effectiveness of its HEAT round. FPV drones have much smaller HEAT rounds and a lot less kinetic energy so improvised spaced armor may be more effective.

"Cope cages" to describe improvised armor was always propaganda though. US soldiers in Iraq put improvised armor on their humvees to protect against IEDs. In WWII solders piled sandbags and spare tracks on their tanks (you can see many pictures of tanks like this). Field improvised armor is as old as warfare. Often it was not effective. For instance, tank designers in WWII thought that improvised armor reduced the chance of a ricochet, which was a serious problem with the era's AP rounds that saved a lot of tankers. Improvised armor gave the AP round something to "grab ahold of" and aid penetration.

anachronist ,

Yeah the fediverse has lower engagement all around because the community is a lot smaller. This is especially true in "long tail" communities. However, the upside is that there are no bots, dark patterns, or manipulated feeds.

That being said, while I appreciate the chronological feed I do wish there was some way to "weigh" less active communities so that I can see their activity in my feed without them being drowned out by the busier communities. I've noticed that I've gone to communities that I'm definitely subscribed to, and seen that there were several posts that I missed because the posts were drowned out by content in busy communities like, for instance, technology@beehaw.org

anachronist ,

"Self driving cars will make the roads safer. They won't be drunk or tired or make a mistake."

Self driving cars start killing people.

"Yeah but how do they compare to the average human driver?"

Goal post moving.

anachronist ,

Look up "interurban railways". Most towns east of the Mississippi used to have frequent rail service with whistle stops at every farm and crossroads. In addition to passengers these railroads also transported the harvest, Sears purchases, kit houses, even hearses!

anachronist ,

Spite and pettiness seem like a poor way to run a business but what do I know? I'm just a guy who's gotten zero starships successfully to orbit.

anachronist , (edited )

Yeah that was the joke. 🙃

Edit: Also none have made it to orbit or even near orbit. They initially claimed that the third one made it to the non-circularized suborbit they had planned, but later analysis was that it did not actually reach the planned velocity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ03eVRgiZ4

anachronist ,

Which part of the video is wrong? The fact is that it failed to reach planned velocity. This is public record. If it did not reach planned velocity then it did not reach the non-circualized suborbit that they intended. They were not "just a circulization away from orbit."

The CSS channel was created when Musk and Shotwell were making bonkers claims about their Mars plans, as well as other crazy bullshit like the suborbital rocket airline stuff. The point of CSS is that none of their claims pencil out if you do even basic math, and they proved that by doing the math. They've also gone after other space grifters like orbital assembly.

anachronist ,

The planned goal of the mission was to achieve orbital velocity but not orbital trajectory. This was because they had not yet demonstrated the ability of their vac engines to relight in space. If they go into a stable orbit but can't relight they can not deorbit and they become space junk.

They initially claimed that this was a success (they achieved target velocity) but subsequent analysis was they were quite a bit off. Also because their engine relight test was failed/cancelled they will also not be allowed to attempt a stable orbit in IFT4. They have to demonstrate relight/deorbit capability before they will be allowed to attempt stable orbit.

anachronist ,

Google was already going downhill but when they fired Matt Cutts and replaced him with an advertising person was the point where it was obvious they weren't interested in search anymore.

anachronist ,

The appeal to google and friends is that it's even less obvious when you're being advertised to when a LLM tells you something than on their existing SERPs.

anachronist ,

Damn that was a cool song too...

anachronist ,

My favorite use of that song was in Candian Bacon when John Candy and friends were singing it while fillibustering in Canada, except they only know the refrain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bXzFY72wbs

anachronist ,

A simple path forward, is to go from classifying single elements of training data, to classifying multiple elements and their relationship in the training data.

Training data already has multiple labels.

Slightly less simple, is to gather orders of magnitude more data, by just hooking the input to an IRL robot.

An entire point of the paper and video is that massive increases in training set size are showing diminishing returns.

Another step, is for the NN to control the robot and decide which parts of the data require refinement, and focus on that.

🤡

anachronist ,

Alternate theory we'll look back the same way we looked back on the claims that IBM watson was intelligent, or the claims in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, that <insert technology x> was going to make computers truly intelligent.

anachronist ,

Tictok is horrible but this entire ban is being driven by the swamp being upset that young people have come to the wrong conclusion about Israel. I think that the idea is that as long as people are using facebook or google-owned properties, people can be shown only information that will lead them to the correct, approved opinions.

anachronist ,

This is probably the most prescient episode of Star Trek ever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek%3A_Deep_Space_Nine)

Basically Sisko and friends go back in time to America in 2024, where it's illegal to be homeless and they get put in an open air prison.

anachronist ,

Hacker news is full of people LARPing as corporate crisis management officers, or counsels for the defense. Every post you get about "company caught grinding up babies to fuel forever-chemical cancer machine" will get a ton of posts by people arguing that actually it's a net positive for the world and how could anyone be against such amazing innovation?

Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract ( www.nbcnews.com )

"Google issued a stern warning to its employees, with the company’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC."

anachronist ,

2000s were peak libertarian for SP. They were against the war on terror so they didn't code "Bush-right" but they were extremely libertarian. I remember the media trying to push this "millennials are conservative actually" line by inventing the phrase "South-park republican"

Still I remember them landing some good observations. For instance, in one episode the boys learn how veal is made and become animal rights activists. You can tell TP/MS are not animal rights activists, but after the boys steal the cows the media, police, government, etc all instantly start calling the boys "terrorists." It really caught the whole post-9/11 zeitgeist of "anybody you don't like is a terrorist."

anachronist ,

This is the definition of late-stage capitalism. Capitalism starts out by finding useful things that improve lives for at least some people (potentially by ruining it for others). For instance, it invents assembly lines to make manufactured goods cheaper but in so doing makes the worker's job dull, repetitive, stressful, and robs him of his agency. This is early stage capitalism. Things are getting worse for some people but broadly better for many.

But then later on capitalism runs out of things to improve. You can only invent the assembly line once. You only get that boost when you implement it. So you have to come up with something else. Maybe you computerize things. But eventually you can't wring any more profits out of production and profits must go up, so you have to take them out of the customers. You roll up all the competing firms into a monopoly and then start jacking up the price, slashing the quality, etc. This is late-stage. It becomes more and more parasitic and the snake eats its own tail.

anachronist ,

"You know what would be totally sick? What if we made our building's roof into a matrix of inverted metal parabolas?"

anachronist ,

Is surströmming considered a chemical weapon?

anachronist ,

Altman makes my skin crawl because whenever I see him in an interview he looks like Patrick Bateman practicing empathetic facial expressions in a mirror.

But if that doesn't do it for you, you need to look into worldcoin. It's like as if they watched Minority Report and said "Yeah, let's do that, but with crypto."

anachronist ,

We're not ready because we're using concepts like "raising" to describe the creation of a probabilistic word sequence generator.

Don't anthropomorphize the algorithm.

anachronist ,

I assume the real main selling point for Windows 11 is the inescapable constant nagging you get when you try to stick with WIndows 10.

anachronist , (edited )

I don't think Jack Ryan would have won. Obama had already won a crowded and contentious democratic primary and was a really strong candidate. Ryan, on the other hand, wasn't a very good candidate and was kinda floundering even before the divorce scandal. This was at a nadir for the Republicans in Illinois because it was after the Ryan/Licenses for Bribes scandal and before Blagojevich. Most of the Republican A-tier had been indicted or had their careers ruined (including Fitzgerald who Ryan was trying to replace) and they were running B-tier candidates.

anachronist ,

The purpose of Mozilla is to kill Firefox. That's what Google is paying for.

anachronist ,

Wikipedia gets something like $150 million in donations annually. Firefox absolutely could have done similar numbers back when they had a massive userbase, and it would have given the users a feeling of ownership. Instead they decided to be funded almost entirely by the technology monopolist.

anachronist ,

Just goes to show the whole of Europe is infiltrated by Russian agents (US too probably).

anachronist ,

I remember what happened last time. Gradually the web will become unusable if you're not using Chrome. That's how it worked back in the day with Internet Explorer. Microsoft even began hooking things into IE that can only work on windows (activex controls) and then getting websites to support them.

When I first started using Linux I had to switch to Netscape 4.7 because it was the only browser available and the web barely worked. I remember thinking "well, the web sucks on Linux but I guess I can live without it."

anachronist ,

Unfortunately Mozilla's brand new CEO is a McKinsey ghoul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chamberslaura/

anachronist ,

I mean that's pretty standard for a McKinsey ghoul:

  • Step 1: go to an ivy league college, get a business degree
  • Step 2: work for McKinsey for a few years as an associate
  • Step 3: get a job at a McKinsey client leapfrogging everyone else into management/c-suite
  • Step 4: hire McKinsey to bring their arrogant children into your org and screw things up

Everything about her subsequent career has been going from one upper management/c-suite role in a tech company to another. This is not the resume of a person who should be running a nonprofit that controls the most important open source project on the internet. But beyond that just look at what she's done in her one month at Mozilla:

    1. Massive round of layoffs
    1. "Focus on {buzzword}" where {buzzword} in this case is AI

That's straight out of the McKinsey playbook.

anachronist ,

Yep Americans have a choice between the party that aggressively cheerleads and gloats while doing everything in their power to enable Israeli war crimes, and the party that "expresses concerns" and "calls for moderation" while doing everything in their power to enable Israeli war crimes.

anachronist ,

This is daft though considering that he needs Michigan and the Muslim voters in were one of the Democratic pillars in that state, and he has completely and possibly irrevocably alienated them.

anachronist ,

How's the head of lettuce doing?

https://slate.com/technology/2022/10/liz-truss-iceberg-lettuce-contest.html

anachronist ,

I think for like ten minutes they were vetting people joining or something, and the answers were high quality. But the whole thing turned into yahoo answers within a month of it getting popular.

anachronist ,

Customers: The glass on our iPhone screens keep cracking.

Apple: Glass on both sides of your phone!

anachronist ,

VR has been around in modern form for more than a decade and the only truly novel and useful application is some types of gameplay.

Apple claims that the future is AR but the only novel and useful application is feeding you more ads. This is a massive benefit for them, but not a reason for anyone to buy this thing and subject themselves to it.

anachronist ,

The crowd cheered at the first two items, but had no real idea why the third item was such a big deal.

I'm not sure, I took that to mean a competitor to Palm, which was pretty popular among a niche segment of the population. Although data plans via 3G kinda sucked back then and most Palm users I knew were constantly trying to connect to wifi.

The Cult of AI: How one writer's trip to an annual tech conference left him with a sinking feeling about the future ( www.rollingstone.com )

From the (middle of the) story: The reason CES was so packed with random “AI”-branded products was that sticking those two letters to a new company is seen as something of a talisman, a ritual to bring back the (VC) rainy season.

anachronist ,

just yesterday I saw a documentary about a sect using their own cryptocoin to pay its members for peddling ayahuasca and other psychedelics

Finally! A use case!

anachronist ,

Ok then be specific.

Like, before smartphones I was lost in hamburg, looking at a paper map trying to figure out where the heck I was, trying to find the street names hidden in the brickwork of the buildings. I had to have a friendly person help me out. I've never been lost like that since smartphones. Give me a specific case where chatgpt would do something like that.

anachronist ,

On the other hand, we’d been trying to do anything useful with natural language since the 50’s and had thoroughly failed.

That's really not true. For instance, machine translation and spam detection (document classification) were getting really good by the late 2000s. Image recognition was great beginning the late 2010s.

What we've seen in the last few years (besides continual incremental improvements in already-existing solutions) is improvement in the application of generative tools. So far the uses cases of generative models appear to be violating copyright, cheating on homework, and producing even more search engine spam. It can also be somewhat useful as a search engine so long as you want your answer to be authoritatively worded but don't care if it's true or not.

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