megopie
@megopie@beehaw.org
- Comment on Self-Driving Tesla Fails School Bus Test, Hitting Child-Size Dummies… Meanwhile, Robo-Taxis Hit the Road in 2 Weeks. 1 day ago:
And of course this is all definitely worth it so checks notes we can become dependent on a handful of private companies to move us through our highly car dependent society and dismantle what little public transit is left.
Yup, totally a good idea and definitely worth it.
- Comment on Self-Driving Tesla Fails School Bus Test, Hitting Child-Size Dummies… Meanwhile, Robo-Taxis Hit the Road in 2 Weeks. 1 day ago:
They’re assuming that just because they can bullshit legal authorities to get the things on the road, that’s a fait accompli. Once the services is operating and generating income it’s untouchable.
Thing is, they’re going to cause problems that will affect people, they will cause traffic jams, they will piss people off, they will cause accidents. These vehicles are, by design, unattended, sure they have cameras, but, anyone with nondescript clothes and a face coverings, can sabotage these vehicles without much risk of legal consequence.
The cost of maintaining a fleet of these vehicles in the face of road rage induced sabotage will sink these companies.
- Comment on Scientists created contact lenses that make farts visible 2 days ago:
Butt why?
- Comment on Google is Using AI to Censor Independent Websites 5 days ago:
Enclosure of the digital commons. An attempt to at least. I do think that it’s ultimately doomed.
Fundamentally, the internet is an open thing, by the very nature of how it works, thus it is difficult to enclose. Google is more likely to destroy its market share than to fully gate off its user base.
But when all is said and done, the average person will be left to pick up the pieces of the fractured web they leave behind.
- Comment on My theory about the easy to spot bots in YouTube comments 1 week ago:
Maybe some of the obviousness is a sort of camouflage in that if it looks like a fishing scheme, people at YouTube won’t look any deeper. I think the actual goal of the bots is to manipulate the algorithm. Like, most of the time, the obvious bots just get ignored, especially on videos from bigger creators, no reason to put effort in to making them believable.
Like, maybe they comment on video A to show “engagement” with that content, then they go and comment on video B. Fool the algorithm into associating people who engage with video A as the same kind of audience who would engage with Video B. Thus getting the algorithm to recommend video B more often to viewers of Video A. For something like that you wouldn’t need the bots to look real to other commenters, and having them seem like innocuous fishing scam bots might reduce the scrutiny on their activity.
I could see a lot of different reasons to do that. Could be as simple as some shady “Viral marketing consultancies” trying to boost a client’s channel in the algorithm. Could also be something more comprehensive and nefarious, like trying to manipulate social discourse by steering whole demographics towards certain topics or even away from specific topics. I do wonder how much the algorithm could be nudged by an organized bot comment spam ring.
- Comment on Nvidia’s RTX 5060 review debacle should be a wake-up call for gamers and reviewers 1 week ago:
Often times reviewers will get cards before release day without going through the manufacturer, as cards will ship to wear-houses and stores in preparation for launch day, and reviewers can get access to buy the cards early through contacts at those places.
One of the things nvidia did this time was they blocked reviewer’s access to drivers until release day, despite them having the cards.
- Comment on Nvidia’s RTX 5060 review debacle should be a wake-up call for gamers and reviewers 1 week ago:
Oh yah, for sure 90% of people shouldn’t be wasting the money on Nvidia cards at this point. There are very few situations where they make sense.
Intel and AMD both have way better price to performance cards.
- Comment on Nvidia’s RTX 5060 review debacle should be a wake-up call for gamers and reviewers 1 week ago:
To some extent it comes down to nvidia’s software. Like, some people like their upscaling, and I’ve heard from streamers that they need them for NVENC.
On the other hand, their Linux drivers are awful and they’ve been less than cooperative on that front in the past.
- Comment on Signal calls out Microsoft for poor implementation of Windows 11 Recall, blocks it by default 1 week ago:
Until Microsoft decides that enterprise customers should be using it and enable it by default with an update.
- Comment on Signal calls out Microsoft for poor implementation of Windows 11 Recall, blocks it by default 1 week ago:
That seems like a fairly credible threat.
Realistically, most of the users are on smartphones, so, they could do that without seriously hurting their user base, and they’re also not a for profit company obsessed with maximizing the growth of their user base
- Comment on Signal calls out Microsoft for poor implementation of Windows 11 Recall, blocks it by default 1 week ago:
issues around these kinds of legal liability situations are why so many companies hung on to systems like fax machines for so long. Or why so many banks still run on cobol.
If a company’s machine does something illegal, the company is liable for allowing the machine to be set up in a way that allowed it to happen.
“Your honor, I didn’t know the computer would do that” is not a viable legal defense.
- Comment on Signal calls out Microsoft for poor implementation of Windows 11 Recall, blocks it by default 1 week ago:
The issue is that there are a lot of situations where a file can not legally be copied, saved or shared, and a screen shot by these systems would be considered that. It’s not that the files would be impossible to save or copy as is, but it’s not legal to, and having a system that might due it without human input is a massive legal liability.
Even if companies in such a situation turn off the system, there is no guarantee that windows won’t at some point push an update that activates recall on systems that had previously opted out of using it, or even reinstall it on systems that had physically removed the program from their system. Such as was done with programs like edge and Cortana.
- Comment on Signal calls out Microsoft for poor implementation of Windows 11 Recall, blocks it by default 1 week ago:
It’s so crazy they’re still trying to push this.
Like, even if the screenshots are stored locally, even if they’re encrypted, even if they get deleted after being scanned by the model, even if it’s turned off by default.
Any company that is handling sensitive information that they can’t legally save and/or share won’t be able to use windows if this is even an option to have on. Like, their business OS monopoly is going to get knee capped by this. To what end? To get training data for agents? For better advertising targeting? To force people to buy new computers, and thus new licenses, by obsoleting and ending support for older ones? It just doesn’t even make cold corporate sense.
- Comment on China begins assembling its supercomputer in space 2 weeks ago:
Judging by the fact these are launching on long march 20s. It’s probably not going beyond LEO, so it doesn’t need proper deep space hardening like the RAD750 or the like.
It’s probably closer to off the shelf parts like what’s used on the ISS.
- Comment on China begins assembling its supercomputer in space 2 weeks ago:
That’s still not very much compared to most data centers. Like, 7000 terabytes is a lot of storage for one person, but it barely even registers compared to most modern data centers.
Also, 7000 desktops networked together isn’t really a super computer or a data center.
such a network is interesting as a scientific tool for gathering and processing data, certainly, but not a data-center and not a super computer.
- Comment on China begins assembling its supercomputer in space 2 weeks ago:
These are likely only using a few kilowatts, calling them data centers or super computers is an absurd hyperbole.
- Comment on China begins assembling its supercomputer in space 2 weeks ago:
it seems a bit disingenuous to call these “data centers in space”
30 terabytes of storage across 12 satellites? So 2.5 TB each and 744 tops (which is like, a modern mid range graphics card for a PC). Like that just sound like they’re launching a gaming PC in to orbit, not a datacenter.
The idea of processing more data on the satellite rather than processing it on the ground is interesting and neat, but representing these as anything more than that is… weird.
- Comment on Shower thought: Valve could do the ultimate boss-move this year 3 weeks ago:
The thing is, I don’t think valve wants to become a desktop OS provider. Becoming the provider and maintainer of an OS for hundreds of millions of users is so far beyond their scope as a company. They’ve got a third the employees of Canonical and a fiftieth the employees of RedHat, the companies behind Ubuntu and Fedora. Maintaining a limited scope console/handheld OS that runs on a handful of hardware set ups is one thing, but supporting a fully fledged daily driver desktop OS meant to operate on any system is something else entirely.
Right now, most of their users are on windows, which makes them nervous because Microsoft is a known monopolist and has been slowly creeping deeper in to the PC games space. That’s why Valve has put so much effort in to software to support comparability on Linux, so there is a viable alternative if Microsoft try’s to push them out. I think the steam deck and steamOS were a means to that end, create a business reason to develop and support those tools, not a first step towards becoming an operating system developer.
A better route forward for them would be to use their reach and public trust to help people make the switch to other extant distros. For example an all in one utility on the steam store that helps people select the right distro for their use case and set it up, have a hardware scan and a little quiz to choose a distro, a hard drive partitioning tool to set up dual boot, a tool to write the ISO to a USB drive (or maybe even just set up a bootable on the disk using the partitioner IDK) ,and migrate important files over using their cloud file system.
If the issue is that people trust stuff with the valve branding on it, but are not willing to try Linux on their own, then Steam acting as a guide is much more practical than Valve taking on all the work needed to maintain a proper distro.
- Comment on Eric Schmidt apparently bought Relativity Space to put data centers in orbit 4 weeks ago:
Ah yes because the cost savings on solar power in constant sunlight over nuclear reactors or solar with batteries definitely justifies the cost of launching hundreds of thousands of tons in to orbit, including the miles of radiators that will be needed to cool all this. Oh and definitely justifies the cost of having to hire astronauts as technicians to repair the thing when something goes wrong.
The numbers for these data centers don’t even work on fucking earth, how does increasing the set up cost by an order of magnitude make this work?
- Comment on OpenAI scraps controversial plan to become for-profit after mounting pressure 4 weeks ago:
Lmao, of course they backed off, they need to say they’re going to do it to get cash to keep going, but they can’t actually do it.
Because the moment they go for profit they’re gonna have to start explaining how they loose money on every single user of the product, all the way up to the highest tier of subscription. Then people might start asking hard questions like “wait…isn’t this more expensive to run than just having a person do these things?”
- Comment on China admits to being behind Volt Typhoon cyber activity targeting US 1 month ago:
So two anonymous observers saw someone else receive an indirect and somewhat ambiguous comment? And this is a bullet proof definite smoking gun admission? Or just… mildly informed speculation that could mean a thousand other things?
- Comment on Bubble Trouble - An AI bubble threatens Silicon Valley, and all of us. 1 month ago:
It’s so funny, because people act like open AI has a viable business model, but they’re loosing money even on their paying customers, even the highest tier of subscription. The product they’re selling really isn’t good enough to charge the price they would need to charge to pay for the operation costs, let along the training costs, and that’s with Microsoft giving them a bunch of servers for essentially free.
Like, there isn’t a path to profitability for them, certainly not on this scale. They’re just praying that if they throw enough data in to a big enough model that somehow it will start doing something different than what it currently does. It’s not a plan, it’s a prayer, a cult.
- Comment on AI surge to double data centre electricity demand by 2030: IEA 1 month ago:
“ don’t worry, we’ll offset some of the demand by restarting nuclear plants to prevent burning as much fossil fuel”
“Wait so we could have just had those running already rather than burning fossil fuels?”
“Noooo… because… uh… reasons”
- Comment on Google will develop the Android OS fully in private, and here's why 2 months ago:
when average users start fleeing en mass, it’s already to late, and arguably it’s approaching a critical mass where there is enough common knowledge and “friends who use that” to make the jump easier. Right now, the average user doesn’t have much of a reason to jump, but if Google has to restructure their business model due to their ad monopoly getting crowbarred, they might implement stuff that would be enough to get average users to start jumping.
- Comment on Cloudflare turns AI against itself with endless maze of irrelevant facts 2 months ago:
great, just, one issue.
“The company says the content served to bots is deliberately irrelevant to the website being crawled, but it is carefully sourced or generated using real scientific facts“
Nah, screw that, actively sabotage the training data if they’re going to keep scraping data after being told not to. Poison it with gibberish bad info. Otherwise you’re just giving them irrelevant but not unuseful training data, so no real incentive to only scrape pages that have allowed it.
- Comment on Porn on Spotify Is Infiltrating the Platform’s Top Podcast Charts 2 months ago:
but think of the shareholders! How would they feel if the company stoped growing? They need to cram their attempt at an audio content monopoly down your throat or else they’d only just be a music streaming monopoly.
- Comment on FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies 2 months ago:
I wonder how effective it would be just to put a bunch of data on servers meant to position the training data they’re scraping. Like, make it data that only a bot trying to get everything would find, not something that users would see or encounter.
- Comment on Reddit Rated Sell as Redburn Flags Risk From Google Algorithm 2 months ago:
It’s so absurd, the website’s appeal lies entirely in the user driven experience created by volunteer moderators and user submitted content. Yet the path of profit growth for them lies in company placed ads, and LLM bots spamming comment sections to astroturf. The more they push for profit, the less appeal to users the site has.
- Comment on Tesla's latest decline could be one for the history books - $795 billion since Dec 17 or 53.7 percent 2 months ago:
That drop largely just cancels out the numbers since November. If it drops further then it indicates a general souring if market opnion.
- Comment on Gadget Boom Fizzles Amid AI Hoopla: ‘It’s a Bloodbath Out There’ 2 months ago:
The problem is that the AI branded software doesn’t run easily on old devices, unless you just stream it from one of their server farms. But they’re losing money every time they run one of these services for you, and the vast majority of people aren’t going to pay them for it.
They’re trying to justify selling new devices with software now, not giving out software that can run on old devices. You gotta replace your 2017 laptop to run windows 11. Gotta get a new computer with an NPU to run AI models locally. But it’s happening again, users are not embracing these new AI features, let alone buying new devices just so they can use them.
Much like wearables and VR headsets, the interest for these things is largely limited to enthusiasts spaces and isn’t translating to mass adoption. The average person doesn’t care about having their computer writing their email in to a limerick, they just want their email client to not freeze up and crash because they got an email with a weirdly formatted gif.