kbal
@kbal@fedia.io
- Comment on [Gamer's Nexus was] Contacted by the US Secret Service | The AI Surveillance Center Dystopia 1 day ago:
Prove_your_argument
Maybe you could mention a few examples of times they got it wrong, what specifically they said that "didn't stand up to scrutiny", and how if at all they responded upon learning about it?
- Comment on ‘Musk is Tesla and Tesla is Musk’ – why investors are happy to pay him $1tn 5 days ago:
It's the deficient market hypothesis in action: If someone has money, he must be right. Therefore, give him more money.
- Comment on ‘Elon Musk won’t stop. It’s time the British government got off X’ 1 week ago:
I didn't read a word of it, simply scrolled to the end to verify that yes, there is a link to X down there.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Grokipedia launches with AI-cloned pages from Wikipedia 2 weeks ago:
Elon cares deeply about the truth and seems as if he has boundless energy to devote to suppressing it.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to science_memes@mander.xyz | 12 comments
- Comment on ‘I’m suddenly so angry!’ My strange, unnerving week with an AI ‘friend’ 2 weeks ago:
Sure they're utterly boring and stupid now, but just wait until next year when Sirius Cybernetics finally launches its Genuine People Personalities models.
- Comment on Xbox requires age verification now 3 weeks ago:
Yoti, a trusted third-party identity verification provider
Sure they could do it without relying on a third party, but Microsoft knows its users are going to have an easier time trusting "Yoti" rather than trusting Microsoft.
- Comment on Give me a single reason why Sora2 should exist. 5 weeks ago:
Well I dunno, I just watched their demo video and otherwise know nothing about it, but it looks like an interesting experiment. Maybe some day — if they keep throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at it for another decade or two — it'll get good enough to justify however much it costs to run.
- Comment on Why are there pyramids in Egypt? 5 weeks ago:
To be fair, if they weren't too heavy to move then by the time England got there they probably would've found that some of them had already been relocated to Rome or Constantinople.
- Comment on Here's what would happen if the UK abolished landlords overnight 5 weeks ago:
Let’s assume being a landlord is made illegal overnight. Tenants won’t be made to leave their homes, however, until the landlord has been able to sell up.
I mean obviously we're not going to abolish landlords overnight unless we abolish a whole lot of other things along with them in some kind of incredibly successful revolution, but thinking that we'd keep them around long enough to profit from the sale of their real estate assets is just a failure of imagination. Let's assume that all mortgage debt is cancelled and ownership of every dwelling is granted to whoever's been living in it.
- Comment on Tories set a low bar after misspelling Britain on conference chocolate 5 weeks ago:
Good call there over at the Grauniad.
- Comment on Brits in disbelief as new refillable drinks ban implemented across UK 5 weeks ago:
Yes... that is the topic of discussion. I'm just saying it's manifestly unfair if they apply that tax to refills of your cup at Nando's, but don't charge extra for each lump of sugar in a cup of tea.
- Comment on Brits in disbelief as new refillable drinks ban implemented across UK 5 weeks ago:
In order to be consistent they'll need to start charging tax per lump of sugar as well.
- Comment on RUMOR: 'The Future of Xbox is Software Publishing' as Next Console Generation Faces Doubts 5 weeks ago:
RUMOR: There is no future for Xbox.
- Comment on Keir Starmer says digital ID cards an ‘enormous opportunity’ for the UK 1 month ago:
"You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It's as simple as that."
Ah, I get it. The idea is to give a massive boost to the underground economy, forcing everyone without a digital ID to work completely off the books.
- Comment on Keir Starmer expected to announce plans for digital ID cards 1 month ago:
Making Britain less attractive to illegal migrants, at the cost of also making it less attractive to everyone else.
- Comment on Microsoft forced to make Windows 10 extended security updates truly free in Europe 1 month ago:
There's still a catch, though — you have to keep running Windows 10.
- Comment on Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg unveils new smart glasses powered by AI 1 month ago:
I think it would sell better if it had more surface areas for sensors, one near the mouth for a mic, and a big compartment over the nose to contain the battery in
- Comment on Parents outraged as Meta uses photos of schoolgirls in ads targeting man 1 month ago:
I dunno whether that's Facebook pushing it more often to men (because their analytics shows it works on their audience) or men clicking on it more often because it works on the Facebook audience.
- Comment on Parents outraged as Meta uses photos of schoolgirls in ads targeting man 1 month ago:
Some fraction of the harm they do is by carelessness rather than malice. That some mindless algorithm intended to find and exploit for advertising purposes the posts that got the most engagement disproportionately selected ones featuring images of cute teenagers does not seem unlikely.
- Comment on Parents outraged as Meta uses photos of schoolgirls in ads targeting man 1 month ago:
Weird that the man assumes those images were chosen to target him, but horrifying that he might be right.
- Comment on 4chan will refuse to pay daily UK fines, its lawyer tells BBC 2 months ago:
They tried that. Don't underestimate the progress already made towards building the Great Firewall of Britain. I guess the main problem was that when the filtering was optional, too many people chose to opt out.
- Submitted 2 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 28 comments
- Submitted 9 months ago to science_memes@mander.xyz | 0 comments
- Comment on Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto 1 year ago:
If I were looking to assign blame, I'd start with the coal and gas operators who are digging up fossil fuels that would otherwise remain in the ground just to fuel their bitcoin mining rigs, those who peddle specious arguments claiming that it somehow isn't a problem, those who turned the whole thing into a machine for separating the gullible from their money, and those who've built the shaky, buggy, mostly proprietary, convoluted, half-finished, untrustworthy, horrible mess that is the software ecosystem surrounding the whole cryptocurrency sphere. Perhaps none of that could have been foreseen by whoever designed bitcoin. On them we can instead put the blame for the failure to make it anywhere near sufficiently scalable, and the ridiculous choice of mechanism for the bitcoin monetary policy which serves to make it function only as a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme and not a durable currency. Regardless of who's to blame, it's got to go.
Perhaps there's already an alternative out there somewhere which is actually useful and not based on avarice, fraud, unsustainable resource usage, or unsustainable hype, but if so it's currently hidden under such an enormous pile of shitcoins that it's impossible to identify. At least the internal combustion engine was good at doing the thing it was supposed to do.
- Comment on Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto 1 year ago:
If you can afford more than a small plot of land in this economy, you've probably been hoarding too much wealth. I know it's a very popular hobby, but it's quite bad for you if taken to excess. But this is getting somewhat off-topic.
Some kind of technology that resembles today's cryptocurrencies may or may not have a future. As they exist right now none of them are anything like a good investment opportunity or a safe store of value.
- Comment on Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto 1 year ago:
A small plot of land with good soil and a steady supply of fresh water, a good education, and a sturdy pair of boots.
- Comment on Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto 1 year ago:
Other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, which are far more energy efficient than Bitcoin
Calling those that don't depend on proof-of-work "more energy efficient" is underselling it to the point of being dishonest. The difference is not that they're more efficient in any conventional way. It's that they don't have the amazing bitcoin feature of relying for their operation on the practice of deliberately wasting enormous amounts of energy for the purpose of being able to prove that you've wasted enormous amounts of energy.
All the way through the cryptocurrency crash that the average reader of headlines thought must've put an end to it by now, the bitcoin network has kept on burning up absurd amounts of power.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s misinformation machine made the horrors of Southport, a small town in the UK, much worse 1 year ago:
Elected officials, journalists, activists, it's gradually becoming clear that everyone who uses centralised social media is part of the problem. Promoting the fediverse ought to be a national security goal.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s misinformation machine made the horrors of Southport, a small town in the UK, much worse 1 year ago:
The problem isn’t merely that Elon Musk is manifestly unsuited to the job of unelected social media tsar. The problem is that no one should have that job.
