riskable
@riskable@programming.dev
Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast
- Comment on When using rsync to backup my /home folder to an external 1TB SSD, I run out of space, how?? 1 day ago:
Simple: Exfat does not support symbolic links. So every file that’s just a symbolic link on your btrfs filesystem is getting copied in full (the link is being resolved) to your Exfat drive.
Solution don’t use Exfat. For backups from btrfs, I recommend using btrfs with compression enabled.
Also don’t forget to rebalance your btrfs partitions regularly to reclaim lost space! Also, delete old snapshots!
- Comment on Sony-led program offers PS5 rentals starting at $13.50 a month in the UK across 12, 24, or 36-month leases — console has to be returned at the end of the contract 1 day ago:
Folks here jest, but this business model is coming to PCs next. Bookmark my words!
(Literally, you can right-click the perma-link to this message and have quick access to it later so you can reply, “Damn, you were right!” And post the link to big PC vendors suddenly offering a similar services because DRAM and GPUs have become so expensive, normal people can’t afford to buy PCs anymore)
- Comment on Curb feelers 1 day ago:
Forbidden chopsticks
- Comment on Start-up idea 1 week ago:
…and burns people’s homes down due to lack of safety features.
…and children choke to death from easily removable small parts.
…and people get electrocuted because of a lack of warning label telling them not to use it in the bath.
- Comment on To USB, or not to USB 1 week ago:
Some day, a lucky archeologist will unearth the one true archive from an innocent-looking tarball.
- Comment on Can anyone explain why? 2 weeks ago:
Wait until you see Gen Alpha’s spending on alcohol!
- Comment on UK proposes forcing Google to let publishers opt out of AI summaries 2 weeks ago:
Wrong way to handle AI summaries: Google crawls the article and presents it’s summary.
Right way to handle AI summaries: Your own browser uses a local AI model on your PC to generate the summary.
The first is easy to stop with legislation, the second is impossible to stop and yet, if you try you’re a fucking asshole trying to tell people what they can and cannot do with their own hardware. That’s straight up villain behavior.
- Comment on How would you spell the sound Transformers make when they transform? 2 weeks ago:
Well, there’s five beats, so…
Ts-che-chu-chu-chk
- Comment on [Video] Bunny betrayal 4 weeks ago:
Now show us “the stick” method.
- Comment on "Not A Single Pixel" Of The New Ecco Game Will Be Generated By AI, Insists Series Creator 4 weeks ago:
This is my take at well, but not just for gaming… AI is changing the landscape for all sorts of things. For example, if you wanted a serious, professional grammar, consistency, and similar checks of your novel you had to pay thousands of dollars for a professional editor to go over it.
Now you can just paste a single chapter at a time into a FREE AI tool and get all that and more.
Yet here we are: Still seeing grammatical mistakes, copy & paste oversights, and similar in brand new books. It costs nothing! Just use the AI FFS.
Checking a book with an AI chat bot uses up as much power/water as like 1/100th of streaming a YouTube Short. It’s not a big deal.
The Nebula Awards recently banned books that used AI for grammar checking. My take: “OK, so only books from big publishers are allowed, then?”
- Comment on Is there anything of any interests for the tech bros in Greenland? 1 month ago:
It’s cold outside all year round and there’s abundant geothermal energy. Basically, is the perfect place to build data centers.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Like I said initially, how do we legally define “cloning”? I don’t think it’s possible to write a law that prevents it without also creating vastly more unintended consequences (and problems).
Let’s take a step back for a moment to think about a more fundamental question: Do people even have the right to NOT have their voice cloned? To me, that is impersonation; which is perfectly legal (in the US). As long as you don’t make claims that it’s the actual person. That is, if you impersonate someone, you can’t claim it’s actually that person. Because that would be fraud.
In the US—as far as I know—it’s perfectly legal to clone someone’s voice and use it however TF you want. What you can’t do is claim that it’s actually that person because that would be akin to a false endorsement.
Realistically—from what I know about human voices—this is probably fine. Voice clones aren’t that good. The most effective method is to clone a voice and use it in a voice changer, using a voice actor that can mimick the original person’s accent and inflection. But even that has flaws that a trained ear will pick up.
Ethically speaking, there’s really nothing wrong with cloning a voice. Because—from an ethics standpoint—it is N/A: There’s no impact. It’s meaningless; just a different way of speaking or singing.
It feels like it might be bad to sing a song using something like Taylor Swift’s voice but in reality it’ll have no impact on her or her music-related business.
- Comment on Drive safe 1 month ago:
These are the same people that would download a car!
- Comment on 1 month ago:
You make AI voice generation sound like it’s a one-step process, “clone voice X.” While you can do that, here’s where it’s heading in reality:
“Generate a voice that’s sounds like a male version of Scarlett Johansson”.
“That sounds good, but I want it to sound smoother.”
“Ooh that’s close! Make it slightly higher pitch.”
In a process like that, do you think Scarlett Johansson would have legal standing to sue?
What if you started with cloning your own voice but after many tweaks the end result ends up sounding similar to Taylor Swift? Does she have standing?
In court, you’d have expert witnesses saying they don’t sound the same. “They don’t even have the same inflection or accent!” You’d have voice analysis experts saying their voice patterns don’t match. Not even a little bit.
But about half the jury would be like, “yeah, that does sound similar.” And you could convict a completely innocent person.
- Comment on VR is an absolute game changer for racing games 1 month ago:
I had to share this because no one else in my life will listen.
I’m listening, but more importantly, I completely understand 😭
Also, if you think this setup (with the Xbox controller) is great, wait until the Steam Frame comes out with the new Steam Controller integration (it has IR LEDs on the front of it so you can see a virtual representation of it in the menus). You also won’t need to plug it into your PC as the Steam Frame itself is basically a full PC.
I’m so hyped about it! Finally, a real Linux OS we can customize TF out of instead of locked-down versions of Android that look like they are designed for toddlers.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
I work for a huge bank and we tested voice recognition technology: Even under the best circumstances (high quality microphone with no ambient noise in a sound booth), it was far, far too easy to copy someone else’s voice by simply playing back a sliced up recording a la Sneakers (the movie). We ruled it out as an option over a decade ago.
The problem was fundamental and had nothing to do with the quality of the technology. If your bank is using your voice as a unique identifier they had better be using something else in addition to it! Because it’s super insecure.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
From the perspective of human perception, people’s voices are only unique enough to about one in a few thousand. There’s a few outliers with much more unique voices but believe it or not, there’s a lot of people walking around on this earth that sound just like Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones, and other voices people think are super unique.
I view an anti-cloning law as too risky: It sounds exactly like the type of thing that would prevent Grandma from cloning her own voice before going down for surgery because it just so happens to sound a lot like a famous person.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
How do you implement voice cloning prevention? Human voices aren’t that unique. Also, AI voice cloning isn’t perfect. So… At what threshold is a voice considered, “cloned” from a legal perspective?
I mean, people couldn’t tell the difference between Scarlet Johansson and OpenAI’s “Sky” voice which was not cloned.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Before any of that can happen we need some non-ambiguous definitions of what “AI” is.
- Comment on Why College Students Prefer Socialism—and Why They're Wrong 1 month ago:
Article from someone who doesn’t know the difference between communism and socialism (which actually doesn’t have a universally accepted definition).
I’d love to hear this guy’s take on how to deal with Baumol’s Cost Disease:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Capitalism has no solution for it, but socialism does. It’s almost as if capitalism is good for some things and socialism is good for other things! Then there’s democratic socialism which chooses to use both economic systems, choosing the most appropriate one for any given thing.
- Comment on Makes sense 1 month ago:
Due to cost cutting, norovirus decided to only do the bare minimum.
Quiet quitter!
- Comment on What do other languages use for "magic" words; or names and titles in fantasy and sci-fi novels or cinema? 1 month ago:
In situations like this, it’s best to remember why dead languages are dead: Nobody speaks these languages anymore because everyone kept accidentally casting spells!
- Comment on I cannot imagine what lawsuit led to this 1 month ago:
Clearly, you do not understand THE POWER of corrugated cardboard!
- Comment on On the wall in every kitchen 1 month ago:
Impossible to untangle the knots in it.
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 1 month ago:
Data centers typically use closed loop cooling systems but those do still lose a bit of water each day that needs to be replaced. It’s not much—compared to the size of the data center—but it’s still a non-trivial amount.
A study recently came out (it was talked about extensively on the Science VS podcast) that said that a long conversation with an AI chat bot (e.g. ChatGPT) could use up to half a liter of water—in the worst case scenario.
This statistic has been used in the news quite a lot recently but it’s a bad statistic: That water usage counts the water used by the power plant (for its own cooling). That’s typically water that would come from ponds and similar that would’ve been built right alongside the power plant (your classic “cooling pond”). So it’s not like the data centers are using 0.5L of fresh water that could be going to people’s homes.
For reference, the actual data center water usage is 12% of that 0.5L: 0.06L of water (for a long chat). Also remember: This is the worst-case scenario with a very poorly-engineered data center.
Another stat from the study that’s relevant: Generating images uses much less energy/water than chat. However, generating videos uses up an order of magnitude more than both (combined).
So if you want the lowest possible energy usage of modern, generative AI: Use fast (low parameter count), open source models… To generate images 👍
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 1 month ago:
The power use from AI is orthogonal to renewable energy. From the news, you’d think that AI data centers have become the number one cause of global warming. Yet, they’re not even in the top 100. Even at the current pace of data center buildouts, they won’t make the top 100… ever.
AI data center power utilization is a regional problem specific to certain localities. It’s a bad idea to build such a data center in certain places but companies do it anyway (for economic reasons that are easy to fix with regulation). It’s not a universal problem across the globe.
Aside: I’d like to point out that the fusion reactor designs currently being built and tested were created using AI. Much of the advancements in that area are thanks to “AI data centers”. If fusion power becomes a reality in the next 50 years it’ll have more than made up for any emissions from data centers. From all of them, ever.
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 1 month ago:
It’s even more complicated than that: “AI” is not even a well-defined term. Back when Quake 3 was still in beta (“the demo”), id Software held a competition to develop “bot AIs” that could be added to a server so players would have something to play against while they waited for more people to join (or you could have players VS bots style matches).
That was over 25 years ago. What kind of “AI” do you think was used back then? 🤣
The AI hater extremists seem to be in two camps:
- Data center haters
- AI-is-killing-jobs
The data center haters are the strangest, to me. Because there’s this default assumption that data centers can never be powered by renewable energy and that AI will never improve to the point where it can all be run locally on people’s PCs (and other, personal hardware).
Yet every day there’s news suggesting that local AI is performing better and better. It seems inevitable—to me—that “big AI” will go the same route as mainframes.
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 1 month ago:
Most people—even obsessive gamers—don’t give two shits about AI. There’s a very loud minority that gets in everyone’s face saying all AI is evil like we’re John Connor or something. They are so obsessive and extreme about it, it often makes the news (like this article).
The market has already determined that if a game is fun, people will play it. How much AI was used to make it is irrelevant.
- Comment on I need help finishing the SHITPO phonetic alphabet 2 months ago:
D should be Dookie.
- Comment on Splitting Hairs, Splitting Atoms 2 months ago:
Atoms lettuce break the iceberg.