riskable
@riskable@programming.dev
Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast
- Comment on Is there anything of any interests for the tech bros in Greenland? 1 day 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 6 days 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 week ago:
These are the same people that would download a car!
- Comment on 1 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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? 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago:
Clearly, you do not understand THE POWER of corrugated cardboard!
- Comment on On the wall in every kitchen 2 weeks 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' 2 weeks 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' 2 weeks 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' 3 weeks 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' 3 weeks 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 4 weeks ago:
D should be Dookie.
- Comment on Splitting Hairs, Splitting Atoms 4 weeks ago:
Atoms lettuce break the iceberg.
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 4 weeks ago:
No, “your sick” makes perfect sense because it will become their sick when that employee brings it into work. Everyone can have the sick that way 👍
- Comment on Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification" 5 weeks ago:
If the cost of using it is lower than the alternative, and the market willing to buy it is the same. If the current cloud hosted tools cease to be massively subsidized, and consumers choose to avoid it, then it’s inevitably a historical footnote, like turbine powered cars, Web 3.0, and laser disk.
There’s another scenario: Turns out that if Big AI doesn’t buy up all the available stock of DRAM and GPUs, running local AI models on your own PC will become more realistic.
I run local AI stuff all the time from image generation to code assistance. My GPU fans spin up for a bit as the power consumed by my PC increases but other than that, it’s not much of an impact on anything.
I believe this is the future: Local AI models will eventually take over just like PCs took over from mainframes. There’s a few thresholds that need to be met for that to happen but it seems inevitable. It’s already happening for image generation where the local AI tools are so vastly superior to the cloud stuff there’s no contest.
- Comment on Standardization rule 1 month ago:
It took until 2021 but we can finally say, “we live in a society.”
Because we have standards.
- Comment on Standardization rule 1 month ago:
Bunch of asses, that’s why!
- Comment on [NSQ Friday] Are sunchips really from the sun? 1 month ago:
No. They’re off the old block.
- Comment on What US Tech Did to Ireland: The country is alarmingly reliant on Meta, Google and Apple. 1 month ago:
It created a lot of jobs. It just didn’t get the usual network effects of having a lot of people employed because they were all incentivized to stay working at these big tech firms.
The solution is to make it easier for said tech employees to form their own tech startups using local talent. That way they’re likely to break away from US tech and forge their own paths.
I don’t know what the situation in Ireland is for starting such business but clearly it isn’t in great shape. The government obviously focused on the big players at the expense of the small (local) ones.
- Comment on Ordinary americans are facing huge electricity bills because of AI Data centers owned by Amazon, Google, Microsoft 1 month ago:
Mandate that all data centers be self powered via renewable energy sources already!
- Comment on Valve announces three new products: the Steam Frame, Steam Machine and Steam Controller 1 month ago:
I’ve done a 3-hour session playing Beat Saber multiplayer with a friend. It was the most intense workout I’ve ever experienced.
The only break was in the middle to refill my enormous water bottle and to clean up the huge pool of sweat on the floor that was getting gross (I was wearing socks, LOL).
My arms hurt for like three days straight after that. I still played every night though 😁👍
- Comment on Valve announces three new products: the Steam Frame, Steam Machine and Steam Controller 1 month ago:
Just place a fan on the floor in front of you. Bam! No nausea. Because now you body instinctively knows your position and orientation in the space you’re in.
It’s such a simple thing but it really works!
- Comment on You live in Clown World when guys are using bathroom hand dryers 1 month ago:
Must be some serious bathroom if “balls to the wall” is a real concern. Must be some full throttle pissing going on!