anachronist
@anachronist@midwest.social
- Comment on TikTok set to be banned in the US after losing appeal 2 weeks ago:
I hate TikTok but I hate even more that the ban seems to have been successful this time because of Israel. Lots of people (Romney, etc) have said that TikTok must be banned because it’s the reason why young people don’t support Israel’s genocide.
I don’t like CCP propaganda being fed to Americans, but let’s be real, CCP propaganda about Israel is way more honest than domestic American propaganda.
While I’m on the subject, Facebook, Google, etc, are pretty near equally as evil.
- Comment on Young people were becoming more anxious long before social media, and we should not be fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables, researcher says 4 weeks ago:
On the one hand I can believe that people are getting more anxious because things are getting more bleak and it’s an op to get the whole thing blamed on social media.
On the other hand, it also feels like an op from social media companies to insist that their algorithms aren’t preying on people.
- Comment on 22 million on bluesky 4 weeks ago:
I read Chris Webber’s essay and I kinda agree. Bluesky is really just another twitter.
That being said I think we are entering into an era of diversification, not perhaps how we would like (through federation) but rather, through people understanding finally that the platform itself is making a choice in what kind of content it serves. We used to have this idea that the platform was just a “neutral third party” like a phone company. But in fact, it’s a publisher with its own editorial line. It pushes that line through algorithms and what voices it wants to amplify or suppress.
As people understand this more, they are going to be much more critical of not just “the media” but also “the platform” and why it chose to show that media to its audience.
- Comment on Large language models not fit for real-world use, scientists warn — even slight changes cause their world models to collapse 5 weeks ago:
An important characteristic of a model is “stability.” Stability means that small changes in input produce small changes in output.
Stability is important for predictability. For instance, suppose you want to make a customer support portal. You add a bot hoping that it will guide the user to the desired workflow. You test the bot by asking it a bunch of variations of questions, probably with some RLHF. But then when it goes to production, people will start asking it variations of questions that you didn’t test (guaranteed). What you want ideally, is that it will map the variants to the best workflow that matches what the customer wants. Second best would be to say “I don’t know.” But what we have are bots who will just generate some crazy off-the-wall crap, and no way to prevent it.
- Comment on Why isnt there an aftermarket way to bulk up pinch welds jack points on cars 2 months ago:
Unibodies do have a frame it’s just not a completely separate assembly like a ladder frame.
As others have said there are lots of places to jack a car. Nobody uses the flange on the rocker panels unless they’re trying to change a tire roadside with the emergency jack.
- Comment on Ok boomer 2 months ago:
Yeah I refuse to pay a “convenience fee.” I’ll mail a f*ing check if they try to charge me.
- Comment on Ok boomer 2 months ago:
Corporate gaslighting be like:
- Comment on Paralyzed Man Unable to Walk After Maker of His Powered Exoskeleton Tells Him It's Now Obsolete 2 months ago:
I’ve been voting for a while and never have I seen a candidate on the ballot who was against capitalism.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Both CEOs are horrible but the new one is a former McKinsey consultant with a background in finance and the silicon-valley C-suite. According to statements she put out her strategy is: layoffs and AI.
- Comment on Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke. 3 months ago:
Reality is about to get all melty and people are gonna have six fingers.
- Comment on Disney wants a wrongful death lawsuit thrown out because the plaintiff had Disney+ 4 months ago:
Yes it is. It is called “forced arbitration” and pretty much every contract you are compelled to sign has it.
In any kind of just society with a fair legal system it would not be legal. But that doesn’t describe us or our legal system.
- Comment on A nightly Waymo robotaxi parking lot honkfest is waking San Francisco neighbors 4 months ago:
My guess is you’re seeing the computer go into a reject loop until a human operator finally takes over.
- Comment on What is Firefox supposed to do? 4 months ago:
My experience is that Firefox often has problems on Google-owned properties. Either performance/responsiveness or functionality just not working. Why this would be is left as an exercise for the reader.
- Comment on Police Really Want a Cybertruck, Email Shows 5 months ago:
Municipal police mostly came from the great railroad strike of 1871.
- Comment on Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable 5 months ago:
Funny you should mention that McKinsey published a paper a few months back concluding that GenAI will take over most of the jobs in America because it was good at doing what McKinsey Associates do. Missed by the authors is that the job of a McKinsey associate is to confidently spout nonsense all day long and that’s actually exactly what chatgpt is programmed to do.
- Comment on Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable 5 months ago:
American Psycho (Sam Altman) and his chorus have been hyping AI and the rest of the world’s reaction has ranged from “these guys seem smart and chatgpt is impressive so what do I know?” to “isn’t this guy a bitcoin bro?”
- Comment on Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable 5 months ago:
Naw if they’re publicly bashing it they’ve already dumped on all the downside risk onto their customers and now they’re net short.
- Comment on Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable 5 months ago:
Game of Life has cool emergent properties that are a lot more interesting and fun to play with than LLMs. LLMs also have emergent properties like, for instance, failing classification due to the manipulation of individual image pixels.
- Comment on Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable 5 months ago:
I suspect Intuit fired those workers for other reasons (free file) and are using AI as an excuse because to admit that free-file is an existential threat to their business is to admit that their company has no long term business prospects.
- Comment on Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable 5 months ago:
This is the same middlebrow dismissal that AI advocates have been using for years.
“It’s just a stochastic parrot.” “How do you know that you aren’t just a stochastic parrot?”
Well we do know. There are experts on human cognition. They have been studying it for decades. We may not know enough about it to know how to make a computer do it. But we certainly know enough about it to know when a computer chatbot is not doing it.
- Comment on Elon Musk's SpaceX contracted to destroy retired space station - BBC News 5 months ago:
The space station’s orbit has been adjusted continuously over its lifetime initially by attaching a shuttle to it and doing a burn of the shuttle’s engines and later doing the same with progress modules.
My bet is the original expectation of the designers was to deorbit by attaching centaurs (or whatever) to the existing docking ports and rotate the beast to the right attitude for a deorbit burn.
NASA has more recently said they want the reentry to be as steep as possible to minimize the size of the debris field, and is using that to justify the development of a new specialized deorbit vehicle. No doubt SpaceX will declare that Starship is the proper vehicle for this, and then will plow the $800 million into the Starship program. The money they got for Artemus is already long gone and Starship has failed to demonstrate key components of the Artemus plan. Dear Moon has been cancelled so NASA and Artemus are the only customers they have left. NASA knows that without a cash injection Artemus is at risk.
- Comment on Elon Musk's SpaceX contracted to destroy retired space station - BBC News 5 months ago:
Honestly this seems like a way to back-door inject another $800 million into the failing starship program.
- Comment on YouTube is dedicated to making itself worse; destroys SponsorBlock with ad injection changes 5 months ago:
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.
- Comment on The level of engagement on Reddit these days 6 months ago:
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
- Comment on Self-balancing commuter pods ride old railway lines on demand 7 months ago:
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!
- Comment on The inside story of Elon Musk’s mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff 7 months ago:
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.
- Comment on The inside story of Elon Musk’s mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff 7 months ago:
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.
- Comment on Google is redesigning its search engine — and it’s AI all the way down 7 months ago:
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.
- Comment on Google is redesigning its search engine — and it’s AI all the way down 7 months ago:
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.
- Comment on The inside story of Elon Musk’s mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff 7 months ago:
Yeah that was the joke. 🙃