anachronist
@anachronist@midwest.social
- Comment on The inside story of Elon Musk’s mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff 2 days 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 2 days 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 2 days 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 2 days 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 2 days ago:
Yeah that was the joke. 🙃
- Comment on The inside story of Elon Musk’s mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff 2 days ago:
Spite and pettiness seem like a poor way to run a business but what do I know? I’m just a guy who’s gotten zero starships successfully to orbit.
- Comment on Has Generative AI Already Peaked? - Computerphile 1 week ago:
Alternate theory we’ll look back the same way we looked back on the claims that IBM watson was intelligent, or the claims in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, that <insert technology x> was going to make computers truly intelligent.
- Comment on Has Generative AI Already Peaked? - Computerphile 1 week ago:
A simple path forward, is to go from classifying single elements of training data, to classifying multiple elements and their relationship in the training data.
Training data already has multiple labels.
Slightly less simple, is to gather orders of magnitude more data, by just hooking the input to an IRL robot.
An entire point of the paper and video is that massive increases in training set size are showing diminishing returns.
Another step, is for the NN to control the robot and decide which parts of the data require refinement, and focus on that.
🤡
- Comment on Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to Biden, who has already committed to signing it 3 weeks ago:
Tictok is horrible but this entire ban is being driven by the swamp being upset that young people have come to the wrong conclusion about Israel. I think that the idea is that as long as people are using facebook or google-owned properties, people can be shown only information that will lead them to the correct, approved opinions.
- Comment on Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract 4 weeks ago:
2000s were peak libertarian for SP. They were against the war on terror so they didn’t code “Bush-right” but they were extremely libertarian. I remember the media trying to push this “millennials are conservative actually” line by inventing the phrase “South-park republican”
Still I remember them landing some good observations. For instance, in one episode the boys learn how veal is made and become animal rights activists. You can tell TP/MS are not animal rights activists, but after the boys steal the cows the media, police, government, etc all instantly start calling the boys “terrorists.” It really caught the whole post-9/11 zeitgeist of “anybody you don’t like is a terrorist.”
- Comment on Enshittification Continues: Discord to begin showing advertisements on it's free platform 1 month ago:
This is the definition of late-stage capitalism. Capitalism starts out by finding useful things that improve lives for at least some people (potentially by ruining it for others). For instance, it invents assembly lines to make manufactured goods cheaper but in so doing makes the worker’s job dull, repetitive, stressful, and robs him of his agency. This is early stage capitalism. Things are getting worse for some people but broadly better for many.
But then later on capitalism runs out of things to improve. You can only invent the assembly line once. You only get that boost when you implement it. So you have to come up with something else. Maybe you computerize things. But eventually you can’t wring any more profits out of production and profits must go up, so you have to take them out of the customers. You roll up all the competing firms into a monopoly and then start jacking up the price, slashing the quality, etc. This is late-stage. It becomes more and more parasitic and the snake eats its own tail.
- Comment on Google’s self-designed office swallows Wi-Fi “like the Bermuda Triangle” 2 months ago:
“You know what would be totally sick? What if we made our building’s roof into a matrix of inverted metal parabolas?”
- Comment on Why is AI Pornifying Asian Women? 3 months ago:
Part of that is just smoothness and symmetry which we consider to be attractive attributes but is also a consequence of the averaging that the algorithm is doing (which is why AI images all look various sorts of “melty”).
- Comment on Why is AI Pornifying Asian Women? 3 months ago:
How is he wrong?
- Comment on Why is AI Pornifying Asian Women? 3 months ago:
I work in tech and asian guys tend to outnumber white guys in it, especially if you combine east asian and south asian.
- Comment on The activist who’s taking on artificial intelligence in the courts: ‘This is the fight of our lives’ 4 months ago:
LLM-based chatbot and image generators are the types of “AI” that rely on stealing people’s intellectual property. I’m struggling to see how that applies to “drone swarming technology.” The only obvious use case is in the generation of propaganda.
- Comment on Atuin is an open-source shell command history app for Linux with syncing, unlimited history, and with contextual search 4 months ago:
I’ve been using
fishfor many years now which has similar history recall features along with an improved and simplified syntax: - Comment on The activist who’s taking on artificial intelligence in the courts: ‘This is the fight of our lives’ 4 months ago:
Strategically important how exactly?