teawrecks
@teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on "Meta and X are going rogue:" European Digital Rights group (EDRi) urges EU to invest in infrastructure "like Mastodon, Peertube and other key pieces of the Fediverse" to secure Europe's independence 13 hours ago:
The US leadership right now, maybe, but remember that Trump didn’t win so much as the incumbent lost. Most Americans didn’t vote for right-wing policies, they voted against inflation and housing costs. It’ll only take a year or two before people start realizing that Trump can’t fix the problems either (or won’t, because that would mean eating the rich).
So yeah, probably no alliance in the short term, but the US isn’t even its own ally right now, so we need to see how this all shakes out before we know how we’ll align with the EU in the long term (i.e. beyond this term).
Trump knows this, and he’s also been advised that the one thing that historically restores popularity for a leader is expanding a country’s territory. So my guess is that, the worse Trump’s approval rating is, the more likely it’ll be that he tries to take Greenland or Panama. Which I think is still a huge gamble for his approval rating.
- Comment on I love my smart TV (From Mastodon) - Repost 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, i don’t like that all the more recent devices all added remotes and explicit apps you have to install and launch. Also the “newest” 4k-capable chromecast is from 2020, so I would already be upgrading to old hw that’s a worse experience.
- Comment on I love my smart TV (From Mastodon) - Repost 2 weeks ago:
Hah, I was going to say, I do check for updates at least once when I first get it, because I have run into TVs that shipped with HDR bugs in the stock firmware.
For the Chromecast, what happens with yours? Mine randomly restarts, or reconnects to wifi, or sometimes Plex has trouble buffering until I reboot it.
I recently bought a raspi5 to try out FCast, though currently afaik only Grayjay supports it.
- Comment on I love my smart TV (From Mastodon) - Repost 2 weeks ago:
I just never connect my TV to the internet and never have any problems. My old Chromecast is showing its age though.
- Comment on This Year, RISC-V Laptops Arrive 2 weeks ago:
I assume DeepComputing isn’t releasing any of their designs as open source, right? They’re just producing RISC-V compatible chips?
- Comment on Technologist: 'Fining Big Tech isn't working, make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain' 4 weeks ago:
What the? I’m literally saying what action to take, what is happening? Is there maybe a bug where you only see the first few characters of my post? Are you able to read these characters I’m typing? Testing testing testing. Let me know how far you get. Maybe there’s just too many words for you? Test test. Say “elephant” if you can read this.
- Comment on Technologist: 'Fining Big Tech isn't working, make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain' 4 weeks ago:
we will not land in a society where the general public profits from not having work. It will be the same owners of capital profiting as per usual.
If we do nothing, sure. I’m suggesting, like the article, that we do something.
The only sentiment I took issue with was the poster above who suggested that somehow the solution would be to delete/destroy illegally trained networks. I’m just saying that’s not practical nor progressive. AI is here to stay, we just need to create legislature that ensures it works for us, especially when it couldn’t have been built without us.
- Comment on Technologist: 'Fining Big Tech isn't working, make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain' 4 weeks ago:
I didn’t misinterpret what you were saying, everything I said applies to the specific case you lay out. If illegal networks were somehow entirely destroyed, someone would just make them again. That’s my point, there’s no way around that, there’s just holding people accountable when they do it. IMO that takes the form of restitutions to the people proportional to profits.
- Comment on Technologist: 'Fining Big Tech isn't working, make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain' 4 weeks ago:
For sure, here you go.
- Comment on Technologist: 'Fining Big Tech isn't working, make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain' 4 weeks ago:
I understand that you are familiar with the buzzword “LLM”, but let me introduce you to a different one: transformers.
Virtually all modern successful AIs are based on transformers, LLMs included. I agree that LLMs currently amount to a chinese-room-inspired parlor trick, but the money involved has no doubt advanced all transfomer-based AI research, both directly (what works for LLMs may generalize) and indirectly (the market demand for LLMs in consumer products has created the a demand for power and compute hardware).
We have transformer-based AI to thank for our understanding of the covid19 protein, and developing a safe and effective vaccine in a timely manner.
The massive demand for energy has convinced Microsoft, Meta, and others to invest in their own modern nuclear power plants, representing a monumental step forward in sustainable energy generation that we have been trying to convince the US government to take for decades.
Modern AI is being used to solve the hardest problems of nuclear fusion. If we can finally crack that nut, there’s no telling what’s possible.
But specifically when it comes to LLMs, profitable or not, people obviously find them useful. People aren’t using it in place of search engines, or doing all their homework with it because they don’t find it useful. My only argument is that any AI trained on public content without consent should be required to effectively buy a license from, or pay royalties to the public. If McDonald’s is going to replace their front counters with AI trained on public content, then they should have to pay taxes proportional to how much use they get from that AI.
In the theoretical extreme, if someone trains an AI on the general public’s data, and is able to create an AI that somehow replaces every job on earth, then congrats, we now live in a post-work society, we just need to reach out and take it rather than letting one person capitalize infinitely.
And at the end of the day, if you honestly believe the profits from AI are non-existent, then what are you worried about? All those companies putting all their eggs in the LLM basket are going to disappear overnight when the AI bubble finally pops, right?
- Comment on Technologist: 'Fining Big Tech isn't working, make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain' 4 weeks ago:
Destroying it is both not an option, and an objectively regressive suggestion to even make.
Destruction isn’t possible because even if you deleted every bit of information from every hard drive in the world, now that we know it’s possible, someone would recreate it all in a matter of months.
Regressive because you’re literally suggesting that we destroy a new technology because we’re afraid of what it will do to the technology it replaces. Meanwhile, there’s a very decent chance that AI is our best chance at solving the energy/climate crises through advancing nuclear tech, as well as surviving the next pandemic via ground breaking protein folding tech.
I realize AI tech makes people uncomfortable (for…so many reasons), but becoming old fashioned conservatives in response is not a solution.
- Comment on Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be 5 weeks ago:
The problem in many cases isn’t that they don’t literally see it but that they aren’t aware of what constitutes racism a lot of the time.
I agree with this part, “in many cases” sure,
That’s the primary issue here.
…but I think this a strong claim to make unless you have data to back it up.
I believe you and I are likely speaking from our own anecdotal experience on the platform, and for all we know, most people are in instance bubbles and are also speaking from their own perspectives.
If the “primary issue” is “why do some people not report seeing racism?” and the two possible explanations are either “they see it but are not aware” and “they actually never see it”, then unless we have accurate data from all those bubbles, we can’t make any claims about which is the real explanation.
But if you have data on this, that would change everything.
- Comment on Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be 5 weeks ago:
Comparing the “racism” present on a federated service to that on a centralized one doesn’t make sense. You can say certain instances of the service fail to adequately moderate racism, but there are so many niche pockets of mastodon that most people are exposed to, and moderated by, completely different groups.
To make a slightly more nerdy analogy, it’s like someone saying “the windows desktop experience is better than Linux”. Well Linux doesn’t come with a desktop interface, so that statement doesn’t make sense. Which of the dozens of windowers/distros are you talking about? I’m sure the criticism is fair, but it doesn’t contain enough information to make any real claim.
So it’s not unreasonable for one person to say “I see racism on Mastodon” and many others to say “I never see it”, and not just because of the races of the people involved. “Mastodon” refers to a protocol, not the various ecosystems that use it.
- Comment on Silent but Deadly: I met some of my closest friends through multiplayer games. Then a strange happening turned everyone (literally) speechless. 1 month ago:
“Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.”
- Comment on Next Generation Internet (NGI) projects adopt platforms Mastodon and PeerTube as main communication channels 1 month ago:
No idea what the state of this topic is in Japan.
Just faxed them about it. Will get back to you as soon as they respond.
- 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 1 month ago:
- Comment on Taylor Swift Fans Are Leaving X for Bluesky After Trump’s Election 2 months ago:
I promise you in a year you’ll be asking the same question about the same group of people.
- Comment on malicious backdoor found in widely used game mod by Low Level [YouTube] 2 months ago:
Wonder if steam workshop scans for this kind of thing, or if it would have otherwise been found quicker.
- Comment on Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users 2 months ago:
Which is a good reminder to everyone to support your local Lemmy instances.
- Comment on need helpbuiltding a PC, not sure where to ask 2 months ago:
Honestly, it’s just a matter of knowing this list:
- CPU
- RAM
- motherboard
- GPU
- hard drive
- case
- power supply
And roughly how they should fit together.
But every time I build a PC I have to figure out what the latest versions of these parts are, make sure they’re compatible, and when I get the parts they might have some unique form factor I have to figure out on the fly. Just going to PC Part Picker and picking out each part is 90% of the way there. After that it’s just a matter of getting them, sticking them together, crossing your fingers that it powers on, and installing an OS. If/when it doesn’t power on, THAT’S when you start learning…
But I would say building a PC is not a fraction as difficult as say, knowing how to work on a car.
- Comment on need helpbuiltding a PC, not sure where to ask 2 months ago:
I feel like the end goal has always been the incentive for me. I learned to build a PC because, if I wanted to play the games I wanted, there wasn’t another option. I still do always enjoy the process of putting it all together, but I’m always ready to have it all working, booted, and put to use (if not just so I can be relieved that I don’t need to RMA anything, hah).
If the end goal isn’t something that interests you, then maybe it’s just not worth doing it.
- Comment on Analogue’s 4K Nintendo 64 launches next year for $249 2 months ago:
I can’t fault them for not making such a niche product at a large enough scale to make them readily available and cheap. I know we’ve become accustomed to that from other larger companies, but for a small company, that’s either very risky or just not an option. So they just design cool stuff, make just enough so that they know they can safely sell them all and thus make a predictable ROI, and move onto the next cool thing. No pressure for growth or satisfying every potential customer. Sounds like the dream.
- Comment on Players are now less "accepting" that games will be fixed, say Paradox, after "underestimating" the reaction to Cities: Skylines 2's performance woes 3 months ago:
I was looking forward to cities 2. When I heard it had crippling performance issues, I decided to wait. Still haven’t gotten back around to it. There are just too many other games that already work for me to put up with broken new releases.
- Comment on Which unplayed game in your library are you most looking forward to playing eventually? 3 months ago:
I highly recommend skipping straight to witcher 3 unless you really love the series and want to consume everything it has. Still, 3 + the dlc has a lot.
TBH my favorite part of W3 was all the side quests. The writing and dialogue are intriguing and give you more of a flavor for the dark fantasy of the world.
- Comment on Which unplayed game in your library are you most looking forward to playing eventually? 3 months ago:
It’s worth noting that the “scary” parts of the Outer Wilds DLC (are very mild, and) are not mandatory. That is to say, for the most part, if you find solving a part of the game too stressful, try approaching it differently.
I loved the base game and DLC. Should be the top of any backlog IMO.
- Comment on Eric Schmidt: ‘We’re not going to hit the climate goals. I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem.’ With "alien intelligence"! 3 months ago:
I intended for you to think about it, and if you disagree, offer a thought out response. There’s still time for that, just scroll back up.
I’m willing to bet I’m older than you.
Given your responses so far, it’s much less embarrassing for you to say you’re either 15 or a troll bot.
Regarding the state of the climate, human kind is an ant hill, a game of factorio, a manufacturing pipeline. We’re in a race to generate enough energy to escape the grave of our own making that started over a hundred years before any of us were born. We’ve already crossed the threshold where, if we stopped emitting any greenhouse gasses whatsoever, we will still see a massive population decline due to heat, weather, food shortage, etc, most in poorer countries who are neither responsible for the problem, nor capable if dealing with it.
Our best bet to save as many lives as possible is to continue research into cutting edge power generation, food production, clean water generation, and sustainable and durable housing/cooling technologies.
The strategy of telling the wealthy to stop consuming energy cold turkey is no longer a viable strategy, as it’s not beneficial for anyone. It’s also not practical unless you’re a fictional, superhuman character who can zip around and force humankind to your benevolent will (or you have globally powerful military and are willing to enact martial law, but good luck).
To win the race, to reduce the ensuing death and destruction and minimize unnecessary casualties to the human (and other) species, we need to put as much research as possible into new renewable tech (solar, wind, water, nuclear, and fusion if possible). It’s unclear what AI has to offer, but it is already being used to solve manufacturing challenges that neither a single human capable of, nor a group of humans can effectively abstract and communicate about. If this can be leveraged to develop new sustainable energy or bioengineering solutions that were never before known to be possible, that is how we save the most lives.
What doesn’t save any lives is rallying behind the same absolutist strategy we’ve tried for over 50 years and making no progress. But I get it, memes travel further and faster than measured thought. That’s also a problem for us.
- Comment on Eric Schmidt: ‘We’re not going to hit the climate goals. I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem.’ With "alien intelligence"! 3 months ago:
You know I didn’t say that, but the sad part is I do believe you think the world is a simple dichotomy of rich vs poor.
Oh well, I’ll take it over the other false dichotomies. I like your energy kid, but you’re going to have to get smarter if you want to see change in the world, for all of our sakes. Your current strategy ain’t gonna cut it.
- Comment on when Nintendo finally runs out of ideas 3 months ago:
100% of this post was clearly AI generated slop.
- Comment on Eric Schmidt: ‘We’re not going to hit the climate goals. I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem.’ With "alien intelligence"! 3 months ago:
Wealth inequality is a huge problem that needs to be addressed. And so is reducing complex systemic issues to catchy reductive memes.
- Comment on Eric Schmidt: ‘We’re not going to hit the climate goals. I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem.’ With "alien intelligence"! 3 months ago:
Well yeah, no sun no problem! What could go wrong?