FaceDeer
@FaceDeer@fedia.io
Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.
- Comment on Are there any serial killers still active in the US today? With all the tech like dna, fingerprints, flock camera's etc. Would it be almost impossible to be one? 5 days ago:
Could well be, I'm sure there were lots of poisonings and whatnot that earlier forensic science misattributed to natural causes.
But it could also be that murderers are getting more savvy too. There have been so many CSI-style shows, police procedurals, and so forth that it doesn't take a great genius to know how to make it a lot harder for police to identify you. Like, if you made an untraceable "ghost gun" to shoot someone with, don't carry it around in your backpack for days after shooting the guy. Sheesh, basic stuff.
- Comment on Why put data centers in space? 1 week ago:
2-10 million per launch, but each launch will carry ~60 satellites. So that's as little as $30,000 per satellite.
- Comment on Why put data centers in space? 1 week ago:
They're not putting up just one satellite. It's going to be a constellation. The constellation as a whole will be equivalent to a data center.
Also, it won't cost them millions of dollars to launch a single satellite. That's why this project is paired up with Starship development, the two go hand in hand. Starship makes the launches cheap, Starmind gives Starship the scale of demand a ship like that needs for its economics to work.
- Comment on Why put data centers in space? 1 week ago:
The actual Starmind satellites will have 175kW of compute on them, Scott made that video before the specs were released so he assumed a minimum package. But all of this scales linearly, if you double the power usage you just double the size of the solar panels and double the size of the radiators. If a 20kW satellite works then you can bolt ten of them together and get a 200kW satellite that works too.
- Comment on Why put data centers in space? 1 week ago:
Here's the usual video I use for this issue, a walk-through of the equations on how things cool in space where Scott Manley runs the numbers and shows that it's perfectly reasonable with a modest radiator panel.
What temperature are you assuming for the radiators? At 80° Celsius (353 Kelvin) they can do 880 watts per square meter. And bear in mind that radiator panels are double-sided, so that makes 1760 watts per square meter of dedicated panel. 80 degrees is what these chips are meant to run at, if you wanted to you could use a heat pump to make the radiator panels even hotter and they'd get much more efficient - according to the Stefan–Boltzmann law thermal radiation goes up proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. Shouldn't be necessary here though.
- Comment on Why put data centers in space? 1 week ago:
There's a whole lot of answers in here saying cooling is impossible or super hard, and that people whose literal job is building satellites haven't thought of this. Or that the people whose literal job is building satellites haven't though about all sorts of other basic stuff like "you can't do maintenance on satellites" or "there's radiation in space" or whatnot.
Yes, they've thought of all those things. Those aren't useful answers
The main advantages continuous high-power solar energy, different regulations being in play (it's "outside the regulatory environment), and in the case of SpaceX it provides synergy with their own rocket launch business. They're creating their own demand, allowing everything to be cheaper in bulk.
Yes, it's to "raise the stock value." Isn't that why companies do anything? Doing a thing that produces value is going to raise the value of the stock of the company doing it.
- Comment on Could machines develop consciousness just like we did? 2 weeks ago:
Mass and complexity are not equivalent. I doubt that a mountain is more conscious than either.
- Comment on Could machines develop consciousness just like we did? 2 weeks ago:
I think your question is equally poorly defined regardless of where the zero point is placed. Enough for what? What is this threshold for?
There are often things in nature that have natural "division points" along some particular spectrum, where conditions abruptly change (phase changes in chemicals when they pass through transition temperatures, for example) or where you have natural gaps where you don't find many examples because of dynamic feedback effects (the gap between planets and dwarf planets when it comes to their ability to clear their orbital neighborhoods, for example). It's possible that once we can actually measure consciousness and put a number to it we'll find that there are similar gaps, for whatever reason. That would be a very interesting and useful thing to know about. But that's putting the cart before the horse, we don't know how to measure consciousness in a numeric way yet. So any such patterns in the results are purely hypothetical.
- Comment on Could machines develop consciousness just like we did? 2 weeks ago:
If you'd like to go all the way down this rabbit hole there's panpsychism, which posits that consciousness is a continuous scale with "zero" literally being down in the elementary particles. So even a single molecule is not quite zero on the scale, having an extremely minuscule degree of consciousness to it.
I actually kind of like this because it means we don't have to try to put that zero point at some other arbitrary location.
- Comment on Are datacenters in space more lucrative than on earth? 2 weeks ago:
Scott Manley did a video that went through the numbers and formulae to calculate how cooling works for these sorts of satellites. Unsurprisingly, the professional satellite designers who think this is a reasonable thing appear to be correct about it.
There's a lot of misinformation circulating about how it's impossible to cool things effectively in space, but it's really not a complicated or new field. I think people mostly just want it to not work and stop there.
- Comment on Game Pass Was Supposed To Save Xbox – Instead, It’s Killing the Company 3 weeks ago:
I just spent a bunch of time talking about PC emulators, why would I just keep repeating myself? I just checked, that game came out in 2001 so I assume it runs on Windows 98. You can install that on DOSBox.
The PS1 hardware isn't being made any more, it's not going to last forever either. PS1 emulators will be needed for that as well.
- Comment on Game Pass Was Supposed To Save Xbox – Instead, It’s Killing the Company 3 weeks ago:
perfectly tuned for it.. for how long though?
Perfectly tuned forever, just keep the game bundled with the same emulator.
If eventually the system that the emulator runs on diverges too far from what the emulator was able to run on, then wrap it in another emulator to emulate that. Or just update the emulator, DOSBox is under the GPL.
How many indie titles on PC aged out of the platform and have no maintainer?
If you have an emulator then you don't need a maintainer. As far as the game is concerned it's still running on the exact same computer that it did when it was first released.
A person who purchased Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for PC would be unable to launch the game in any modern OS. But if they have it on PS1, it still works.
They'd need a PS1 emulator for that. DuckStation, for example.
A person who purchased Minecraft in 2011 can no longer play that game on the same computer they purchased it from.
The newer versions of Minecraft can't. The old version they purchased in 2011 still can because it hasn't changed.
I'm saying PC is a moving platform.
And I'm pointing out that an emulator need not be a moving platform. It can be a frozen snapshot of a particular moment in time. Get a game working on an emulator and you can freeze that emulator's code and configuration and then you'll know that the game will always work on it from then onward. Bundle the emulator with the game, like GOG does, and there's no "fiddling around" - you can indeed just sit down and play it.
- Comment on Game Pass Was Supposed To Save Xbox – Instead, It’s Killing the Company 3 weeks ago:
You can swap out their dosbox.exe with a version that includes CRT shaders, such as DOSBox Staging or DOSBox-X.
Or you could wrap the existing DOSBox window in an external shader using ReShade, it's a universal post-processing injector that can add a CRT filter.
My search also found all-in-one frontends called ExoDOS and LaunchBox/RetroArch to do this to a whole library of GOG games so that you don't have to do it individually to each.
- Comment on Game Pass Was Supposed To Save Xbox – Instead, It’s Killing the Company 3 weeks ago:
The answer there is emulation. Goid Old Games sells old DOS games and they work fine on modern computers because each comes wrapped in a DOS emulator.
- Comment on Just got arrested for a supposed DWI even though I blew a 0.0000000. Don't cops need to read your Miranda rights to you? I asked for a blood or hair follicle test and I was denied. WTH is happening? 4 weeks ago:
Miranda rights are only required during a custodial interrogation, which means you are in police custody (arrested or not free to leave), and the police are actively questioning or interrogating you. If the police arrest 50 people at a protest, put them in a van, process them at the precinct, and never ask them a single question about their conduct, the police never actually need to read them their rights.
Any self-incriminating statements you make before your rights are read to you generally cannot be used against you in court as primary evidence (this is the Exclusionary Rule). Note that that's as primary evidence, though. If you mention the kilogram of illicit substances hidden in your shoes before they Mirandize you they can't use that statement in court, but they sure can use that kilogram of illicit substances as physical evidence.
So other than the bare minimum of what the law says you have to say, always remember that it's Friday.
- Comment on Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search 4 weeks ago:
Trying to legislate the world to go back to the way it was in 2023 probably isn't going to work any better than DRM does.
- Comment on Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search 4 weeks ago:
Guess we'll see, then. I suspect the result is going to be a bunch of websites going "huh? Where did all our traffic suddenly disappear to?"
- Comment on Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search 4 weeks ago:
Also Moonshot, Alibaba, Baidu. Can they also be reined in?
It doesn't matter who invented DRM. My point is that DRM fundamentally doesn't work. If you pubish a web page in a manner that allows humans to read it then it's also readable by AIs. A pinkie-promise not to is the best you can get.
- Comment on Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search 4 weeks ago:
And they may also want a magical unicorn for a pet. Simply wanting a thing doesn't conjure it into existence.
They want the same thing that people who want DRM want - a way to show their content to a viewer without that viewer being able to copy what they're seeing. It's just as impossible either way. As with DRM there may be tricks one can come up with to hinder it temporarily under some circumstances, but fundamentally data is data. If someone can see it then someone can copy it.
- Comment on Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search 4 weeks ago:
“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”
Sounds like they want DRM,
- Comment on How did you guys deal with the death of a parent? 5 weeks ago:
There's no one "right" way to deal with it, for starters. People will give lots of advice and describe a bunch of scenarios but don't feel like you "should" do it any particular way or that you're doing something wrong if you grieve in your own way.
For me, I "talk" to my dad now and then. It's been six years now and I still find comfort in doing that. I'm an atheist, I don't believe he's actually hearing me, it's just a thing I do that feels nice psychologically. I've been imagining I'm keeping him "up to date" on stuff, since one of the things I told him on his deathbed was that I'd let him know "how it all turned out" - he was always future-focused and I'm sure it annoyed him that he wouldn't be around to see it.
I wouldn't worry too much about any deep and meaningful "final words" and such, though. I think the words that were exchanged throughout life were just as important, if not moreso.
- Comment on Will the next president of America have to do a world wide apology tour for this administration? Kind of like celebs do when they get their ass in a sling. 1 month ago:
As a Canadian, an "apology tour" would feel like this to me.
If the next administration wants forgiveness it'll have to show real progress on fixing America's broken system of government and its broken culture. That'll take longer than four years so the next administration should not expect forgiveness. The best it can hope for is to get started on eventual forgiveness.
In the meantime we need to keep diversifying away from America and building defenses against them because there's no reason to extend the benefit of the doubt. They elected not-Trump after the previous time Trump was elected and where did that lead them? Back to Trump.
- Comment on We found their kryptonite! 1 month ago:
I'm not even clear on how the bamboo is supposed to damage the data center.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Ah, in the name of environmentalism, go forth and plant invasive species?
What do people think this is actually going to do to data centers? Oh no, there's plants growing near them... like there weren't already?
- Comment on Bee fly 2 months ago:
In the lower right photo I can hear him yelling "wheee!"
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
It's a process. As long as there are new people showing up, or more rarely people who change their minds, there will always be some disequilibrium.
I was literally told in another thread on this same topic of "AI hate" that I should "leave this community, and not to return" because my views weren't in alignment with the community's. I don't tend to pay attention to that sort of social pressure but other people do and the result is an ongoing filtering of participation.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
But this is exactly the effect I'm pointing out. You say:
More engagement here is less engagement elsewhere, where profits and data mining and surveillance are priorities.
And you're describing "here" in terms that are appealing to anti-AI sentiment and "elsewhere" as being the opposite. Whether the effect is "secondary" or not, it's still an effect.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
You can drive engagement without money changing hands.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
This place that we're in right now is not a bubble of AI lovers, it's a bubble of AI haters.
Of course Lemmy is designed to feed engagement. If it wasn't then it would lose engagement to other forms of social media. For example, now that I've responded to your comment you're going to see a notification that will draw you back here.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Social media is typically designed to create and strengthen social bubbles, bringing together like-minded people and showing them what they want to see. It is also designed to feed "engagement". Rage is a great way to do that.
Just look at the prevalence of upvoting and downvoting tools in various social media sites. A great way to ensure that opinions that are popular within a particular community become even more prominent, while driving out anything that isn't popular within that community. Little wonder that views inside those bubbles become a bit skewed compared to the outside world as a whole.