balsoft

@balsoft@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Languages have rules and follow predictable patterns. French:⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s more about how this doesn’t follow the usual rule for adjective agreement. By that rule it would be le manteau blanc / la veste blance, but that sounds weird so “blanche” it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we assume paper towels are sterile, or at least clean?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a bad assumption to make. Many pathogenic bacteria can survive for months with no meal.

  It’s more that interacting with bacteria, even pathogenic bacteria, is a normal part of everyday life. That’s exactly what our immune systems are for. Unless you are sticking the paper inside you or doing surgery with it, you’ll be fine using a paper towel with some microbes on it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we assume paper towels are sterile, or at least clean?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The paper rolls themselves are variably clean or sterile

  No consumer-grade paper towel/kitchen roll is going to be sterile even in the wide “medical” sense, that’s basically a statistical impossibility. No factory is going to spend a shitton of extra money to have clean-room equipment and practices, and that means people will sneeze on it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we assume paper towels are sterile, or at least clean?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Is anyone assuming they’re sterile (aseptic) tho? I would hope nobody is using paper towels for anything important in a medical context. In other cases their sterility is not important at all, interacting with microbes (includiing pathogenic ones) is a normal part of everyday life and our immune systems are pretty good at dealing with them (unless you are exposed to something particularly nasty, like during a pandemic). Unless you go full-on germaphobe, the microbial contamination that exists on new paper towels is nothing compared to other stuff you interact with (smartphone, door handles, kitchen sponge, fresh produce, etc).

  Otherwise, they’re self-evidently cleaner than whatever I’m trying to clean with them, that’s why they work for cleaning in the first place. If I swipe a kitchen counter with them after cooking, it will very obviously have less gunk and shmutz now, which means it will be cleaner.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DLSS 5 comes with a massive 50-60% performance hit, so I hope you like lower frame rates with your dose of AI image enhancement⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Imperial China has you covered: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding (the horrors never cease)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I find that a bit weird, video compression (still) sucks for dark videos, either you need to make the bitrate higher or there will be artifacts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Park benches don't "open" until 10am⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It may have felt differently to you 25 years ago - maybe you were in a better neighborhood or something, but capitalism has always been about heartless extraction of money from the poor. Check out The Condition of the Working Class in England for a 180-year-old account of this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Every payment option has a fee⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If there’s an unavoidable fee for processing, it needs to be included in the initially advertised price of whatever you’re purchasing. In this case, the price should have been set $2 higher and the bank account fee should be $0. Otherwise it is just false advertising, since you cannot actually receive the service for the initially advertised price.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly yeah, that’s the best solution if you want to do something like this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Data contained on the phone is very much the property which they wanted to take into custody or control, and it was wiped.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google mistranslates the word because it uses English as a medium(probs).⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience, with the amount of mistakes similar to the one in the OP, I strongly suspect that language is somehow unbelievably close (semantically) to English then.

  I decided to quickly experiment with two languages I somewhat know, and got 3/3 incorrect translations consistent with English as intermediary:

  • Russian ширинка (fly, meaning “zipper on your trousers”) -> Georgian ფრენა (to fly, as in “flight”) - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary
  • Russian парковаться (to park, as in “park your car”) -> Georgian პარკი (park, meaning “green space with trees”) - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary
  • Russia лежать (to lie, as in “lie on your back”) -> Georgian ტყუილი (lie, as meaning “untruth”) - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary

  It makes exactly the same mistakes if you translate from Russian to Spanish and French too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think stuff like that would be up to the jury to decide. If I was on that jury I definitely wouldn’t consider just having a duress password to imply intent of “knowingly preventing the Government to take property into its custody”, especially since GrapheneOS doesn’t really mention state actors in its FAQ. It would be reasonable for him to claim that he enabled this feature to protect himself from illegal searches or kidnapping, and accidentally gave the wrong answer to the cops.

  But reading the OP interview it seems to me that he is almost admitting that he wiped the phone intentionally, tipping the scales significantly. Is it “beyond reasonable doubt” that he intentionally gave the duress password now? Maybe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, it doesn’t change anything. The statute says

  Whoever, before, during, or after any search for or seizure of property by any person authorized to make such search or seizure, knowingly destroys, damages, wastes, disposes of, transfers, or otherwise takes any action, or knowingly attempts to destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, transfer, or otherwise take any action, for the purpose of preventing or impairing the Government’s lawful authority to take such property into its custody or control or to continue holding such property under its lawful custody and control, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

  It’s clear that if he intended to wipe the phone and told the officer a password which would erase the contents, he “knowingly took an action for the purpose of preventing the Government’s lawful authority to take such property into its custody”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah and it’s even more stupid for him to be giving out interviews right now defending his actions. If I was him I would shut up in public and tell prosecutors that I was under extreme stress and pressure of the detainment and accidentally mixed up the real password with the duress password. The government can easily prove all elements for obstruction of justice and/or destruction of evidence here, except for intent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google mistranslates the word because it uses English as a medium(probs).⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  it should be able to translate text not just by the word definition, but also context and conceptual meaning.

  It has been doing that at least since 2016, and it’s using LLM-adjacent tech (transformer + RNN) since 2020. The problem is that it still seems to be doing things via English, which is especially problematic for single words with no context. In this example, “зачиняти” means “to close”. Google translates it to English as simply “close”, which loses the context of which meaning or even part of speech it is. Google then translates it to Japanese, but since the context is lost it assumes that “close” means “near” rather than “block an opening” and translates it as “chikai”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google mistranslates the word because it uses English as a medium(probs).⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, in my experience it absolutely does translate everything via English. If you need to translate from Ukranian directly to other languages, ironically Yandex Translate is probably your best bet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is what Democratic voters are saying. Will the party listen?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s like expecting fender benders to not happen. And people die in auto accidents. We accept that risk as a part of driving, and we understand that safety improvements over the years have made accidents more survivable. And yet we drive, take that risk, and know that it could be worse.

  Not to take away from the rest of your point with which I agree, but we absolutely must stop driving. The risks of driving are not necessary. There are plenty of other forms of transportation that are not only safer but also faster, healthier, make for better cities, and help eliminate poverty. Motonormativity is a crime perpetrated by capital to sell everyone more cars, tarmac, and gasoline, at an enormous cost to human wellbeing and life.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Date artsy girl⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mostly understood at least the basic points of all of his movies… except Inland Empire. That shit was just impossible to decipher even after re-watching it three times, the third one with pen and paper to try and piece the plot together (cause the Wikipedia plot section is useless at capturing the detail). Honestly I feel like he was just throwing shit at the camera and seeing what doesn’t end up on the cutting room floor. A shame that’s the one he went out on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Vancouver Police⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Drug consumption should never be criminalized. And I say this as someone who doesn’t even drink alcohol.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Love Wins⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In a residential setting with reasonable cable lengths, beefy enough extension cable, and reasonable loads you actually kinda can. That’s basically what a ring circuit is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The System does not work.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  All those “homeowners” are backed by a system of violent oppression called capitalism. Homeowners wouldn’t be able to collude and raise prices like this without the police which can enforce evictions and otherwise protect their property.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Take cover⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it depends on the country and industry. I never ever had to write a cover letter, but then again most of my jobs the company recruiters found and messaged me instead of the other way around. On the other hand one of my friends had to recently write a detailed cover letter and heavily customize their CV for every job they applied to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what the fuck is that allowed???⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what the fuck is that allowed???⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly that sounds really nice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨pied⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly nothing wrong with that, not my cup of tea but content like that definitely has an audience…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨And Miss The Opportunity To Tap That Ass?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s obviously wrong. I don’t need to read Mein Kampf to know that nazism is a bad idea. Sure, it helps, but it’s not necessary.

  Similarly, I don’t need to read the entire corpus of christian theology to understand that the bible is mostly fiction and that christofascists are wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨And Miss The Opportunity To Tap That Ass?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, IIRC The Hobbit was initially just a collection of bedtime fairy tales he made up for his children, of course it had inconsistencies.

  Actually, thinking about it, that seems like a plausible source of the Old Testament as well…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I know Reddit sucks but this one is funny.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, sadly it’s not a real passport. You can tell (at a minimum) because the first machine-readable passports were issued in 1980, and Egypt didn’t start issuing MRPs until 2008.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tried to login to the arch wiki but was given a 3 minute crypto challenge.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The point is to make scraping too expensive to be profitable. Even the easy level 4 anubis challenge multiplied by a few million pages becomes very expensive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨🤔 Interesting⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If a company unlawfully … reproduced protected works in a way that violates copyright law, then it has broken the law and should be prosecuted.

  Merely training an LLM on copyrighted material without holder’s permission (and then distributing the weights or selling access to inference on those weights) is a violation of copyright law if it were to be applied consistently (ignoring the fair use argument, which I’ll get back to). That is, if you applied any other computational process in this way, the result would be a derivative work. The reason it’s “different” this time is that the people violating the law are richer than those who wrote the law in the first place, not because of any legal argument.

  As of right now, there are multiple lawsuits against major LLM developers. In some of those cases, the courts have ruled that training on publicly available data can qualify as fair use.

  If a court ruled that it’s “fair use”, that actually lends more credence to the idea that LLM weights are a derivative work - “fair use” is a defense for copyright infringement that only makes sense in this case if the new work is an unauthorized derivative of the original.

  Whether it’s actually fair use or not is another question (I can see the fair use argument for open-weight non-commercial models, not so much for commercial offerings).

  BTW, I’m not even necessarily anti-AI (at least the open-weight, local models). I use a local model in my job almost daily, and also I think it’s mostly good that the entirety of FOSS corpus is available for download in a compressed and easily remixable form. I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy of the legal system which applies its already unjust copyright law (and most other laws) only against poor people.