spit_evil_olive_tips
@spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org
- Comment on Doug Bowser is stepping down as Nintendo of America president and COO | VGC 1 day ago:
best of luck to his replacement, Greg Yoshi
- Comment on Regulating AI hastens the Antichrist, says Palantir’s Peter Thiel 1 day ago:
there’s an old joke that poor people are “weird” but wealthy people are “eccentric”
if you heard someone in your family saying this bullshit at Thanksgiving, you’d think they were experiencing delusions and in need of professional mental help.
instead, Thiel talked about this in a four-part lecture series with sold-out tickets.
- Comment on A robot programmed to act like a 7-year-old girl works to combat fear and loneliness in hospitals 4 days ago:
“Nurses and medical staff are really overworked, under a lot of pressure, and unfortunately, a lot of times they don’t have capacity to provide engagement and connection to patients,” said Karen Khachikyan, CEO of Expper Technologies, which developed the robot.
tapping the sign: every “AI” related medical invention is built around this assumption that there’s too few medical staff and they’re all overworked and changing that is not feasible. so we have to invest millions of dollars into hospital robots because investing millions of dollars in actually paying workers would be too hard. (also, robots never unionize)
Robin is about 30% autonomous, while a team of operators working remotely controls the rest under the watchful eyes of clinical staff.
30%…according to the company itself. they have a strong incentive to exaggerate. and they’re not publishing any data of how they arrived at that figure so that it could be independently verified.
it sounds like they took one of the telepresence robots that’s been around for 10+ years and slapped ChatGPT into it and now they’re trying to fundraise on the hype of being an “AI” company. it’s a good grift if you can make it work.
- Comment on A Cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover Is Causing a Supply Chain Disaster 4 days ago:
Asshole cars for mostly assholes
from the article:
Some firms have reportedly already laid off staff, with the Unite union claiming that workers in the JLR supply chain “are being laid off with reduced or zero pay.” Some have been told to “sign up” for government benefits, the union claims.
…
JLR, which is owned by India’s Tata Motors, is one of the UK’s biggest employers, with around 32,800 people directly employed in the country. Stats on the company’s website also claim it supports another 104,000 jobs through its UK supply chain and another 62,900 jobs “through wage-induced spending.”
regardless of your opinion about the cars or the people who drive them…thousands of people getting furloughed or laid off suddenly is bad.
- Comment on ‘I love you too!’ My family’s creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy 1 week ago:
It’s advertised as a healthier alternative to screen time
vaping and e-cigarettes were initially advertised as a way for cigarette smokers to quit.
- Comment on Social robots can help relieve the pressures felt by carers 1 week ago:
“In other words, these conversations with a social robot gave caregivers something that they sorely lack – a space to talk about themselves”
so they’re doing a job that’s demanding, thankless, often unpaid (in the case of this study, entirely unpaid, because they exclusively recruited “informal” caregivers)
and…it turns out talking about it improves their mood?
yeah, that’s groundbreaking. no one could have foreseen it.
if you did this with actual humans it’d be “lol yeah that’s just therapy and/or having friends” and you wouldn’t get it published in a scientific paper.
it’s written up as a “robotics” story but I’m not sure how it being a “robot” changes anything compared to a chatbot. it seems like this is yet another “discovery” of “hey you can talk to an LLM chatbot and it kinda sorta looks like therapy, if you squint at it”.
(tapping the sign about why “AI therapy” is stupid and trying to address the wrong problem)
- Comment on Elon Musk is trying to silence Microsoft employees who criticize Charlie Kirk 1 week ago:
You need better mental health care.
you start off by saying you’ve always thought you’re on the left
but the moment you disagree with someone, you start shit like this, which is a very common pattern of argument from right-wingers.
“I think your opinion is so wrong that it’s a symptom of mental illness” is just fucking stupid. do better. or, if you refuse to do better, stop attempting the “I’ve always been on the left but…” shtick. it is absolutely see-through and does not fool anyone.
- Comment on Comcast Executives Warn Workers To Not Say The Wrong Thing About Charlie Kirk | 404 Media 2 weeks ago:
I haven’t. It was omitted from the article in question. I stand corrected.
keep standing…because here’s the 5th paragraph of the article:
Political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC on Wednesday after speaking about Kirk’s death on air. During a broadcast on Wednesday following the shooting, anchor Katy Tur asked Dowd about “the environment in which a shooting like this happens,” according to Variety. Dowd answered: “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
- Comment on Comcast Executives Warn Workers To Not Say The Wrong Thing About Charlie Kirk | 404 Media 2 weeks ago:
a contributor who made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event
have you read the actual statement that got him fired?
On September 10, 2025, commenting on the killing of Charlie Kirk, Dowd said on-air, “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.” Dowd also speculated that the shooter may have been a supporter.
you can agree or disagree with the decision to fire him (I’m not shedding any tears, Dowd was the chief strategist for the 2004 Bush re-election campaign, it’s ludicrous that he was working for a supposedly “progressive” network like MSNBC in the first place)
but characterizing that statement as “celebrating murder” is just bullshit.
- Comment on Comcast Executives Warn Workers To Not Say The Wrong Thing About Charlie Kirk | 404 Media 2 weeks ago:
How the fuck does the government have this much control over the media?
wealthy oligarchs purchased the media, and purchased the government. so it’s not the government controlling the media directly, it’s just that they report to the same boss.
- Comment on Microsoft mandates a return to office, 3 days per week 2 weeks ago:
My best guess is that you were going for “hypothetical.”
no, if I meant hypothetical I would have said hypothetical. notice that I gave two hypotheticals - Brinnon-Redmond and Tacoma-Redmond. only the Brinnon one was pathological.
let’s go back to 9th grade Advanced English and diagram out my comment. that sentence is in a paragraph, the topic of which is “some shit about Seattle’s geography that people who’ve never lived here probably don’t know”. notice I’m talking about geography. I wasn’t saying anything about Brinnon’s population, or the likelihood of its residents working at Microsoft. that was entirely words you put into my mouth and then decided you disagreed with.
if you think pathological is the wrong word choice there, then no I don’t think you actually understand what it means, at least not in the context I was using it. from wikipedia:
In computer science, pathological has a slightly different sense with regard to the study of algorithms. Here, an input (or set of inputs) is said to be pathological if it causes atypical behavior from the algorithm, such as a violation of its average case complexity, or even its correctness.
there’s crow-flies distance and there’s driving distance, and obviously driving distance is always longer, but usually not that much longer. playing around with Google Maps again, Seattle-Tacoma is 25 miles crow-flies but 37 miles driving, for a ratio of 1.5. that seems likely to be about average. the Brinnon-Redmond distance, without the ferry, gives you a ~3.7 ratio. that’s an input that causes significantly worse performance than the average case. it’s pathological.
the closest synonym to pathological in this context would be “worst-case”, but that would be subtly incorrect, because then I would be claiming that Brinnon is the longest driving distance out of all possible commutes to Redmond within a 50 miles crow-flies bubble. you’d need some fancy GIS software to find that, not just me poking around for a few minutes in Google Maps.
(and this is the technology sub-lemmy, in a thread about something that will mostly affect software engineers, and planning out a driving commute is a classic example of a pathfinding algorithm…using “pathological” from the computer science context here is actually an extremely cromulent word choice)
there seems to be a recurring pattern of you responding to me, making up shit I didn’t actually say, and then nitpicking about it. recently you accused me of “trying to both-sides Nazis”. please stop doing that.
- Comment on Microsoft mandates a return to office, 3 days per week 2 weeks ago:
We’re seriously citing a population of 900 people on the Olympic Peninsula as somehow central to the RTO order?
I said “for a pathological example”
if you don’t know what that term means, you can look it up.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 2 weeks ago:
But I’m still able to use it, so.
yeah. except when you’re not.
because this “I can do whatever I want” Ron-Swanson-wannabe brand of libertarianism is very predictable.
if you go to a dinner party and the host notices your Spyware Amulet and says “turn that off or leave my house” would you respect their property rights? without pissing and moaning about it?
if a bar or restaurant banned them (like happened with Google Glass) would you respect that rule as well?
if you were on a date, and your date noticed and said “that’s kinda creepy, would you mind turning it off?” would you do it? or would you start ranting about how it’s not infringing on your date’s rights?
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 2 weeks ago:
yeah, no, we still disagree. I think you are missing the point completely, and continually.
general protip: if the conversation is about some behavior being creepy or weird or against social mores, and you jump in talking about the legality of it, you are missing the point, and also contributing to the creepiness.
for another example, upskirt photography was legal in the US until 2004 (at least at the federal level, state laws seem to have trickled in around the same timeframe)
hop in a time machine back to 2000, and imagine there’s a digital camera that’s marketing itself as being very easy to attach to your shoe in order to take surreptitious upskirt photos.
people say “wow that’s a fucking creepy product” and you jump in to say that technically it’s not illegal, and people have the right to attach cameras to their shoes. and if a woman is wearing a skirt in a crowd of people, and sees a guy with a camera on his shoe, she has the right to walk away from him. that is technically true, and also completely misses the actual point.
if you think upskirt photos are a bad analogy, here’s a reddit thread from 2 weeks ago about a gynecologist wearing the “Meta Ray-Ban” sunglasses that have a built-in camera.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 2 weeks ago:
“data is the new oil”
most people keep their phones in their pockets, which would ruin audio quality for 24/7 listening, and Apple and Android are able to restrict app permissions as well to prevent it.
VC money doesn’t care about whether normal people actually want a device like this. what they’re really after is “we’re collecting a bunch of user-specific data that no one else has, that we can sell to people who think it’ll help them do better ad targeting (among other things)”
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 2 weeks ago:
people have the right to do things you personally disapprove of
meanwhile, literally in the headline:
Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy.
no one is saying you don’t have “the right” to wear this Spyware Pendant in your one-party consent state.
people are saying it’s creepy and you’re jumping in defending it with “well, technically, it’s not illegal, depending on state law”. you’re just completely missing the point entirely.
this is like, if someone wrote an article about how people are annoyed by someone microwaving fish in the office cafeteria, you chimed in with “well they can simply quit and find a different job where people don’t microwave fish at the office”.
- Comment on Microsoft mandates a return to office, 3 days per week 2 weeks ago:
Puget Sound-area employees: If you live within 50 miles of a Microsoft office, you’ll be expected to work onsite three days a week by the end of February 2026.
“return to office” mandates are always, always, always a form of stealth layoff.
people structure their lives around their commute (or lack thereof). if you can work from home and don’t have to go to the office like it’s 2019, it opens up a bunch of places to live that wouldn’t be feasible otherwise.
this will force a bunch of employees into godawful commutes, or require them to move to be closer to the office. that’ll be relatively easy for younger employees who most likely rent an apartment and don’t have kids, but much harder for older / more experienced people who own houses, have kids, a partner with their own job, etc. lots of people will just quit instead - constructive dismissal.
also, I suspect many people who aren’t familiar with the Seattle area will read “50 miles” and think “about an hour’s drive”…lmao. 50 miles as the crow flies, in Seattle’s geography, can be a multi-hour drive, possibly including a ferry ride, before considering traffic delays. for a pathological example, Brinnon to Redmond is 35 miles in a straight line, but 130 miles driving distance, or 75 miles driving distance if you take a ferry. (and there can be a multi-hour wait just to drive on to the ferry during peak times)
even if you constrain it to 50 miles driving distance - Tacoma to Redmond is 43 miles driving distance according to Google. if you ask it for driving directions and specify “arrive at 9:30am” you get an estimate of “typically 1 hr to 2 hr 30 min”. public transit takes 2 hours, and that’s assuming you’re leaving directly from downtown Tacoma.
- They thought they were making technological breakthroughs. It was an AI-sparked delusion.edition.cnn.com ↗Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 24 comments
- Comment on Tech CEOs Praise Donald Trump at White House Dinner 3 weeks ago:
from The Needling, Seattle’s local Onion-esque satire site:
Bill Gates Compliments Trump on Wife Who Didn’t Ditch Him Just Because He’s in the Epstein Files
- Comment on An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with Autism 3 weeks ago:
Research has shown that practicing social interactions with professionals in a clinical face-to-face intervention can improve outcomes for individuals, but these solutions are often costly or not widely available.
the common theme every single time I read about LLM chatbots being used for mental health - having human therapy is great but it’s just too expensive for regular people. and that’s treated as an immutable fact about society that can’t be changed. (“it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”)
human therapy is too costly? OK, make it cheaper, or free, for the patients. it’s not widely available? OK, pay the therapists more, and give them better working conditions.
but where will the money to do that come from?
Silicon Valley is spending billions of dollars building AI datacenters. so I dunno, where is that money coming from?
resource allocation is a choice that we as a society, and a species, make. we can make different choices. we don’t need to confine ourselves to “well human therapy is expensive, so only rich people can access it, and poor people have to settle for AI slop, but they should be grateful because without the AI slop they’d have nothing at all”.
- Comment on How much does storage speed affect your games? 5 weeks ago:
a cheap docking station with two SATA slots (currently housing hard disks) and putting them together on a RAID0 almost doubles a single one’s performance.
you can buy a 50cc moped and attach a NOS cylinder to it. that might be a fun hobby project, if you’re into it.
but in a drag race, you’re going to get beat by a 10 year old Toyota Prius. because there’s only so much you can eke out of a 50cc engine.
“RAID0 using a cheap 2-slot external enclosure” is one of the more cursed things I’ve ever contemplated. firmly in “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” territory.
- Comment on MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing 5 weeks ago:
the remaining 5 percent are totally awesome and doing great and hey check out these jangling keys aren’t they shiny and interesting
- Comment on How much does storage speed affect your games? 5 weeks ago:
short answer: buy NVMe. plug it directly into your motherboard, don’t use an enclosure. forget about wonky RAID0 crap.
longer answer:
SATA SSDs (which you say in the comments below are all you’ve got) are an evolutionary dead-end. they’re SSDs pretending to be very fast hard drives. they end up being bottlenecked by the assumptions that the SATA protocol makes about how fast a hard drive can be.
look at this chart for example. SATA (AHCI) limits a device to having 32 commands queued up at once, which means the operating system needs to jump through hoops in terms of maintaining its own queue of pending reads & writes and issuing them to the device as queue space becomes available.
NVMe raises that limit to 64k, which for any non-server workload is effectively unlimited. the NVMe drive can respond to IO requests pretty much as quickly as the OS can dispatch them.
if you want to know more nitty-gritty details, Scaling ZFS for NVMe is an interesting talk, much of it isn’t specific to ZFS, but instead is about how NVMe devices are so fast that they’re forcing filesystem developers to rethink long-standing assumptions about drives being slow.
- Comment on UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought 1 month ago:
I’ve always called it “getting mail-blasted on the information superhighway” but not many dictionaries include this alternative usage, and Merriam-Webster filed for a restraining order against me.
- Comment on This startup wants to use the Earth as a massive battery 1 month ago:
yeah, the scalability of this seems like a pretty big challenge
annoyingly, they talk about the amount of water they pumped only in terms of energy (35MWh) and not in terms of water volume.
I think they do that because, if you estimate the water volume…it’s pretty unimpressive.
going off the numbers for Bath County Pumped Storage Station, the largest in the US, and until 2021 the largest in the world:
total storage capacity of 24,000 MWh - meaning that this power station built in the late 70s / early 80s has almost 700 times the storage capacity of this 35MWh demo
between their upper reservoir and lower reservoir, their water capacity is 78.4 million cubic meters. so as a crude estimate, Quidnet’s demo project used ~115,000 cubic meters.
Olympic swimming pool contains 2.500 cubic meters. so, again with the caveat that this is a rough estimate because Quidnet didn’t publish the actual numbers…this demo they’re bragging about involved 45 Olympic swimming pools worth of water.
- Comment on This startup wants to use the Earth as a massive battery 1 month ago:
yep, 100%
that’s even one of their main selling points:
And Quidnet’s approach, which uses commercially available equipment…
this seems to fall into the bucket of “fossil fuel industry looking for ways to diversify and still make profits even as fossil fuel usage declines”
also notable is that fracking for oil is typically a one-time (or at least time-limited) thing. you do it to some rock formation, extract the oil or natural gas from it, and then move on to another formation.
what they’re pursuing here seems to be repeated fracking, pumping water in and back out over and over again. this article about Racoon Mountain in TN for example, mentions a daily pumping cycle - fill up the reservoir using excess nuclear power at night, then drain it during the day.
they’re claiming success based on pumping in water, sealing it up for 6 months, then pumping it back out again. that’s very different from pumping water in and out of this “impermeable” rock every 24 hours, for years or decades (Racoon Mountain was built in the 1970s)
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 1 month ago:
So much for dissing on AIs for not being able to count.
no, I’m still going to do that.
- Comment on AI Data Centers in Texas Used 463 Million Gallons of Water, Residents Told to Take Shorter Showers 1 month ago:
yeah, that sure makes it infeasible 👀
uh-huh. do you have the source data for that infographic?
it’s a bit hard to read because it’s ridiculously low-res (almost a full quarter of a megapixel), but I can at least make out the caption, which says “European cities with district heating systems (population)”
from that alone I suspect it’s a bit misleading - it’s ambiguous whether the population they’re highlighting is the population of the city total, or the population served by the district heating system.
eg, if there’s a city with 100k population, and a college campus in that city that serves 1000 students with district heating, does that show up on the map as a dot representing 1k population? or 100k?
as I said, this depends heavily on high population density. I don’t doubt that it can work in European cities, or on American college campuses (because those tend to be some of the few places in the US that have population density approaching a European city, as well as the political tolerance for that sort of centrally managed infrastructure)
but the OP I replied to was talking about trying to do district heating in suburban / exurban Texas. I don’t know if you’re from the US, or if you’ve ever been to Texas. if you haven’t, you probably don’t understand the sheer scale of the sprawl we’re talking about here. go pick one of the cities on that infographic, look up its population density (in people per square km), and compare it to the population density of suburbs in Dallas / Fort Worth. if they’re even within an order of magnitude of each other, I’ll give you a cookie.
- Comment on AI Data Centers in Texas Used 463 Million Gallons of Water, Residents Told to Take Shorter Showers 1 month ago:
could we not use the data center as water heaters and distribute the hot water to households?
is that technically possible? sure. it’s called district heating. that wikipedia article mentions examples of it being used in the Roman empire, 14th century France, the 19th century US Naval Academy, and early 20th century MIT campus.
in practice…houses already have a “regular” water connection running to them. in order for this to be practical, you’re talking about having to run plumbing for a 2nd hot water connection. to every house.
come up with an estimate for how much you think that would cost. then go look up the actual cost that Flint spent on replacing their primary water connection pipes. then go look at your estimate again.
when it’s feasible, usually you see it on a college campus, or somewhere else with high population density and a centrally-located physical plant providing the hot water / steam.
we’re talking about data centers in Texas here. they’re probably in some warehouse district in exurban sprawl, and the homes you’d theoretically want to run the pipes to would all be detached single-family homes in suburbs miles away. hope your pipes are well-insulated.
- Comment on SCOOP: Substack sent a push alert promoting a Nazi blog 1 month ago:
on one hand, if you’ve been following news about Substack at all, this is not particularly surprising:
November 2023: Substack has a Nazi problem
January 2024: Substack faces user revolt over anti-censorship stance on neo-Nazis
but on the other hand…this is the kind of thing that will be surprising to a lot of people who aren’t savvy media consumers. if they thought about Substack at all they probably thought of it as just “that website with all the newsletters”.
many of those people had the Substack app installed on their phones.
they got a push notification. the icon of the push notification was a swastika.
imagine looking at the list of notifications on your phone and just…seeing a whole-ass swastika.
I would compare this to the time Elon Musk called that cave diver in Thailand a “pedo guy”. he was a shitbag before that, he was a shitbag after that, but that was still a watershed moment when a lot of people had the sudden realization of “oh, huh, this guy’s a shitbag”.
Substack has been a Nazi bar for a few years now. they started allowing customers of the bar to hang up flags on the front patio. today was the day they hung up a Nazi flag.