GenderNeutralBro

@GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 3x04 "A Space Adventure Hour"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Also they put a spotlight on the huge energy costs of running an AI

  Plus it’s fully in keeping with canon. They mentioned several times in TNG and beyond that holodecks needed isolated power. (And obviously we know the original Enterprise didn’t have a holodeck in a few years’ time.) It’s a nice way for them to have their cake and eat too.

  I hope they have another holodeck episode at some point, maybe on a space station.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The “free market” solution is for malpractice suits to be so ruinously expensive that insurance companies will apply sufficient pressure to medical practices to actually do their fucking jobs.

  Same in the legal field, plus we should see a wave of disbarments already.

  I’m not holding my breath. AI is shaping up to be history’s greatest accountability sink and I’ve yet to see any meaningful pushback.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I tried Servo, the undercover web browser engine made with Rust⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  All major browser engines are FOSS.

  Chrome and Edge are proprietary wrappers around Chromium (BSD license). Firefox and derivatives are FOSS (Mozilla Public License). Safari is built around WebKit (LGPL/BSD).

  The problem, however, is governance. These projects are all too big for anyone to realistically fork and maintain independently. So in practice, they are under control of Google, Mozilla, and Apple — all of which have questionable priorities (especially Google).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 3x01 "Hegemony, Part II" & 3x02 "Wedding Bell Blues"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not really looking forward to another season of Gorn PTSD. We just did that with La’an. We don’t need to rehash it. It’s boring.

  Time will tell if they justify it.

  I did love the costumes in this episode, although I also felt like they were a little too present-day. But if they’re playing Wham I guess that’s what they were going for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Annotations for *Star Trek: Strange New Worlds* 3x02: “Wedding Bell Blues”:⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Pike also commented on the wedding planner being Andorian. Spock didn’t seem to react to that statement, so I guess he also saw the Trelane as Andorian at that point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OmniSVG: A Unified Scalable Vector Graphics Generation Model⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Just gave it a try. I couldn’t get coherent results from img-to-svg with a few different tests of low-res pixel art and high-res cartoons. txt-to-svg also gave me incoherent blobs even with simple prompts. Something must be wrong there. Is it working for anyone else?

  I might just try installing it locally when I get home.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OmniSVG: A Unified Scalable Vector Graphics Generation Model⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hard to judge quality when what we’re seeing is practically a pixel-perfect recreation. The tricky part of automated vectorization is detecting and plotting curves in such a way that it scales correctly. Bad implementations will use too many elements, or include straight lines that should be parts of curves, etc. Those errors would not be visible in those low-res rasterizations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Travel reporter accuses Hyatt of $500 smoking fee scam⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Wireless card readers are relatively new tech. I see them more and more as time goes on. New places usually give their waitstaff mobile readers, but there’s little motivation for older restaurants to upgrade their whole POS systems. POS systems have pretty long life expectancy. At least the older ones do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fairphone 6 Teardown: Proof Phones Don’t Have to Be Disposable⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nobody should feel a strong need to upgrade after only two generations. Same deal with most tech like GPUs and CPUs.

  I use my phone a lot and my Pixel 7 is fine. The primary factors driving my last couple upgrades were battery degradation and software support. Neither should be a big problem with a Fairphone.

  I’m also trying to decide whether to stick with the Pixel/GrapheneOS ecosystem or go for Fairphone.

  How hard/expensive was it to replace your battery? I looked on iFixIt and it seemed a lot harder than my orevious phones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cursed⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not necessarily the most efficient, but it’s the best guess we have. This is largely done by trial and error. There is no hard proof or surefire way to calculate optimal arrangements; this is just the best that anyone’s come up with so far.

  It’s sort of like chess. Using computers, we can analyze moves and games at a very advanced level, but we still haven’t “solved” chess, and we can’t determine whether a game or move is perfect in general. There’s no formula to solve it without exhaustively searching through every possible move, which would take more time than the universe has existed, even with our most powerful computers.

  Perhaps someday, someone will figure out a way to prove this mathematically.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ring can use AI to 'learn the routines of your residence'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ring was an obvious trojan horse from day 1. It’s depressing how many people are only just realizing this, and how many people still don’t even give a shit.

  If you have a Ring camera, you are a scourge to your entire community.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paramount+ Announces Fifth and Final Season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed, seems weird. But I’m optimistic when a series ending is announced well in advance. It means they’ll have time to finish it properly instead of hedging their bets, uncertain if they’ll be renewed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why we’ve fallen out of love with dating apps⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you like hiking, you might also enjoy indoor rock climbing. It’s more social and fun than a gym and you will have the opportunity to interact with a lot of the same people repeatedly. You might even have some beginners groups in you area to get started. Meetup.com is good for finding groups like that.

  Good luck out there!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Am I going crazy, or has people's spelling gotten awful lately?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  recently I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?

  There is a mountain of anecdotal evidence, and a small mound of scientific research, suggesting that psychedelics can improve creativity even in the long term. Ask your doctor if LSD or psilocybin might help with your imagination deficit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown | CNN Business⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is the clearest sign to me that Apple has jumped the shark.

  Apple has a long history of waiting until they could do something right rather than rushing to market with some fad. And here they are tripping over themselves to ship something that is obviously half-baked (at best). There’s no vision, there’s no attention to detail, there’s no careful UX design. It’s just “oh shit we need AI right?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  SEO (search engine optimization) has dominated search results for almost as long as search engines have existed. The entire field of SEO is about gaming the system at the expense of users, and often also at the expense of search platforms.

  The audience for an author’s gripping life story in every goddamn recipe was never humans, either. That was just for Google’s algorithm.

  Slop is not new. It’s just more automated now. There are two new problems for users, though:

  1. Google no longer gives a shit. They used to play the cat-and-mouse game, and while their victories were never long-lasting, at least their defeats were not permanent. (Remember ExpertsExchange? It took years before Google brought down the hammer on that. More recently, think of how many results you’ve seen from Pinterest, Forbes, or Medium, and think of how few of those deserved even a second of your time.)
  2. Companies that still do give a shit face a much more rapid exploitation cycle. The cats are still plain ol’ cats, but the mice are now Borg.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨they did the math 🦀⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Context: phys.org/…/2012-04-scientists-crab-powered.html

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why extracting data from PDFs is still a nightmare for data experts⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well I’m sorry, but most PDF distillers since the 90s have come with OCR software that can extract text from the images and store it in a way that preserves the layout AND the meaning

  The accuracy rate of even the best OCR software is far, far too low for a wide array of potential use cases.

  Let’s say I have an archive of a few thousand scientific papers. These are neatly formatted digital documents, not even scanned images (though “scanned images” would be within scope of this task and should not be ignored). Even for that, there’s nothing out there that can produce reliably accurate results. Everything requires painstaking validation and correction if you really care about accuracy.

  Even ArXiv can’t do a perfect job of this. They launched their “beta” HTML converter a couple years ago. Improving accuracy and reliability is an ongoing challenge. And that’s with the help or LaTeX source material! It would naturally be much, much harder if they had to rely solely on the PDFs generated from that LaTeX. See: info.arxiv.org/about/accessible_HTML.html

  As for solving this problem with “AI”…uh…well, it’s not like “OCR” and “AI” are mutually exclusive terms. OCR tools have been using neural networks for a very long time already, it just wasn’t a buzzword back then so nobody called it “AI”. However, in the current landscape of “AI” in 2025, “accuracy” is usually just a happy accident. It doesn’t need to be that way, and I’m sure the folks behind commercial and open-source OCR tools are hard at work implementing new technology in a way that Doesn’t Suck.

  I’ve played around with various VL models and they still seem to be in the “proof of concept” phase.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla rewrites Firefox's Terms of Use after user backlash | TechCrunch⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For instance, Mozilla said it may have removed blanket claims that it never sells user data because the legal definition of “sale of data” is now “broad and evolving,” Mozilla’s blog post stated.

  Uh huh.

  The company pointed to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) as an example of why the language was changed, noting that the CCPA defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”

  Yes. That’s what “sale of data” means. Everybody understood that. That’s exactly what we don’t want you to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gaming on Linux, How openSUSE Stacks Up for Gamers⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The experience of installing and updating GPU drivers can be very different across different distros. Especially if you use secure boot. This was such a pain point for me on Tumbleweed that I just pinned my kernel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla's New AI Detector Add-On for Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t see any mention of whether this uses local models or cloud models. I’m not interested in sending anything I care about it into the cloud.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Alex Kurtzman Gives Live-Action Comedy Update, Says Star Trek Can “Broaden”⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Spot on.

  SNW is good but I don’t think we’ll ever see a return to the old TV format of 20+ episode seasons. You can’t do random episodic stories all that well in 6-12 episodes. Short seasons have no room to breathe.

  Even Futurama has this problem with the two new Hulu seasons, and that’s without the burden of an overarching plot to keep moving forward.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Facebook flags Linux topics as 'cybersecurity threats' — posts and users being blocked⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you think this isn’t related to human rights, then you’ve missed the point.

  People have the right to use technology, and indeed we effectively need technology to exercise our right to free speech. You cannot have one without the other. Not anymore.

  The right way to think about this that they are arbitrarily banning a topic of discussion simply because it is not dead-center average. This isn’t even a legal issue, and the justification is utter nonsense (Facebook itself runs on Linux, like >90% of the internet). No government has officially asked them to do this, though the timing suggests that it is unofficially from the Trump administration.

  This is about exerting control, establishing precedent, and applying a chilling effect to anything not directly aligned with their interests. This obviously extends to human rights issues. This is a test run.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨wondering about those commercial stalkerwarw stuff and mitigations? kinda curious about the subject⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This will be highly platform-dependent, and also dependent on your threat model.

  On PC laptops, you should probably enable Secure Boot (if it’s not enabled by default), and password-protect your BIOS. On Macs you can disable booting from external media (I think that’s even the default now, but not totally sure). You should definitely enable full-disk encryption – that’s FileVault on Mac and Bitlocker on Windows.

  On Apple devices, you can enable USB Restricted Mode, which will protect against some attacks with USB cables or devices.

  Apple devices also have lockdown mode, which restricts or disables a whole bunch of functionality in an effort to reduce your attack surface against a variety of sophisticated attacks.

  If you’re worried about hardware hacks, then on a laptop you’d want to apply some tamper-evident stickers or something similar, so if an evil maid opens it up and tampers with the hardware, at least you’ll know something fishy happened, so you can go drop your laptop in an active volcano or something.

  If you use any external devices, like a keyboard, mouse, hard drive, whatever…well…how paranoid are you? I’m going to be honest: there is a near 0% chance I would even notice if someone replaced my charging cables or peripheral cables with malicious ones. I wouldn’t even notice if someone plugged in a USB keylogger between my desktop PC and my keyboard, because I only look at the back of my PC once in a blue moon. Digital security begins with physical security.

  On the software side, make sure you’re the only one with admin rights, and ideally you shouldn’t even log into admin accounts on a day-to-day basis.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tawny Newsome Says Live Action Star Trek Workplace Comedy Will Explore Life Outside The Federation⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Totally agree.

  I’ll watch whatever Tawny Newsome does next. Lower Decks earned a ton of goodwill. It was a breath of fresh air.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Technologist: 'Fining Big Tech isn't working, make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain'⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree that the models themselves are clearly transformative. That doesn’t mean it’s legal for Meta to pirate everything on earth to use for training. THAT’S where the infringement is. And they admitted they used pirated material: techspot.com/…/101507-meta-admits-using-pirated-b…

  You want to use the same bullshit tactics and unreasonable math that the RIAA used in their court cases?

  I would enjoying seeing megacorps held to at least the same standards as individuals. I would prefer for those standards to be reasonable across the board, but that’s not really on the table here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Technologist: 'Fining Big Tech isn't working, make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain'⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess the idea is that the models themselves are not infringing copyright, but the training process DID. Some of the big players have admitted to using pirated material in training data. The rest obviously did even if they haven’t admitted it.

  While language models have the capacity to produce infringing output, I don’t think the models themselves are infringing (though there are probably exceptions). I mean, gzip can reproduce infringing material too with the correct input. If producing infringing work requires both the algorithm AND specific, intentional user input, then I don’t think you should put the blame solely on the algorithm.

  Either way, I don’t think existing legal frameworks are suitable to answer these questions, so I think it’s more important to think about what the law should be rather than what it currently is.

  I remember stories about the RIAA suing individuals for many thousands of dollars per mp3 they downloaded. If you applied that logic to OpenAI — maximum fine for every individual work used — it’d instantly bankrupt them. Honestly, I’d love to see it. But I don’t think any copyright holder has the balls to try that against someone who can afford lawyers. They’re just bullies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord’s New Age Verification uses AI and Your Face!⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Why? This cannot possibly have any legal weight. Some adults look young. Some kids look old. The very idea is broken from the outset.

  I can’t tell if this is incompetence or malice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the info. I was not aware that Bluesky had public, shareable block lists. That is indeed a great feature.

  For anyone else like me who was not aware, I found this site with an index of a lot of public block lists: blueskydirectory.com/lists . I was not able to load some of them, but others did load successfully. Maybe some were deleted or are not public? I’m not sure.

  I’ve never been heavily invested in microblogging, so my first-hand experience is limited and mostly academic. I have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, though. I would not have realized this feature was available in Bluesky if you hadn’t mentioned it and I didn’t find that index site in a web search. It doesn’t seem easily discoverable within Bluesky’s own UI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you think this is a systemic problem, or just the happenstance of today? Is there something about Bluesky’s architecture or governance that makes it more resilient against that (particularly in the long term)? Or will they have all the same problems as they gain more users and enable more federation with other servers?