sonori
@sonori@beehaw.org
- Comment on History says tariffs rarely work, but U.S. President Biden’s 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs could defy the trend, researcher says 15 hours ago:
While I think in this case they won’t have an effect because no Amarican company is even trying to compete in the space, I feel like claiming “history says tarrifs rarely work” is pretty misleading. The high tarrifs caused by the US generating nearly all federal income by tarrifs in the 17 and 18 hundreds are after all widely credited with being the reason the northern US went from being a minor agricultural nation dependent entirely on european industrial goods to becoming one of the largest industrialized nations so quickly.
Indeed that was why the WTO blocking third world nations from putting tarrifs on western goods was so heavily criticized by the left a few decades ago, before China proved you could do it without said tarrifs so long as your competitors were greedy enough to outsource their industry to you.
- Comment on Futures 1 day ago:
The hard part would things like water and raw building materials, one of the benefits of ground is that it’s mostly iron, oxygen, and other metals, while basically everything on Venus would need to be shipped in from moons or the belt.
- Comment on Schools won't be allowed to teach children that they can change their gender ID, reports say 2 days ago:
So what your saying is that you have gone through years of therapists telling you not to transition every two weeks, and accidentally been given a medication that delayed the decision until you were more mature and which you could stop taking at any time with no serious side effects. Turely that was a fate so horrible that it’s worth taking the decision away from the thirty thousand English for which it was demonstrably the right decision.
- Comment on Schools won't be allowed to teach children that they can change their gender ID, reports say 2 days ago:
The scientists of the 1880s, through every decade up to the modern day were all so terrified of being called transphobes that they secretly conspired to fake the entire field’s research? Right, that makes sense.
You definitely promise that they’d be canceled too, and not given constant interviews by the Daily Mail, Fox News(the largest and most watched television news station in America), and the BBC(looking to show both sides of banning only certain people from getting otherwise uncontroversial and freely prescribed medication). None of thouse outlets would ever be interested in interviewing them say things their editors are pushing for.
They would also certainly not then get millions in dollars to continue their research by groups like the Heritage Foundation, the group which in 2016 focused group tested ways to create new culture war issues and identified the decades old practice of prescribing puberty blockers to children who have fought through years of therapy as one of the effective things for conservative outlets and politicians to push.
Yes, questioning children should be given love, therapy, and the choice to delay the permanent changes brought on by puberty until they are an adult and can make an informed decision, and not forced to because a politician copied an American far right party’s method to distract voters form the impacts of their economic policies by screwing over the thirty thousand English who are physically incapable of otherwise loving their own bodies.
- Comment on Schools won't be allowed to teach children that they can change their gender ID, reports say 3 days ago:
Trans people know they should be the other gender and that puberty causes massive permanent changes to their body they are horrified by. They often do not know that everyone else around them’s deepest fantasy isn’t to wake up one day as the other sex.
They do not know that there is a easy and harmless way to delay these permanent changes effecting their bodies until they are an adult and can make a informed decision, that if started early enough these medications create a path to eliminate the need for nearly all of the intensive surgeries that are otherwise in their future, can be stoped at any time if they don’t want to continue with it, or that these medications are deemed harmless enough to be freely handed out to their fellow cis children for a wide body of disorders, but which the NHS suddenly requires years of regular therapy trying to talk them out of it to “prove” they are deserving of if there is even a hint of them being trans.
Yes, this means that the NHS has for decades required that the child and their parents must know they are trans and how they feel about the exact effect of puberty years before the child even starts puberty in order to gain the majority of the benefits from these medications which doctors can freely prescribe for non trans children without any of these barriers.
When you talk about the recent UK “research” you are talking about the Cass report yes? The report that outright stated it ignored over a century of scientific research because thouse papers went double blind, meaning they secretly gave an equal number of cis children puberty blockers without their knowledge or gave trans children sugar pills without them realizing they are still going through puberty, which was subsequently ridiculed as a purely politically driven by hundreds of UK pediatricians and experts in the field, who’s authors were actively helping draft policy with American far right politicians that defines a child gaining any acess to puberty blockers or even social transition as child abuse and requiring years of prison time for the parents, and who despite all this own author’s stated that even with their standards that while the NHS gives little support for non-binary children the high barriers it maintains against trans children pausing puberty, socially transitioning, and other forms of gender confirming care are actively harming them.
But hey, if so many people are apparently treating acess to these medications as no big deal dispite all the evidence to the contrary, why do nearly half of trans people in the UK end of having to get these medications from grey market dealers in southern europe instead of their local chemist?
- Comment on Has Generative AI Already Peaked? - Computerphile 1 week ago:
While the paper demonstrated strong diminishing returns in adding more data to modern neural networks in terms of image classifers, the video host is explaining how the same may effect apply to any nureal network based system with modern transformers.
While there are technically methods of generative AI that don’t use a neural network, they haven’t made much progress in recent decades and arn’t what most people mean when they hear or say generative AI, and as such I would say the title is accurate enough for a video meant for a general audience, though “Is there a fundamental limit to modern neural networks” might be more technically correct.
- Comment on Major U.S. newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft for copyright infringement 2 weeks ago:
But if we don’t feed the entire internet into Siri, China would, and you don’t want China to have an advantage in the autocomplete wars, now do you?/s
- Comment on It’s the End of the Web as We Know It 2 weeks ago:
I can’t imagine any sort of verification system not being completely overrun by bots/people on fiver/ mechanical turk immediately unless you tied it to meatspace IDs in an know your customer sort of way, in which case you would definitely need a central organization to do said verification, which eliminates any possible need for a blockchain as said organization can just use a faster, far cheaper, and most importantly for this application editable database.
More to the point, no one doubts that an article published by one organization was secretly published by another, but rather that they secretly used AI in the writing process, which also negates the system because that organization is never going to tell you which articles are done by AI, and any sort of reporting system for the entire organization or a specific author is just going to be immediately and constantly used to review bomb.
- Comment on It’s the End of the Web as We Know It 2 weeks ago:
How could that help at all? Seeing as the blockchain would have no way of telling the difference between human and Ai text, and if you could find a way to automatically verify that in way way that was so efficient you could expect all the text uploaded to the internet you could just run that program locally and not be beholden to people paying a fee to post anything to the internet.
- Comment on Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to Biden, who has already committed to signing it 3 weeks ago:
There is also a massive difference in user experience in China vs abroad, to the point where they might as well be two fundamentally different apps. Even just things like time limits for children exist by default in China and are unavailable elsewhere, which kind of feels like an admission that they only take things like platform safety seriously at home.
- Comment on Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract 4 weeks ago:
Probably, but I would much rather be a background character in the intro to a space opera instead.
- Comment on Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract 4 weeks ago:
Well on the bright side, getting fired from one of the largest mega corps in the world for complaining about the company’s providing resources to kill civilians is a hell of a thing to be able to put on your resume.
On the not so bright side, I don’t like being a background character in a cyberpunk story.
- Comment on Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers 5 weeks ago:
Except this preticular discussion thread isn’t about Discord used as documentation, but Discord use in general as a videoconferencing tool. I also imagine the project started using Discord for conferencing, and documentation grew up around it because everyone was already there, emulation is very finicky, and it wasn’t out in the open for Nintendo to find indexed by Google. They could have used Jitsi, and the same thing would have happened.
A video conferencing program like Discord is hardly the first or best place to put software documentation, but in this case it being hard to find was presumably the point.
It also seems odd to insist that Capitalism doesn’t allow Jitsi, Matrix, or XMPP to exist, when they and many other open source projects do. Jitsi is owned by a major cooperation, but Matrix and XMPP arn’t to my knowledge. Rough around the edges and in need of significant work, yes, but not prevented from ever exsisting.
Video, voice, and text messaging are together the signifiant part of Discord as you put it, it doesn’t make sense in order to split them apart any further.
- Comment on Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers 5 weeks ago:
Forgive me, but I fail to see how expecting video/voice conferencing software to actually be capable of carrying video/voice could be described as a fallacy. It seems to me like that is kind of a core functionality to any software trying to fulfill that role.
IRC has nothing to do with the subject, and while XMPP/Matrix are promising they are still a long way from being able to talk someone without significant tech expertise and who has never seen them before into jumping onto a call in five minutes or so without touching a single setting. That is the fundamental part of Discord, Teams, Skype, or Zoom that matters.
Lemmy isn’t exactly voice conferencing software, so I don’t know why you would want to collaborate on software development work with it as a forum. As for documentation, a static site is probably the best place for that, although in this case keeping it off the clearnet was presumably a core consideration.
- Comment on Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers 5 weeks ago:
The problem with non-persistent messaging is that for most things people use Discord for it is a non-starter. Most people who are doing more than just socializing really don’t want to spend half their time repeating things to people who were at work, asleep, or in a different time zone when the discussion came it. Any serious Discord competitor would need to focus on practically and low barriers to entery, which tend to be directly opposed to novelty.
- Comment on Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers 5 weeks ago:
Everything here is basically text and maybe images if your lucky. In order to make it into a Discord or Zoom competitor you would need to solve far higher bandwidth things like HD video and low latency audio, and both of thouse are fundamentally very different things for a server to handle as compared to high latency short text messages.
You could probably link account sign in, but any real-time stuff would likely be limited to within that single instance unless you create a whole alternative method of federation that would still only be available between thouse certain supported instances.
It’s also a whole lot more expensive to host, unless you go peer to peer in which case good luck, and vulnerable to bad actors massively running up hosting bills even if you can protect against denial of service attacks.
It would be nice to see, but there is a reason why Matrix is the closest anyone’s come and it’s still more a proof of concept then an actual platform you could direct family or random strangers to.
- Comment on Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers 5 weeks ago:
From my understanding IRC’s biggest flaw is that it requires the recipient to be online in order to receive messages, and any software that includes voice, video, screen sharing, and proper servers would by necessity have very little resemblance to it.
- Comment on Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI? 5 weeks ago:
A point the article makes rather well is that something is not a bobble because it doesn’t work, but because the investment going into it is fundamentally irrational in scale. The web still existing has nothing to do if investment or companies tripping over themselves to advertise as a dotcom in the dotcom bobble was rational, because it clearly wasn’t.
The question when it comes to LLM’s, the near exclusive subject of the marketing around AI, is if bunch of random companies paying for a mildly improved chat bot going to actually generate enough profit once the marketing hype has worn off and the legal questions are all settled is actually enough to generate the massive profits needed to justify the current investment.
- Comment on Why Large Language Models Like ChatGPT Treat Black- and White-Sounding Names Differently 5 weeks ago:
What, a system that responds with the next most likely word to be used on the internet treats people of color differently? No, I simply can’t believe it to be true. The internet is perfectly colorblind and equitable after all. /s
- Comment on Breakthrough drug trial saw cancer vanish in every patient (2022) 1 month ago:
That’s because cancer is a broad category of thousands of similar ‘diseases’, and the more effective cures tend to be for the rarer kinds.
- Comment on somewhere a postdoc is crying 1 month ago:
Depends on how far out it is from the nearest star. Inside the orbit of jupiter exposed ice will sublimate into steam thanks to heating from sunlight, outside it remains ice. This is actually what a comet is, namely a ball of ice from the outer solar system orbiting in close to the sun and sublimating off. The steam is so loosely bound thanks to the tiny gravity of the comet that the solar wind blows it away, creating the visable tail.
- Comment on Spotify plans to raise prices this year and introduce new plans - GSMArena.com news 1 month ago:
A decent number of artists offer digital downloads of their music directly either for a flat fee or in a pay what you wish system.
It is nowhere near as convenient unfortunately. Benn Jordan mentions some options in several of their videos about their experience with Spotify, but i’m admittedly not certain I just linked the right one.
- Comment on Uv saves Home Assistant 215 compute hours per month 1 month ago:
Python isn’t bad, but it is fundamentally designed to trade the performance of a precompiled language for ease of use and writing. That’s why in fields like data science you often see people writing things in python to see if they work first, and then porting the performance heavy tasks to a complied language like C or Rust.
- Comment on What are some games you find yourself frequently coming back to? 1 month ago:
Minecraft, you can only pretend to have gotten away for so long before the block game calls again.
- Comment on Bridge in US city of Baltimore collapses after ship hits it, sending vehicles into water 1 month ago:
It unfortunately happens more often than one might hope. Off the top of my head the in the last half century the US has seen the Sunshine Skyway, one interstate freeway, and one passenger railway bridge over the Mississippi river collapse after a collision with ship or barge. Over in your neck of the woods I know the Tazman bridge in Hobart, Tasmania also collapsed after a freighter collided with it.
It will be interesting to see if the bridge had gotten modern dolphins to protect it, and if so why they failed here. In maps it shows up as just having some very small ones, so they may just been insufficient for size of ship.
- Comment on Here’s the Elon Musk interview that got Don Lemon’s show canceled 1 month ago:
Yes, but at the end of the day SpaceX is the work of tens of thousands of people, not just the guy who provides a pile of money in exchange for constantly forcing the engineering teams to do stupid stuff if they can’t explain why not at an eighth grade level.
- Comment on Here’s the Elon Musk interview that got Don Lemon’s show canceled 1 month ago:
I mean the first time he really did something in public was getting mad at a bunch of journalists for just tacking a little blurb about him as a key Tesla investor when discussing the actual ceo’s presentation a Tesla press event, so i’m not sure that he fired his PR team so much as the less you know about him the easier it is to like him.
If all you know is that he’s a techbro that used his pile of free money to buy an EV and a rocket company it’s easier to file him under the James Cameron folder of generally inoffensive rich dude with neat hobbies.
- Comment on Biden’s Budget Calls for Tax Increases on Corporations and the Wealthy 2 months ago:
Ohh no, they should ban it. I just don’t expect it to do anything.
- Comment on Biden’s Budget Calls for Tax Increases on Corporations and the Wealthy 2 months ago:
The problem is it’s typically their families that do the stock trading, and i you can’t extend employment contracts to unrelated parties. Even if you did do it with a law, people will still talk with their friends. This is part of the reason why insider trading is so difficult to prosecute and enforce outside of the blinding obvious.
- Comment on Show HN: Name That Nation 3 months ago:
Fun little game, got 85/102, which I thought was bad but apparently is higher than average?
Mostly had trouble in the Pasific and Central Africa. I could name which countries were in the area, but which cluster of islands is which is always hard. Be curious to see what everyone else got.