jarfil
@jarfil@beehaw.org
Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.
- Submitted 2 days ago to technology@beehaw.org | 13 comments
- Comment on Games can no longer use virtual currencies to disguise the price of in-game purchases in the European Union 2 days ago:
“Right of withdrawal” is quite easy: allow cancelling the transaction before the in-game content has actually been used.
It only takes a “has been used” flag, and maybe a log entry to prove when.
- Comment on Games can no longer use virtual currencies to disguise the price of in-game purchases in the European Union 2 days ago:
The newest take on cookies, is “accept all, or pay to read”. Quite shady, if you ask me.
- Comment on Games can no longer use virtual currencies to disguise the price of in-game purchases in the European Union 2 days ago:
Games reward you in game mechanics, same as most games at a casino.
- Comment on Discord heightens ad focus by introducing video ads to mobile apps in June - Ars Technica 3 days ago:
Matrix/Element
- Comment on YouTube cracks down (again) on ad blockers. 4 days ago:
GOOGL knows that to become a long term successful company in a world of 4.50% interest rates, that P/E of 21 and dividend yield of 0.49% are barely cutting it.
They can no longer push popular platforms like YouTube as a loss leader.
- Comment on Tesla's latest decline could be one for the history books - $795 billion since Dec 17 or 53.7 percent 1 week ago:
A company that can’t offer a ROI to its stockholders, is a startup that should never be allowed to go public; stick to angel and venture investors instead. Public stocks relying on the hype of “growing quickly”, are a Ponzi scheme through and through.
If we speak of company ages, the argument doesn’t hold either:
- AAPL - 49yr - 0.48%
- MSFT - 50yr - 0.88%
- NVDA - 32yr - 0.04%
- AMZN - 31yr - 0.00%
- GOOG - 27yr - 0.49%
- TSLA - 22yr - 0.00%
- SpaceX - 23yr - not traded
A good chunk of the US market is made up of Ponzi scheme companies. With 401k-s tied to market investments, people are setting themselves up for a very rough awakening.
- Comment on Tesla's latest decline could be one for the history books - $795 billion since Dec 17 or 53.7 percent 1 week ago:
Meaningful part are the dividend ratios.
The problem with P/E is that, while it’s great to measure business health internally, a company that has great earnings and then decides to “invest in growth” instead of paying dividends, is just a Ponzi scheme as far as investors are concerned: no expectation of returns from the company, only from the hype among other investors.
- Comment on Tesla's latest decline could be one for the history books - $795 billion since Dec 17 or 53.7 percent 1 week ago:
Is TSLA overvalued? To be generous, let’s compare them to just NASDAQ stocks:
- AAPL - $209 - 0.48% annual dividend
- MSFT - $378 - 0.88%
- NVDA - $115 - 0.04% 🚩
- AMZN - $193 - 0.00% 🚩
- GOOG - $164 - 0.49%
- TSLA - $240 - 0.00% 🚩
- SpaceX - not traded
- Comment on Tesla's latest decline could be one for the history books - $795 billion since Dec 17 or 53.7 percent 1 week ago:
When your Lemmy client shows you previews of the links…
- Comment on Spain to impose massive fines for not labelling AI-generated content 1 week ago:
The bill hasn’t passed yet, we’ll see what amendments get into the final version.
The general downside of this kind of bills, is that they require marking “any amount” of AI-based modification, like for example: using an “AI optimized” curves modifier to adjust a photo, makes the whole thing into “made using AI”.
My phone camera has an AI based detector for focusing on faces, pieces of paper, brightness and color correction… so ALL photos I take with it are automatically “made with AI”, which is BS.
- Comment on Google changes Chrome extension policies following the Honey link scandal 1 week ago:
Whoever the fuck thought it would be a good idea to add a script tag to SVG needs to be put down.
SVG was in part intended as a replacement for Flash, which had animations and interactive graphic elements. The script tag has been there since 2001’s SVG 1.0 🤷
- Comment on Trump’s Crypto Reserve Is Really Happening 1 week ago:
Not sure where you get your propaganda from, but I refuse to engage with that whole twisted argumental line. I stand by what I said, I think it was pretty straightforward.
- Comment on YouTube trials DRM on all videos served to TVs (yt-dlp Github issue) 1 week ago:
Putting DRM on CC videos is kind of evil… but also kind of expected of a video platform to do.
In the long run, from a purely economic point of view, it could even make sense for YT to charge users for uploading non-monetized videos. It would destroy even more good faith, but would “make sense” on paper.
- Comment on Why the Chips Get Hot (Asianometry) 2 weeks ago:
Nice explanation. For future advances, part of it could be solved by photonics, getting rid of most of the interconnects. Massively parallel simple computations could be carried out on a photonic neuromorphic substrate, making NNs use orders of magnitude less power.
- Comment on Christie's First-Ever AI Art Auction Earns $728,000, Plus Controversy 2 weeks ago:
They are examples of a simple prompt you can put into an AI, to get similar results.
One is little more than random noise. You can put this comment into an AI prompt, in the presence of a legal witness, and when people start liking the output, say “aha!”.
The second is an automated process of canning food, that the artist used to can his own feces. Yes, they were real, about half the cans have exploded after being exposed in places when the sun would heat them up, which was part of the artist’s plan. Another piece by the same artist is Fiato d’Artista, a balloon blown up and sealed by the artist, that over time has deflated. The “art vs. automation” of both, fall heavily on the automation part.
The last can be generated with a single sentence prompt to any image generating AI.
The interpretation you make up to justify a piece, is independent from the means used to generate it… so you have to choose:
- The interpretation is the art, making all tools a valid option, including AI.
- The piece itself has to embody some interpretation, making the examples into “not art”.
- Comment on Trump’s Crypto Reserve Is Really Happening 2 weeks ago:
There is no “safe” store of value, it always depends on demand; there is no single item with a constant demand. One would think that air, water, food, housing, etc. should be always in demand… but reality is showing how people are willing to sacrifice those for something else all the time.
Bitcoin transfers cost pennies on the Lightning Network. An argument can be made, that SEPA transfers cost exactly 0… also an argument can be made, that SEPA didn’t go all the way down to 0, until cheap crypto transfers became a thing. But SEPA is an Euro thing.
China, I think the powerhouse of an economy that it has will make it awfully enticing for investment orgs
China has a 100% intervened market, there is exactly 0% security that any investment won’t go to 0 in an instant, by decree. There is a reason why Chinese people invested 30% of GDP in the housing market, allowing scammers to build ghost towns they never planned on completing… and then it all went crashing down.
The US sees the Euro as a competitor of the Dollar; for the US to buy a strategic reserve of EUR, it would definitely mean recognizing defeat.
- Comment on Elon Musk says X hit by 'massive cyber attack' as users unable to log in 2 weeks ago:
It’s back up and working fine:
- Comment on Christie's First-Ever AI Art Auction Earns $728,000, Plus Controversy 2 weeks ago:
This anti-AI propaganda talking point is getting old.
Value each artist’s input at what it is: if there is no input, then it’s slop; if there is input, value for what it is.
Some works of art, long predating AI, for your consideration:
- Comment on Trump’s Crypto Reserve Is Really Happening 2 weeks ago:
Same misunderstandings as usual:
crypto transactions can be done anonymously
Except for a couple “anonymouse coins”, no they can’t.
KYC+Blockchain = full traceability.asset with little proven real-world application that regular old U.S. dollars can’t already account for
Close. Consider the following scenario:
- USD is a US government IOU, same as every other fiat currency.
- Fiat money’s value depends on the trust in the credit it represents.
- Trump&co are destroying USA’s trust worldwide.
- External countries like China, have huge amounts of US credit… have given a lot to the US in exchange for a pinky swear.
- The US keeps emitting USD credit by manipulating interest rates, hoping to attract investors and greed/trust.
But what if the US were to default on its obligations instead, break trade agreements, break defense agreements… what would be a safe store of value then?
- Gold, will say some… but there is not enough gold to go around to represent all the credit currently tied in money, that was the reason to abandon the gold standard in the first place.
- Others will pick the Yuan, after all it’s the second largest economy GDP PPP… but really? Does anyone trust China? I doubt so.
- Euro seems much more trustworthy, but it will take long after Trump has utterly trashed the US economy, for the US to recognize defeat.
That leaves little more than fantasy money, with the stablest of them being: Bitcoin.
- Comment on A quarter of startups in Y Combinator's current cohort have codebases that are almost entirely AI-generated 2 weeks ago:
using natural language and instincts to create code.
After decades of seeing job offers like “Idea guy, looks for technological partner to write code for startup”… I can’t but smirk at the vision of an “idea guy” having an LLM write some code, then convincing some investors to finance the sham.
This will be the new COBOL, a natural language any businessman can write by themselves 🤭
- Comment on Voice actors speak out on AI in video games 2 weeks ago:
I think automation only cares about increasing the output, not about the effort or exclusivity of the input. Since you propose reviewing history, let’s do it together:
- Artists used to perform for a single patron, getting paid for each performance.
- Amphitheaters allowed multiple patrons to attend each performance.
- Recordings allowed performances to be reproduced over and over.
- Copying allowed millions of patrons to reproduce the same recording multiple times, independently of each other.
Now LLMs are suddenly the preposterous advance? Nonsense.
Luddite propaganda is corporate propaganda is elitist propaganda, a step back towards less efficient ways of reaping the benefits of labor so it can be more easily controlled and restricted, an elitist approach where artists perform at the whim of someone wealthy enough to be able to afford them.
If you want to discuss the fair compensation for labor, we can start talking about total production, compensation inequality, an UBI system, or whatever. Don’t come in blindly claiming that cutting down technological labor amplification, is the only way to get paid enough to live… or that getting paid is even required to live in a post-scarcity world, much less that artificially imposed scarcity is something positive.
- Comment on Voice actors speak out on AI in video games 2 weeks ago:
When I get a web search brain implant, I might stop relying on memory. Or better not.
Blindly rejecting technology and automation, for some misguided interpretation of ethics like “work gives a man dignity”, or Gen 2:15, is the feudal corporate propaganda, to put it mildly.
- Comment on Voice actors speak out on AI in video games 2 weeks ago:
No… it’s more the strawnan gaslighting to insult people without arguing any point. See ya.
- Comment on OpenEvidence Sounds Promising, but is it Reliable? 2 weeks ago:
Is AI handing out destructive advice to medical professionals, though?
It seems to me like it’s still working as a summarizing service, taking in vast amounts of information sources that no human would be able to process in a lifetime, and handing out recommendations about which paths a doctor might want to pursue further.
We live in a world where information generation has long ago vastly surpassed anyone’s ability to grasp it all, long gone are the days of polymaths like daVinci, or even Euler. International communication has outgrown human ability around the 18th century, and we’ve gone multiple orders of magnitude farther in the Internet age.
Just like Google was barely enough to search for information, we’re now at the point where AI summaries are barely enough to surface data that would otherwise remain hidden.
I agree that these summarizing services need oversight to avoid malevolent and irresponsible uses or manipulations, and I think recent EU AI legislation is on the right track to tackle that.
- Comment on Voice actors speak out on AI in video games 2 weeks ago:
Hm, I’ve heard “Animal management” as the general term, with “husbandry” focusing on the breeding and artificial selection, with all the ethical issues around that.
Anyway, it’s kind of off-topic, isn’t it?
Cars replaced horse carriages, fridges replaced ice sellers… new technologies keep replacing old professions. We’re at a large job replacement point right now with AI, new skills will be required, but we’re yet in uncertain times as to what those skills will exactly look like.
Not sure which “corpo propaganda” were you referring to, and maybe it’s just me, but the whole post feels hostile.
- Comment on Voice actors speak out on AI in video games 2 weeks ago:
Horse husbandry is also a major craft and fine art
Is that what you call tying a female horse’s legs to a fence so she doesn’t kick the stallion being forced onto her??
According to the laws of debate… you can go find the videos on YouTube on your own, I’m not linking to them.
Seriously, what is this opinion post even about?
- Comment on OpenEvidence Sounds Promising, but is it Reliable? 2 weeks ago:
There is no realistic way of avoiding those doctors. I’ve been to a GP who, after looking at my medical history and the meds I was taking after a heart attack… slid me a business card for her homeopathic healing practice. 🙄
Still, I’d hope a majority of doctors would be more likely to be able to parse through an AI’s advice, and take it into consideration, but not blindly depend on it, when giving their own advice.
Targeting it at GPs makes sense, since they’re supposed to “know of everything”, but no person is capable of doing that, definitely not of staying up to date on everything. Specialists have a narrower area of knowledge to keep up with, but could also benefit from some AI advice based on latest research.
- Comment on OpenEvidence Sounds Promising, but is it Reliable? 3 weeks ago:
It’s like in the joke: “What do you call someone who barely finished medical school?.. Doctor.”
Every doctor is allowed to provide medical advice, even those who should better shut up. Liabilities are like what a friend got after a botched operation, when confronting her doctor: “Sue me, that’s what my insurance is for”.
I’d like to see the actual final assessment of an AI on these tests, but if it’s just “9% vs 15% error rate”, I’d take it.
My guess would be the AI might not be great at all kinds of assessments, but having a panel of specialized AIs, like we now have multiple specialist cooperating, sounds like a reasonable idea. Having a transcript of such meeting analyzed by a GP, could be even better.
- Comment on OpenEvidence Sounds Promising, but is it Reliable? 3 weeks ago:
The grading is a mess. It goes about qualitative, quantitative… and statistical corrections “to make it fair”.
Anyway, there is ~30% margin on the scores for passing, so chances are that 9% is better than the worst doctor who still “passed”.
