So, if we do some sloppy rounding and say that the subscriptions make them 3 million a year . . . it’ll only take a bit more than 330 years for anyone buying Humane at the asking price to break even. My cat could figure out that wasn’t a good buy. (Of course, he’d prefer to invest in a tuna cannery . . .)
512MB was a huge flash drive now it’s not enough ram. Turns out Spotify can’t open-source Car Thing because it’s a potato androidauthority.com/spotify-car-thing-open-sourc…
What, you mean 640KB isn’t really enough for everyone?
. . . I kid, I kid. Still, the CarThing strikes me as more of an embedded-type system. 512MB is generous for devices of that class, and more than sufficient for a carefully-tailored Linux kernel + busybox + another 100MB+ of running software. Potato, yes, but potatoes are a useful food source—just not as impressive as filet mignon.
3D printing’s primary role in supply chains revolves around manufacturing. Many manufacturers use it for small-batch or custom orders because of its fast turnaround time. Its popularity in warehousing and distribution is rising, too, since it’s a relatively versatile technology. Logistics companies use it to bridge the gap...
Note that they’re talking here primarily about $10000-and-up printers that use technologies like laser sintering, not the plastic filament types that you can buy for a few hundred and set up in your garage. Sintering printers can print metal and ceramic as well as plastic, and can produce better-quality parts.
Microsoft has essentially forgotten what a desktop GUI is for. It’s a program launcher packaged with a set of libraries that make it easy for other programs to do complex things like displaying video in a uniform way, plus some system administration tools. Pack-ins not related to system administration should be limited to very basic software.
There may be something that Microsoft has added to Windows lately that isn’t bloat, or evil, or both, but damned if I know what it is.
Two and a half years after Norman Tate’s son was killed in a car accident, he’s still struggling to come to terms with how the justice system handled the aftermath....
The problem is that the courts don’t prioritize, and we’re at a point where we need to triage. Cases involving death or serious bodily harm should be jumping the queue, and victimless crimes sent to the back of the bus.
When you think about it, triage in medicine is also not an ideal solution. Ideally, in both medicine and law, the system would have enough capacity to deal with everyone in strict first-in-first-out order without anyone being harmed. In the absence of that capacity, we have to decide which cases to look at first somehow, and FIFO doesn’t appear to be the best basis for making that decision.
We need more judges too, but even if we were to somehow force legislators to select them this instant, some cases would end up getting dropped before the backlog got caught up. I’d much prefer that they were things like solicitation, small-amount drug posession, and minor traffic violations—not petty theft if we can help it, since that isn’t a victimless crime, but I’d nevertheless rather have ten petty theft cases dropped than one assault case that landed someone in the hospital.
A 51-year-old Calgary man who suffers debilitating cluster headaches has won a Federal Court battle forcing Health Canada to reconsider his bid for legal access to psilocybin to treat his extreme pain....
Heroin was originally developed as a pharmaceutical, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it is still being manufactured and distributed as such somewhere in the world. Morphine has certainly never gone out of style.
And actually, in some cases they have been dug up, by accident or by design. There have also been one or two cases of human remains in unmarked graves near former residential schools being revealed by erosion. It’s only the recent ground-penetrating radar scans that haven’t been verified by excavation, including those in Kamloops.
The question is, how necessary is it to verify that the graves of the missing children are at the specific locations pointed out by the radar and other scans? I would say “not very”, but I’m not someone whose opinion matters in this.
Most of those responsible are probably dead—the Kamloops school closed in 1978 after ~85 years of use, and there would have been more deaths earlier in the school’s existence. Assuming staff members were at least 20 years old, the youngest of them would now be in their late 60s, and the testimonies of the surviving students would be more useful in bringing them to account.
Whether the remains need to go home to their families is something the families have to agree upon. Some might prefer that the remains be left undisturbed. Religious beliefs may factor in, and may differ between tribes—it’s unlikely that all the victims were local.
Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually....
Liters are a great unit for making small things seem large. I’ve seen articles breathlessly talking about how “almost 2000 liters of oil was spilled!” When 2000 liters could fit in the back of a pickup truck.
That just means you have no intuitive sense of how large a litre is. If they’d written it as “2000 quarts” (which is close enough to being the same volume at that level of rounding) would it have painted a clearer picture in your head?
I like that their implant is simply laid on top of the brain, instead of driving electrodes into brain tissue like Neuralink. I’d like to keep my brain unscarred.
I actually have a bit of hope for this one, since they seem to have figured out a way to avoid one of the known problems with these systems. At very least, it’s an angle worth exploring.
Yes, you can have your own robot attack dog for about the same price as a high-end gaming PC. Some assembly possibly required, and you’ll have to write your own attack software based on a manual poorly translated from Chinese (if you’re lucky), but what do you expect at that price point? 🤨
Part of the issue with raising retirement age, though, is that you can only go so far before the majority of people are unfit to work. Things like osteoarthritis have a much larger effect on your ability to work than they do on your life expectancy. Plus, the burden of continuing to work disproportionately falls on poor people whose work is more physical—well-educated people with desk jobs usually earn more money, have somewhat better savings, and can thus afford to retire a few years before their government pension kicks in.
A big biometric security company in the UK, Facewatch, is in hot water after their facial recognition system caused a major snafu - the system wrongly identified a 19-year-old girl as a shoplifter.
stores use it and it alone to ban people despite it having a low but well known error rate.
And it is absolutely predictable that some stores would do that, because humans. At very least, companies deploying this technology need to make certain that all the store staff are properly trained on what it does and doesn’t mean, including new hires who arrive after the system is put in. Forcing that is going to require that a law be passed.
Technically, there’s a tendency for them to be trained on datasets that don’t include nearly enough dark-skinned people. As a result, they don’t learn to make the necessary distinctions. I’d like to think that the selection of datasets for training facial recognition AI has improved since the most egregious cases of that. I’m not willing to bet on it, though.
The real issue is that we seem to be purging all the wrong things.
Useful answer to technical question? Gone five years later.
Unfounded and fraudulent accusation that some teenager in Albuquerque committed a hideous crime? Preserved for the ages. Revenge porn photos? Also preserved, although possibly without the attributions.
Although, really, all of that is human nature too: we conserve what draws the attention of the average mook, not what specialists find useful.
You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...
Likely won’t make a difference to the gene pool. I looked up a couple of MSDS, and it seems that PVA glue (“white glue”), is safe to ingest. The Elmer’s glue “recommended” in the original Reddit post is a form of white glue.
Yes, but as a solution it’s far inferior to not presenting questionable output to the public at all.
(There are a few specific AI/LLM types whose output we might be able to “human-proof”—for instance, if we don’t allow image generators to make photorealistic images of any sort for any purpose, they become much more difficult to abuse—but I can’t see how you would do it for search engine adjuncts like this without having a human curate their training sets.)
Since it’s not actually Wednesday (and because I wanted to document it somehow) you get a picture of the back. I’m done with everything but the rain. And I fully expect that to make the back look … different. So here you go. 😅
The philanthropist behind the University of Manitoba’s largest-ever personal donation — $30 million — has denounced a speech made by a valedictorian for medicine grads and admonished the university for letting it happen....
That can bite both ways, though—I mean, not with publicly funded universities so much, but what if you find out the small religious sect you supported is a front for a murderous cult? (Yeah, I know, silly example, but . . .) Is there a point at which you should be able to exert control or claw back the money?
Humane is said to be seeking a $1 billion buyout after only 10,000 orders of its terrible AI Pin (www.engadget.com)
512MB ram is nothing now
512MB was a huge flash drive now it’s not enough ram. Turns out Spotify can’t open-source Car Thing because it’s a potato androidauthority.com/spotify-car-thing-open-sourc…
How 3D Printing Is Impacting Supply Chains | HackerNoon (hackernoon.com)
3D printing’s primary role in supply chains revolves around manufacturing. Many manufacturers use it for small-batch or custom orders because of its fast turnaround time. Its popularity in warehousing and distribution is rising, too, since it’s a relatively versatile technology. Logistics companies use it to bridge the gap...
Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide? (www.antipope.org)
Long delays and collapsed cases are eroding faith in the justice system, lawyers warn (www.cbc.ca)
Two and a half years after Norman Tate’s son was killed in a car accident, he’s still struggling to come to terms with how the justice system handled the aftermath....
Health Canada must reconsider man's bid to use magic mushrooms for cluster headaches, Federal Court rules (www.cbc.ca)
A 51-year-old Calgary man who suffers debilitating cluster headaches has won a Federal Court battle forcing Health Canada to reconsider his bid for legal access to psilocybin to treat his extreme pain....
Terry Glavin: Canada slowly acknowledging there never was a 'mass grave' (nationalpost.com)
I feel like we skipped over the ‘truth’ bit in Truth and Reconcilliation here.
The ugly truth behind ChatGPT: AI is guzzling resources at planet-eating rates (www.theguardian.com)
Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually....
Neuralink rival sets brain-chip record with 4,096 electrodes on human brain (arstechnica.com)
I like that their implant is simply laid on top of the brain, instead of driving electrodes into brain tissue like Neuralink. I’d like to keep my brain unscarred.
China’s military shows off rifle-toting robot dogs (www.cnn.com)
Posthaste: Canada could face two more decades of stagnant growth, report warns (ca.finance.yahoo.com)
UK Woman Mistaken As Shoplifter By Facewatch, Now She's Banned From All Stores With Facial Recognition Tech (www.ibtimes.co.uk)
A big biometric security company in the UK, Facewatch, is in hot water after their facial recognition system caused a major snafu - the system wrongly identified a 19-year-old girl as a shoplifter.
Study finds a quarter of all webpages from 2013 to 2023 no longer exist (www.pcgamer.com)
CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)
You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...
(wip) it's Wednesday somewhere? (lemmy.world)
Since it’s not actually Wednesday (and because I wanted to document it somehow) you get a picture of the back. I’m done with everything but the rain. And I fully expect that to make the back look … different. So here you go. 😅
Philanthropist who gave $30M to U Manitoba condemns 'hateful' valedictory speech, university for allowing it (www.cbc.ca)
The philanthropist behind the University of Manitoba’s largest-ever personal donation — $30 million — has denounced a speech made by a valedictorian for medicine grads and admonished the university for letting it happen....