FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 10 hours ago

Well, Russia collapsing and fragmenting would reshape the world order, it's true...

FaceDeer, 10 hours ago

It's down near the end of the article, for those who want to get right to it:

There was a scene with Kirk on the bridge of the Bird of Prey. They cut out five lines where Kirk says to Saavik, 'Have you told him yet?' And she says, 'No. I'm taking a maternity leave.'

That would've been a bombshell development in Trekland. "That's why she's standing with Amanda [Grayson, Spock's human mother] when the Bird of Prey leaves," said Meerson. "Because Amanda knows Saavik is carrying Spock's kid. All they did was cut out five lines of dialogue, and you lost that whole thing."

FaceDeer, 1 hour ago

True. But headlines like this that tease some specific fact that could easily be fit into the lead for those who are interested in that specific fact and instead bury it deep in the article inherently annoy me.

FaceDeer, 10 hours ago

Yeah. No way to prevent this, says only nation etc.

FaceDeer, 16 hours ago

As a counterpoint, I have clothes hooks in my front foyer. So that's one place that it would make a lot of sense to use one of these.

I still don't see why I'd want to hide a camera in something that's explicitly designed to have clothing draped over it, though. Seems like there are better things in my foyer to disguise a camera in.

FaceDeer, 15 hours ago

And also, the bathroom seems like a prime location for a child abuser to corner a victim.

Huh. I'm actually swinging very slightly back toward Amazon's side on this. Only very slightly, though. This is a tricky case.

FaceDeer, 23 hours ago

The list of features for the "ransomware" example he had ChatGPT help him write is almost identical to the list of features that would be present in a piece of software that was designed to help dissidents protect sensitive information from an oppressive government.

FaceDeer, 23 hours ago

May not work so well for them this time, General Winter seems to be on Ukraine's side.

FaceDeer, 23 hours ago

I think I'll leave it up to the Ukrainians to decide that. They're better informed than I am and they're the ones who'll be paying.

FaceDeer, 1 day ago

And Quebec separatism wasn't its own particular flavour of pre-MAGA MAGA? I think Quebec would have done a fine job of turning it into a shitshow on its own.

FaceDeer, 1 day ago

It’s obviously a form of nationalism, but that’s not really what I was getting at.

Well, that's what I was getting at. MAGAism is at its heart a nationalist movement, an "our people are better than those people and we'll be better off keeping those people out!" Thing.

FaceDeer, 1 day ago

It's been quite a while, but I recall back during the height of separatism there were rumblings about both the First Nations of the northern portions of Quebec and even Montreal that in the event that Quebec separated from Canada they'd want to separate in turn from Quebec. To which Quebec would of course go "but not like that!" And that could lead to quite a mess.

Frankly, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander - if Quebec won out on the "countries can have bits decide to leave if they want to" argument then more power to those parts of Quebec that subsequently want out of there and maybe back into the rest of Canada again.

FaceDeer, 1 day ago

This post, yes. The satellites themselves, no. Starlink satellites are designed to quickly deorbit and burn up when they're no longer useful.

FaceDeer, 1 day ago

Oh, it's you again.

Insert the usual "this is exactly how Starlink's constellation and business plan are supposed to work, you're obsessing about some kind of weird conspiracy theory" response here.

FaceDeer, 2 days ago

Mozilla: "We'd like to build a dataset of underrepresented languages and accents so that voice recognition works for everyone. It'll be under an open license."

Most of this thread: "GIVE ME MONEY."

Sigh. As soon as it turned out that AI training data was "worth something" everyone turned into a money-grubbing mercenary.

FaceDeer, 2 days ago

So, wait, you're fine with Mozilla impersonating you as long as you get a little money in the process?

Not that this is what Mozilla wants this data for, mind you, I'm just puzzled by this place you've jumped to.

FaceDeer, 2 days ago

Now we're just haggling over the price.

FaceDeer, 2 days ago

It bundles them together. Imagine buying a loose handful of slices, it doesn't work well.

FaceDeer, 2 days ago

I was talking about the outer plastic.

The kind of cheese slices I'm thinking of are sort of a solidified cheeze-wiz substance, I suspect that if there was nothing between them they'd merge back together into the blob they were probably originally extruded from.

FaceDeer, 2 days ago

Are there any 10-year-old Linux distributions that are still getting free support?

FaceDeer, 2 days ago

Whatever you want to call it, version or service pack, the point is that you're going to need to be using a relatively recent one to get that free support.

FaceDeer, 2 days ago

So update to Windows 11, then. This is how Microsoft has always operated, they're doing this on their usual schedule.

FaceDeer, 2 days ago

And that's the way Windows' patches and updates have always worked. This isn't some amazing new twist that Microsoft has thrown at us. If I'd bought Windows 10 ten years ago, I would have bought it with the full knowledge that at some point it'll no longer be updatable without it turning into Windows 11.

If this is a fundamental obstacle to you then you should never have bought Windows in the first place. It's like buying a gasoline-powered car and then exclaiming "this is bullshit!" When it comes time to fill the tank.

FaceDeer, 2 days ago

The guy I was originally responding to was talking about this being a reason to "switch" from Windows to Linux, suggesting that he had chosen Windows in the first place. That's the position I'm addressing, so I'm not sure why you're jumping in on this when it's not relevant to you. I've been trying to explain why this is the normal Windows experience and you were never interested in the normal Windows experience in the first place.

FaceDeer, 2 days ago

Upgrading from Windows 10 to 11 is also free.

FaceDeer, 2 days ago

I think you missed the point. The auction was for the original.

FaceDeer, 2 days ago

On the Internet no one can tell if you're being sarcastic.

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

If you're really that sick for that long, I would honestly call a doctor for some advice. Where I live there's a number, 811, for non-emergency medical advice. Maybe there's something like that where you are.

A while back my dad almost died from the flu because he couldn't eat well enough to keep his electrolytes balanced, you'll want to avoid that before it becomes potentially life threatening.

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

General Winter is not on your side this time, Russia.

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

Those words concisely describe what it's doing. What words would you use instead?

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

Well, it's an important step along the way.

There was a fun thread on Reddit the other day, /r/ChatGPT I think, where someone did a little study that showed ChatGPT gives lengthier responses with more detail if you include "I'll give you $200 if your response is good" in your prompt.

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

You didn't answer my question, though. What words would you use to concisely describe these actions by the LLM?

People anthropomorphize machines all the time, it's a convenient way to describe their behaviour in familiar terms. I don't see the problem here.

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

Many humans I've encountered don't seem to really understand what money is either. I'd honestly expect ChatGPT to have a better grasp of the concept than most.

It doesn't know that I'm not actually going to give it the two hundred dollars, though.

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

If I take my car into the garage for repairs because the "loss of traction" warning light is on despite having perfectly good traction, and I were to tell the mechanic "the traction sensor is lying," do you think he'd understand what I said perfectly well or do you think he'd launch into a philosophical debate over whether the sensor has agency?

This is a perfectly fine word to use to describe this kind of behaviour in everyday parlance.

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

If you want to get into a full blown discussion of whether ChatGPT has "agency" then I'd open the topic of whether humans have "agency" as well. But I don't see the need here.

These words were perfectly fine labels for describing the behaviour of ChatGPT in this scenario. I'm merely annoyed about how people are jumping on them and going off on philosophical digressions that add nothing.

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

If you want to get down into the nitty-gritty of it, I'd say that this is just as rough an explanation of what humans are doing.

People invent false memories and confabulate all the time without even being "aware" of it. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of "lies" that humans tell have no intentionality behind them. So when people get all uptight about applying anthropomorphized terminology to LLMs, I think that's a good time to turn it around and ask how they're so sure that those terms apply differently to humans.

FaceDeer, 4 days ago

Last I saw Lightning was pretty much DOA, it's been around for many years and almost nobody's using it. At the time I was checking there was an order of magnitude more activity transferring Bitcoin on Ethereum using WBTC tokens than using Lightning on Bitcoin itself.

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

I recall back when Lightning was first come up with thinking how incredibly hacky a solution it was, full of awkward workarounds for the limitations of Bitcoin's blockchain. A few small changes to the blockchain would have made it so much simpler and more robust, but at that point Bitcoin's immutability had become such a fundamentalist religion that any such changes were absolutely rejected. They wouldn't even fiddle with the block size, let alone consider expanding its scripting capabilities.

Then Ethereum came along with the exact opposite philosophy, it's willing to continue making changes to the foundation layer with the overall goal of making Ethereum more functional for diverse applications. Ever since then it's just been a slow transition of everything useful moving over to Ethereum and Bitcoin becoming ever more insular and obsolete by comparison.

It seems like I haven't thought about Bitcoin in years. When this article came up it took me a moment to shift the mental gears and go "oh yeah, that. I guess it's still around."

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

Yeah. Right now, the cost of a Bitcoin transaction is around $65 US. That price includes all of the expenditures that the miners have made on resources (electricity, water, rental costs for the space they're using, hardware depreciation, etc.), as well as whatever bit of profits it takes to keep miners in business. That puts a cap on whatever environmental impact the transaction is having.

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

Bitcoin is inflationary, it's generating new Bitcoin with every block and issuing that to the miners. That new Bitcoin combines with the transaction fees to pay the miners.

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

Maybe in the long run. However, when you want to actually calculate how much each transaction costs, you need to account for the fact that right now Bitcoin is inflationary. It won't stop issuing new tokens until around 2140 AD, assuming no hard forks happen to modify that issuance strategy in the meantime.

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

It's an overestimate. Right now the total cost per transaction is around 82 US dollars, which at current exchange rates is 75 Euros. That cost covers everything - electricity, rent for the building, salary for staff, taxes, depreciation of mining equipment, and whatever profit is required to keep the miners in business. I don't know what proportion of miner costs actually goes to electricity but I expect it'll likely be much less than 70 Euros.

Perhaps someone got that 700 kWh figure by doing the reverse calculation - looking at how much a transaction cost and then assuming that all goes toward electricity.

FaceDeer, 2 days ago

Yes. If you're wanting to know how many resources mining a transaction takes, that's the value you need to look at. The block reward effectively goes into subsidizing the transaction fees that are being paid.

FaceDeer, 4 days ago

Neat! I have to admit I've never heard of Flipboard (I'm not known for my broad experience in social media). From the summary I read just now it sounds like Flipboard is a kind of news aggregator? If so, that's right up the alley of sites like Lemmy and Kbin instances. So a good match for federating here.

FaceDeer, 4 days ago

Which one is the fastest? I'll pick that one and then have it just carry me away from the rest of them. The other two can stay behind to slow them down even more.

Once I'm out of sight, I'll dismount the tank that's carrying me and run off to hide in a culvert somewhere. Or flag a taxi, depending where I am.

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

Oh, of course. Silly me.

Da red wunz go fasta.

FaceDeer, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Lots of hostility, but that's to be expected. Research has shown that humans generally like AI-generated content as long as they don't know it's AI generated content, and when they find out they switch over to hating it.

It's simply bias. It'll go away eventually.

FaceDeer, 4 days ago

The threshold for how much human input counts as "authorship" is extremely low. Photographers get copyright over pictures they take when their sole contribution to the image is aiming the camera and pushing a button. Most AI-generated art involves a lot of human input in the form of prompting, selecting outputs, and then often tweaking or splicing them together in various ways.

But even if by some weird twist US courts do rule this sort of thing to be public domain, why wouldn't this "threaten human artists?" Having awesome AI-generated art being public domain seems like the best of both worlds to me - you get awesome art and it's legally unencumbered. How would a human artist compete with that? Their art would be more expensive and you'd have all kinds of limitations on what you can do with it.