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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Are they? As the article OP shares suggests, these films quietly make us compare our lives to what is portrayed on screen. This is advertisement 101: display people in enviable positions to portray a sense of longing for a lifestyle that one would not normally seek. A food commercial isn’t selling you a product, it’s trying to make you hungry.

    If all you wanted out of these rom coms is the portrayal of a carefree life, you could just watch pharmaceutical, banking, or insurance ads.





  • The wording of the article implies an apples to apples comparison. So 1 Google search == 1 question successfully answered by an LLM. Remember a Google Search in layspeak is not the act of clicking on the search button, rather it’s the act of going to Google to find a website that has information you want. The equivalent with ChatGPT would be to start a “conversation” and getting information you want on a particular topic.

    How many search engine queries, or LLM prompts that involves, or how broad the topic, is a level of technical detail that one assumes the source for the number x25 has already controlled for (Feel free to ask the author for the source and share with us though!)

    Anyone who’s remotely used any kind of deep learning will know right away that deep learning uses an order of magnitude or two more power (and an order of magnitude or two more performance!) compared to algorithmic and rules based software, and a number like x25 for a similar effective outcome would not at all be surprising, if the approach used is unnecessarily complex.

    For example, I could write a neural network to compute 2+2, or I could use an arithmetic calculator. One requires a 500$ GPU consuming 300 watts, the other a 2$ pocket calculator running on 5 watts, returning the answer before the neural network is even done booting.




  • I’m pretty sure Windows is a key part of their “cloud stuff” strategy. You are right that consumers are not the direct focus of Windows, since they are not the direct paying audience, and that shows in the direction Windows is going, but getting consumers to use Windows is a big part of creating corporate buy in for Microsoft cloud services. Corporate environments will shun Microsoft cloud services if employees can’t use Windows, or Windows features run afoul of corporate policies (like blanket LLM bans).



  • These freedoms are a strength indeed, but they are also a vulnerability that can be exploited by foreign powers. Freedoms remain free so long as the people exercising those freedoms do so responsibly. I think a lot of people in the US do not exercise this freedom responsibly. I think a lot of Americans are being manipulated into voting in autocracy. Ironically.

    Complete and total freedom is just anarchy, and anarchy collapses on itself and turns into autocracy.



  • It depends on the law really. There is no one rule.

    For example, owning lockpicks is in many places not illegal, but owning lockpicks with the intent of bypassing a lock is.

    Some laws are very specific about the severity or testability of a crime where as others are not. In that case a judge has to interpret the criteria for legal tests, either from previous case law or by building new case law.

    In any case, being charged for something or not is a completely separate issue. Things are no less illegal just because the state has no resource or will to execute the law.

    Also, being charged does not mean you broke the law either. Nor does judgment determine it (although it’s a very strong hint) since a latter appeal could acquit you of chargers.

    The determination of guilt is in the facts of what happened. And that’s the whole point of the legal system. Being charged, getting judgement, appealing. It’s all a process to determine guilt or not. It is not itself the mechanism of guilt.

    The idea of a “guilty conscience” enshrines this idea in expression.



  • The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

    https://opensource.org/osd/

    Paradoxically (or not), restrictions on selling software is a fundamental violation of freedom. When the OSS movement says free, it means freedom as in free to do what you want, not free as in free beer. Of course, that freedom also includes the freedom to give it away.

    So in practice, that usually results in exactly what you lament: free software with a business model on top to support its development and pay programmers so they can eat.


  • To add to what has already been said about it taking a large effort, the follow up question is then, why don’t governments fund all this effort publicly through taxes, like what is done with roads, scientific research, education, healthcare?

    Well the short answer is that high-performance computing specifically is a strategic resource. Publicly funding roads only benefits the country doing the funding, so that is an easy decision to make. Meanwhile, much of the publicly funded scientific research has minimal to no strategic value (or may only be of value in states capable of that investment in the first place), so this is also an easy decision to make. But giving away technological investments in strategic ressources to rival states is a pretty bad move.




  • This article replaces the “Google is cracking down on ad blockers” mantra with “Google is consolidating control by restricting general purpose computing as the model of security”.

    Honestly, I’m not sure this is a better look. It’s true that this is “more secure”, in the sense that it limits the power afforded to malicious extensions, but it completely ignores the collateral damage. It strips the power individuals have to enact their own policies, instead having to go through Google to accomplish the same thing.

    Honestly, this is just another step in the direction of WebDRM and centralized control. This is more erosion of what made the Internet great. It’s just one more step of turning the Internet into a TV set.

    Fuck. This. Shit. Give me back web 1.0.



  • It took me a looooooooong time to realize that trying to minimize waste in “clever” ways (i.e. “why do people do X, it’s so wastefull!”) actually ended up being more wastefull in the long run because by doing so I was impacting other things I didn’t understand.

    My suggestion: don’t try to be clever, or original. Do some serious research and talk to people before embarking on these journeys.

    Housing for example is built making a ton of expectations, such as the expectation that the space will be heated. When it is not, you risk problems, starting with freezing pipes, sure, but also expansion/contraction and humidity issues (too much, too little), which can lead to all kinds of problems, including mold growth, cracks in walls, buckling floors, shifting structure, and many other things I don’t understand.

    You should talk with an HVAC expert before experimenting on your house.