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anachronist

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anachronist ,

This is depressing as hell and a statement about the time we live in and the corporate overlords who control our lives.

Jimmy McGee made a great video about it last year:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJoGm8c523M

anachronist ,

The one big law about lending out digital copies of books you own is that you only lend out as many as you physically own.

That is not what the lawsuit is about, and that was not what the plaintiffs or the judge argued. Their argument is that if you can not take a physical copy and digitize it.

If you want a digital copy to lend, you must beg the publisher to allow you to have a digital copy to lend and you must accept their terms. If they don’t want to provide you with a digital lending option as a library, then you can not lend it. If they want to make you use their DRM software you must use it even if it spies on your patrons and charges you per-lending fees, or even “expires” the book after so many loans, or “blacks out” or “embargoes” lending of titles you are supposed to have in your catalog (these are all features of publisher-backed digital lending schemes).

anachronist ,

I mean we’re sitting here on the lemmyverse having a conversation…

But yeah creators should upload to peertube but they won’t get any meaningful viewership there. The only way to break the network affect stranglehold google/youtube has over video content on the internet is making sure that if you do produce that content it’s available via other channels.

anachronist ,

Ok but why a raccoon?

anachronist ,

Still not as bad as the pink fracking drill bit “for the cure.”

www.snopes.com/fact-check/fracking-for-a-cure/

anachronist ,

baby murdering killers

As opposed to Israel?

anachronist ,

Yeah the fediverse has lower engagement all around because the community is a lot smaller. This is especially true in “long tail” communities. However, the upside is that there are no bots, dark patterns, or manipulated feeds.

That being said, while I appreciate the chronological feed I do wish there was some way to “weigh” less active communities so that I can see their activity in my feed without them being drowned out by the busier communities. I’ve noticed that I’ve gone to communities that I’m definitely subscribed to, and seen that there were several posts that I missed because the posts were drowned out by content in busy communities like, for instance, [email protected]

anachronist , (edited )

And before SpaceX the cost to do anything in space was extremely prohibitive.

As opposed to now…

With SpaceX they created re-usable rocket components

Nobody had done that before? Wasn’t the promise that they would do few quick checks, refuel, and send it back up same day?

Before SpaceX the U.S. was reliant on Russia’s soyuz to get us to and from the space station.

Nasa had do use Soyuz because crew dragon was late. SpaceX won the contract then underdelivered a late product. Basically exactly what ULA or Boeing would have done.

Wanna talk about Artemis?

anachronist ,

“Self driving cars will make the roads safer. They won’t be drunk or tired or make a mistake.”

Self driving cars start killing people.

“Yeah but how do they compare to the average human driver?”

Goal post moving.

anachronist ,

Look up “interurban railways”. Most towns east of the Mississippi used to have frequent rail service with whistle stops at every farm and crossroads. In addition to passengers these railroads also transported the harvest, Sears purchases, kit houses, even hearses!

anachronist ,

When I first started using DDG I would use the bang to get me back into google very often. Now whenever I use a browser or device (mis)configured to use google I feel like a guy who accidentally launched and tried to use IE8.

anachronist ,

Spite and pettiness seem like a poor way to run a business but what do I know? I’m just a guy who’s gotten zero starships successfully to orbit.

anachronist , (edited )

Yeah that was the joke. 🙃

Edit: Also none have made it to orbit or even near orbit. They initially claimed that the third one made it to the non-circularized suborbit they had planned, but later analysis was that it did not actually reach the planned velocity:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ03eVRgiZ4

anachronist ,

Which part of the video is wrong? The fact is that it failed to reach planned velocity. This is public record. If it did not reach planned velocity then it did not reach the non-circualized suborbit that they intended. They were not “just a circulization away from orbit.”

The CSS channel was created when Musk and Shotwell were making bonkers claims about their Mars plans, as well as other crazy bullshit like the suborbital rocket airline stuff. The point of CSS is that none of their claims pencil out if you do even basic math, and they proved that by doing the math. They’ve also gone after other space grifters like orbital assembly.

anachronist ,

The planned goal of the mission was to achieve orbital velocity but not orbital trajectory. This was because they had not yet demonstrated the ability of their vac engines to relight in space. If they go into a stable orbit but can’t relight they can not deorbit and they become space junk.

They initially claimed that this was a success (they achieved target velocity) but subsequent analysis was they were quite a bit off. Also because their engine relight test was failed/cancelled they will also not be allowed to attempt a stable orbit in IFT4. They have to demonstrate relight/deorbit capability before they will be allowed to attempt stable orbit.

anachronist ,

Google was already going downhill but when they fired Matt Cutts and replaced him with an advertising person was the point where it was obvious they weren’t interested in search anymore.

anachronist ,

The appeal to google and friends is that it’s even less obvious when you’re being advertised to when a LLM tells you something than on their existing SERPs.

anachronist ,

Unfortunately Mozilla is being run by a McKinsey consultant.

anachronist , (edited )

I switched from Alta Vista at Google in the early 2000s because the Alta Vista index was stale and full of spam. Google search tools were comparatively primitive (av let you do things like word stem search) but the results were really good.

anachronist ,

I wanna see Sam Altman reenact the “make it work” mirror scene from always sunny.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBXNa0ipFPQ

anachronist ,

A simple path forward, is to go from classifying single elements of training data, to classifying multiple elements and their relationship in the training data.

Training data already has multiple labels.

Slightly less simple, is to gather orders of magnitude more data, by just hooking the input to an IRL robot.

An entire point of the paper and video is that massive increases in training set size are showing diminishing returns.

Another step, is for the NN to control the robot and decide which parts of the data require refinement, and focus on that.

🤡

anachronist ,

Alternate theory we’ll look back the same way we looked back on the claims that IBM watson was intelligent, or the claims in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, that <insert technology x> was going to make computers truly intelligent.

anachronist ,

Pretty crazy to think that it is actually not sure whether spending less than 500k on a supercomputer is worth it.

Has more to do with the market for supercomputers. They are monsters to keep fed so it’s not a question of if you can buy it but rather if you can run it. But customers for supercomputers are in the market because they need the most raw power that the technology is capable of supplying, so buying and installing a decade old supercomputer (which is going to have the same operating costs at a lower capability than a new one) doesn’t make sense.

You also have to consider that the downtime’s going to be a lot higher on this equipment as you’re going to start having components hit the end of their useful life.

anachronist ,

The biggest con is the industry’s war to make Kei trucks illegal in the US.

anachronist ,

Tictok is horrible but this entire ban is being driven by the swamp being upset that young people have come to the wrong conclusion about Israel. I think that the idea is that as long as people are using facebook or google-owned properties, people can be shown only information that will lead them to the correct, approved opinions.

anachronist ,

Unfortunately, then they can legally terminate you for refusal to work.

I don’t think they’re being fired for “refusal to work”. There is a concept of “job abandonment” but one 9 hour period wouldn’t count. Typically you need several days of no contact/no show before you have considered to have abandoned your job.

This is more about at-will employment: Google has a right to fire an employee at any time for almost any reason, or for no reason. There have been people getting fired for posting pro-Palestine content to linkedin, which is completely legal in the US.

This isn’t a story of “employees overstepped a line and got fired” this is a story of “there is no line, companies can fire employees for almost anything and definitely for their political views regardless how respectfully they are expressed.”

Also going on strike is basically the definition of “organized refusal to work”

anachronist ,

Hacker news is full of people LARPing as corporate crisis management officers, or counsels for the defense. Every post you get about “company caught grinding up babies to fuel forever-chemical cancer machine” will get a ton of posts by people arguing that actually it’s a net positive for the world and how could anyone be against such amazing innovation?

anachronist ,

These are almost certainly saleried, exempt employees with no “timeclock”.

They were fired for expressing a political opinion and doing so in a way Google did not like.

It is certainly legal for Google to fire them for this because it is legal for Google to fire them for almost any reason. But it’s also pretty certian that there is no way in America to protest your employer in a way where the law would protect you from retaliation.

Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract (www.nbcnews.com)

“Google issued a stern warning to its employees, with the company’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC.”

anachronist ,

2000s were peak libertarian for SP. They were against the war on terror so they didn’t code “Bush-right” but they were extremely libertarian. I remember the media trying to push this “millennials are conservative actually” line by inventing the phrase “South-park republican”

Still I remember them landing some good observations. For instance, in one episode the boys learn how veal is made and become animal rights activists. You can tell TP/MS are not animal rights activists, but after the boys steal the cows the media, police, government, etc all instantly start calling the boys “terrorists.” It really caught the whole post-9/11 zeitgeist of “anybody you don’t like is a terrorist.”

anachronist ,

This is the definition of late-stage capitalism. Capitalism starts out by finding useful things that improve lives for at least some people (potentially by ruining it for others). For instance, it invents assembly lines to make manufactured goods cheaper but in so doing makes the worker’s job dull, repetitive, stressful, and robs him of his agency. This is early stage capitalism. Things are getting worse for some people but broadly better for many.

But then later on capitalism runs out of things to improve. You can only invent the assembly line once. You only get that boost when you implement it. So you have to come up with something else. Maybe you computerize things. But eventually you can’t wring any more profits out of production and profits must go up, so you have to take them out of the customers. You roll up all the competing firms into a monopoly and then start jacking up the price, slashing the quality, etc. This is late-stage. It becomes more and more parasitic and the snake eats its own tail.

anachronist ,

I think OJ single handedly killed the Bronco as a car anyone with self-respect would own.

The image of that white Bronco rolling down the highway in the slow lane with a long procession of cop cars behind in second gear was one of the most iconic images of the 90s. You couldn’t have picked a worse getaway car.

anachronist ,

This isn’t even remotely true. This is specifically what the DOJ is suing over: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39780312

anachronist ,

I guess they decided to lean into it.

anachronist ,

More of a fart reel than a sizzle reel.

The basic message was “stop resisting” because AI is “inevitable.” I think it’s telling that this is the message the industry is going with.

anachronist ,

“You know what would be totally sick? What if we made our building’s roof into a matrix of inverted metal parabolas?”

anachronist ,

Well now all we need is internet connected chargers with dodgy security…

anachronist ,

We’re not ready because we’re using concepts like “raising” to describe the creation of a probabilistic word sequence generator.

Don’t anthropomorphize the algorithm.

anachronist ,

I assume the real main selling point for Windows 11 is the inescapable constant nagging you get when you try to stick with WIndows 10.

anachronist , (edited )

I don’t think Jack Ryan would have won. Obama had already won a crowded and contentious democratic primary and was a really strong candidate. Ryan, on the other hand, wasn’t a very good candidate and was kinda floundering even before the divorce scandal. This was at a nadir for the Republicans in Illinois because it was after the Ryan/Licenses for Bribes scandal and before Blagojevich. Most of the Republican A-tier had been indicted or had their careers ruined (including Fitzgerald who Ryan was trying to replace) and they were running B-tier candidates.

anachronist ,

The purpose of Mozilla is to kill Firefox. That’s what Google is paying for.

anachronist ,

Wikipedia gets something like $150 million in donations annually. Firefox absolutely could have done similar numbers back when they had a massive userbase, and it would have given the users a feeling of ownership. Instead they decided to be funded almost entirely by the technology monopolist.

anachronist ,

I remember what happened last time. Gradually the web will become unusable if you’re not using Chrome. That’s how it worked back in the day with Internet Explorer. Microsoft even began hooking things into IE that can only work on windows (activex controls) and then getting websites to support them.

When I first started using Linux I had to switch to Netscape 4.7 because it was the only browser available and the web barely worked. I remember thinking “well, the web sucks on Linux but I guess I can live without it.”

anachronist ,

Unfortunately Mozilla’s brand new CEO is a McKinsey ghoul: www.linkedin.com/in/chamberslaura/

anachronist ,

I mean that’s pretty standard for a McKinsey ghoul:

  • Step 1: go to an ivy league college, get a business degree
  • Step 2: work for McKinsey for a few years as an associate
  • Step 3: get a job at a McKinsey client leapfrogging everyone else into management/c-suite
  • Step 4: hire McKinsey to bring their arrogant children into your org and screw things up

Everything about her subsequent career has been going from one upper management/c-suite role in a tech company to another. This is not the resume of a person who should be running a nonprofit that controls the most important open source project on the internet. But beyond that just look at what she’s done in her one month at Mozilla:

    1. Massive round of layoffs
    1. "Focus on {buzzword}" where {buzzword} in this case is AI

That’s straight out of the McKinsey playbook.

anachronist ,

Yep Americans have a choice between the party that aggressively cheerleads and gloats while doing everything in their power to enable Israeli war crimes, and the party that “expresses concerns” and “calls for moderation” while doing everything in their power to enable Israeli war crimes.

anachronist ,

This is daft though considering that he needs Michigan and the Muslim voters in were one of the Democratic pillars in that state, and he has completely and possibly irrevocably alienated them.

anachronist ,

I think for like ten minutes they were vetting people joining or something, and the answers were high quality. But the whole thing turned into yahoo answers within a month of it getting popular.

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