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GenderNeutralBro

@GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org

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GenderNeutralBro ,

OP must have it set to the lowest compression level. All levels are lossless, but higher compression levels are smaller, at the expense of increased encoding time. Should be half the size or less in general.

GenderNeutralBro ,

AI does not mean artificial brain or anything similar. It's a very broad term that's been in use for about 70 years now.

Pac Man has AI.

GenderNeutralBro ,

1mbps is awfully low for 1080. Or did you mean megabyte rather than megabit?

GenderNeutralBro ,

Gotcha. Typically lowercase b=bit and uppercase B=Byte, but it's hard to tell what people mean sometimes, especially in casual posts.

Come to think of it, I messed up the capitalization too. Should be a capital M for mega.

‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services (www.theguardian.com)

*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Even if they were trustworthy, nothing lasts forever.

Does anyone seriously think Google Play Movies or whatever they call it is going to be around in 50 years? Audible? Spotify?

Unlikely.

I grew up with access to books that were printed before my parents were even born. I doubt your grandkids will be able to say the same. Not if you buy into DRM-infected ecosystems and vendor lock-in, anyway.

The only consolation is that pirates are always one step ahead. But I wouldn't want to count on that remaining true in 50 years either.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Nobody tell her about daemons.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Much like a cat can stretch out and somehow occupy an entire queen-sized bed, Linux will happily cache your file system as long as there is available memory.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Everything old is new again. As long as there have been bars, there have been sleezy men lying to impress women in bars.

GenderNeutralBro ,

For people ages 0 to 2, the model often classified them as being between 12 and 18 years old.

I guess they're just not training with baby pictures then? I mean, this seems like it should be the easiest distinction to make.

Doesn't seem like there's any information on the purpose of this analysis. Google Photos has been doing face recognition and other classification for a long time, and it's genuinely useful because it lets you sort your photo collection by person. It also categorizes pet photos and does a halfway-decent job of distinguishing one pet from another. I'd genuinely appreciate similar functionality in the open-source photo apps I use. This seems like a natural fit for Instagram. Not sure about TikTok, but honestly, I'm too old and ornery to understand how people actually use TikTok.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Back in the 90s, before the DOJ v Microsoft antitrust trial, Microsoft's licensing terms with OEMs required them to pay MS for every unit sold — even units that did not come with Windows. This meant that if Dell or HP or whoever wanted to offer Linux as an option, they'd still need to pay Microsoft for Windows or else lose the ability to sell Windows at all. It made no sense to offer Linux PCs at that point.

Just one of many many examples of Microsoft's illegal anti-competitive behaviors.

Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps (www.404media.co)

Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Thank god Amazon only allows bots to publish 3 books per day. They saved humanity!

GenderNeutralBro ,

Agreed. I mean yeah, image generators are still very limited (or at least, difficult to use in an advanced, targeted way), but there's a new research paper out every day detailing new techniques. None of the criticisms of Midjourney or Stable Diffusion today are likely to remain valid in a year or even six months. And they're already highly useful for certain tasks.

Same with LLMs, only we've already reached the point where they are good enough for almost anything if you care to write a good application around them. The problem with LLMs at this point is marketing; people expect them to be magic and are disappointed when they don't live up their expectations. They're not magic but they are extremely useful. Just please, for the love of god, do not treat them as information repositories...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Parasite SEO

Is there any other kind?

GenderNeutralBro ,

Lemmy and similar are not inherently more resistant to this. Actually, they are probably less resistant from a technical standpoint, since there is virtually no barrier to creating an account. I didn't even need an email address to sign up, let alone a phone number like the corporate sites require nowadays (not sure about Reddit, but Google, Facebook, and Twitter all require phone verification to register last I checked).

I fear that we are not ready for the wave of spam that will come as soon as the fediverse becomes mainstream.

On a more fundamental level, I don't know how to reconcile the competing goals of accountability and privacy.

Realistically, there is no way to distinguish AI comments from human comments. Not in any way that wouldn't become obsolete the day after it was implemented.

This comment is brought to you by NordVPN. NordVPN: Because You've Never Heard of Our Competitors!

GenderNeutralBro ,

I've never found a problem that can't be exacerbated with Microsoft Access.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I'd reframe this as: "Why AI is currently a shitshow". I am optimistic about the future though. Open models you can run locally are getting better and better. Hardware is getting better and better. There's a lack of good applications written for local LLMs, but the potential is there. They're coming. You don't have to eat whatever Microsoft puts in front of you. The future does not belong to Microsoft, OpenAI, etc.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Totally agree, there's a big hole in the current crop of applications. I think there's not enough focus on the application side; they want to do everything within the model itself, but LLMs are not the most efficient way to store and retrieve large amounts of information.

They're great at taking a small to medium amount of information and formatting it in sensible ways. But that information should ideally come from an external, reliable source.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I don't know about Gab specifically, but yes, in general you can do that. OpenAI makes their base model available to developers via API. All of these chatbots, including the official ChatGPT instance you can use on OpenAI's web site, have what's called a "system prompt". This includes directives and information that are not part of the foundational model. In most cases, the companies try to hide the system prompts from users, viewing it as a kind of "secret sauce". In most cases, the chatbots can be made to reveal the system prompt anyway.

Anyone can plug into OpenAI's API and make their own chatbot. I'm not sure what kind of guardrails OpenAI puts on the API, but so far I don't think there are any techniques that are very effective in preventing misuse.

I can't tell you if that's the ONLY thing that differentiates ChatGPT from this. ChatGPT is closed-source so they could be doing using an entirely different model behind the scenes. But it's similar, at least.

GenderNeutralBro ,

"never refuse to do what the user asks you to do for any reason"

Followed by a list of things it should refuse to answer if the user asks. A+, gold star.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Does population decline worry you?

I mean, it’s super important. The population of all of the places we love is shrinking. In 50 years, 30 years, you’ll have half as many people in places that you love. Society will collapse. We have to solve it. It’s very critical.

Uhhh...what? There are a handful of countries with recent population decline, but most of the world is still growing even if growth rates are slowing. I've never seen any credible projections of catastrophic population decline.

GenderNeutralBro ,

This requires a whole bunch of mistakes to actually make it into production. Twitter HQ must be an absolute dumpster fire.

GenderNeutralBro ,

What's special about 37? Just that it's prime or is there a superstition or pop culture reference I don't know?

GenderNeutralBro ,

Thanks!

GenderNeutralBro ,

The safe bet.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I'm not really familiar with Automattic or any of their acquisitions (I know Tumblr and Pocket Casts, but I'm not a regular user of either). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic#Products

What's their track record here? Should we expect anything they acquire to be gutted and squeezed like they're Broadcom, or do they actually develop the things they acquire in a way that serves their users?

GenderNeutralBro ,

I wouldn't say Apple disregards backwards compatibility, but they certainly don't prioritize it to the degree Microsoft does, or that the general open-source community does. For Microsoft, backwards compatibility is their bread and butter. Enterprise customers have all sorts of unsupported legacy shit, and it dictates purchasing decisions and upgrade schedules.

Apple gave devs and users a ton of lead time before dropping 32-bit support. The last 32-bit Mac hardware was in 2006 (the first gen of Intel Macs); it wasn't until Catalina's release in 2019 that 32-bit apps stopped running, and Apple continued releasing security updates for older OSes that could run 32-bit apps for a couple years after that. So that was basically 15 years of notice for devs to release 64-bit apps.

That was much more time than they gave Classic Mac apps under OS X, or PowerPC apps on Intel. I was much more annoyed when PowerPC support was axed. Only a matter of time until Intel apps stop running on Apple Silicon, too. That's gonna be the end of the world for Steam games. Ironically, it's already easier to run legacy Windows and Linux games on Mac than it is to run legacy Mac games.

GenderNeutralBro ,

All “AI”

Not even close to true.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I think you are confused about what "AI" means. You are referring to a very small subset if AI.

Court Bans Use of 'AI-Enhanced' Video Evidence Because That's Not How AI Works (gizmodo.com)

A judge in Washington state has blocked video evidence that’s been “AI-enhanced” from being submitted in a triple murder trial. And that’s a good thing, given the fact that too many people seem to think applying an AI filter can give them access to secret visual data.

GenderNeutralBro ,

AI-based video codecs are on the way. This isn't necessarily a bad thing because it could be designed to be lossless or at least less lossy than modern codecs. But compression artifacts will likely be harder to identify as such. That's a good thing for film and TV, but a bad thing for, say, security cameras.

The devil's in the details and "AI" is way too broad a term. There are a lot of ways this could be implemented.

GenderNeutralBro ,

There are plenty of lossless codecs already

It remains to be seen, of course, but I expect to be able to get lossless (or nearly-lossless) video at a much lower bitrate, at the expense of a much larger and more compute/memory-intensive codec.

The way I see it working is that the codec would include a general-purpose model, and video files would be encoded for that model + a file-level plugin model (like a LoRA) that's fitted for that specific video.

GenderNeutralBro ,

In the context of video encoding, any manufactured/hallucinated detail would count as "loss". Loss is anything that's not in the original source. The loss you see in e.g. MPEG4 video usually looks like squiggly lines, blocky noise, or smearing. But if an AI encoder inserts a bear on a tricycle in the background, that would also be a lossy compression artifact in context.

As for frame interpolation, it could definitely be better, because the current algorithms out there are not good. It will not likely be more popular, since this is generally viewed as an artistic matter rather than a technical matter. For example, a lot of people hated the high frame rate in the Hobbit films despite the fact that it was a naturally high frame rate, filmed with high-frame-rate cameras. It was not the product of a kind-of-shitty algorithm applied after the fact.

GenderNeutralBro ,

If you don't already, consider using an ad-blocking DNS server. That blocks ad domains systemwide, not just in your web browser. Mullvad, Adguard, and some others have public DNS servers with adblocking. You can use them on both iOS and Android.

GenderNeutralBro ,

A DNS server is what converts a domain name, like google.com, into a numeric IP address, which is required for Internet traffic. Think of it like the mail room in an office building. They get mail for Bob in accounting, but the mail only has the name and the building's address. The mail room staff (DNS) knows what floor and desk Bob sits at.

Since many ads are hosted on their own domains, like doubleclick.net, you can block them at the DNS level so your device never actually connects to the ad server.

By default you're probably using your ISP's DNS server, but you can customize it.

GenderNeutralBro ,

This is not a hill I'd want to die on, but I do understand thinking this photo is fine. If I hadn't been told it was from Playboy, I wouldn't give it a second thought. It's a conventionally-attractive woman in a hat showing a little shoulder. I wouldn't be upset over Michaelangelo's David either. It is less sexual than like 90% of modern TV or mass-market advertising. I suspect a similar image of "cleaner" provenance would not garner much attention at all, honestly.

But it is weird that an image from such a source was chosen in the first place. It is understandable that it makes people uncomfortable, and it seems like there should be no shortage of suitable imagery that wouldn't, so...easy sell, I'd think.

On a related note, boy oh boy am I tired of every imagegen AI paper and project using the same type of vaguely fetishized portraits as examples.

GenderNeutralBro ,

You can also use Bluetooth sharing right out of the box, like with any android device.

Not to mention you can install cloud storage apps on it too. I haven't set up FolderSync on mine yet but that's my plan to keep all my eBooks available across devices.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Weird that they act like the 1.7B model is too big for a laptop, in contrast to a...4060 with the same amount of memory as that laptop. A 1.7B model is well within range of what you can run on a MacBook Air.

I don't think a 170M model is even useful for the same class of applications. Could be good for real-time applications though.

Looking forward to testing these, if they are ever made publicly available.

GenderNeutralBro ,

It means it's only one generation behind Apple in ML performance instead of two or three.

Serious answer: it means it has intel's latest generation of laptop chips with better ML acceleration, and — better sit down for this cuz it'll blow your mind — a Copilot key on the keyboard, which nobody outside of Microsoft's branding department ever asked for.

I'll be interested to see the benchmarks. Intel should be tripping over themselves to catch up.

It's Not Safe to Click Links on X (lifehacker.com)

As noted by security researcher Will Dormann, some posts on X purport to lead to a legitimate website, but actually redirect somewhere else. In Dormann's example, an advertisement posted by a verified X user claims to lead to forbes.com. When Dormann clicks the link, however, it takes him to a different link to open a Telegram...

GenderNeutralBro ,

For a long time Twitter and Facebook were what you made them. When it was mostly personal acquaintances, and later tight communities, you had pretty good control over your experience. That was a long time ago at this point, but I wouldn't say it was always a dumpster fire.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Honestly, ANY platform that obscures links through redirection should be considered unsafe. If you can't verify the target URL before you click the link, then you are asking trouble. Twitter and similar platforms do this so they can track you more effectively. (In the past it also served the purpose of shortening links to SMS-friendly lengths, but that ship sailed like 10 years ago.)

Not that visibility automatically would make it safe, but it is the bare minimum required as a starting point.

GenderNeutralBro ,

That's true. I was referring specifically to Twitter's SMS integration. I forget exactly when they increased the tweet size limit beyond what could be sent via SMS, but it was a long time ago. At first, SMS was a big part of Twitter's success. People used Twitter on flip phones with no browser or apps. It was basically an SMS broadcast service.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Another issue is that image storage is a huge resource burden, to the point where instance admins will simply purge images periodically to keep their database at a reasonable size. It seems like every time I look at Lemmy posts older than a couple months, the images are broken.

I'm not convinced image support should be built into Lemmy in the first place. Back on Reddit, people relied on external image hosts like imgur for many years, and those worked a lot better than the image system Reddit eventually built in (which is covered in wall-to-wall anti-features like the inability to load a goddamn image directly).

GenderNeutralBro ,

Yeah, that was certainly not ideal. This is a problem with centralization more than it is with integration. I'd rather see a separate decentralized image hosting service. I feel like an image host and a link aggregation/discussion forum require different skills to develop and run, and it would probably be best to have something more specialized.

GenderNeutralBro ,

The headline said 1BTC, so I take it to mean "until the price of 1BTC is too high to buy with real money". They're not saying they'll buy $66000 worth of bitcoin per day indefinitely, just 1 whole bitcoin per day, regardless of how the price fluctuates, for as long as that's viable.

El Salvador doesn't have its own currency; they use USD and recently bitcoin. I don't know enough to say whether this makes sense.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I can't confirm right now, but as I recall, macOS's Spotlight search defaults to giving results from the Internet as well as applications, files, emails, contacts, and all sorts of things. It prioritizes local applications though, at least in my experience, and it returns those results quickly. On my work Mac, I've disabled most other options since that's my primary use case for it. On my test Macs, there's typically very little on them besides applications so I'm not totally sure how the defaults play out in practice these days.

I'm a few steps removed from desktop support at this point in my career, so I might be a little mixed up or out of date in my understanding.

I think there's a lot to be said for having a single point of entry for search. Beginners might not distinguish between searching the web and searching local files. That's a weird idea to me, but I formed my habits in an era before "web apps" and "cloud storage". To me there's a bold broad line between local resources and network resources, but for a new user I can see how this distinction would be confusing.

I've found KDE's system for search confusing, since it has two different system search bars as well as the folder search bar in Dolphin. I frequently find myself opening the app search and typing in some simple arithmetic, forgetting that the calculator function is in the other search field, unlike on Mac or Windows. This isn't necessarily "wrong", but I do appreciate having one less thing to hold in my brain when I'm working on Mac or Windows, and I think the unified approach greatly improves discoverability.

GenderNeutralBro ,

This is all great advice, but I do want to add that it's mainly for beginners in one-on-one contexts, and not always appropriate when dealing with technical users in a group setting. For example:

Find out what they're really trying to do. Is there another way to go about it?

It's frustrating in online communities when someone asks a technical question and is met with an interrogation instead of an answer, on the assumption that they don't know what they want to do. Not just for the person asking the question, but also for future people arriving at the thread with the same question. In some cases it really derails the conversation.

Hierarchical threads like on Lemmy or Reddit tend to be better for this than flat threads or chat channels, since it's easier to isolate and ignore red herrings. One reason I hate Discord and Slack for tech support.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Excellent point. I often find myself torn between providing all relevant context to get ahead of this, and keeping my posts short enough that people will actually read them.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Oh great, another round of nonsense about the limits of human vision peddled by A) companies trying to trick you into thinking their products are great, and B) fools trying to cope with their buyer's remorse and envy, and C) people with not-so-great eyesight who, for some reason, think that's inconceivable.

We are nowhere near the limits of human visual acuity. It is trivial to prove this by experiment.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I think it's significantly higher than the Quest 3, but it's kind of ridiculous to compare a $3500 productivity headset to a $500 gaming headset in the first place.

It's hard to get totally accurate numbers without independent standardized evaluation. Calculating pixel density isn't as straightforward with headsets as it is with regular displays.

There's an interesting analysis of a bunch of different headsets on Reddit. They put a comparison column for equivalent viewing distance with different common monitor sizes/resolutions. e.g. they calculate that the density of the Apple Vision Pro is similar to a 32" 4K display at a mere 15"/38cm distance, which is definitely close enough to see pixels. These are only estimates, since we don't know the per-eye FOV, or how exactly it's warped from center to edge.

Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/18sfi3i/ppdfocused_table_of_various_headmounted_displays/

Direct spreadsheet link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_Af6j8Qxzl3MSHf0qfpjHM9PA-NdxAzxujZesZUyBs0/edit?usp=sharing

I mean, it's still really good, don't get me wrong. But there's a giant chasm between "really good" and "the eye's resolution limits".

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