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GenderNeutralBro

@GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org

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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".

GenderNeutralBro ,

True for any company asking for anything sensitive.

I've gotten scams from my internet provider asking me if I want to upgrade my plan with a new discount. Caller ID was spoofed and it sounded pretty legit, until they started asking me about my current plan tier and price. I was like "uh, you tell me. You're the one with access to my account info." After they hemmed and hawed about that, I just hung up.

Honestly, you should be suspicious of ANY incoming calls at this point. There are convincing scams that spoof the voices of people you actually know using trained AI. It's actually pretty easy to do now, since you only need a few seconds of audio to use as a training sample. Anyone who's ever posted a video with their voice on social media can potentially have their voice spoofed. I've warned my family about this, since most of us have our voice out there somewhere.

Phone calls are dumb. SMS is dumb. Phone numbers are dumb. Phone line security is basically non-existent. It's wild that phone numbers have become the de facto ID on the internet; almost everything requires SMS auth to register now. PHONE NUMBERS ARE NOT PERSONAL IDS.

GenderNeutralBro ,

There are a bunch of apps that strictly require Chrome for their in-app custom tabs, though. I have to re-install Chrome on occasion because I can't log into apps without it. Also, having Chrome installed at all makes it impossible to NOT set a default browser (i.e. to have it ask every time), which is what I prefer since I use several different browsers for different use cases. (Note: this is on Pixel. Never had that problem on my older phones.)

GenderNeutralBro ,

I think it used to be possible to set your default "custom tabs" browser as well, but I don't think it is anymore. I'm not totally sure though.

I don't know why these apps use custom tabs in the first place. It's always struck me as a solution in search of a problem.

GenderNeutralBro ,

It was due to other reasons, too.

One of the main malware vectors back then was Internet Explorer (and specifically ActiveX), Outlook Express, and MS Office macros. That's not just a matter of obscurity; it's because Microsoft specifically wrote very shitty software with no regard for security. Netscape was not nearly as exploited as IE even when it was the leading browser.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Same IP address(es), same OS/browser/app, same configuration? Easy match.

I mean, they got me, that's for sure. I used to cycle accounts pretty frequently to dodge stalkers, but even a dedicated user could've figured me out just by matching the different subs I posted to. I eventually stopped posting in my local subreddits because of this, but even so, I talked about a lot of seemingly-common things that in aggregate could identify me pretty accurately. And that's even without the data that only Reddit admins would have access to, like browser fingerprinting and whatever tracking mechanisms I wasn't able to block (or the mere fact that I did block them).

For example, millions of people use the same phone model as I do, but how many of those also share my hobbies? How many of those play the same types of games? And how many of those use my same general writing style? How many times did I throw in an idle comment referring to a city I'd traveled to, or hinted at where I grew up? Oh my god, did I call Coke "soda"?! Information is leaking everywhere!

Heck, I wouldn't be shocked if someone could match my Lemmy account to my Reddit account(s). It'd take a crazy stalker with a lot of time and skill, but with the ever-increasing power of AI, it'll probably be easy for any schmuck to do within a couple years, never mind major governments and corporations. There's a ton of information that's hidden in plain sight, and it won't stay hidden forever.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I'm curious about what the original caption said. I can't explain this clusterfuck of typesetting with normal meming conventions.

Anyway, for context:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-s-new-stalin-center-evokes-pride-revulsion-n1267521

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/06/25/aeroflot-still-flying-abroad-despite-russias-international-travel-ban-vedomosti-a70694

What do you think about Abstract Wikipedia?

Wikifunctions is a new site that has been added to the list of sites operated by WMF. I definitely see uses for it in automating updates on Wikipedia and bots (and also for programmers to reference), but their goal is to translate Wikipedia articles to more languages by writing them in code that has a lot of linguistic...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Sounds like a great idea. Plain English (or any human language) is not the best way to store information. I've certainly noticed mismatches between the data in different languages, or across related articles, because they don't share the same data source.

Take a look at the article for NYC in English and French and you'll see a bunch of data points, like total area, that are different. Not huge differences, but any difference at all is enough to demonstrate the problem. There should be one canonical source of data shared by all representations.

Wikipedia is available in hundreds of languages. Why should hundreds of editors need to update the NYC page every time a new census comes out with new population numbers? Ideally, that would require only one change to update every version of the article.

In programming, the convention is to separate the data from the presentation. In this context, plain-English is the presentation, and weaving actual data into it is sub-optimal. Something like population or area size of a city is not language-dependent, and should not be stored in a language-dependent way.

Ultimately, this is about reducing duplicate effort and maintaining data integrity.

GenderNeutralBro ,

This will help make machine translation more reliable, ensuring that objective data does not get transformed along with the language presenting that data. It will also make it easier to test and validate the machine translators.

Any automated translations would still need to reviewed. I don't think we will (or should) see totally automated translations in the near future, but I do think the machine translators could be a very useful tool for editors.

Language models are impressive, but they are not efficient data retrieval systems. Denny Vrandecic, the founder of Wikidata, has a couple insightful videos about this topic.

This one talks about knowledge graphs in general, from 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oips1aW738Q

This one is from last year and is specifically about how you could integrate LLMs with the knowledge graph to greatly increase their accuracy, utility, and efficiency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqYBx2gB6vA

I highly recommend that second video. He does a great job laying out what LLMs are efficient for, what more conventional methods are efficient for, and how you can integrate them to get the best of both worlds.

GenderNeutralBro ,

How common is it in English? I haven't checked a lot of articles, but I did check the source of the English and French NYC articles I linked and it seems like all the information is hardcoded, not referenced from Wikidata.

GenderNeutralBro ,

The W10 requirements were almost identical to the W7 requirements. There might've been some edge cases but in general, anything that ran 7 could run 10.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-7-system-requirements-df0900f2-3513-a851-13e7-0d50bc24e15f

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-system-requirements-6d4e9a79-66bf-7950-467c-795cf0386715

GenderNeutralBro ,

To be fair, some voting adults were also misled by Weekly World News' "photos" of 800-pound babies and aliens back in the 90s. It's a pretty low bar.

GenderNeutralBro ,

DRM is evil. Laws prohibiting circumventing DRM are also evil.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I haven't read any of his book yet, but I agree with a lot of his philosophy toward tech. For example, you can read here why he did not publish his recent book on enshittification on Audible, Amazon's audio book service, because he is against the DRM that Amazon requires: https://scribe.rip/@doctorow/kickstarting-a-book-to-end-enshittification-because-amazon-will-not-carry-it-7585250dabaf . He's willing to put his money where his mouth is, excluding himself from potential sales out of principle, and I respect that.

I also try put my money where my mouth is and support DRM-free media when possible, e.g. on gog.com and the DRM-free section of ebooks.com.

GenderNeutralBro ,

A maximum line length of 80 characters is RECOMMENDED.

This is a terrible recommendation. It defeats the purpose of semantic line breaks if you insert them for non-semantic reasons as well. It also makes editing much more difficult. Let client software handle soft line wrapping, so the user can customize it as it makes sense for them. If your client software doesn't handle soft line wrapping in a sensible way, find better software.

GenderNeutralBro ,

That should be out of scope for a spec which "MUST NOT alter the final rendered output of the document."

It's not the place of a markup language/spec to influence writing style.

GenderNeutralBro ,

This is a human problem, not an AI problem.

Maybe if we hadn't neglected it for the past century.....

GenderNeutralBro ,

The real deepfakes were the scumbags we elected along the way.

GenderNeutralBro ,

To err is human.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Given any finite data set above a trivially small size/complexity, and an undefined set of criteria, the odds of meaningless patterns appearing are extremely high.

Machine learning algorithms are basically automated P-hackers when misused. Be skeptical of any conclusions drawn from ML that are not otherwise verifiable.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Also antithetical to teaching complex subjects.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I'd love more info. I was not able to find reports of this from searching. The Verge article is mostly just a reformatted press release from ASU. :/ https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/18/24043017/openai-arizona-state-university-asu-chatgpt

GenderNeutralBro ,

However, the Snapdragon X Elite is not too far off the M3 Pro, as Windows Latest highlighted. It’s running at about 80% of the speed of this Apple SoC

Uhhh. 80% the speed of Apple's second-tier laptop chip doesn't sound impressive to me.

GenderNeutralBro ,

They won’t and supposedly can’t turn over information from or about the account

Sort of, but not entirely. They use E2EE for message contents, so they would not be technically able to hand over that data (assuming their E2EE system is not compromised). However, they do NOT use E2EE for email headers, which includes email subject lines, recipients, and other metadata.

From https://proton.me/support/does-protonmail-encrypt-email-subjects:

subject lines in Proton Mail are not end-to-end encrypted, which means if served with a valid Swiss court order, we do have the ability to turn over the subjects of your messages.

From https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained:

Subject lines and recipient/sender email addresses are encrypted but not end-to-end encrypted

GenderNeutralBro ,

AGI is not a new term. It's been in use since the 90s and the concept has been around for much longer.

I agree that we should use more specific terms whenever possible. I call LLMs "LLMs" or "language models". Not that it's inaccurate to call them AI, but it's not useful either. AI is an extraordinarily broad term. Pac-Man had AI. And there's a large portion of the population who thinks it means something much, much more lofty and specific than it ever really has. At this point, the term should probably be abandoned. Any attempt to reclaim it is bound to fail.

I see this as yet another example of a technical term being bastardized by mainstream press who do not understand the field. It happens all the time with tech. I remember when "virus" actually meant something; the industry eventually abandoned the term because it was bastardized to the point of uselessness; now we just say "malware" and if we need to refer to viruses specifically...well we just don't for the most part.

This is a linguistic problem more than a technical problem.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Isn't it?

Your ID, along with the canonical data associated with it, is tied to your instance. That's how the protocol works. There's no mechanism for decoupling all that.

Mastodon has a half-hearted migration feature.

GenderNeutralBro ,

"obviously"

As if this hasn't been a defining problem or the past decade on every monolithic social media site...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Nomadic accounts are currently not supported by ActivityPub

Good to see there's at least a proposal though.

Apple Officially Warns Users to Stop Putting Wet iPhones in Rice | The company said the popular remedy could cause "small particles of rice to damage your iPhone." (gizmodo.com)

Apple Officially Warns Users to Stop Putting Wet iPhones in Rice | The company said the popular remedy could cause "small particles of rice to damage your iPhone."::The company said the popular remedy could cause "small particles of rice to damage your iPhone."

GenderNeutralBro ,

Silica gel desiccant bags. That's the same thing used in a lot of packaging material, like the little thing that says "do not eat" in a pill bottle or electronics bag.

GenderNeutralBro ,

This is getting increasingly unreliable, though.

I guess it's still self-hostable, right?

GenderNeutralBro , (edited )

1TB for $8/month isn't bad. Cheaper than Google anyway. Never mind, it's actually more expensive than Google and others. See below.

I'd rather go for something with E2EE anyway.

GenderNeutralBro ,

This says $20/month. https://one.google.com/about/plans

Is there a cheaper drive-only option?

GenderNeutralBro ,

Doh, I misread. I saw $20 and thought that was the monthly price, but that's actually for 2 months, before annual discount. Never mind.

So...yeah, who is Rakuten trying to compete with?

GenderNeutralBro ,

The line between user and advertiser is getting blurrier. They're rolling out a feature where users can pay to "boost" their posts.

Meta's boosts are a type of paid advertising that shows a Facebook or Instagram account's posts to a wider audience. Meta frames boosts as a tool that many "small businesses" use, but it's also being used by celebrities, brands, and individuals looking for more eyes on their content.

Paid boosts are a quick way to pay-to-play for engagement on Instagram and Facebook. They're different from full ad campaigns, which can be purchased through Meta's Ads Manager feature.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Ah, I guess I misread the article. So the only new part is the Apple tax?

GenderNeutralBro ,

You ain't wrong, but also, I think a lot of people here just don't want this kind of information in the form of a YouTube video. It would probably get a better response if the link was to the GitHub page, or if there were a meaningful text summary in the main post.

Props to the YouTube channel for including good links in the video description, though.

GitHub: https://github.com/google-deepmind/graphcast

Full paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.12794

GenderNeutralBro ,

Research indicates younger ids who stumble across porn accidentally can find it shocking and disturbing although the majority of young people surveyed in a 2020 British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) report said this didn't impact them in the long term.

Nobody is visiting porn sites accidentally anymore. This ain't the 90s. They don't pop up in any mainstream search engines by default.

Unless this includes not only porn sites but any site that might potentially host porn (like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, or really any site with user-uploaded content), this argument is invalid (as well as specious).

GenderNeutralBro ,

Turning off safe search requires explicit action, so I wouldn't consider that accidental.

Interesting point about typos though.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Here's a wild idea: make them publish the exact criteria and formulae used to determine coverage. Their decisions should be verifiable and reproducible.

This isn't rocket science.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Pretty much every LLM you can download already has CUDA support via PyTorch.

However, some of the easier to use frontends don't use GPU acceleration because it's a bit of a pain to configure across a wide range of hardware models and driver versions. IIRC GPT4All does not use GPU acceleration yet (might need outdated; I haven't checked in a while).

If this makes local LLMs more accessible to people who are not familiar with setting up a CUDA development environment or Python venvs, that's great news.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Ooh nice. Looking at the change logs, looks like they added Vulkan acceleration back in September. Probably not as good as CUDA/Metal on supported hardware though.

GenderNeutralBro ,

You'd probably have to go out of your way to avoid logging this. I've always seen such logs enabled by default when setting up web servers.

andrew , to Technology
@andrew@andrew.masto.host avatar

Walmart in Talks to Buy TV Maker Vizio

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/13/24072191/walmart-vizio-smart-tv-acquisition-rumor

@technology

GenderNeutralBro ,

It's been a while since I was in touch with the TV market. Is Vizio still good? 10 years ago, Vizio made excellent budget TVs. They were my go-to recommendation for people who weren't looking to spend $1000 or more on a TV.

Walmart's current store brand for TVs is Onn. Perhaps they're looking to replace their lineup, or add some high-end offerings?

GenderNeutralBro ,

Yes, or find a different revenue model that doesn’t invade people’s privacy

Agreed. The business model is unsustainable, and toxic. As much as I hate paywalls, it's better than the alternative.

Nobody could seriously believe that the viability of journalism should be dependent on the public's malleability and willingness to buy McDonalds burgers. And yet that's the status quo, more or less.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Getting there, but I can say from experience that it's mostly useless with the current offerings. I've tried using GPT4 and Claude2 to give me answers for less-popular command line tools and Python modules by pointing them to complete docs, and I was not able to get meaningful answers. :(

Perhaps you could automate a more exhaustive fine-tuning of an LLM based on such material. I have not tried that, and I am not well-versed in the process.

GenderNeutralBro ,

That's a good idea. I have not specifically tried loading the documentation into GPT4All's LocalDocs index. I will give this a try when I have some time.

Because AI and Crypto use so much electricity, what if a law was made that they had to power it with green energy?

Something on the lines of if your company facility is using over X amount of energy the majority of that has to be from a green source such as solar power. What would happen and is this feasible or am I totally thinking about this wrong...

GenderNeutralBro ,

And that's just Visa.

https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/data/2012/c&e/cfm/pba4.php

That lists the energy usage of banking and financial office space to be 18 billion kWh, or 64.8 petajoules. (About 87x that Visa figure.)

And even that is just office space. Doesn't factor in the manufacture, distribution, transport, storage, and disposal of physical money, or any other associated costs.

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