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Khanzarate

@Khanzarate@lemmy.world

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Khanzarate ,

Seems solid.

It doesn't change a ton, but the point was basically them putting their money where their mouth is and saying "now we can't sell out like everything else."

If you liked them before, this is great. It means google or whoever literally can't buy them out, it's not about the money. If you were iffy already because they're not FOSS or whatever other reason, this doesn't change that, either, for better or worse

Khanzarate ,

A company with a public offering basically cannot refuse a large enough buyout because with a public offering comes a financial responsibility to the shareholders. Public stock is a contract saying give me money and I'll do my best to make you money back, and it's very legally binding.

You can avoid this by never going public, but that also means you basically don't get big investors for expanding what you can offer. A public offering involves losing some of your rights as owner for cash.

When the legal goal becomes "money above all else", it is hard to justify NOT selling all the data and violating the trust of your customers for money, customer loyalty has to be monetizable and also worth more.

Proton has given a majority share to a nonprofit with a legal requirement to uphold the current values, not make money. This means that the remaining ownership can be sold to whoever, the only way anything gets done is if this foundation agrees. It prevents everything associated with a legal financial responsibility to make money, but still allows the business to do business things and make money, which seems to be proton's founder's belief, that the software should be sold to be sustainable.

Khanzarate ,

It's a bit different because of the stated values though.

Raspberry pi's foundation is focused on making computers available broadly, while this new organization is focused on making privacy widely accessible.

While both can be commercialized, the pi's foundation has no fundamental problems with selling out privacy or focusing on money to achieve those goals. Proton would have a much harder time arguing that profiting from sale.of private data supports privacy.

This is relevant because it means even if the remaining shares end up on the stock market, the foundation can use its majority ownership to veto any privacy concerns.

Time will tell. I could also have missed something

Khanzarate ,

Well they remembered the plot of Frankenstein and boldly applied it to reality to become afraid of a new thing.

Khanzarate ,

They're basically saying they won't ship off data to be processed to anyone else. Apple server hardware will process it in data centers.

There's then a further promise that this hardware will be isolated from other things apple is doing, so that no other apple processes not related to AI will be able to see this data.

So, for instance, some other AI company might cut a deal with Amazon, get a discount on AWS processing, and in exchange, let amazon snoop through the data being processed. Or, a company might use a cheaper process in an existing data center that isnt particularly secure, and just not care if its being spied on. I'm sure there's more likely scenarios as well, I'm not a security expert, but apple is promising to thwart any similar thing, by promising the "cloud" for AI is a unique cloud, not just encrypted or whatever, but actually physically separate from everything else

Its the equivalent of saying "this product won't trigger your peanut allergy, we've built a facility that will never see a peanut, so cleaning procedures are easy and accidental contamination is impossible since this product is the only thing made in this factory."

These are still just claims though, not facts, so we'll see.

Khanzarate ,

I mean a black box would just mean that no one can see it as it processes. Put things in, get things out. As long as their claims are true, this will certainly do that. Same as an onboard AI that we still don't understand.

Khanzarate ,

3.0

2.0 was windows 8.

Khanzarate ,

It's not legal anymore but that doesn't mean you'll get caught

Khanzarate ,

So I have been unable to quickly confirm this on the post office directly, but the commonly cited rule online is quoted as 917.243(b).

If we can believe the multiple sources and the rule hasn't been changed, I recalled it a little incorrectly. Using such a letter as a label is legal but if they deem it an improper usage, like directly mailing a brick with the letter taped to it, they reserve the right to just dispose of it. No trouble for the sender though, so it can't hurt.

Khanzarate ,

Like that, but filtered through an AI.

Features: questions like "Hey, where's that file I worked on last week", "What was that recipe I found the other day" or "hey can you pull up a copy of this document from 3 days ago so I can compare them" all work. Its nice to be able to just do that, and you can apply all the normal AI editing things to them, too. They're all available.

Downside: a black box AI system the user doesn't have full control over has the right to record literally everything you do on your computer. They promise its local, for now, but not only is Microsoft not trustworthy in that regard, even if they're honest we don't know if or when they'll change that policy. I would not be surprised if the next step was "A small amount of none identifiable information is transmitted to our servers" snuck in, and they used that permission to have Microsoft Recall answer queries for advertisers directly, technically without ever identifying you. Advertisers could directly ask your own computer for all the info they'll ever need.

And, yes, Mac still has Time Machine. Linux has its own version, too. Both are very handy and I've used them each personally. In my personal opinion, a basic search with time machine does enough of Microsoft recall's job that I'm not going near it, but honestly at least you're getting functionality out of them selling your data, so it could be worse.

Khanzarate ,

It'll stick anyway because Microsoft is not about to let all that data go. It's great for training better AI and for advertising, and those seem to be the only businesses in big tech lately.

Khanzarate ,

So, you're pretty much spot on with how emulators work. I also like using claymation to demonstrate it, like this. Your computer bends over backwards to give the game the exact environment it expects.

What makes recompilation more than a simple script is the rebuilding aspect. I brought up claymation because it's a great analogy for this, too. An n64 ROM is a complete set of characters, sets, and a script for a claymation movie. It's I in one studio right now, and that studio is the N64, but you need this to be in your PC studio.

First, you have to decompile your sets and characters. You take reference photos and rip out every tree in a forest set and roll each tree back into it's own ball of clay, with its own reference photo each time. Every little clay cobble on a road, characters outfits, hair, limbs, you meticulously separate every piece of clay that Nintendo shaped, ball them up, and pack them. You now have a million little clay balls and reference photos for every one of them. You take these back to your PC studio. Thankfully, with these reference photos, your clay 3D printer (compiler) can return these balls into something very close to their original shapes, except there's a bunch of little mistakes. One character's leg is slightly thinner and longer than it should be, which messes up their gait when you re-film this, so you manually tweak the leg to be accurate. The cobbles don't quite fit the same, they're a bit smaller, but you have extra clay because of that so you just make more cobblestones. The road doesn't look exactly like the original, but that's fine. The trees, again, don't quite fit right, but you've made similar trees in your studio before and you know those will work so you actually just use those as references instead of the originals. You get filming but this one scene just isn't lit right, and you can't figure out why, but you eventually figure out the N64 studio opened the blinds on their window to get natural sun in this shot, but your studio doesn't have a good view of the sun at that angle, so you have to get a good lamp.

You face a million little hurdles decompiling and recompiling. Its almost literally reinventing the wheel. Almost all the work goes into little details that almost seem unnecessary, but there's so many that it's absolutely necessary. I was watching a playthrough of a recompiled majoras mask earlier today, and the Dev of this project found his way there, too, and he said it took a few days to get majoras mask to decompile and recompile, and about a year to fix all those little details that in software become lag or new bugs. So the script guy isn't really wrong when he said he could do it fast, but he definitely wouldn't do it right.

Khanzarate ,

I think of LLMs like digital bugs, doing their thing, basically programmed.

They're just programmed with virtual life experience instead of a traditional programmer.

Khanzarate ,

You forgot Vista between XP and 7, and it wasn't great, so the pattern holds up remarkably well.

8 felt like a mobile OS, because it was.

10 is OK. Not as good as 7, broke support for a bunch of things, really amped up the spyware feeling, but it works OK.

Then 11.

Probably still can have a computer though, it's just not fully yours on 11.

Khanzarate ,

There are already 2 of them.

NACS, which is essentially the Tesla charger, was made available to other car manufacturers at no cost already, in 2022. Due to a few reasons, among them the existence of Tesla superchargers already deployed, a lot of companies have adopted this as their charger for newer cars.

Even if Tesla went down completely, their charger is already open, so nah I don't expect any changes based on this.

Khanzarate ,

Yeah I'm kinda surprised they made it open, to be honest. But they did, and its in a way that can't be retracted, so nothing depends on their continuing good behavior.

Khanzarate ,

Ah that explains that nicely. Thanks.

Khanzarate ,

Which is why they suggested finding an organization/association, not an arbitrary website.

Funnily enough, chatgpt should be able to recommend some great associations. GPT-3 doesn't even have up-to-date databases so it doesn't even know about any new AI things that have popped up.

So find a real group of people, ask them things.

Khanzarate ,

Obviously using it as a thin client for this MacBook, duh.

Khanzarate ,

I got them so I could listen to audio books without actually ignoring my kid, who was 3 at the time. Couldn't not hear her world if she decided to get up to something. 10/10 for that.

I also loved them being hidden under my hair. Its rude to have headphones in a conversation, but this isn't rude, with them silent I can hear as well as without headphones.

Aa for dual-pairing, I had your same issue with shokz, but I found out it was Windows with the issue. Shokz switches based on who it hears playing audio and Windows likes to keep "playing" audio at 0 volume instead of properly not sending audio. It's an issue that's pretty irrelevant for most things, but it means Shokz never feels that there's only one audio source at a time, after its connected to a windows computer once. They worked fine when I paired them to my android phone and an iPad to test things.

Khanzarate ,

DS had full WiFi, just nothing to do with it unless a game needed it, but yeah pictochat did use that receiver. As far as I know it was a proprietary protocol so not actually WiFi, but same antenna and bandwidth and everything.

Khanzarate ,

Yeah that's right. No routers needed.

All local wireless gameplay on the DS is the same ad-hoc networking, too. Some games, like Mario kart, could use ds download play which is the same thing but a host would send over full game data before playing, too.

The 3ds also used it for local streetpass.

Nintendo experimented with it a bunch, honestly, although I always felt it was relatively unexploited in the ways they did. DS download was cool though because it was a mobile console's split-screen gameplay, instead of selling you 4 games to let 4 people play.

Khanzarate ,

But can you convince it to report itself for its violations if you phrase it like it's a person?

Khanzarate ,

Your wall outlet is AC but a battery is DC, so a pure wire setup is not so much a safety thing as it is just incompatible. A good fire starter.

So you'll have to convert it, which makes for a big, bulky plug.

On top of that, you'll need prior knowledge of the battery layout, including whether they're parallel or serial. Usually parallel, but not a guarantee.

All of this isn't insurmountable, but is enough to make it not the norm. They do, in fact, already exist

Khanzarate ,

There are better ones out there, that one in particular had some iffy reviews about voltages, but yeah they definitely exist.

I usually see them labeled as "power supply adapter for [AA,AAA,etc]".

Khanzarate ,

My pi 3 has struggled with some particular codecs or large (greater than 5 hours) videos. I'm not proficient enough to say that it wasn't my fault in some way, some config option, but it was a near thing, regardless. A pi 4 or 5 should do it flawlessly, and my pi 3 works more reliably than my roku, even with that flaw.

WiFi, as long as your router isn't ancient, will be more than enough. Latency isn't a factor, and you can get HD streaming at well under 100 Mbps, the upper limit of most routers. My router, in another room with walls from an old house that destroy my signal, still gives me about 20, which is enough for 1080p.

I will say a pi 3 feels fairly laggy just using it to browse online. It does much better as a streaming box. The pi 5 I just got yesterday is much snappier, feels great to use. The 4gb model is 60$ right now, although I got the 8gb model.

All this was on default raspberry pi OS with kodi installed as an app. Very little to set up besides getting the media itself shared in your preferred way.

Khanzarate ,

While I'd love a percentage based fee, this is a damages suit, so it should be actual damages these people are owed, as determined by the court. A percentage just doesn't make sense here unless punitive damages were also on the table.

In principle I agree, though, breaking the law should not be an affordable "cost of doing business".

Khanzarate ,

It could be good because if they actually gave their customers a refund or access elsewhere then they've at least made up for the closing.

Naturally, if you received something actually of equal value, it's generally alright, in the same way that I'll accept a FedEx van running into my mailbox if they paid me enough to replace it.

The emphasis is on "could" because they tested the claim that they're doing the equal value thing and found they don't seem to be. So the claim of giving something worth the digital goods you're losing just isn't holding up, so they're shit.

Khanzarate ,

Because companies insist on it and when growth stops they'll start to cannibalize their own company and charge more money for things that used to be free or fairly-priced until they price themselves out of the market entirely and die as a service.

Yay, capitalism!

Khanzarate ,

"Gen Z ruining clickbait 'Gen Z are ruining industry' industry. Will they never realize complaining about them has been a national pastime for 400 years?"

Khanzarate ,

That'd be a great Halloween vibe. Bit pricy for my Halloween budget though.

Khanzarate ,

I wish I had fiber. I get 100 Mb from T-Mobile 5g and 80 from spectrum. I've had two significant gaps in coverage from T-Mobile, but I also had internet during a power outage with a generator and an extension cord, which was huge.

For 50$, I'll take that over a more consistent 80mb for 100-120$.

Definitely a rural thing, less 5g congestion and all. a physical line makes way more sense in a city, ideally fiber, but 5g internet has a pretty big niche.

Khanzarate ,

I have never thought of writing things with static ipv6.

I have been missing out.

I lost my job after AI recruitment tool assessed my body language, says make-up artist (www.msn.com)

I lost my job after AI recruitment tool assessed my body language, says make-up artist::A make-up artist says she lost her job at a leading brand after an AI recruitment tool that used facial recognition technology marked her down for her body language.

Khanzarate ,

Only if the AI used discriminatory criteria from a protected class.

They CAN fire you for feeling you're likely to sue. They can't retaliate against a lawsuit, but there isn't one yet. At-will employment sucks, and the thing that protects against this is a union, not discrimination laws.

Khanzarate ,

Well, so a lot of people call it a Ponzi scheme, and it certainly has been used as one before, but the thing that separates it from a true Ponzi scheme is there is a product, and it's not you.

Places accept Bitcoin as a currency, there's Bitcoin ATMs, all that. This makes it valuable as a method to make online purchases, specifically, as a third-party payment processor. First you convert your money to Bitcoin through a service of your choice that's not related to the person you're paying, then you transact, and eventually that person cashes out Bitcoin for money. This generates 3 transactions, which a Bitcoin miner can authenticate and be paid in Bitcoin for their efforts.

This seems convoluted but it's about the same process as using a debit card, with MasterCard or Visa promising to balance everything in a bit and acting as an institution to verify trust.

This process is not the only positive thing about Bitcoin, but it's a major one and ensures two things. The first is that those exchange services give everyone in this "Ponzi scheme" an out. While they're running, you can't be pumped and dumped in the usual way. This creates some confidence, which helps keep people in, which raises the value. A normal Ponzi scheme promises an out, but has none.

The second, because there's people who trust in Bitcoin on actual merits, is that Bitcoin becomes a legitimate investment. It becomes equivalent to currency exchanges, where people exchange their money anticipating the value of USD or the euro to raise or fall. Again, very much like a Ponzi scheme, but since these people have an out, this is a risk, not a scam.

As far as I know (I'm not an expert) these two kinds of transactions are the bulk of the transactions in Bitcoin, but between the two, Bitcoin will remain alive with frequent usage and that enables bitcoin mining. None of this is stable, but it's also not a scam.

During the big push to get some vendors to accept Bitcoin this system hadn't formed, there were plenty of people willing to sell and mine Bitcoin, but few that were willing to buy it, and calling it a Ponzi scheme was appropriate. It's just the end goal wasn't to sucker someone into giving you money, it was to sucker them into supporting an economy that didn't exist. They succeeded, so now it's not a scam, just risky.

Khanzarate ,

Yeah the out is that you can buy goods and services with it. I could've paid for my VPN (Private Internet Access) with Bitcoin, Overstock takes Bitcoin, those ATMs exist.

If everyone suddenly wanted to cash out, it would crash and very few people would get money for it, but that's also what separates it from a Ponzi scheme, the fact that I don't need to transform it to USD to spend it. There was a hard push by Bitcoin enthusiasts to get some places to accept it directly for exactly that reason.

Khanzarate ,

That's not what the article said they meant.

An EU split that can comply, and a rest of the world split that continues to monopolize the iPhone.

Khanzarate ,

Yeah. Wireless charging helps some of that, especially if the pad is itself connected through a USB-C cable.

Ideally, in my mind, someday phones themselves will be able to charge wireless devices, so we'll connect the phone through the USB-C cable and place the watch on top and they'll both be ready to go in the morning.

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