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LesserAbe

@LesserAbe@lemmy.world

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LesserAbe ,

Lol yeah everyone shitting on stereo is shooting in the wrong direction - companies suck, stereo or surround sound doesn't. Not saying it's a super high priority for me, but another channel of audio isn't going to use much bandwidth, we already listen to streaming music in stereo all the time.

LesserAbe ,

If there's one thing I learned from Civ V it's you have to get your population numbers up in order to produce enough settlers

LesserAbe ,

It sucks! I'd guess this was an attempt to get something on the books and maybe they go back for exemptions later. Article says an earlier bill only applied to wheelchairs and then later they expanded to include agricultural equipment.

LesserAbe ,

Good read, and I grabbed a bunch of other links in there for later.

LesserAbe ,

Good lord, everyone please learn a tiny bit about spacex and the state of the space industry instead of letting your (justified) hatred of Elon do the typing.

LesserAbe ,

You're right, Elon Musk being associated with a company is negative. And what SpaceX has accomplished despite that association is truly impressive.

I think around here most people agree that billionaires don't earn their billions, they reach that point having benefited from the efforts of thousands of workers. So why don't we recognize those people's work? Somehow, SpaceX has managed to avoid the meddling that we see from Musk in relation to Twitter and Tesla.

Before SpaceX the U.S. was reliant on Russia's soyuz to get us to and from the space station. We didn't have anything that could launch people into orbit.

Before SpaceX we were launching single use rockets built by companies like United Launch Alliance (ULA), which was founded as a joint venture between defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (They're still around and still for the most part suck)

And before SpaceX the cost to do anything in space was extremely prohibitive. NASA didn't and still doesn't really build their own rockets, they contract out, and the contracts had been cost-plus, meaning ULA got an agreed on profit plus expenses. So if the schedule slipped on development or development cost more than expected, they actually make more money. There wasn't much of a private market in space.

With SpaceX they created re-usable rocket components, re-established a U.S. sourced crew capsule, and using fixed price contracts they reduced the cost of launch by an order of magnitude. And by publishing fixed prices to get into space, they pretty much by themselves kicked off the private space economy. SpaceX launches more frequently than any other company, and more than any nation.

And they did all that with a better safety record than previous programs! I can't speak to this particular explosion, but SpaceX has taken an approach where they create new designs quickly, and test them quickly with the potential for explosions, before they put humans at risk on a live launch.

Elon Musk didn't do all that, the people at SpaceX did. And if anything I'm concerned about the point when he gets tired of fucking up twitter and tesla and turns his attention to SpaceX. I'm hoping the national security aspect of the company will mean responsible adults prevent him from interfering.

LesserAbe ,

Meaning no disrespect, it's clear from your response you're not familiar with space history. And that was my point - a lot of people are jumping in here and making negative comments just because of the Musk association without knowing or caring about the reality.

The space shuttle (the U.S.' s previous manned "reusable" vehicle) was retired in 2011, and the Crew Dragon was ready in about 2020. NASA was not forced to use Soyuz because of a delay in the Crew Dragon, it was because the Space Shuttle had two previous fatal disasters, was way more expensive than planned, and would be even more expensive to keep running. I didn't know this until looking at the wikipedia just now, but early safety estimates put the chance of catastrophic failure and death of the crew between 1 in 100 to as low as 1 in 100,000. After those two disasters they re-evaluated and put the risk as high as 1 in 9.

NASA was willing to take a chance on other contracts for commercial vehicles because it had no other options. It awarded contracts both to SpaceX and ULA. The first is doing dozens of uncrewed launches per year and has flown 12 crewed missions. The other is doing like 3 launches per year, has yet to fly Starliner with a crew, and costs more per launch.

The space shuttle vehicle itself was re-usable. The "external tank" was discarded and not re-used. The solid rocket boosters would fall into the ocean, and then would have to be recovered, examined and refurbished. Those tanks/boosters represented a huge portion of the cost. While the space shuttle was slightly more re-usable, other rocket launches would be single use. What SpaceX did that no one else had before was a controlled vertical landing of the booster. In other words, it landed under power and standing up. That's very difficult, and a game changer since it skipped the recovery step, and they didn't require the time and cost of examination / refurbishment the way the space shuttle components did.

What is it you want to say about Artemis?

LesserAbe ,

Please see my other comment in this same thread. It's not like Tesla or Twitter where they're clearing slipping and releasing bad product. Look at the actual accomplishments!

As much as we on lemmy might look down on consumers of conservative news, I'm really surprised by how similarly reflexive and uninformed a lot of the comments here are.

LesserAbe ,

You wouldn't say this if you were following the industry at all. Please see my other comment in this thread. SpaceX is dominating, for good reason, and seemingly in spite of musk.

LesserAbe ,

Hmm sensing similarities to that other thread where the gen z person was saying millennials always complain about them. What if some predictable percentage of people regardless of the time they were born are assholes?

LesserAbe ,

I'm a millennial too. You're right, there were definitely people saying we suck, aren't hard workers, it's our own fault for not doing well financially, etc. I'm just saying that wasn't all the boomers in the same way all millennials aren't giving gen z shit. But those sorts of claims drive engagement, from upset people in both demographics, so that's why the narrative keeps popping up.

LesserAbe ,

Joker is claiming he's smoking good weed and Batman disagrees telling him it's low quality. Then Joker goes to clean out the bottom part of the grinder he uses to prepare his weed, which is the part that catches all the tiny weed particles, so it's the most potent part.

Google's call-scanning AI could dial up censorship by default, privacy experts warn (techcrunch.com)

A feature Google demoed at its I/O confab yesterday, using its generative AI technology to scan voice calls in real time for conversational patterns associated with financial scams, has sent a collective shiver down the spines of privacy and security experts who are warning the feature represents the thin end of the wedge. They...

LesserAbe ,

"Thin end of the wedge" is a good way to put it.

LesserAbe ,

Trouble is when everybody else uses it, just because you turn it off doesn't mean you won't have issues.

What is the most appropriate way of tracking web traffic?

I have my personal blog, made with Hugo and hosted on GitHub pages. Initially I did not turn on any kind of web tracking / web analytics, because I do not like tracking at all. But I want to make my blog better and to achieve it, I need a feedback loop about traffic. For example, what are the most popular publications, or how...

LesserAbe ,

I was using plausible for one of my projects and had a good experience.

LesserAbe ,

I like "I'll bet he's nice". The synths are really interesting on the album. Can't say it's something I want to listen to all the time though. I appreciate Brian Wilson.

LesserAbe ,

Boooooo to this post

LesserAbe ,

I'm just assuming the gallows were added later

ajsadauskas , to Fuck Cars
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

The toll road scam: A government-made monopoly you pay for.

Here's a funny-because-it's-true take on Transurban and the poor tax it imposes, from Punter's Politics:

https://youtu.be/FlKBakPAtiw?si=G39_0GcJzSB0SSA8

@fuck_cars

LesserAbe ,

I don't like when government funded projects are sold to private corporations. I like government funded infrastructure though.

LesserAbe ,

Yeah what the heck? How does this guy use electric for regular things, let alone a car?

LesserAbe ,

This is a lot of who cares shit, but Aubrey is Drake's real name

LesserAbe ,

Then he wouldn't get nearly as many views. Or have articles written about him

LesserAbe ,

My understanding is the premise of world coin is to provide identity verification somehow, but I don't get how is it supposed to work?

Also how does it benefit the network to have scanned irises for people who don't care about world coin or understand how it works?

LesserAbe ,

I didn't say it was good or I support it. I'm trying to understand it. Which is usually an important step to effectively combat something.

LesserAbe ,

Stupid question, but am I right in thinking that osmc won't support streaming services like Netflix/Hulu/Max?

LesserAbe ,

If my car started playing music automatically I think I'd keep it on. But seems like poor form to waste time actually putting music on. I assume every second counts

LesserAbe ,

Here's the Wikipedia article for anyone catching up like me.

LesserAbe ,

Torn. This is clearly a cool idea, and it would save a lot of work (which I would immediately offset with all the work putting it together) But then it will be that much easier to keep a traditional lawn going, which I'd love to get away from over the long term.

LesserAbe ,

Of course don't let me dissuade you. My wife would much prefer a robo mower with "normal" lawn over a no-lawn solution

LesserAbe ,

Open your third eye

LesserAbe ,

From the wiki they mention researchers created a tool to check the identification code yourself, or to anonymize documents you're printing: https://github.com/dfd-tud/deda

Clearly a pain in the ass and not user friendly for the general public though.

LesserAbe ,

I feel like people who shit on AI so much live in a different reality than I do.

I'll put the big caveats here: I hate venture capital, I think people are over hyping less likely risks (creating skynet) while underplaying more likely ones (taking people's jobs, flooding the Internet with shitty content/misinformation). All AI gets stuff wrong some of the time.

That said, I've been impressed with what it can do and use it more days than not. I don't see a fundamental reason why AI wouldn't be effective at controlling a robot body. Currently something like chatGPT responds after a user types a prompt. But what if the prompt was just audio/video/sensory input every fraction of a second? I don't think this is far fetched, if you threw enough money at it.

LesserAbe ,

Please state any reasons you have here, since we're talking here.

LesserAbe ,

Actually controlling the robot body could be a subsystem - as others have said here, AI has been used to control video games or even robotic devices, but that's different than LLMs like chatgpt.

If the LLM is the "brain" it can send commands to the body subsystem. In a similar way to right now where chatgpt can do a web search or upload a file. Those capabilities aren't fundamentally part of the LLM, they're kind of like an API call.

LesserAbe ,

Thanks! I don't know what you mean by your first paragraph.

You're right that it's not near being an AGI. But it doesn't need to be to be used in a robot form and perform some useful tasks.

Right now I can ask chatgpt to take a block of code in Ruby and output the equivalent in Python, and it will do it, and for the most part it's correct.

I could envision telling an AI robot to sort this pile of parts by type, or pick up all the sticks in the yard, etc. I think we could make something like that now without any significant technological breakthroughs. It might get stuff wrong sometimes, but I envision it as having an intern, not creating a new god. Of course these companies may promise much more in their marketing.

LesserAbe ,

What would be a good straight flag that also follows vexillology best practices?

LesserAbe ,

I don't get it, does India require speed limiters on ebikes?

LesserAbe ,

I think also helpful to remember that many have died just from being punched and their head hitting the pavement. If a bike knocks someone over there's always the potential for serious injury, especially for older folks.

LesserAbe ,

Every new technology is initially more expensive, then as it moves into mass production the cost goes down because of economies of scale - more suppliers, innovations in technique.

Battery costs have gone down an insane amount already, and it doesn't look like they're done.

Going further, what percentage of accidents affect the battery pack? The article seems to conflate Tesla manufacturing techniques that make cosmetic repairs difficult with all electric vehicles - just because Tesla has long repairs doesn't mean all manufacturers do.

It also talks about electric manufacturers going out of business, but is it 15% by number of businesses or by manufacturing volume? Lucid and Rivian aren't making that many cars in terms of absolute volume, but could go under. Hyundai, Kia, Chevy et al. make a lot more cars and seem unlikely to collapse.

LesserAbe ,

Needs legislation! When everybody's doing it and people need to get around, there should be privacy by law

LesserAbe ,

Not sure how other people are but I couldn't not have a smartphone for my job. Feels like that's either a luxury for rich people or one tiny benefit for people with lower demand jobs who are done with the job when they leave the office

LesserAbe ,

Like a job where they don't expect to be able to reach you outside of office hours

LesserAbe ,

To be honest I do get paid a lot more for this type of job than one where I'm strictly available 9-5.

LesserAbe ,

Well it's not the cost of the phone we're talking about, the article is about having some carefree phone free lifestyle

LesserAbe ,

Seems like you're making a lot of assumptions. I'm in sales. I make money by being responsive, and having a smartphone gives me tools to use wherever I am instead of having to always going to a computer or tablet like the article describes

LesserAbe ,

Again, you're making a lot of assumptions, which are incorrect. Not trying to give away all my personal information so I'll skip that.

I wasn't saying anything like "being responsive to make money at all times". We're commenting on a thread about an article advocating people get rid of their smartphones, and I said I couldn't do my job without a smartphone.

LesserAbe ,

Is Reddit adding a watermark to everything posted there now?

LesserAbe ,

My understanding is on these fillings you're supposed to give a full accounting of all the risks so investors can't sue you later. It's like going for surgery where they say you could die - not saying it's likely, but tries to get them off the hook.

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