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ShittyBeatlesFCPres

@ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world

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ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

That one is true, though. It’s like when we learned squirrels violate all known laws of physics and are actually part of an elaborate conspiracy to collect acorns and corner the market on oak saplings.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

In a getting pulled over situation, this works. But do it before you go protest anything. Or better yet, leave your phone at home. You don’t want to be reaching for something while a cop is pointing a gun at you and saying “Hands up!”

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9d489992-2cda-49e0-8aeb-6ceb7485774c.jpeg

That’ll happen.

Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone (www.theverge.com)

Microsoft is starting to enable ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11 for all users. After testing these briefly with Windows Insiders earlier this month, Microsoft has started to distribute update KB5036980 to Windows 11 users this week, which includes “recommendations” for apps from the Microsoft Store in the Start menu....

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Gaming is pretty close now thanks to the Steam Deck and Valve’s work on Proton. It depends on what games you play since some anticheat requires Windows or console but I mostly play single player games and have a console if I want to play something competitive.

If you have a specific, competitive game you play, you might want to stick with Windows (or console) if support isn’t there. AMD GPUs are also better for Linux (because they open source their drivers) but Nvidia is getting better since a lot of machine learning customers use Linux. They have a huge financial incentive now that it’s data center customers complaining instead of random Linux users.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

I don’t really use TikTok but I really hope this gets tossed by the courts. I don’t care if ByteDance is owned by cthulus and draculas, it’s a terrible precedent to have the government ban a media company. If we don’t like China having access to data, ban apps from collecting it in the first place. Require algorithm audits. There are so many better ways to handle this than singling out TikTok.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Is it transactional emails, one-to-many, or like a message board where people get email notifications? I’m not sure I’ll have a good answer but I suspect that context would change some answers.

Twitter alternative Post News is shutting down (www.theverge.com)

Post News, a Twitter alternative that emerged in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover, is shutting down. Noam Bardin, the platform’s founder and former CEO of Waze, writes that Post News “is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform.”...

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Kara Swisher was on their board. She’s not a journalist.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Aside from knowledge, context, ability to reason, and spatial awareness.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Consciousness is not a computer program. Neurons don’t use binary. I’d love it if we had computers that could do squirrel things perfectly but we don’t even have that.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

A piece of friendly advice is to not say “Well, actually…” on the Internet because that’s a meme about know-it-alls. I (and probably everyone on Lemmy) has a tendency to “Well, actually” people and it’s one of those things where people will discount your argument before it begins.

That aside, I do think we’re trying to model the brain using the best tools we have. I suspect the next 100 years will see a revolution in biology that can be compared to previous centuries seeing huge leaps in the understanding of physics, electromagnetism, and the immune system. No one in 1900 could not have ever foreseen us mapping the human genome.

So: I wouldn’t be shocked if neural networks caught up with humans in our lifetimes. But we’re basically trying to reverse engineer it using a lot of electricity and I doubt we’ll get to squirrel level intelligence in my lifetime, much less human level. But who knows? “There are decades where nothing happens; and, there are weeks where decades happen.” (A quote from V.I. Lenin. I don’t want to be political here but hopefully we can all agree he made some history happen.)

Reddit Is Taking Over Google (tech.slashdot.org)

Reddit, Quora, and other internet forums that have climbed up through the traditional set of Google links. Data analysis from Semrush, which predicts traffic based on search ranking, shows that traffic to Reddit has climbed at an impressive clip since August 2023. Semrush estimated that Reddit had over 132 million visitors in...

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

I really don’t get how Quora gets ranked so highly in search results when it’s one of the worst sites I’ve ever seen. They somehow managed to fuck up the UI on a Q&A forum. And the answers are wrong like 30% of the time.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Elon Musk said free speech like once and then immediately threw a bunch of journalists off the site. And apparently every news article for the rest of my life is going to be about how he was hypocritical instead of whether he wants power or influence or has power and influence or the meaning of giving him those things.

Don’t trust every industrialist you meet even if they invested in one company where competent people make cool space ships. He’s clearly on Ket and some uppers. Grimes divorced him and her music isn’t even good. He’s not that complicated.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

In my experience, most things about TikTok are purely cosmetic. (Except when that kid broke into the water park during the pandemic and skated down the water slide.)

That being said, the best way to have a company create real data silos is to just wait. Maybe the CIA can recruit the world’s most incompetent middle managers and have them apply to ByteDance jobs but it’ll happen eventually anyway. Probably not worth the effort.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Is nothing sacred?

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Why? Did they release the world’s shittiest truck because their CEO is on too much Ketamine and meth to function? Or is it because of BYD?

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Like Farnsworth Bentley?

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Wow. I didn’t know white supremacists were still insisting on race being a biological fact. I thought even they’d switched to dumb cultural superiority arguments.

You’d think people obsessed with race would at least read the first thing about it. I guess they’re even dumber than I thought.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Different strokes for different folks but I wouldn’t want a voice-controlled “smart” brooch if it was free and worked flawlessly.

It also seems like it should be a Bluetooth phone accessory that cost $99 or whatever. I wear a smartwatch so still not for me but maybe if they made it stylish (or just less conspicuous and geeky), it could fill a gap in the market? Some of my friends wear traditional fashion watches, bracelets, etc. and usually leave their phone in their purse. They might like the form factor as a way to stay minimally connected in case the baby sitter calls or whatever.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

I’m no Windows expert but I wonder why they don’t offer a “Windows Now” type product that breaks backwards compatibility but is more secure. Something that doesn’t even come with cmd.exe because Powershell exists. (Not that it would solve the issue in the article. This is more an aside.) Windows RT was probably not that. From what I understand, it was a “Windows But Weirdly Limited” product. I mean full Windows that can run reasonably modern software but does away with all the backwards compatibility stuff only certain businesses need.

Apple is ruthless about that and it doesn’t seem to hurt them. Linux distros barely bother because you can always find a way to run an old version if you really want to. It’s kind of neat that Windows can still run Excel 1.0 or whatever but as a non-Windows user, it seems like they could break with the past and fix a lot of security issues for a fraction of what they’re spending on A.I. PowerPoints or whatever.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

When I was in college (2000-2004), we wrote our long papers on computers but we had what were called “blue books” for tests that were like mini notebooks. And many of the tests were basically, “Here is the topic. Write for up to an hour.”

And now my hand cramps if I write anything longer than a check. I can also type quickly enough that it basically matches the speed of my train of thoughts but actually writing cursive with a pen now, I get distracted and think, “Wait, how does a cursive capital ‘G’ go? Oh yeah. Hold on. What was I going to write?”

I pity the kids that have always typed for what their hands will go through on written tests

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

You setup passkeys for all your devices with biometric features. I know I have a Yubikey for my desktop, facial recognition on my phone, and a fingerprint reader on my laptop. So, I setup 3 passkeys using biometric (fingerprint or face). I also kept my password and 2FA for now because it’s all new. I wouldn’t recommend jumping in face first.

I only am using it on a few key sites and partly because I’m a web developer testing it all out. I wouldn’t advise it for the average user at the moment but it’ll mature and many password managers can store passkeys now. As it matures, I’m hopeful it becomes seamless like FaceID and fingerprint readers.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Too many but here’s a few off the top of my head:

  • GitHub Pro and Copilot
  • ChatGPT
  • Linode (I self-host a lot of things but keep Nextcloud off-site for backups)
  • YouTube Premium and Nebula
  • RadarScope, Windy, and NightSky (astronomy hobby plus I live in NOLA so good weather apps are kind of a must have)
  • Feedly
  • Bitwarden
  • TripIt
  • Apple Music

There’s more but as a developer, I try to pay for software. (I mean, if I don’t, who will?) I’ll sail the high seas for some stuff but only if the company pisses me off.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

I read it. It seems real and close to market. They have strategic investment from car companies and the battery charges quickly (5 minutes per 100 miles) while still retaining over 80% capacity after 2000 charges, which is apparently a typical regulation for EVs. Their goal is to get it down to 3 minutes per 100 miles of range so fast charging a car will be about like pumping gas and not a thing where you bring a Kindle or a Switch/SteamDeck to juice up.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Don’t let the door hit you on the—oh shit, the door!

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

He’s gonna need a parachute if he flies home on one of his planes.

Redditors Vent and Complain When People Mock Their "AI Art" (futurism.com)

Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on...

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

People talk about A.I. art threatening artist jobs but everything I’ve seen created by A.I. tools is the most absolute dogshit art ever made, counting the stuff they found in Saddam Hussein’s mansions.

So, I would think the theft of IP for training models is the larger objection. No one thinks a Balder’s Gate 3 fan was gonna commission an artist to make a drawing for them. They’re pissed their work was used without permission.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Yeah, right. He resigned because they raised $100m and was burning through at least $8m a month. A bunch of staff left and he failed to commercialize or find a partner with deep pockets — like OpenAI with Microsoft — to lower costs. (OpenAI gets a ton of compute credits from Microsoft). Whatever the technical merits of stability AI is, it’s a shitty business.

And that’s just what’s public info. He probably was offered the opportunity to resign or be fired by their board.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Instagram isn’t for politics. It’s for wanting to see your friends but instead getting low-quality content irrelevant to your interests no matter how hard you try to train the “algorithm.”

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Which human? This could be a really easy project if you pick the right dumbass.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

That isn’t 1/3 of what it would take for it to be a technical job. It’s probably OSINT.

Apple to allow iOS app downloads direct from websites in the EU (with restrictions), in compliance with the Digital Markets Act (www.pcmag.com)

Developers interested in distributing iOS apps on their websites also have to cross a high bar. This includes being registered or incorporated in the EU, being a member of “good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more,” and having an app that received “more than one million first annual...

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Which football?

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

I still wouldn’t bet against America. As a Tottenham fan, I have bet against Chelsea many times based on pure and justified loathing and ended up sad until American sports come on TV.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

I’m also a Linux user who got a MacBook Pro for work reasons and Parallels is nice, especially for Windows VMs. I was also annoyed to find I couldn’t use Virtualbox on Apple silicon and reluctantly bought Parallels. It’s expensive but it has a lot of features and nice touches so I don’t regret the purchase.

Basically, it’s like everything Apple-related where you initially go “Wait, how much does it cost? Fuck that.” But then once you buy it, it’s actually really nice and you don’t feel ripped off. (Or not as ripped off, anyway.)

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

I have the same feeling about this as I have about text written by A.I.: why would I want to read something no one could be bothered to write? Art isn’t interesting because it’s technically adequate. It’s impressive because a human (or humans) made it and it meant something to them.

I’m all for A.I. as a tool for creative people and doing rote tasks but I don’t get the point of A.I. generated “art.”

Roku TV bricked until agreeing to new terms of service

See title - very frustrating. There is no way to continue to use the TV without agreeing to the terms. I couldn't use different inputs, or even go to settings from the home screen and disconnect from the internet to disable their services. If I don't agree to their terms, then I don't get access to their new products. That...

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

People might not like this suggestion but I got an AppleTV when my Roku TV started showing ads. Like everything with Apple, it cost money but at least there’s no fucking ads. (I have a Raspberry Pi running Kodi for my “DVD rips” but for streaming services, the Apple TV is great. It’s got HDR and Dolby support and they don’t fuck up the user experience on purpose. I know it’s making a deal with the devil but it does just work. I usually am a DIY person but when I sit down to watch TV, I just want to relax.)

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

I stopped letting governments install Pegasus spyware on my phone as part of the BDS campaign.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

I would only disagree on your “near future” prediction. I don’t totally disagree — maybe it will — but I’d caution that a lot of new tech gets a shit ton (metric) of hype when the “easy” problems are solved and the last 10-20% can take forever or just need too much money, power, resources, whatever to solve. (Like we see with self-driving cars where it’s tantalizingly close but edge cases are really hard.)

Technological progress doesn’t always continue in a straight line or improve exponentially. The S-curve is far more common. With A.I., your guess is as good as mine on where we are on that curve but don’t be shocked if progress stalls somewhere even if it’s temporary. (You could imagine a situation where the models are advancing faster than Nvidia or electricity infrastructure.)

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

I had the same thing happen to my internet cables but it was the cat.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Wow, a volatile currency backed by nothing has large swings in value and if you pick the right date range you can tell any story you want? That’s pretty amazing.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Militaries, usually.

A nicer way to put that is that taxes are collected in national currencies. You can use any currency you want in private transactions but when the tax man comes calling, you better have the government’s preferred currency.

Also, what are cryptocurrencies backed by? Why do y’all exclusively call government money “fiat” when that just means it isn’t backed by a precious metal? Is there a Bitcoin Ft. Knox out there making it not a fiat currency?

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Well, luckily, you don’t have to worry about explaining TradFi history to me since I studied a lot of it in college and after. To me, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocates haven’t read enough about the 1800’s, whether it’s the Free Banking Era or all the post-civil war panics (including the Panic of 1907 so don’t stop at 1899). A lot of hard lessons had to be learned before we created the modern system.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

TL/DR: I think blockchain(s) have limited, niche use cases and we shouldn’t dismiss the technology entirely but I think the hype around it was misguided and its misuse has caused more problems than it’s valid use cases have solved. (There’s also a Luddite commentary.)

I’m not against alternate currencies or air travel. I have a ton of airline miles, in fact, which proves both of those things.

I’m certainly not a Luddite in the fear of tech sense. (Though, I do think the original Luddites are more sympathetic and interesting than we give them credit for. The first ones were skilled craftsmen who were just as mad that the automated products were shit quality made in horrific working conditions by people paid sub-poverty wages. So, their initial issue wasn’t automation writ large so much as “automation that only benefits the owners of the machines while customers get worse products and workers get sub-poverty wages.” It’s kind of where “A.I.” is now: low quality writing/art/video for cheap that’s only making a few people richer.)

As for blockchain, I don’t have a problem with it existing. Append-only digital ledgers already existed when public, decentralized ones came out in 2008/2009. There’s some real, but niche use cases where you’d want that ledger distributed and public with no central authority. I’m typing this on Lemmy; so, I’m not clearly not against decentralizing things just for the sake of it. But the proof of work version obviously doesn’t scale well if it uses more power than mid-sized countries. At this point, the tech isn’t that new and hasn’t really improved anything spectacularly. And it’s got some debt to repay for its use in money laundering and enabling ransomware attacks and shit like that. So, my hostility to blockchain isn’t the neutral technology component so much as misuses of it by people.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres , (edited )

Ironically, in the article, the link to the original Census source of the 1.2% datum is now dead.

Also, it’s 2.1% now (for people over 25), according to the Wikipedia article’s source:
https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2018/demo/education-attainment/cps-detailed-tables.html

Edit: the Wikipedia citation is from 2018 data. The 2023 tables are here:
https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/demo/educational-attainment/cps-detailed-tables.html

Citation party!

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

The most recent data is 2.1% for people over 25.
https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/demo/educational-attainment/cps-detailed-tables.html

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

It’s a Mastodon type microblogging service but I think I read it’s popular in Japan and South Korea.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Everyone wishing for more users might be wishing on a cursed monkey paw. I don’t know what the sweet spot number of active users is — I want more so we can have contributors to niche communities — but there’s a tipping point. You want your favorite bar/restaurant/message boards to be popular but not too popular.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

I emailed my region’s national weather service and asked that they join Mastodon and the meteorologist said they wanted to but there’s an approval process for communications and it takes awhile to add new services.

I’m basically completely off X (and haven’t had a Facebook account for years) but during a recent storm, I made a new Twitter account that just follows local government accounts. It’s annoying that the fastest way to find out about flooded roads and stuff is X and I really hope that changes soon.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Remember that internal Microsoft video that leaked where a marketing person was begging them to use Apple’s iPod box designs instead of their usual ones:
https://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k?si=3aAZ9xulggtHDVp6

It was apparently 17 years ago but it’s still true that Microsoft can’t brand things for shit.

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