Welcome to Incremental Social! Learn more about this project here!
Check out lemmyverse to find more communities to join from here!

abhibeckert

@abhibeckert@lemmy.world

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

abhibeckert ,

Huh? No. This is a really simple tool - you type text into a file, and save that file on your disk. Other things read the file. Thee's no "control" anywhere to be seen.

Apparently Apple has been using Pkl internally for years, and they've decided to do the world a favour by making it publicly available... probably because they want to use it for public projects too, instead of just their internal ones.

Scientists develop game-changing 'glass brick' that could revolutionize construction: 'The highest insulating performance' (www.thecooldown.com)

Scientists develop game-changing 'glass brick' that could revolutionize construction: 'The highest insulating performance'::The team of scientists developed an aerogel glass brick, which is a translucent and thermally insulating material.

abhibeckert , (edited )

but the cost is like 10-30 times that of other options

Are you just talking construction costs? How about if you consider the lifetime energy consumption of a building over, I dunno, 50 years? And using zero emission heating, since in 50 years we hopefully are not using fossil fuels for that.

Obviously that's going to vary dramatically depending on the indoor/outdoor temperature delta and future renewable energy costs, so there are too many variables to come up with a number easily, but I could see these bricks being very cheap if you factor int he total cost over the life of the building.

The better option than glass block would be filling the cavity of a double glazed window with aerogel granules

Glass works ok for small windows - but large glass panels are fragile and expensive.

abhibeckert ,

The source article has this "visualisation":

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/39aed747-3490-44de-b07c-31bd6128c70a.png

From that I'd assume it's not suitable for windows, but it is suitable for taking advantage of natural lighting (not to mention it just looks pretty cool... though I'm not sure about the rest of the architecture in that image).

abhibeckert , (edited )

That's because Europe has actual experience with having their privacy invaded and it wasn't just to show you relevant ads. During the war my grandparents burned letters and books after reading them. And they had nothing to hide either - and all of the ones they burned were perfectly innocent and legal... but even those can be taken out of context and used against you during a police investigation.

The UN formally declared privacy as a human right a few years after the war ended. Specifically in response to what happened during the war.

A lot of the data used by police to commit horrific crimes was collected before the war, for example they'd go into a cemetery home and find a list of people who attended a funeral six years ago, then arrest everyone who was there. You can't wait for a government to start doing things like that - you have to stop the data from being collected in the first place.

Imagine how much worse it could be today, with so much more data collected and automated tools to analyse the data. Imagine if you lived in Russian occupied Ukraine right now - what data can Russia find about you? Do you have a brother serving in Ukraine's army? Maybe your brother would defect if you were taken hostage...

abhibeckert , (edited )

Would you refuse to visit websites that force registration even if the account is free?

Lots of sites require a free account these days. I don't visit those sites.

What’s all the fuss about, you don’t care?

I care.

Is advertising a necessary evil in fair trade for content?

I like advertising - how else are you supposed to find out what products/services are available? Regularly visit every website of every company I might be interested in? That doesn't work.

It's data collection I dislike, nothing wrong with ads as long as they're a reasonably short interruption. Make ads relevant to the content, not the visitor.

Unfortunately under the current system I don't see ads, because the only way to block tracking is to also block most ads. Sorry, but ad networks have burned that bridge. It's going to take time to rebuild it.

Would this limit your visiting of websites to only a narrow few you are willing to trade personal details for?

A website would need to offer some really valuable service for me to "trade personal details". Even sites where I have an account (e.g. YouTube) I generally don't log into that account.

Is this a bad thing for the internet experience as whole, or just another progression of technology?

I think anything that gives users control over wether or not they're tracked is a good thing - and forcing people to sign up / agree to terms before using a site does that. If websites want my personal details to access them... that's fine with me. I just won't use those sites. Other people will make a different decision. It's how it should be.

I also think I'm not alone, and plenty of major sites will choose to just not do any tracking. I look forward to using those sites.

Is this no different from using any other technology platform that’s free (If it’s free, you’re the product)?

I reject that premise. Lemmy is free. I don't feel like "the product" when I use lemmy. The product is the content and the discussions. If Lemmy has a few ads on every page, I'd be fine with that. I think it'd be a good idea - as long as it's done right, without invading privacy.

Should website owners just accept a lower revenue model and adapt their business, rather than seeking higher / unfair revenues from privacy invasive practices of the past?

It's their business, choose whatever revenue model they want. Just be honest and open about it.

abhibeckert ,

Nothing convenient about those for me. Browser extensions/etc that block tracking cause all of those services to direct me to "are you a robot" and "something looks strange about your login" auth bounces which are getting increasingly difficult to wade through.

A simple username/password, saved in a password manager, is so much easier.

abhibeckert ,

Big difference between posting a comment and just viewing a website.

abhibeckert ,

Google regularly thinks I'm a robot and the ads are not even remotely relevant. There's no way they know who I am.

abhibeckert , (edited )

people refusing to create an account acting all doom and gloom are getting to be insufferable

I'm not doom and gloom, I think this is a good step in the right direction.

Users should be able to control what websites have access to their data and a sign in process achieves that. Only sign into a site if you are happy with the website's privacy policy. I have an account on this website because it has in the privacy policy:

We do not sell or disclose user data under any condition, unless required by relevant data protection authorities, any other law enforcement authorities, or if the account owner requests the data themselves.

The thing that offends me the most about tracking across the internet is you are tracked wether you agree to a website's privacy policy or not. Usually you can't even read the privacy policy without being tracked.

Users who don't care about any of that can simply tap this button in Chrome (and Google could easily make it even more seamless if they want to, with a simple "share my stuff with every website I visit" setting):

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/3fd2b6c9-083b-4d32-bd15-b91024622357.png

There are also less invasive versions of that, such as the Passkeys standard, where you just share a unique id web the website - no name or email address. Passkeys are supported in every modern browser and the prompt is pretty similar to the screenshot above, minus the 'share your name/email/picture' bit.

Personally, I'm only going to sign into websites that I trust. 99.999% of the internet is run by companies i have never even heard of, so obviously I don't trust them. And some of the sites I have heard of (e.g. Twitter, Reddit), I definitely don't trust. But there are a few sites like lemmy.world which I trust and there are also plenty of websites websites that do even less tracking than Lemmy. Including a bunch that are ad supported... because you can show an ad to a visitor without knowing the personal details of that visitor.

As things stand right now, I run a browser extension that stops websites from tracking me and they do that by blocking all ads. I don't see that as a sustainable option - it means those websites are losing money whenever I visit the website. Far better, far more honest, if I just don't visit those websites at all. But I need to know what the website's tracking policy is before i can make that choice, so they need to start asking for permission.

abhibeckert ,

The headline is totally wrong - there have been other fatalities before this one and I'd bet Washington Post reported all of them.

At least one was almost identical, which shows just how seriously Tesla takes this whole thing. They should be learning from every crash and making sure it's not repeated.

abhibeckert ,

SS301 is a great material

Totally agree. But is this an appropriate use for it? I regularly have to use sandpaper to remove surface rust from my SS301 knife. And I don't leave that out in the rain. It's just surface rust, doesn't damage anything, but it is rust and it's very ugly.

Thankfully with a knife, it takes two seconds to remove the rust. With an entire car? And body panels with areas that are hard to get to? Honestly if I was going to buy a cybertruck I would paint it.

If you want "real" stainless, you want 316, but it's not as strong and would require significant modifications - making it thicker/heavier/more expensive/worse battery range/etc.

abhibeckert ,

Done properly it should prevent rust. Especially on already rust-resistant metal. And you could use clear paint.

abhibeckert , (edited )

// write a function to invert a string

That's not how I use it at all. I mean I started out doing that, but these days it's more like this (for anyone who hasn't used copilot, the grey italic text is the auto-generated code - tab to accept, or just type over it to ignore it):

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d732f3d4-f1de-4e48-9a97-d606d1384ec6.png

Sure - I totally could have written the constructor. But it would have taken longer, and I probably would've made a few typos. And by the way it's way better than copying from Stack Overflow, because it knows your coding style, it knows what other classes/etc exist in your project, etc etc.

It's also pretty good at refactoring. You can tell it to refactor something to use a different coding pattern for example, and it'll write 30 lines of code then show you a git style diff.

Not to mention you can ask questions about your code now. Like "how has X been implemented in this 20 year old project I started working on today?" Or one I had the other day "I'm getting this error, what files might be causing that?" It gave me a list of 15 files and I was able to find it in a few minutes. The error had no context for me to figure it out.

abhibeckert ,

Idk how Microsoft has bungled this naming

You haven't followed been following Microsoft for long have you? The first version of Windows was version 3.0 (there were technically earlier versions but they were "a work in progress" and weren't really usable at all). The third version of Xbox was called "Xbox One".

abhibeckert , (edited )

There's still plenty of EU pressure. This was a close enough thing that the EU spent months investigating it before making a decision.

That sends a pretty clear message to Apple "we're OK with what you're doing with messaging right now, but only just barely". If Apple does something the EU doesn't like, new legislation can be written.

There's also pressure in the USA and other countries where iMessage is far more widely used. The pressure hasn't gone anywhere yet, but it definitely could. The USA came down hard on Ma Bell when they dominated the phone industry. They're so dead most people have forgotten they existed. They were arguably the biggest company in the entire world at the time. Just like Apple is now.

Part of the order against Ma Bell was to order the company to stop selling phones. Imagine if the USA did that again, with Apple this time. I listened to an interview with an antitrust regulator in the USA yesterday (Decoder podcast)... he said they're short staffed and rely on punitive damages so harsh that other companies choose voluntary compliance, removing the need to actually regulate the whole industry (they don't have enough people to do that). Pretty scary stuff - the EU's approach is far gentler.

abhibeckert ,

iMessage is a typical American thing which, we Europeans, have a really hard time comprehending what is the obsession with it.

To help you comprehend - the big difference is SMS has been free for a long long time in the USA. No other text messaging service has ever been able to get off the ground because why on earth would anyone sign up for Viber / WatsApp / Messenger / Signal / Telegram / Threema / etc, when you could just use SMS which works fine and works for everyone?

Then iMessage came along, and you could keep using "SMS", only now it's more reliable, has high resolution photos, delivery confirmation, etc. That was a real improvement over SMS, with no cost at all other than having to stay on the iPhone platform, which you were already on, and who's going to switch? You've got all these apps you found/like and who knows which ones work on Android?

Also, it's not just the USA. iMessage is big in other markets too. Also ones where SMS has historically been free. The cost of having to pay to send SMS between London/Paris is a pain we never really experienced here, so there was no motivation to try WhatsApp/etc.

abhibeckert ,

I'd look for one that also does passwords. And passkeys too, since that's looking like it will replace TOTP.

Since like it or not you're going to have three credential systems to deal with, at least have all of them in one place.

abhibeckert , (edited )

Huh? If anything it would probably be even easier to jam.

abhibeckert ,

IP anything is generally far more difficult to jam thanks to TCP/IP checking for acknowledgment the data arrived and trying again - at a slower speed which can handle more noise.

Our cameras at work use wifi and Ethernet and have an internal SD card - plus a built in coin cell battery that can run for a little while. Obviously not cheap though.

abhibeckert ,

IMAP is a mess. None of the major email services or clients properly implement the protocol and pretty much all of the major email services have a proprietary replacement of their own with IMAP as an afterthought. That's why so many of the best email clients these days only work (or only have all features enabled) with Gmail or Office365.

For the user mostly it's just slow. It can literally take ten seconds just to check if there's any mail and that's if there are no new messages. When there are messages it takes much longer.

It's not slow because the servers are slow, it's slow because IMAP sucks. Too many requests and the requests are not really in a format that works well for the actual database format used by clients and servers.

For developers there are bigger problems, it's incredibly difficult to write an IMAP client that even works at all with all with all email servers.

JMAP fixes all of those issues. It's still not perfect, I think a perfect protocol would use Activity Streams, but it's definitely the best (open) email protocol available right now.

abhibeckert ,

You say that like it's not happening now, but it is.

abhibeckert , (edited )

No I don't think this is a training issue. Light skin physically reflects more light, which gives cameras significantly more data to work with to detect shadows/etc.

The face recognition on a phone gets around that by creating their own light, with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Face_ID_infrared_dot_projector.jpg at a light wavelength the human eye can't see, but I've only ever heard of that being done for short range face recognition. CCTV cameras are too far away from the face and are not really accurate enough for anyone (including white people).

AFAIK Amazon's system was mostly intended for their self service retail stores... that's a different scenario entirely since you're only comparing faces to other customers who are in the store at the same time as you. And also the stakes are much lower - if two people appear to be the same person you can just flag both customers as needing to be verified by a staff member. No big deal at all.

Using it as evidence for a crime though, will inevitably result in false convictions.

abhibeckert ,

Better cameras aren't enough - you also need much brighter lighting. So bright customers would complain and get headaches.

Or alternatively, have the camera close to the customer's face. Again, nobody wants that... though we do put up with it for ATMs / etc.

Toyota cars collecting and potentially sharing location data and personal information, Choice says, and it's not the only car brand facing privacy concerns (www.abc.net.au)

Rafi Alam from CHOICE told The World Today: "When we looked at Toyota's privacy policy, we found that these Connected Services features will collect data such as fuel levels, odometer readings, vehicle location and driving data, as well as personal information like phone numbers and email addresses."...

abhibeckert ,

Android Auto/Car Play don't require giving the car access to anything. It should just be a simple video signal output, touch screen coordinates, and audio output/input line.

And I'm pretty sure that is how it works, unless cars are applying screen reader/etc technology (TVs do that, so I wouldn't put it past car manufacturers...).

I'm pretty sure this article is talking about bluetooth, not Android Auto / Car Play. The bluetooth car protocol sends a copy of your full address database to the car because it's a low bandwidth protocol that minimises sending data back and forth while the user is interacting with the hardware. I would never pair my phone to a modern car with bluetooth.

abhibeckert , (edited )

And yet the need for a car in our family is indeed extant.

Let me guess - because while your home is ideally located for your daily commute, it's not ideally located for the rest of your family?

I love travelling by bike, but unfortunately it's just not possible to find a home that is within cycling distance for everywhere anyone in our household needs to go. Right now it's pretty much only my kid's school, but in a couple years he'll be older and need to move to another school, which won't be as close. We live about half way in between my work and my partner's work - which is 30 minutes each way (by car) in opposite directions... it's not really practical to take a bus either (cycling is faster, because it's not a direct bus route). So, two cars in our household. I try to cycle to work twice a week or so, whenever I can spare the extra time, but my partner can't do that since there are no safe cycling paths on her commute.

abhibeckert ,

E2EE does help. Notifications can include the content of the notification but they don't have to and it's generally recommended to send a notification telling the device to launch the app in the background to check the server for new content. The app will then decrypt the message and display a plain text notification that is not sent to any servers.

If you're worried about metadata leaks, you can delay delivery by a random time interval.

Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here. (insideevs.com)

Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here.::The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here. All seven of its California stations...

abhibeckert , (edited )

First of all, there are three (popular) hydrogen cars available, and only one of them is from Toyota. And more are scheduled to launch very soon.

Everyone who's tested those three cars loves them. The Toyota Mirai is supposedly very similar to, and in fact nicer than, the Lexus LS 500 and it's also tens of thousands of dollars cheaper than that car. When (and I believe it is a "when") hydrogen is easier to access, it's going to take off.

The only real drawback Hydrogen ever had was cost. But that's not an issue anymore, prices have come down a lot. And the "range anxiety" issue is helped tremendously by just having a really really long range. You're only going to fill up twice a month or so.

abhibeckert , (edited )

Most daily commuters could get used to a train

It's definitely not "most". You have to live and work near a train station for that to be viable option. It's not about "getting used to" trains, it's just for most commutes a train simply takes too long - because they don't go directly to your destination.

In Denmark, which has one of the best transit networks in the world, only 13% of commuting is by public transport. 20% is by bicycle. Cars are 60%.

abhibeckert , (edited )

How many individuals can drive cars before congestion makes it impossible

It's impossible to answer that - there are just too many other variables, such as how far are people travelling each day on average, how many of them are going to the same destination, how many roads are there (not how many lanes, how many roads), etc etc.

A lot of the problem can be mitigated with zoning rules to encourage people not to travel to the inner city. Whatever reason they might have to go to the CBD should also be available elsewhere in the city if at all possible.

The fact is trains also have traffic issues and that tends to get a lot worse as you increase the number of train lines in your city. The efficiency of train travel is in part because not many people use that mode of transport. Cities that have 10% of travel by train now probably can't expand that to 80%.

Diversity is the only option. Give people access to every mode of transit, and let them pick the best one. I'm not from California so I don't know the local issues, but looking at a map I-10 has six train lines that run basically parallel to it. Trains are clearly available so why are people choosing to drive? I'm sure they have a reason. Rather than trying to add more train lines, how about figure out why people are driving that route and tackle it from that perspective? What are they heading into LA for? Can it be done somewhere else?

abhibeckert , (edited )

Arc has a lot of unique features, but these three are funamental. It took me a couple months to adjust my browsing habits, and it has ruined me. I literally hate using any other browser now.

Arc syncs tabs between windows. This allows new workflows that just are not possible at all in any other browser. I have five windows open right now, all showing the same set of tabs (which are split into groups, so not all tabs are showing the same group... but some are the same group, for example I opened Sideberry in a new tab in the same group, but I'm reading it in another window). This also obviously syncs between devices, so your work desktop, laptop, phone, gaming pc at home... all have the same tabs. All the time.

Arc automatically closes tabs for you. That definitely takes getting used to, but once you do get used to it, it's awesome.

Finally, there are no bookmarks in Arc. Instead of bookmarks you can "pin" any tab which essentially disables auto-close for that tab. Unlike a bookmark, a tab doesn't contain a fixed URL. For example i have a Lemmy tab, which by default is the homepage but it could also be this discussion temporarily, then go back to being the homepage again later today.

Those three are tied together in a carefully thought out user interface, with a bunch of other nice little touches like the way audio/video is handled if you're not in the tab that's playing media right now.

There are other major features in Arc too - for example the URL bar is, well, not a URL bar at all. It's a command prompt where the default command happens to be "search the web/go to url". Arc also has a growing set of Large Language Model integrations that might pan out into something interesting one day. And it has some half-baked stuff for teams/collaboration which may or may not eventuate into something interesting.

abhibeckert ,

Arc has uBlock installed by default. So that's not a differentiator between the two.

abhibeckert , (edited )

That problem has been solved. A bit over a year ago NIF was able to produce about 3MJ of energy with about 2MJ of input.

This particular experiment didn't do that but that likely wasn't the goal... They managed a 69MJ output over five seconds... the NIF experiment was less power but over "a few billionths of a second".

69MJ over five seconds is 13MW which is a very usable amount of power. About on par with the typical output of a real world utility power generator, compared to the old one which was similar to a small lightning strike - impressive but not useful. It's not enough to power an entire city, but you kinda don't want that anyway since a city should have redundancy. Several 13MW generators could power a city with enough excess production to take one or two of them offline for maintenance. If you combined this with solar/wind(*), you could have two or three fusion reactors for a large city.

The tech is still not ready of course, but it's getting closer and seems to be accelerating too - those two breakthroughs were a year apart. This generator is right in the sweet spot, now they just need to improve efficiency / reliability / reduce costs.

(* I seriously doubt fusion is ever going to be cheaper than solar / wind / hydro - but it could be more reliable making it a great "baseload" option - enough to keep the lights on, fridges cool, etc)

‘What do you mean, the tower is gone?’: thieves steal 200ft structure from Alabama radio station | Alabama (www.theguardian.com)

‘What do you mean, the tower is gone?’: thieves steal 200ft structure from Alabama radio station | Alabama::Small radio station forced to go silent after ‘unbelievable’ theft of giant tower, which would cost over $100,000 to replace

abhibeckert ,

This reminds me of the time someone stole a mango in Australia... obviously, being Australia, the mango was very big.

It was just a marketing stunt and it backfired — police weren't too happy about wasting their time investigating a fake crime. Even after they were told what happened, they still had phones ringing off the hook with people calling in evidence, wasting government resources.

abhibeckert ,

Surely there's an easy to find switch to cut power and make it safe.

abhibeckert ,

They have a 100+ mile range and often the same content will be broadcast on a different frequency by other towers. A lot of people would have just switched to the other frequency and moved on with their lives. You might have three frequencies to choose from for the same content.

The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes (www.businessinsider.com)

The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes::Biden's AI advisor Ben Buchanan said a method of clearly verifying White House releases is "in the works."

abhibeckert , (edited )

Click the padlock in your browser, and you'll be able to see that this webpage (if you're using lemmy.world) was encrypted by a server that has been verified by Google Trust Services to be a server which is controlled by lemmy.world. In addition, your browser will remember that... and if you get a page from the same server that has been verified by another cloud provider, the browser (should) flag that and warn you it might be

The idea is you'll be able to view metadata on an image and see that it comes from a source that has been verified by a third party such as Google Trust Services.

How it works, mathematically... well, look up "asymmetric cryptography and hashing". It gets pretty complicated and there are a few different mathematical approaches. Basically though, the white house will have a key, that they will not share with anyone, and only that key can be used to authorise the metadata. Even Google Trust Services (or whatever cloud provider you use) does not have the key.

There's been a lot of effort to detect fake images, but that's really never going to work reliably. Proving an image is valid, however... that can be done with pretty good reliability. An attack would be at home on Mission Impossible. Maybe you'd break into a Whitehouse photographer's home at night, put their finger on the fingerprint scanner of their laptop without waking them, then use their laptop to create the fake photo... delete all traces of evidence and GTFO. Oh and everyone would know which photographer supposedly took the photo, ask them how they took that photo of Biden acting out of character, and the real photographer will immediately say they didn't take the photo.

abhibeckert ,

It would be nice if none of this was necessary... but we don't live in that world. There is a lot of straight up bullshit in the news these days especially when it comes to controversial topics (like the war in Gaza, or Covid).

You could go a really long way by just giving all photographers the ability to sign their own work. If you know who took the photo, then you can make good decisions about wether to trust them or not.

Random account on a social network shares a video of a presidential candidate giving a speech? Yeah maybe don't trust that. Look for someone else who's covered the same speech instead, obviously any real speech is going to be covered by every major news network.

That doesn't stop a ordinary people from sharing presidential speeches on social networks. But it would make it much easier to identify fake content.

abhibeckert ,

They're probably running a meditation app and listening to the sounds.

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...

abhibeckert ,

The hydro plant for my city doesn't even have a reservoir. It's just on a river that flows down a mountain. And 99.999% of the water doesn't go through any turbines.

Having said that - it doesn't produce enough power for the city, let alone spare to be wasted on other things.

abhibeckert ,

You mean "carbon offset", not "carbon capture". Carbon capture is where you extract carbon out of the air and make concrete or something else out of it. Capture isn't widely done but likely will be soon.

Carbon offsets are very useful. They paid for a sizeable portion of the solar installation on my home for example. Which has cut my household power emissions by about two thirds and that's with us selling about 80% of the generated power to the grid (where it reduces emissions for other households).

abhibeckert , (edited )

Why not just pass a law that no one can generate electricity except from green sources? It sounds so easy when I put it like that.

Um - those laws have been passed in many countries. Usually with a reasonable approach such as "you can continue operating the coal plants that were already built, but no more can be built".

What's actually happening around the world though is those plants are becoming too expensive to run, so they're shutting down even if they are allowed to continue to operate. Renewable power is just cheaper.

About two thirds of global electricity production is zero emission now and it'll be around 95% in a 25 years or so.

Source (note: this is a "renewables" article, not a "zero emission" article. Some non-renewable energy produces zero emissions and there's not expected to be much movement on that in the foreseeable future): https://renewablesnow.com/news/renewables-produce-85-of-global-power-nearly-50-of-energy-in-2050-582235/

The unstoppable rise of batteries is leading to a domino effect that puts half of global fossil fuel demand at risk (rmi.org)

The unstoppable rise of batteries is leading to a domino effect that puts half of global fossil fuel demand at risk::The unstoppable rise of batteries is leading to a domino effect that puts half of global fossil fuel demand at risk.

abhibeckert ,

This chart is pretty shocking, and makes IEA look like idiots. Or maybe it's malice? The IEA's founding purpose was to protect the Oil industry. Supposedly they now also work to "promote clean energy transitions"... but if that's their goal they don't seem to be doing a very good job.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/dea370a9-93f5-4a4f-91fc-01514554fe28.png

Weaver: New Specialised Writing LLMs Outperform GPT-4 (arxiv.org)

Weaver introduces a new family of specialised large language models tailored for creative and professional writing. Offering models ranging from 1.8B to 34B parameters, said to outperform larger generalist models like GPT-4 by focusing on human-like text production and diverse content creation capabilities.

abhibeckert ,

I don't think they've said what the license will be.

abhibeckert , (edited )

Specifically I wanted to know which apps would be able to communicate with WhatsApp

WhatsApp will allow any service to communicate with their network. But wether or not any do is entirely up to those other apps. I think there's very little chance Signal will ever interoperate with anything for example. iMessage surely won't either.

Technically it shouldn't be difficult, because almost every chat app these days uses the same protocol (Signal which is an unofficial industry standard and soon to be an official one). The question is how well it fits with their business model. And most companies don't share their business model.

The other issue is the recipient needs to opt in. You won't be able to send messages to just anyone... and if spam is an issue then everyone might turn it off.

The bigger question for me is wether or not you will be able to use a third party app to access WhatsApp. As in full access, view all messages, view contacts, create messages, receive push notifications, etc etc. It looks like the DMA might allow a return to software like Adium which is an open source messaging app that used to be able to log into almost any messaging service. These days none of the most popular services are available in the app, so almost nobody uses it.

abhibeckert ,

This new legislation comes into effect next month. So sure, "not yet", but very soon.

abhibeckert , (edited )

It’s funny too because at the same time AI promises a very different future where screens are less important. Tasks that require computers could be done by voice command or other minimal interfaces

Apple seems to be the only major tech company that still believes in that future. Microsoft has killed Cortana entirely and all of their AI work is now focused on enhancing ordinary every day computing, Google and Amazon have both been cutting features and laying off staff for their voice assistants. Which means right now, the only serious entrants in that space are Apple and a bunch of startups.

From what I can see, Vision OS is perfectly suited to it. You can go about your day without any computing, ask your voice assistant a question, see the answer, dismiss it, and move on, without taking devices out of your pocket or sitting down at a desk. What's clearly not ready for that is the hardware - it's too big, too heavy, the battery life isn't good enough, the viewing angle is too narrow, too expensive, etc etc.

The other thing missing is Apple's voice assistant is clearly falling behind. It has always worked well for simple commands but that doesn't cut it any more. Tim Cook has said they have more to announce on that front "later this year" and it's worth noting that Apple has bought 21 AI companies in the last several years. All they have to show for that is the ability to search for "dog" in your photo library. Clearly they're working on something more meaningful and it seems pretty obvious that a better Siri is going to ship sooner rather than later.

My best guess is Siri has fallen behind because all of their best staff are working on something to replace it.

Apple Vision Pro, I think, is two products:

  1. An immersive content viewing experience - movies, photos, games, etc
  2. An experimental new computing platform that developers can potentially use to build great things

The second won't really pay off until the hardware is better. But the first is good enough justification to ship this product now, even though it's nowhere near achieving it's potential.

abhibeckert ,

Honestly, I think contacts are the best option. The Zeiss lenses move the headset slightly heavier and worse move it further away from your face creating a lever action amplifying the weight issue.

You can still wear glasses. Just don't put a prescription in them.

Personally I love my glasses and have never tried contacts, but I think I'll switch to contacts when this product category is more mature.

Boeing Finds More Misdrilled Holes on 737 in Latest Setback (finance.yahoo.com)

Boeing Finds More Misdrilled Holes on 737 in Latest Setback::(Bloomberg) -- Boeing Co. found more mistakes with holes drilled in the fuselage of its 737 Max jet, a setback that could further slow deliveries on a critical program already restricted by regulators over quality lapses. Most Read from BloombergWhy NYC Apartment...

abhibeckert , (edited )

Instead of doing most shit in-house, they contracted out shit tons of parts to the lowest bidder

No that's not true. What happened is they found things that were not profitable to do in-house and sold those off (they found investors willing to take over their non-profitable production lines).

... the investors simply cut costs in order to make it profitable. Which is predictable, what else were they going to do? Obviously an investor expects to make money on their investment.

Now Boeing is basically stuck - they can't make the parts in house, because they don't have enough staff, and their only supplier sucks, and there is no other supplier.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • incremental_games
  • meta
  • All magazines
    •