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azertyfun

@azertyfun@sh.itjust.works

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azertyfun ,

I learned the term Information Kessler Syndrome recently.

Now you have too. Together we bear witness to it.

azertyfun ,

Depends on how they were trained, if they aren't actively used to lots of human touch early on the default mode for cats is "pets on my schedule, if I feel like it".

I don't... think it's bad? Such cats aren't unhappy or evil, they just don't crave affection which kinda makes sense for a barely domesticated species whose wild counterpart is non-social. Raising a cat to be cuddly definitely goes against its innate instincts.

azertyfun ,

Of course not. There's glory, there's internal CCP politics, pooh bear's ego, claims over the South China Sea, reducing the US sphere of influence, the fulfilled narrative of a "united China", etc.

China doesn't stand to gain anything pragmatic by invading Taiwan. However humans, and dictators in particular, do not always act perfectly rationally and in the best interest of their nation.

azertyfun ,

There is almost certainly internal communication that basically reads "hey let's get an actress who sounds as close to ScarJo as possible". There's also the CEO tweeting "her" on the day of release.

Is that legal? IANAL, but OpenAI's reaction of immediately shutting that shit down leads me to believe they realized it is, in fact, illegal.

Your comparison is also incorrect. You're not getting a JEJ soundalike, you're getting a JEJ soundalike to do a Darth Vader impersonation. Meaningfully different semantics. They don't just want "white american woman who vaguely sounds like ScarJo I guess" they have proven beyond doubt that they want "The AI from the 2013 movie Her starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson".

Also legality aside, it's really fucking weird and ethically wrong. I don't care if it's legal or not, you shouldn't be able to make an AI replicate someone's voice without their consent.

azertyfun ,

There is without a doubt a connection to ScarJo. They asked her to voice the AI, they asked her again right before release, and the CEO tweeted "her" on release.

The only question is whether, backlash aside, they could technically get away with it (which does not make it right).

azertyfun ,

New notification, old notification, either way it auto-dismisses the system notification after 5 seconds. Why? I guess they don't trust the DE to manage notifications properly??

So my colleagues know if they send me a message I'll get to it when I'll get to it because I probably will have missed the notification.

azertyfun ,
  1. Then don't call it autopilot
  2. What's the point of automated steering if you have to remain 100 % attentive? To spare the driver the terrible burden of moving the wheel a couple mm either way? It is well studied and observed that people are less attentive when they're not actively driving, which, FUCKING DUH.

Manufacturers provide this feature for the implicit purpose of enabling distracted driving. Yet they will not accept liability if someone drives distractedly.

Next in We Are Not Liable For How Consumers Use Our Product, Elon will replace the speedometer by Candy Crush with small text that says "pwease do not use while dwiving UwU".

azertyfun ,

Well someone's done it at least once this century. It looks equal parts awesome and terrifying.

azertyfun ,

A bunch of countries just have their own flag as an emoji... The author barely managed to identify which emoji tourists use when posting about their trip on twitter.

azertyfun ,

I don't think twitter users in authoritarian hellholes are acting like NPCs going "Glory to Artsotzka" every five minutes.

It's tourism, coupled with low twitter use from the local population. Belgium has a bigger population than Belarus and unlike it isn't an authoritarian hellhole. But it's way more touristy. So Belgium has its own flag as the most used emoji but Belarus doesn't.

You can see this pattern pretty clearly in the ME as well. Jordan, Yemen, or Syria don't have their own flag as their most used emoji (despite being both small and undemocratic), because there ain't any tourists there. Qatar does. (A bit surprised about Cyprus though, do they use twitter a lot?)

The data is probably sound, but the methodology is insane.

azertyfun OP ,

I know Brave browser has had a lot of controversy in the past regarding their business practices, including rolling out their own crypto-coin.

They apparently make the really bold claim of using their own index exclusively. If true (given their track record I am not 100 % willing to accept that as truth without seeing some independent analysis), that would do wonders for the search ecosystem. I'm definitely interested to see how it pans out.

azertyfun ,

Kagi is just Google's index with fancy features and filtering on top. They include a few other sources but for regular search it's almost always going to be Google's index providing the base results.

azertyfun , (edited )

Wow, looks like they just updated that page and removed all references to their external indexes. Very shady stuff, Kagi. I'd go as far as to say they are now lying by omission.

The archived version of that page from March does open with (emphasis mine):

Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Mojeek and Yandex, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, and other APIs.

Then it goes on to say:

Kagi's indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and "small web" discussions surrounding a particular topic.

Now reading between the lines, and more importantly knowing how much sheer capital goes into indexing the entire web, I can say with much certainty that Kagi is probably powered mostly by Google since it and Bing (which they aren't using) are basically the only meaningful players in the space. Yandex is for the Russosphere, and Mojeek is nice but nowhere even close to Google or Bing's coverage. By their own admission Teclis is more narrowly focused and not meant to replace Google's index. So I'm going to go ahead and call them big fat liars.

I wouldn't even care that Google is their main index, that's fine and they can't be expected to compete with the billions of dollars Google spends on indexing. But the lack of transparency and shady business practices are a big turn-off for me.

azertyfun ,

You expect us to not notice how you skipped over the entire 0-50 range there? "It's just better for everyday temps" my ass.

Also 100F is not deadly if you got water and aren't working hard, and neither is 0F if you got appropriate clothing.

And don't get me started on how y'all pretend that measuring temperature has to be on this stupid ass scale "because it goes to a hundred where I live" but then y'all count your school grades (which are entieely made up and would cost literally nothing to change) to 3.8 or whatever the fuck.

azertyfun ,

If 100 % of Indians start using English as their lingua franca (they're on a track to just that), does that make Hindi a dialect of English?

The sociopolitical reality of a lingua franca does not define the scientific linguistic reality of other languages.

I will say that personally the notion of catalan being a subset of castellan sounds ridiculous on account of the fact that in its written form catalan is roughly mutually intelligible with french, where castellan is not. If it's going to be lumped in as a dialect of something, it'd be more intellectually honest to make it a dialect of French.

azertyfun ,

I’m honestly unsure. What is the alternative?

Given that there are plenty of developed countries where credit scores don't exist (and plenty more where they do but only for businesses), I think alternatives are imaginable. I would know, I live in one such country.

If you want a mortgage here, the bank will:

  • Ask you about your current loans and potential past defaults
  • Ask you about your current and past income, marital status, employment status, etc.
  • Use those variables to pretty straightforwardly determine your loan capacity
  • I think do a background check in national databases for defaults/"bad payer" status
  • Contractually obligate you to receive your salary on the same account from which they will automatically pull the mortgage. I don't think this helps reduce actual defaults much, but it probably greatly reduces the financial and administrative overhead of late/missed payments. Also this ties you into the creditor bank which is good for business, IDK how standard that practice is abroad.

The US consumer economy is very highly dependent on short-term/credit debt, and that is absolutely crazy to me. Some Americans say they "need" a credit card to defer payment on some purchases, and as someone raised in culture where debit is king this sounds absolutely insane. Y'all have been propagandized, here it is perfectly normal to not have a single credit line open before shopping for a mortgage and if anything your banker will commend you for it.

azertyfun ,

You're choosing to interpret "300 % efficient" under the very narrow definition used in thermodynamics.

Then you acknowledge that it is "more energy efficient" than a (almost) 100 % (thermodynamically) efficient furnace, completely contradicting yourself. Pick a lane and take a breath, outside of academic contexts people will "misuse" technical terms (such as equating COP to efficiency) and it does not matter one bit because it is very clear contextually what they mean.

azertyfun ,

IIRC that's a house in Zaventem, aka Brussels Airport. So, not a great spot place to build a house.

I don't remember the exact story, but that was supposed to be row housing... but ain't no-one building any more houses there.

azertyfun ,

They already are! Some young artists are already doing those 2000s nostalgia CD releases for the kicks of having a physical medium.

However a big part of the marketing for vinyl has historically been "the sound is warm/high definition/whatever audiophile bullshit". Anyone can achieve the same "warmth" with an EQ and some crackle/white noise (it works so well it's a whole genre called lofi...), but the "vinyl sounds better" crowd will make the unfalsifiable claim that "it's not the same".
However, good luck claiming that "CDs sound different from FLACs"!

In the end both vinyl and CD enjoyers are doing the same thing: enjoying music through personal and ritualistic manipulation of physical objects, that also come with nice album art. It's just that some vinyl enjoyers are attributing some of that enjoyment to a largely made-up supposed "superiority" of sound (yes there are edge cases like "bad" remasters of songs originally released on vinyl, but is that really why anyone buys a turntable? Be honest.).

azertyfun ,

nuh-UH. Nope.

Talent ≠ practice ; talent + practice = greatness

Thankfully it's usually quite easy to dispel this myth by saying "then why are you bad at maths". We all had the same number of hours in maths class as kids, but some had to practice WAY MORE to achieve a passable grade.

Most people can't be Mozart. Some dedicate their lives to music, and do not get a fraction of the way there.

"Talent doesn't exist" is a lie we tell ourselves as a society because our individualist culture sells us a pipe dream of personal greatness that many/most people literally aren't equipped to achieve no matter how hard they try (and we should try regardless).

azertyfun ,

Nah, I hate maths and never studied at home. Still did way better than kids with difficulties that were studying way more.
Not studying didn't pay off in higher education (focus issues, possibly undiagnosed ADHD or related), because talent ALONE is not enough anymore, but before then I had an objectively easier time than most and that was with little time or interest devoted to it.

We ALL use the concept of "left" and "right" daily. I've been doing that instinctively without a problem since I was, like, 8. Some adults still need to use a mnemonic every single time. Is that because they don't have enough interest or didn't spend as much time on it as 8 yo me did? Of course not.

I have put hundreds of hours into one of my hobbies, digital photography. I really like it. I have watched and read plenty of theory and know most of what there is to know about what makes a good picture. My photographs are only halfway decent and nowhere near what they should be given my time investment. And that's OK, because I know it's not because of anything I did and I like the hobby anyway.

Your argument does not have a leg to stand on. Someone with music agnosia cannot learn to play the guitar like you do. Dyslexics cannot "just study like I did" their way into being good at mental arithmetic. Pretending that skill is ONLY a function of time and drive is extremely pretentious and factually incorrect. It's the "you're depressed? Just do like me, think happy thoughts" of education.

azertyfun ,

Now you're just reaching at straws to comfort your worldview. I could explain to you that I never was a huge gamer (and only started spending significant time gaming around 12 y/o), and that I am hugely uncreative (in the traditional sense at least) despite having played with dolls as a child. But I get the feeling that you'll just come up with more explanations why I somehow unconsciously "trained" the things I'm naturally good at.

Anything to avoid facing the fact that brains, like bodies, aren't all created equal and identical. To pretend they are is completely ridiculous. Yet we do so because admitting that not everyone is born with equal potential breaks through the veil of The Meritocracy™, Karma™ and all the other little lies we tell ourselves to avoid facing the fact that the world is fundamentally unjust.

Threads is automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed (mastodon.social)

For anyone wondering if Threads and Facebook at large will be a fine neighbor in the space and compatible with other apps/services in the fediverse: they’re already automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed https://mastodon.social/@dansup/112126250737482807

azertyfun ,

It's not. You have the "explore" tab which is more like "today's viral toots" (which tend to be a lot more varied than Lemmy's "All/Top 24h" since Lemmy is a link aggregator and doesn't really lend itself to jotting down thoughts or diatribes), and you have your personal timeline which is people you actively follow. It's not a cafeteria, it's your RSS feed.

Where it gets shouty is in replies, especially as those get federated weirdly. But that's only a problem for the few percent of users who are making content, not for consumers.

azertyfun ,

Yet another day where I get to use the "sound cleverer than I am" cheat code by just randomly inserting French words in my English.

azertyfun ,

u/1-Sisyphe's original upload of THE response gif is dead... Purged by imgur. Enjoy this archive.org version instead

azertyfun ,

At that point he'd outed himself as an asshole to the general public, but he still got big results with SpaceX and Tesla. That incident could have been lost to time and a legacy of undeniable successes.

Hyperloop is where things went cuckoo-bananas business-wise IMO. The delays and broken promises at Tesla were weird, but anyone who'd heard of subways could tell the whole hyperloop thing was doomed to fail, and it became increasingly obvious to anyone who read tech headlines that he wasn't just any asshole, but a clueless asshole.

azertyfun ,

Wikipedia also releases all content for free download under a permissive license, so I don't think it's fair to say that the US government is a meaningful threat to its quality of information, especially over non-English languages that are managed by an independent set of volunteers who could pack up their bags and move everything over wherever they want at any point.

Still a cool project and technological diversity is good though.

azertyfun ,

Anyone can fork at any time. The US gov could theoretically hold Wikipedia's brand and servers hostage, but the actually valuable stuff is already mirrored in a decentralized fashion that is completely unrestricted under US and international law.

EDIT: Maybe you meant that the US could covertly vandalize Wikipedia? Maybe, if they keep it very low-key. Editors are used to this kind of stuff though, it happens all the time from all governments since they can just, y'know, edit it. Anything actually impactful will be noticed by the editors which will just cause a fork.

azertyfun ,

That statement ITSELF is American cultural Imperialism. There are a bunch of languages other than English on Wikipedia...

Also [citation needed].

azertyfun ,

"Because safety isn't a thing we can measure" reads exactly like a dril tweet.

... holy shit there's a whole academic-level analysis of dril's tweets. I am enchanted.

azertyfun ,

He's a coward. Rides the whole "messiah" thing to get revenge for his family, thinking he can avoid the bad parts, then it happens anyway. He glimpses the Golden Path but instead of going through with it he gets depressed and dies. If his son didn't do the job for him, billions would have died in his Jihad and then humanity would have gone extinct anyway. I remember Leto II's feelings towards his father were... complex in God Emperor.

Anyway I'm very happy with Villeneuve's adaptation because he did a much better job than Herbert at writing Paul as a Villain (Herbert famously regretted that his depiction wasn't clearer which is the why he wrote Messiah).

azertyfun ,

This is like boomers who fantasize about millenials breaking down in tears when confronted with a rotary phone or vinyl record or gramophone. The whole premise is ridiculous and always revolves around an item so iconic its use is immediately obvious to anyone who's ever, like, seen a movie.

Now I guess old cranky farts being old cranky farts shouldn't matter, if it wasn't for the fact that their unfounded opinions on Gen Z's supposed ignorance are already breaking UX patterns everywhere. The save icon is going away, and now it's a guessing game as to which button has replaced it. Is it the little cloud? The down arrow, or the up arrow? Is there even an icon? Who knows!

azertyfun ,

The browser version of Office 365 frustrates me the most with this, their autosave works well but it is impossible to "save as" anything. They just allow to download an xlsx copy, and I have to open that in LibreOffice to convert to CSV or whatever is relevant. And of course no save icon to download the xlsx because someone decided a skeumorphic floppy disk is too incongruent with the cloud.

I'm sorry if I came off as a bitter asshole (I guess I kinda am), it's just that this common sentiment feels patronizing because "outdated" ≠ "obscure". Like, pagers I would say are actually obscure because they were more of a gimmick than a truly mass-market product, but floppies and CDs were in such wide circulation for such a long time that I'd expect a teenager to recognize one at a glance even if they have never personally used that technology.

azertyfun ,

So are fax and floppies for really old processes and equipment, but pagers are not visually/culturally iconic and most people never had one so most people born after 2000 wouldn't recognize them at a glance unless they worked in a specific field that uses severely outdated tech. Hell, there are probably still industrial machines in production somewhere that take punch cards.

azertyfun ,

Artists three years ago: Being an artist under capitalism sucks ass, I'm forced to make soulless corporate "art" for almost no money and I hate it.

Artists now: Hey! My corporate art gigs!

If AI can replace your job, you weren't doing art, you were doing illustration. That's like 19th century painters complaining about photographs replacing royal portraits. Sucks for the lost income (the same way it sucks for anyone whose job is automated, artists aren't special there, almost none of the jobs from 200 years ago still exist). But let's not pretend that what is being replaced had great creative or artistic value to begin with. If it did, AI couldn't do it.

azertyfun ,

What the fuck? What makes you think this is an even remotely acceptable way to talk you absolute degenerate?

azertyfun ,

The people around you must love you

azertyfun ,

It all boils down to the Value of a Statistical Life.

Whatever the context, the political or economic system, engineers, shareholders and politicians all have to deal with inherently finite resources. Ultimately humans only make so much stuff each year. And we'd need way more than that to prevent every conceivable accidental death by lining every road, railroad, sidewalk and stairwell with fire-retardant pillows. So we need to prioritize resource allocation. How much money do you give to lung cancer research vs pancreatic cancer research? How much do you invest in guardrails on highways vs traffic calming? How many potholes justify the cost of repaving a road? How much would you pay for a car with a 10% higher safety rating? We make these decisions all the time, so often we don't even think about it.
But with every one of these decisions we indirectly place a Value on a Statistical Life, whether we mean to or not. So we might as well actually compute it to inform policy making.

Anyway all this to explain that bad PR being expensive for capitalists is Good, Actually. The perfectly safe car cannot exist, and every engineering decision carries some risk, but for some definition of undue risk there is an additional reputational cost factor in addition to the VSL which heavily leans decision makers to err on the safe side.

azertyfun ,

See, that's how you know people here have never touched grass. Otherwise they'd know how big of a difference it makes to fall on grass vs concrete. All over a few mm of yield.

Also anecdotally I've seen videos of people catching falling children (back in the day in/r/DadReflexes). It works, empirically.

UK Trial: Pornhub's Chatbot Halts Millions from Accessing Child Abuse Content (www.wired.com)

A trial program conducted by Pornhub in collaboration with UK-based child protection organizations aimed to deter users from searching for child abuse material (CSAM) on its website. Whenever CSAM-related terms were searched, a warning message and a chatbot appeared, directing users to support services. The trial reported a...

azertyfun ,

Eeeeeeeh. There's nuance.

IIRC there were only a handful of verified CSAM videos on the entire website. It's inevitable, it happens everywhere with UGC, including on here. Anecdotally, in the years leading up to the purge PH had already cleaned up its act and from what I saw pirated content was rather well moderated. However this time the media made a huge stink about the alleged CSAM, payment processors threatened to pull out (they are notoriously very puritan, it's caused a lot of trouble to lemmynsfw's admins for instance) and so regardless of the validity of the initial claims PH had to do something to gain back the trust of payment processors, so they basically nuked every video that did not have a government ID attached.

Now if I may speculate a little, one of the reasons it happened this way is probably that due to its industry position PH is way better moderated than most (if not all) websites of their size and already had verified a bunch of its creators. At the same time the rise of OnlyFans and similar websites means that real amateur content has all but disappeared so there was less and less reason to allow random UGC anyway. So the high moderation costs probably didn't make much sense anymore anyway.

azertyfun ,

They're the fuckers who almost turned OF into Pinterest as well? Not surprising in retrospect. The crazy thing is how all news outlets ran with the narrative and payment processors are so flaky with adult content. De-platforming sex work shouldn't be this easy.

azertyfun ,

Oof, sounds like a nightmare. I have an IKEA induction stove and it's literally just four sliders that you click where you want the heat to be. 100% power is at the right of the slider. There are a couple other buttons (multi-zone heating, timer, etc.), but you don't strictly need them.
So it's way less frustrating and I guess a bit more accessible for people with bad eyesight, but for people with zero eyesight it still doesn't work.

The only induction stoves with physical knobs I saw online were several grand. Maybe there's business to be made by selling "touch-to-physical" conversion kits for appliances... Or I guess bumpy decals would work as well.

azertyfun ,

Anyone who stills sells a conventional stove in 2024 needs to be jailed. Induction is so damn cheap now (229 € entry-level fullsize at IKEA) and better in every way that trying to sell a resistive stove else is just a scam.

azertyfun ,

Probably helps that their legs are wayy lighter though. Square-cube law strikes again.

I actually like sitting up high, but I just tried sitting on my desk and I reflexively tensed my thigh muscles to keep my legs slightly raised. Otherwise the dead weight of my legs pulls me forward against the edge of the desk, which is uncomfortable. Maybe a short person can chime in with their own experience lol

azertyfun ,

Although no-one likes the Québécois, and they don't like anyone else either, their linguistic and cultural ties to Europe allowed them to bring the Civil Code, delicious pastries, and proportional representation to the Constitution of this new country.

However they are now very resentful of the positive effect this had on the other States and a separatist Québécois party is trying to impose a Federal Pastry Export Moratorium.

azertyfun ,

Québec doesn't have it, I'm European but I can only surmise that were they given a chance, they'd run with the opportunity to fix FPTP. Unlike the Anglosphere they are way less stuck with the "we have to democracy the British way" mindset.

azertyfun ,

I agree with what you're saying, but you're shifting the goalpost.

Everyone is cheering Wayland on, no one believes it’ll succeed

That parent comment (and other comments like it in these threads) are what I take issue with. You can make the exact same argument why people should stick with Windows and not bother with Linux.

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