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bassomitron

@bassomitron@lemmy.world

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bassomitron ,

I feel like these will be useless in all but limited circumstances. A modern battlefield in urban centers will be rife with small and large rubble, making these things unreliable in real world practice when you factor its ability to balance navigating obstacles and dealing with recoil. How does it reload? How long does its battery last? What happens when its weapon jams? Additionally, tricking current AI is fairly simple when you have the resources of a modern military.

Anyway, it's interesting to experiment with, but I just don't think the technology is quite there yet. I think it'd probably be more effective to create self-destructing bomber robot dogs than gun toting ones with our current tech.

bassomitron ,

You can almost be certain other countries' intel agencies were watching the entire time.

andrew , to Selfhosted
@andrew@andrew.masto.host avatar

Netris: An open-source cloud gaming platform (GeForce NOW alternative) that can be self-hosted, integrates your Steam game library.

https://github.com/netrisdotme/netris?tab=readme-ov-file#self-hosting

@selfhosted

bassomitron ,

Is there a big advantage to using Moonlight/Sunshine vs the built-in Steam remote play feature? I regularly stream from my desktop to my Steam Deck without too many issues, although sometimes I get weird minor problems (e.g. Banishers Ghosts of New Eden will be noticeably darker, Elden Ring will get random "flashes" where the screen kind of blinks for a split second from time to time). These issues are hardly a big deal for me, so I'm more curious than seeking a true alternative.

bassomitron ,

Quoting the 59% drop is dumb. They chose the peak in 2021 to be able to get that number. Damn near everything was peaking in 2021/2022 due to rock bottom interest rates, so the stock market was insanely inflated. If you look at their pre-2021 valuation, it's roughly the same as it is now. While VW may indeed be failing, them using their valuation as their main argument in the headline is misleading at best.

bassomitron ,

I always said way back in the early 2000s that once corporations figured out the internet, it and society in general would be very screwed. Their early attempts at trying to make things go viral and create engagement were laughably bad. Then they hired a bunch of psychologists and sociologists, bought up everything, and the rest is history.

bassomitron ,

It's like the third season of Westworld where the AI is telling everyone what to do (e.g. assigns them jobs, determines if they're going to be criminals, etc) and people just blindly accept it.

bassomitron ,

That post on mastodon claiming that it strictly came from a reddit post could purely be coincidental. If you Google "how common is glue in food," you'll find a ton of links talking about commercials using stuff other than food in food commercials/ads to make the food/drink look more "vivid/full/whatever."

bassomitron ,

You're right, I somehow missed that it mentioned the exact same amount, heh

bassomitron ,

What solution are you looking towards? I work in a massive organization with 20,000+ VMs and we've been having weekly virtual working groups across the country (our overseas depts have been doing their own) to try and discuss finding other solutions. We haven't been very successful, as the biggest pitfall we've seen is no one offers lifetime licenses so if we don't renew a yearly maintenance our VMs won't stop functioning properly. That's one of the main reasons we're looking to off board from VMware.

bassomitron ,

I wouldn't be surprised if it's a mixture of the two. It's kind of like if you surround yourself with criminals regularly, you're more likely to become one yourself. Not to say it's a 100% given, just more probable.

bassomitron ,

I'm not hoping anything, haha wtf? The comment above me asked if it was a proven statement or common sense and I said I wouldn't be surprised if it's both. I felt confident that if I googled it, there would more than likely be studies backing up a common sense statement like that, as I've read in the past how sending innocent people or people who committed minor misdemeanors to prison has influenced them negatively to commit crimes they might not have otherwise.

And look at that, there are academic articles that do back it up:

https://www.waldenu.edu/online-bachelors-programs/bs-in-criminal-justice/resource/what-influences-criminal-behavior

Negative Social Environment

Who we’re around can influence who we are. Just being in a high-crime neighborhood can increase our chances of turning to crime ourselves.4 But being in the presence of criminals is not the only way our environment can affect our behaviors. Research reveals that simply living in poverty increases our likelihood of being incarcerated. When we’re having trouble making ends meet, we’re under intense stress and more likely to resort to crime.

https://www.law.ac.uk/resources/blog/is-prison-effective/

Time in prison can actually make someone more likely to commit crime — by further exposing them to all sorts of criminal elements.

Etc, etc.

Turns out that your dominant social group and environment influences your behavior, what a shocking statement.

bassomitron ,

Because it's a casual discussion, I think it's obnoxious when people constantly demand sources to be cited in online comments section when they could easily look it up themselves. This isn't some academic or formal setting.

And I disagree, only the second source mentioned prisons explicitly. The first source mentions social environments as well. So it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Additionally, even if you consider the second source, that source mentions punishment reforms to prevent that undesirable side effect from occuring.

I find it ironic that you criticized me for not citing sources and then didn't read the sources. But, whatever. Typical social media comments section moment.

bassomitron ,

Again, in casual conversation where no one was really debating, it's obnoxious. When you're talking to friends in real life and they say something, do you request sources from them? No, because it'd be rude and annoying. If you were debating them in earnest and you both disagreed on something, sure, that would be expected.

But that wasn't the case here, the initial statement was common sense: If pedophiles are allowed to meet up and trade AI generated child sex abuse material, would that cause some of them to be more likely to commit crimes against real kids? And I think the answer is pretty obvious. The more you hang around people who agree with you, the more an echo chamber is cultivated. It's like an alcoholic going into a bar without anyone there to support them in staying sober.

Anyway, it's your opinion to think asking for sources from strangers in casual conversation is okay, and it's mine to say it can be annoying in a lot of circumstances. We all have the Internet at our fingertips, look it up in the future if you're unsure of someone's assertion.

bassomitron ,

Pen drives are cheap as dirt nowadays, especially small ones that are like 16GB. I'd just buy a new one.

bassomitron ,

It's true that you're often playing the lottery with them, that's why I just buy a few at a time. Like right now in the US, you can buy 16GB USBs for $4. The last three I've bought have lasted over 5 years each, thankfully. But I've had ones that have been bad right out of the package. That's why I just buy from places that have at least 30-day return policies.

bassomitron ,

I'm super jealous. Whenever we decom servers at work, we're required to fill out paperwork and provide proof that all HDDs and SSDs were properly destroyed (i.e. rendered completely unusable and wiped) and turned in to our disposal department. The servers themselves also have to be handed over to them. I'm not sure what they do with the servers, but I'm guessing they either repurpose them as emergency replacements for other sites that have hardware failures or they bulk sell them at auctions or something.

bassomitron ,

Our SSDs just have to be wiped but we still have to document and provide proof they were wiped and turned in. HDDs and tapes are a different story and a pain in the ass, though.

bassomitron ,

That's a deep rabbit hole (no pun intended). I know it's blasphemy to mention the other site around here, but check out the r/locallama subreddit. It covers more models than just LLaMA. There are literally thousands of variations at this point, so preferences are quite subjective based on your use case and your best bet is just to begin researching on your own for your intended purposes and available resources. Huggingface is the main model repository, as well.

bassomitron ,

Being able to send pictures and videos without SMS/MMS downscaling them to like 144p (hell I've had it be even worse than that for videos sometimes) is incredibly handy. That's the main benefit for me. Others have commented about the other features. And I'm fairly certain the article did state E2EE will be implemented.

bassomitron ,

Which coincidentally you need to do to cash out or cash in.

Yes, and no. You do need to cash in at some point, but you don't have to do it thru a public exchange. People do sell physical wallets for hard cash. And even if you do use an exchange, when I last looked into crypto the common currency for drugs (monero) was obtainable on exchanges that didn't have KYC rules. Outside of exchanges, you can also transmit currency directly to other parties, and once you use tumblers and other anonymous platforms, tracking becomes extremely difficult. It's not impossible, but it becomes troublesome enough that unless you're a big fish/crime lord/whatever, the FBI/interpol/whoever isn't going to be bothered wasting resources.

bassomitron ,

A fairly aggressive comment. I'm not the person you replied to, but as a parent with young ones, there are times where TV is literally an enormous rescuer. For example, just a couple of months ago, the entire family got hit with an extremely nasty stomach bug. I could barely walk without needing to either throw up or shit my pants. Being able to setup a little triage center in our living room for us and the kids, where we napped and watched movies all day, made that experience at least mostly bearable.

There are numerous other cases where modern technology makes parenting far easier. Back in the day, communities were much closer knit and extended family lived within the neighborhood, so parents had a lot more backup to help in those situations. Nowadays, that kind of support network is increasingly rare for parents to have. So yes, it's a luxury, but it should be an accessible luxury. Private companies are free to do what they want, doesn't mean we can't complain about it while begrudgingly continuing to pay for it.

bassomitron ,

I never realized I subconsciously did this until your pointing it out. Huh. Thanks for that insight I suppose, haha

bassomitron ,

it'll go to a rich white fuck first and they'll be the ones to sell it to China instead.

And that's really what most politicians care about. Meta and Co. are butthurt that the new dopamine dealer on the block is cutting so ruthlessly into their numbers, especially among the younger generations. Normally, Meta et. al. would just engage in their typical antitrust behavior and buy them out, but they can't because a) ByteDance doesn't need them or their money and b) I'd be surprised if China let them sell such a valuable tool willingly.

This is just protectionism under the guise of national security, plain and simple. We've heard, "oh but national security!!!" countless times before, and if this was truly the main concern, they'd be going after all the other blatantly egregious privacy snoopers as well.

bassomitron ,

To be devil's advocate: We already know China loves to be meddlin' in Western elections, so both parties have a vested interest in getting them out of their pants.

That being said, China can easily meddle all over the place, so I don't consider that the primary motivator. Like I said before, this is 98% about protectionism.

bassomitron , (edited )

You're missing the point, though. China has sizable stakes in multiple social media and streaming platforms, movie studios, and popular videogame studios (like the makers of Fortnite). But the fact those are all primarily owned by US companies makes it okay (in this context--I know China has stakes in similar businesses around the world, too).

TikTok is a threat to Meta and Co's dominance and American companies can't simply buy it out to make it go away or at least make it directly benefit them. Don't mistake me in saying it isn't a national security threat. What I'm saying is, if TikTok is a threat, then all of these corporate platforms are a threat. The government should targeting all of them! But they're not, and the reason seems pretty obvious to me.

bassomitron ,

You're also missing my original point. The argument that Congress is making is that TikTok is a dire threat to national security because: a) it's entirelt owned by a Chinese company, b) it is egregiously invasive, spying on its users and logging the data, c) it's very addictive, and d) it's algorithms are so effective that it's capable of mass targeted propaganda distribution that can impact elections, radicalize, etc.

Please, tell me how that is different than YouTube, Facebook, etc. other than the core ownership? We have literal fucking proof that Facebook collaborated with foreign agents in 2016 to influence our elections, for fuck's sake! And Congress did nothing to them besides a half-assed Q&A session with Zuckerberg and Co! But nope, TikTok is entirely about ethics and a sense of patriotic duty to keep our country safe, not about money and protectionism at all. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are some politicians who are genuinely trying to protect the US. Some. But the rest couldn't give a shit if a literal foreign plant was running our country.

And yes, I realize Fortnite and TikTok are different. But it doesn't take a genius to see a pattern in Tencent buying as much stake as possible in every major trending Western company. It's pretty obvious that they're buying influence and power vs caring about just profits, similar to China's whole silk road or whatever the fuck they call that program that lets poor countries borrow money. TikTok is a drop in the bucket when you consider how beholden we are to China in so many other far more immediately dire areas, e.g. critical medicine and medical supplies, critical technology components, etc etc.

bassomitron ,

I'd say that the bulk of the sales decline are primarily rooted in the fact that the competition has outdone Tesla on pricing and quality. Way too many stories of Tesla cars dying from a simple rainy day or driving through puddles and then the company fucking the customers over by not covering those incidents under the warranty with bullshit excuses.

bassomitron ,

I work with government admins a lot and they've already told me the shit show they've been dealing with regarding feature updates somehow installing themselves on their devices despite it being disabled via GPO. Unfortunately, I think the government will just flex on Microsoft and force them to strip the shit out for their baseline Windows images rather than move to a Linux alternative.

bassomitron ,

It's a double-edged sword as abandoning your personal time is mentally exhausting. But, yeah, being consistently sleep deprived creates a domino effect of making everything less enjoyable or even miserable, including your personal time.

bassomitron ,

Oh 100%, but if you're never allowing yourself free time, you're going to end up having side effects from that. Regardless, you shouldn't need to sleep deprive yourself in order to get some time off.

andrew , to Technology
@andrew@andrew.masto.host avatar

Samsung plans to more than double its total semiconductor investment in Texas to roughly $44 billion

https://highlighter.com/load?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Ftech%2Fsamsung-to-fortify-u-s-chip-revival-by-swelling-its-texas-investment-to-44-billion-6d2d1799

@technology

bassomitron ,

Even then. I won't be excited until any of these supposed foundries are actually producing chips.

‘IRL Fakes:’ Where People Pay for AI-Generated Porn of Normal People (www.404media.co)

A Telegram user who advertises their services on Twitter will create an AI-generated pornographic image of anyone in the world for as little as $10 if users send them pictures of that person. Like many other Telegram communities and users producing nonconsensual AI-generated sexual images, this user creates fake nude images of...

bassomitron ,

Img2img isn't always spot-on with what you want it to do, though. I was making extra pictures for my kid's bedtime books that we made together and it was really hit or miss. I've even goofed around with my own pictures to turn myself into various characters and it doesn't work out like you want it to much of the time. I can imagine it's the same when going for porn, where you'd need to do numerous iterations and tweaking over and over to get the right look/facsimile. There are tools/SD plugins like Roop which does make transferring over faces with img2img easier and more reliable, but even then it's still not perfect. I haven't messed around with it in several months, so maybe it's better and easier now.

bassomitron ,

Keep in mind that most plants only process co2 by day

Huh, did not know that. Damn, even nature has 9-5 jobs.

bassomitron ,

Depends on the ventilation setup, size of the room, and how well insulated the room/house is. My old house, the room would definitely get hot if we closed the door at night. But in my current house, it gets a lot colder if we do. It's just one of those things where all those variables above will likely be very different place to place, so there will never be a universal consensus that fits for everyone.

bassomitron ,

I think people are ignoring looking at this through the lens of anti-competitive behavior. Right now there is an alternative, yes. But Apple continues to grab the marketshare in the US (and some Asian and EU markets). However, there is no guarantee that will be forever. Sure, they support SMS now, but again, no guarantee that'll continue to last.

Apple has displayed on numerous occasions that they do not care about interoperability with other platforms and have even been outright hostile and aggressive against them. Just look what happened when some kid figured out how to make iMessage work on any other platform. Sure, that kid's solution was hacky, but he was 16 years old. If one kid can do it, then there's absolutely no justifiable reason seasoned software engineers can't figure out a secure solution.

It astounds me that there are so many people defending any company that not only encourages walled gardens, but in some cases aggressively enforces it. Yeah there are alternatives, but people are lazy and seek convenience. iMessage just works by default, and so many folks get annoyed or even sometimes confused when non-Apple users ask them to use a 3rd party app to communicate with modern features instead of being stuck with SMS's severe shortcomings.

That's why I think the DOJ is justified in this. Because it is anti-competitive behavior.

bassomitron ,

Well there's also school, work, messaging friends/family to coordinate events or daily errands/child caretaking/etc or just simply keeping in touch/chatting, reading for news/pleasure, tracking emergency events like inclement weather or other disasters, etc. etc. So there's plenty of screen time still even when you subtract social media usage, at least for many older kids/young adults, and/or adults.

bassomitron ,

I think they were referring to basic information censorship versus letting 10-year-olds/whatever aged minor have unfettered access to the entirety of the internet.

bassomitron ,

True, guess I interpreted it less literally. Who knows for certain besides OP, I suppose.

bassomitron ,

Audiophiles are 100% targeted with tons of nonsense products, mainly because sound is such a subjective thing beyond a certain level. That's not to say all hifi products are placebo-driven, just that the industry is rife with them.

bassomitron ,

Reddit's advertising platform has been garbage the entire time, I remember randomly going down the rabbit hole on social media marketing articles and the unanimous consensus among them was how bad/useless traditional advertising on Reddit was. One of the many reasons was due to how aggressively advertisement averse the userbase was (there were plenty of other critiques, such as how awful the management dashboard, metrics insight, etc. were). That being said, they did point out how fairly successful "organic" advertising could be on the site, e.g. AMAs, ads disguised as seemingly innocent meme posts, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I loathe advertisements, too. I think reddit is/has been going the wrong direction in focusing so much on ads as their primary method of generating revenue. However, there is no excuse for harassing an independent artist just trying to get their work out there to get discovered. Sorry you went thru that mate.

Firefox saw an increase in users (~50% in Germany and ~30% in France) following Apple’s default browser changes in the EU, as did Brave. (www.theverge.com)

Firefox spokesperson Christopher Hilton tells The Verge that the browser has seen a more than 50 percent jump in users in Germany and a nearly 30 percent increase in France....

bassomitron ,

Why would they? They already have a Mac build, I can't imagine it'd be that huge of a difference, but maybe iOS is a lot more different than I realize.

bassomitron ,

I suppose I'm not surprised. Typical Apple shenanigans.

bassomitron ,

No one was saying reddit couldn't implement API costs. In fact, every major 3rd party app developer, including Apollo, supported Reddit charging for API access and made suggestions on how such an arrangement could be made that was fair and reasonable to all parties. Reddit even invited these developers to discussions on the topic. However, Reddit's CEO said fuck that and wanted to charge an insane amount of money for API usage that no 3rd party developers would be able to reasonably afford without asking for an exorbitant amount of money from their users.

Here: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/

That was post made by the Apollo dev after their meeting with the Reddit team. With more info here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_to_debunk_reddits_claims_and_talk_about/

This link is really the one that discussed how willing 3rd party devs were to pay for API access if it was a fair cost. Reddit wasn't interested in being fair.

bassomitron ,

To be fair, most of the time those updates are trying to patch security vulnerabilities haha

Like iOS and Android both had a few critical CVEs a few months ago that were a really big deal since the vulnerabilities required no user input.

Anyway, those updates are pretty important more often than not and not just meant to annoy you :)

bassomitron ,

I mostly agree with all of your points, but I think you're failing to see the forest for the trees. The vast majority of users are ignorant as fuck about their tech. They couldn't give a shit about anything other than their own convenience. If the devs allowed everyone to opt out if it meant no longer getting annoying messages, a huge majority of them would do exactly that, caring little for what that actually means in the long-term for their own security and others' (yes, a vulnerable device is a danger to others, it isn't always only impacting just that user).

So they opt for this collective, utilitarian approach, despite it meaning less user control. If you don't like it, get an android device and root it. Again, I don't disagree with your points, I just thought it worth pointing out the larger picture.

bassomitron ,

I'll use this analogy: Do you hate seatbelt reminders in cars? It's the same concept. You're putting a lot of trust in people that just isn't going to work out well in the long run, as was seen with countless people continuing to ignore seatbelt safety for generations until it was forcefed into the culture. I view cybersecurity reminders the same way, where lots of people ignore it until it's forcefed into the collective to be taken seriously.

Those who hate it because they already take it seriously, will just figure out how to quiet the alarms/notices and/or move on. Again, I get that you're essentially saying, "but it's the principle of the matter!" I just don't think it's that big of a deal, as I'd rather be comforted knowing that my friends and family who send me videos/pictures/random crap are doing so from a device that isn't as likely to be completely compromised.

bassomitron ,

Haha right, I often think how it's starting to feel like we're entering the early years of the capitalist dystopian cyberpunk era.

bassomitron ,

What's crazy is if you read the monetary value of the biggest corps on the Cyberpunk wiki, we have corporations in real life that dwarf those numbers. Granted, Cyberpunk was written in the 80s, which had IBM as the richest corporation at the time worth around $130 billion (adjusted for inflation). Meanwhile, nowadays, Microsoft is worth over $3 trillion, Apple over $2.8 trillion, Saudi Aramco over $1.9 trillion, etc. Absolutely wild that even in the worst predictions by the Cyberpunk creator, it's still a fraction of what reality turned out to be.

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