partial_accumen
@partial_accumen@lemmy.world
- Comment on 4 days ago:
For the 2040s, if the pattern holds, local compute power will be come dirt cheap again, and there will be very few reasons to pay someone else to host your compute power remotely. Maybe it will be supercomputers on everyone’s wrist or something.
- Comment on 5 days ago:
So, what prediction did Bezos make back then, that seems particularly poignant right now? Bezos thinks that local PC hardware is antiquated, and that the future will revolve around cloud computing scenarios, where you rent your compute from companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.
This isn’t a new idea, and it certainly predates Bezos.
I’m older now, but throughout my life there has been a pendulum swing back and forth between local compute power vs remote compute power. The price of RAM going up follows the exact same path this has gone half a dozen times already in the last 50 years. Compute power gets cheap then it gets expensive, then it gets cheap again. Bezos’s statements are just the most recent example. He’s no prophet. This has just happened before, and it will revert again. Rinse repeat:
- 1970s remote compute power: This couldn’t really compute anything locally and required dialing into a mainframe over an analog telephone line to access the remote computing power.
- 1980s local compute power: CPUs got fast and cheap! Now you could do all your processing right on your desk without need of a central computer/mainframe
- 1990s remote compute power: Thin clients! These were underpowered desktop units that could access the compute power in a server such as Citrix Winframe/Metaframe or SunOS (for SunRay thin clients). Honorable mention for retail type units like Microsoft WebTV which was the same concept with different hardware/software.
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2000s local compute power: This was the widespread adoption of desktop PCs with 3D graphics cards as a standard along with high power CPUs.
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2010s remote compute power: VDI appears! This is things like VMware Horizon or Citirix Virtual Desktop along with the launch of AWS for the first time.
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2020s local compute power: Powerful CPUs and massively fast GPUs are now now standard and affordable.
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2030s remote compute power…in the cloud…probably
- Comment on Police Unmask Millions of Surveillance Targets Because of Flock Redaction Error 5 days ago:
Thw issue youll run into is effectiveness at that small scale, sonyoull be tempted to share data with other systems like that, and eventually you’ll end up creating a different flock.
I wonder if a segregated system design could address this. Similar in-system segregation like a TPM for the actual detection/matching part of the system separated from the command and control part.
As in, the camera and OCR operations would be in their own embedded system which could never receive code updates from the outside. Perhaps this is etched into the silicon SoC itself. Also on silicon would be a small NVRAM that could only hold requested license plate numbers (or a hash of them perhaps). This NVRAM would be WRITE ONLY. So it would never be able to be queried from outside the SOC. The raw camera feed would be wired to the SoC. The only input would be from an outside command and control system (still local to our SoC) that and administrator could send in new license plates numbers to search against. The output of the SoC would “Match found against License Plate X”. Even the time stamp would have to be applied by the outside command and control system.
This would have some natural barriers against dragnet surveillance abuse.
- It would never be possible to dump the license plates being searched for from the cameras themselves even by abusive admins. The only admin option would be to overwrite the list of what the camera is trying to match against.
- The NVRAM that contains the match list could be intentionally sized small to perhaps a few hundreds plate numbers so that an abusive admin couldn’t simply generate every possible license plate combination effectively turning this back into a blanket surveillance tool. The NVRAM limit could be implemented as an on-die fuse link so that upon deployment the size could be made as small as needed for the use case.
- Comment on Ibis chicks are as ugly as I imagined... 6 days ago:
Bin chickens in their larval state.
- Comment on Every anime ever… 6 days ago:
Watching season 1: “I can totally believe they shot this whole show in an old hot tub factory”
Watching season 4: “I can’t believe they shot this whole show in an old hot tub factory!”
- Comment on Going to a Protest? Don't Bring Your Phone Without Doing This First 1 week ago:
Shut off and leave your phone at home, buy a pay-as-you-go to bring with you for emergency contact
/coordinationLeave the pay-as-you-go phone powered off too, and only power it up if you actually have to use it. If you have to use it once, you need to get a replacement for a future event.
I’m thinking perhaps something like Meshtastic transmitters and receivers should be used for coordination instead.
- Comment on How do I feel comfortable/safe going outside by myself after being so used to have parent(s) be with me outside most of my life? 1 week ago:
So like… I feel scared about the idea of like… just going for a walk all by myself…
How about making a list of the things you think would possibly happen to you going for a walk by yourself that would justify being rationally scared. Then go through the list and consider even if each event is possibly, how probable is it? I think you’ll find that that things you’re most afraid of are the least likely to happen.
Now as a comparison, make a list of all the things that could happen to you staying at home. Another list of all the things that could happen to you being driven to your destination. Assign realistic probabilities to each event. I’m guessing you’ll find that the probabilities of bad things on each of these three list will all look pretty equal. If they are equal, then going for a walk is no more dangerous that staying home or being driven somewhere.
In a sense, if you’re afraid to go for a walk, you should be equally or more afraid of going for a drive or staying at home. As such, its not more dangerous to go for a walk than the other option.
- Comment on 'Worst in Show' CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells 1 week ago:
Well sure, if you’re in a time crunch that makes sense. Additionally, you did attempt to shop elsewhere, but in your case it was such a specialized opening you only had one choice from all the retailers available to you. I imagine, had there been multiple to choose from, you would have examined the choices more closely, right?
- Comment on 'Worst in Show' CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells 1 week ago:
Was that the only refrigerator store close to you, so even if there were other choices that fit manufactured you wouldn’t have been able to lay your hands on one?
- Comment on 'Worst in Show' CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells 1 week ago:
I feel like the problem here is that you get people who are curious or like the other features the fridge has and just get what they can when theirs goes out. And while, sure, those people learn not to do that again,
Part of what makes us intelligent is learning from others. I guess I would expect buyers to do even the most basic research on a large dollar figure purchase which would likely expose them to the headlines about Samsung putting ads on fridges after the sale.
Do people actually just walk into an appliance store and just drop more than $1k on what they see on the floor without researching reliability, warranty, or other features from articles and news sources?
- Comment on 'Worst in Show' CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells 1 week ago:
This is the same Samsung that sold fridges with giant LCD screens on them, ostensibly to help the buyer, but then later turned that expensive screen into a billboard showing ads to the fridge buyer in their kitchen. Samsung has shown who they are. Anyone that buys an AI fridge from them will have no one to blame but themselves.
- Comment on Dell admits consumers don’t care about AI PCs 1 week ago:
IBM got out of the retail desktop/laptop market in 2005 when they sold their product lines (like Thinkpad) to a company in China called Lenovo.
- Comment on Solar Panels and Heat Pumps to Be More Expensive in US in 2026 | Here’s what you need to know about electrifying your home as US green tax credits expire. 2 weeks ago:
Sadly even with the fall of cell prices and panels, the overall installations will likely still be much more expensive.
For solar, panel prices are actually a much smaller part of the overall cost of having an array installed. The other parts are the labor to install along with the design and permitting work. Labor costs continue to rise as well as inflation making the costs of both product and labor incrementally more expensive.
For heat pumps there’s also a double whammy of a new replacement refridgerant over the R-410a. This means buying a new unit that all the old R-410a will be difficult as the EPA rules say that complete systems can no longer be manufatured as of Jan 1 2026. Environmentally its a good move, but the cost of the new systems will be higher than the older ones.
I, personally, was able to take advantage of both the solar tax credit as well as the heat pump credit. This allowed us permanently shut off the natural gas at our house significantly lowering our household carbon impact. I wish more Americans could do the same, but the US government has stopped these credits.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
“The odds of Madura [sic] getting tipped off by our own system approach 100%”
Did Palmer forget that less than a year ago our own Defense Department, using a non-approved commercial chat app, added in a reporter to receive realtime mission updates about airstrikes in Yemen?
- Comment on I'm brave enough to say it: Linux is good now, and if you want to feel like you actually own your PC, make 2026 the year of Linux on (your) desktop 2 weeks ago:
I’ve used Linux on desktop, servers, and embedded devices regularly, but my mobile laptop has always been Windows. There were just enough times when a commercial OS was the only working solution to something even if Linux was great for 95% of other things.
Not quite two months ago now, I’ve changed that. I bought a M2 Macbook Air and run Asahi Linux (Fedora Remix) as my primary with the ability to dual boot back to OSX if I need a commercial OS. I’ve only had to boot back to OSX one time (and it really was the only solution). Asahi on M2 isn’t perfect but I’m quite happy with it.
- Comment on Do you think Google execs keep a secret un-enshittified version of their search engine and LLM? 2 weeks ago:
Its also possible we’ve reached the limits of the training data.
This is my thinking too. I don’t know how to solve the problem either because datasets created after about 2022 likely are polluted with LLM results baked in. With even a 95% precision that means 5% hallucination baked into the dataset. I can’t imagine enough grounding is possible to mitigate that. As the years go forward the problem only gets worse because more LLM results will be fed back in as training data.
- Comment on Last Year on My Mac: Look back in disbelief – The Eclectic Light Company 2 weeks ago:
Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. I appreciate it.
Have a happy new year!
You too!
- Comment on Last Year on My Mac: Look back in disbelief – The Eclectic Light Company 3 weeks ago:
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. Often times if I see an interesting question in the comments, I am glad for it, because that was the insight I needed to want to read the article and answer it.
Just reading comments without the article? I have no issue with that at all, and do that myself.
For me that isn’t annoying unless the commenter is getting something wrong that is talked about in the article, and doubles down on it.
How do you, as the commenter yourself, know you aren’t getting something wrong without reading the article?
I feel like each post is an invitation to discuss the general topic
How do you know what the general topic is without reading the article?
If you feel like that is disrespectful, I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think it is that disrespectful.
Maybe disrespectful is too strong a term. Let me amend that; I lose respect for the poster when they’re asking a question that is answered in the article. I sometimes write off engaging with them further in that thread because they’re clearly not even doing the most basic of tasks to be a part of the conversation.
But plenty of interesting conversations can happen in the comments (like this one) that have almost nothing whatever to do with the article!
I’ll do this too on occasionally, if I can clearly tell we’re not discussion the article topic, but its a gamble on my part and if someone smacks me down because it is article topical, I fully own that and apologize knowing its my fault.
- Comment on Last Year on My Mac: Look back in disbelief – The Eclectic Light Company 3 weeks ago:
I get where you’re going here and I do the same as far as reading, but before I post I make it a point to actually read the article. Otherwise I may be forming and asking questions clearly already addressed or are completely divorced from the actual topic because I lack the articles context.
I feel it is part of the mutual respect with other posters to not waste their time asking questions already answered (in the article) or derailing the conversation because I don’t know what conversation I’m in.
- Comment on Quick post about AI-free FireFox Based Browsers (Keep your Adds and avoid the Bloat) 3 weeks ago:
Nowadays, iOS sees just as many vulnerabilities as every other popular OS.
I’m no Apple fanboy but Apple security is more than the OS. Since they also produce all of the hardware, it means they can do things at the hardware level and either make available or restrict things to the OS that Windows cannot do because Microsoft doesn’t control all the hardware makers.
I’m posting this in Asahi Linux on an M2 powered Macbook. Its been an interesting experience learning not only the benefits of this as a hardware platform, but also its limitations from the FOSS point of view.
- Comment on Days after Christmas are confusing 3 weeks ago:
We have 4lbs of honey baked ham to go through. I’m eating a lot of ham.
- Comment on Estonia Issues Shoot-to-Kill Warning Over Russia’s ‘Little Green Men’ 3 weeks ago:
I don’t think Estonia will have empty “red lines” like Russia does.
- Comment on Estonia Issues Shoot-to-Kill Warning Over Russia’s ‘Little Green Men’ 3 weeks ago:
Sure, but the powers in Tallinn have to make this statement first to head off a diplomatic crisis. If Estonia had just started shooting Russians it would have been a much harder position diplomatically. There’s no room for Russia to claim “we accidentally stepped on your territory” because Estonia has now made the statement publicly what the consequences for Russian soldiers is that do that. Any Russian soldiers that do that (or their commanders) now have a full understanding they’ll be shot.
When the first shooting actually occurs, Russia can’t present any kind of credible complaint about “you shot our soldiers that were just lost!”. That would show incompetence on the part of Russian commanders, which is something Russian’s are even more loathed to admit.
- Comment on Turning an old Amazon Kindle into a eink development platform 3 weeks ago:
So, off to ebay I went! I saw a number of really cheap ones marked “BLOCKED BY AMAZON”; I decided not to go for these since theoretically they might have been stolen. In the end, I went for £7 Kindle 4 “non-touch”.
A few days later, it turned up. And I discovered why it might have been so cheap: its stuck in some sort of unquittable demo mode:
This makes me wonder the unit might have been stolen from a retail demo display.
Still, the content of the article is wonderful. I really like the author’s marriage of both the hardware and software aspects. I had no idea that an RS-232 interface was exposed off 3 soldier pads inside the unit. That certainly makes it a great place to start, but as the author shows a lot more knowledge (that the author had) was necessary.
A really interesting read!
- Comment on Estonia Issues Shoot-to-Kill Warning Over Russia’s ‘Little Green Men’ 3 weeks ago:
“Let me put it bluntly: If the little green men ever cross our border, we will shoot them. Those will be the consequences; there’s no arguing about it. If Russia isn’t sure we’ll actually react, they might test us,” Tsahkna said, as reported by another Polish outlet, Onet.
This is the way to communicate to Russia.
- Comment on Capitalism only asissts innovation for the first few years of existence. After that its a grift. 3 weeks ago:
While those are cool, none of them help an average person, except maybe the trains, and definitely not in the US lol.
mRNA vaccines largely ended the most widespread global pandemic in human history just 5 years ago.
Cars were perfect in 05
Climate change would disagree.
Electric cars existed before gasoline cars… And you know what still doesn’t exist? A repairable, mostly analog electric car thats affordable. Doesn’t exist.
What’s stopping you from buying a used 2012 Nissan Leaf for about $6k? Or how about a 2014 BMW i3 for about the same price? Neither of those are Cell network connected or touchscreen heavy cars.
- Comment on Nanobots will be used to attack people, rendering guns obsolete 3 weeks ago:
After you finish the last of the 3 novels, make sure you seek out the additional short stories. They fill in some nice gaps in the before, during, and after.
- Comment on Do rich people in landlocked countries have yachts? 3 weeks ago:
For rich people, it’s not about using it or making a practical purchase. Its a way to show others how much you care about them (none).
I was thinking about this topic just a few days ago. I have another theory. Yes, yacht ownership is a method of communication, but they’re not trying to communicate with the common people, but instead indicating to each other of their level of wealth so they can find equal peers or greater peers to associate with, or greater to avoid.
A rich person with $10M net worth has almost nothing in common with a rich person with a $1B net worth.
- Comment on Grid-Scale Bubble Batteries Will Soon Be Everywhere 3 weeks ago:
On the downside, Energy Dome’s facility takes up about twice as much land as a comparable capacity lithium-ion battery would. And the domes themselves, which are about the height of a sports stadium at their apex, and longer, might stand out on a landscape and draw some NIMBY pushback.
This is surprisingly good! I would have figured it would have taken far more than twice the land than a Lithium battery solution.
- Comment on Grid-Scale Bubble Batteries Will Soon Be Everywhere 3 weeks ago:
yeah, sure thing buddy. the CO2 will be in a closed loop until it won’t. just like Fukushima and Chernobyl were supposed to be closed loop systems, until they weren’t. disasters happen, no matter how much the techbro mindset insists that they’re impossible.
So you concern is the ecological impact should this bubble fail and the entirety of the CO2 is released to the atmosphere as pollution? Did you even read the article? They discuss that.
First, a full on failure would be rare. Then, a full on failure of 100% loss of the closed loop CO2 is equivalent to 15 round trip flights of a jet flying from New York to London. To put it in perspective there about 250+ flights of this length per day from London, with many being much much farther.
So you’re comparing the impacts of a once in a lifetime nuclear power plant failure to the impacts of another source 1/16th of something that already happens every in one airport. Your logic is why out of whack on this if this is your concern with the bubble.
