nucleative
@nucleative@lemmy.world
- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
I think this was the version right before WYSIWIG support was added. So you could still use fonts, and change font sizes but on screen it would show a strange notation but not the actual font. Complex layouts were tough 😅
- Comment on The return of pneumatic tubes 1 week ago:
When I was young I remember that banks often had large drive-thrus with pneumatic tube systems at each car stall. They’re only be one teller but they’d serve quite a few lanes.
If you wanted a cash withdrawal, you might put your ID and your withdrawal slip in the tube, and a few minutes later it would come back with cash in it.
It was pretty rad. But ATMs seem like a better bet overall.
- Comment on X is about to start hiding all likes 2 weeks ago:
Now Elon can like his favorite OF creators without anybody knowing it’s him.
- Comment on We have to stop ignoring AI’s hallucination problem 1 month ago:
Well stated and explained. I’m not an AI researcher but I develop with LLMs quite a lot right now.
Hallucination is a huge problem we face when we’re trying to use LLMs for non-fiction. It’s a little bit like having a friend who can lie straight-faced and convincingly. You cannot distinguish whether they are telling you the truth or they’re lying until you rely on the output.
I think one of the nearest solutions to this may be the addition of extra layers or observer engines that are very deterministic and trained on only extremely reputable sources, perhaps only peer reviewed trade journals, for example, or sources we deem trustworthy. Unfortunately this could only serve to improve our confidence in the facts, not remove hallucination entirely.
It’s even feasible that we could have multiple observers with different domains of expertise (i.e. training sources) and voting capability to fact check and subjectively rate the LLMs output trustworthiness.
But all this will accomplish short term is to perhaps roll the dice in our favor a bit more often.
The perceived results from the end users however may significantly improve. Consider some human examples: sometimes people disagree with their doctor so they go see another doctor and another until they get the answer they want. Sometimes two very experienced lawyers both look at the facts and disagree.
The system that prevents me from knowingly stating something as true, despite not knowing, without some ability to back up my claims is my reputation and my personal values and ethics. LLMs can only pretend to have those traits when we tell them to.
- Comment on Winamp has announced that it is opening up its source code to enable collaborative development of its legendary player for Windows 1 month ago:
Damn, I’d even works on mobile
- Comment on How Airbnb accidentally screwed the US housing market and made $100 billion 1 month ago:
I’ve heard a lot of people having this problem. Airbnb is next to useless, even with their guarantee.
Prices goes up, other hotels are booked solid, there are fewer options and travelers are left in the cold.
A big brand would be less likely to risk their reputation over $50 or $100/night difference if there’s some new big event in the area
- Comment on How Airbnb accidentally screwed the US housing market and made $100 billion 1 month ago:
There are a few things humans (and thus a healthy society) require for survival. Water, food, shelter.
When we start to point unadulterated VC backed capitalism at those resources, I think we give up something in our society and culture that we don’t actually want to give away.
I travel a lot worldwide and have used Airbnb quite a few times. However I’m now on the side of “Airbnb is evil”.
A couple years ago had a horrific experience in a villa and Airbnb customer support didn’t give a rats ass. Fortunately, my bank did and my credit card chargeback for $4,000 was successful. While I was going through that experience I came across a multitude of communities of travelers who have had equally horrific, oftentimes more horrific experiences with Airbnb where they’ve failed to step in and assist in any way.
Random dudes who own houses are on average unqualified in the hospitality business and not incentivized by maintaining a brand reputation. There are so many issues caused by shitty Airbnb hosts that hotels - real hotels - just don’t suffer from.
So now we have this situation where a lot of spaces are allocated to hotel businesses, more space is allocated to residential housing, And any random dude who can qualify for a mortgage can take a house off the market, fill it for 10 or 15 days out of the month, and keep both a domicile unused for a resident and a hotel room empty.
This is one of the few areas where I think hotel regulations are smart.
- Comment on TikTok sues U.S. government, saying potential ban violates First Amendment 1 month ago:
Will be interesting to read the arguments and hear what experts have to say.
There is some precedence that corporations do have first amendment rights.
A hypothetical argument from TikTok is they think they are allowed constitutional rights, in this case to publish whatever they want, in the act of doing a commercial activity and that the law which was passed to force a sale to a local owner is a violation of their right to speak freely.
I’m suspect TikTok operates in the USA under an American registered entity that is wholly owned by a foreign entity. Whether that grants and removes any such constitutional rights seems unclear.
Next, it doesn’t seem like the law intends to block TikTok’s “speech”, rather it specifically allows the executive branch to block this particular type of foreign entity from doing business on American soil on the grounds of security, enforced most likely by blocking it from doing business with the app stores. This also has precedence - a lot of it, in fact - when it comes to security. The US blocks all kinds of foreign businesses from trading with American businesses. Like arms dealers and drug dealers.
So TikTok will need to defeat the idea that even as a foreign businesses they don’t need to be subject to the whims of the executive branches power to block foreign businesses AND that even congress doesn’t have the power to write a law that gives the executive branch this power (because, ya know, they just DID write that law).
And then TikTok will need to win on the idea that somehow their rights have been suppressed.
Seems like a long shot to me and the precedence that would be established by making it difficult for Congress to write laws that give the executive power to block foreign entities because it risks their unlikely right to speech in the US seems a bit whack.
- Comment on The Verge shows how Google search is useless 1 month ago:
I saw a website that was selling Reddit bot services to companies that want to review their products. They would just send a swarm of bad accounts in there and make nice comments. Even replying to their own comments.
After that I stopped trusting almost every Reddit review (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
- Comment on The Verge shows how Google search is useless 1 month ago:
Missing the days of consumer reports.
- Comment on Exclusive: ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail, sources say 2 months ago:
TikTok hasn’t shown themselves to be particularly politically savvy so far.
As popular and as well loved as their platform is, they are getting kicked in the ass by the powers that be.
I think their survival now is predicated on them finding more powerful allies.
- Comment on One Login: Towards a Single Fediverse Identity on ActivityPub 2 months ago:
I thought it was so that if you build a following, and then decide to change instances, you keep the followers?
Perhaps I’ve missed the point too.
- Comment on If TikTok in the US is spun off as a separate entity, how hard would it be for the current company to put in a back door to still access the data. 2 months ago:
Terms of Sale:
Buyer agrees to sell user data to TT DataVacuum, LLC
Buyer agrees to install For You page algorithm updates per the requirements of TT DataVacuum, LLC on a quarterly basis.
Btw our lawyers are still setting up our new LLC with nominee directors. Dont worry, totally American.
- Comment on Mercedes becomes the first automaker to sell autonomous cars in the U.S. that don't come with a requirement that drivers watch the road 2 months ago:
Wonder how this works with car insurance. Os there a future where the driver doesn’t need to be insured? Can the vehicle software still be “at fault” and how will the actuaries deal with assessing this new risk.
- Comment on Killing the Middlemen in the Rideshare Industry 2 months ago:
I wonder if a P2P ride-sharing system could be made to work. Or if it would be rife with scams and dangers.
- Comment on Forest Gump thought "life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get" because he was illiterate and couldn't read the little card. 2 months ago:
There was always a risky box of chocolates on grandma’s kitchen table.
Each bite was a gamble: might be a delicious milk chocolate with a peanut inside, or it might be a bitter chocolate with some medicine-like cherry filling.
- Comment on Homeowner baffled after washing machine uses 3.6GB of internet data a day 2 months ago:
Yeah, I was reaching for really extreme cases. Maybe an IOT wash machine with a smooth app is easier to program than a machine with a control panel itself.
Who knows, the tech could hypothetically be useful.
Any why don’t we have reservoirs with measured doses of detergent anyways? That would be kinda rad.
- Comment on Homeowner baffled after washing machine uses 3.6GB of internet data a day 2 months ago:
Solution in search of a problem.
I guess a mobile alert that lets you know the cycle is finished could be handy? Ability to schedule a load to start later? Maybe a maintenance or problem alert? Depleted detergent and fabric softener reservoir?
Possibly an energy usage chart for the nerds out there who like that kind of thing?
But damn, all of that shouldn’t need more than a few kb a day max.
- Comment on OpenAI introduces Sora, its text-to-video AI model 4 months ago:
Welcome to the club my friend… Expert after expert is having this experience as AI develops in the past couple years and we discover that the job can be automated way more than we thought.
First it was the customer service chat agents. Then it was the writers. Then it was the programmers. Then it was the graphic design artists. Now it’s the animators.
- Comment on OpenAI Wants to Eat Google Search's Lunch 4 months ago:
OpenAI’s existential problem is that they’ll eat their own lunch and then have nothing left. The reason people make useful content now and give it away for free is because they can get paid for the traffic.
Take that traffic away and all the content goes behind paywalls and login screens where OpenAI can’t touch it.
- Comment on BBC: Extending our Mastodon social media trial 4 months ago:
Totally agree. The smtp protocol server to server interoperability made enail it all work smoothly acrossany federated hosts and I think ActivityPub is more or less designed with a similar strategy, except for defederations. I guess the equivalent would be blocking spam at your smtp gateway, lol.
- Comment on BBC: Extending our Mastodon social media trial 4 months ago:
It’s like running your own email server on the early 2000s. For large businesses it totally makes sense.
Hobbiests can do it to if they are interested.
Most people will land at a “shared” service and let someone else handle the admin tasks. I’m afraid that eventually there might only be “outlook.com, gmail.com, and yahoo.com” so to speak, because it’s just the easy way to go for most people and economies of scale make it more feasible for the operators who find ways to get paid.
- Comment on What if we aimed the Hubble Telescope at Earth? 4 months ago:
Tl:dw Hubble is designed to look at objects really far away and isn’t calibrated for Earth or fast enough to track a single spot long enough for good exposure, so the earth would be blurry.
- Comment on Remembering multi-tasking in MS-DOS: DESQView 4 months ago:
Wow it’s amazing you’ve still got one going. Are you still letting users connect to the system? Over IP I’d imagine. Recently I went down the rabbit hole and found that MajorBBS is now available for free. I installed it in a virtual dos environment and got tcp/ip connections to it up and running. That system, at least in it’s heyday, was one of the few that could run multiple lines simultaneously in DOS and I always wanted to see the backend.
My BBS back in the day was running Wildcat! As well and then eventually moved to RoboBOARD which had the first mouse gui system. For the front end I used BinkleyTerm to get FIDOnet working. For a lot of the time it was up and running on OS/2 as well, so I could get multiple lines working.
Such great stuff that led me directly into an IT/entrepreneur career.
- Comment on Remembering multi-tasking in MS-DOS: DESQView 4 months ago:
I’d have given my left nut to have desqview in the late 80s/early 90s. I was just a kid with a homegrown BBS but the concept was out-of-this-world cool.
- Comment on YouTube Premium announces 100 million subscribers 4 months ago:
I live in a place where its just $2.50. No YouTube ads ever is great.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
Anecdotally everyone has an anecdote about this topic because it concerns a basic function of the human body. It’s too bad that so many people believe it’s a moral character problem making the topic nearly impossible to talk about openly.
- Comment on How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT 4 months ago:
I use it as an answer engine. Queries like: what’s that css property for xyz, or please summarize this email, or give me the top 25 most commonly used color words in English in a json schema like this.
All of that could be found with a normal search engine but I’d have to work harder and sort through a lot of trash along the way.
ChatGPT just understands what I’m looking for almost no matter how poorly worded my query is and just answers the question.
- Comment on PayPal to Cut Around2,500 Jobs as Rivals Snag MarketShare 4 months ago:
Gee, I wonder why they have rivals who are taking market share.
- Comment on How I cannot be worry?? 5 months ago:
Worrying about problems definitely helps to keep you alive, but the motivation to do something ideally comes from a prefrontal cortex desire to improve rather than a fight or flight response to threats.