evranch
@evranch@lemmy.ca
- Comment on the ologies don't like to talk about theo 2 weeks ago:
This would make a good explanation for the bizarre biblical angels, especially having parts of their “body” that aren’t connected to each other. They only appear disconnected in the 3D projection we see, and are actually parts of a 4D organism.
- Comment on Independent auditors confirm top VPN doesn't log your data 3 weeks ago:
Yeah I know, but have you seen their site? It’s like an old 90s static HTML page. The main thing I see is that it’s clearly not a glossy “marketing first” service. They’re surviving off of their actual product.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 3 weeks ago:
I draw the line at “overpopulated” when our resource consumption is unsustainable to the point where we are becoming the sole consumer of the planet.
It’s commonly stated that we would need 2 planets the same size to sustain our current population in a way that doesn’t result in eventual collapse.
We’ve cleared vast land areas and scoured the sea of fish in our quest for calories. Eating bugs will not be the solution that makes us sustainable.
It’s been proven our population increases every time we increase our carrying capacity, such as through the invention of nitrogen fertilizer, mechanized agriculture etc. And there has never been a time that there were not people starving somewhere.
If we carry on this path we will be eating bugs and people will still be starving while ecosystems continue to collapse. It sounds like there is no net gain, IMO.
- Comment on Windows 11 will reportedly display a watermark if your PC does not support AI requirements. 3 weeks ago:
Might be something patched in Tiny10 but it even activated fine for me with the usual hack and hasn’t caused any problems. I had to take it online momentarily on install to activate, but that was all.
- Comment on Independent auditors confirm top VPN doesn't log your data 3 weeks ago:
I trust Mullvad and Proton at this point for VPNs, nobody else.
Any reason you can state not to use AirVPN? I switched to them from Mullvad because they support port forwarding. So far I’ve been very happy with their service.
Having ads and sponsors blocked I can’t be 100% sure, but I don’t think they advertise at all. I only tried them because of a recommendation on Lemmy. Their site design is very old school which really says “run by nerds and not marketers” to me.
- Comment on Windows 11 will reportedly display a watermark if your PC does not support AI requirements. 3 weeks ago:
Could you run fossilized and sandboxed in a VM? I run Tiny10 for a couple Windows applications that can’t run on Wine, completely offline so that there’s no need for updates. The system continues to work exactly how I want it to with no Microsoft Surprises.
One of the applications is for tax filing, so I finish the taxes, clone the VM, put the copy online and file. After it gets confirmation, I copy the database back to the fossilized version and wipe the copy. Been doing it for years now.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 3 weeks ago:
Valid point. When I grew up fishing for shrimp as a kid I was quite terrified of them until I was taught how to eat them.
I can assume they taste bad, because otherwise we would all be eating them already. Humans eat just about everything on the planet if it’s tasty, even if it’s really weird.
Personally I don’t see the need for it when we have plenty of plant sources of protein like pulses, and we can raise ruminants on otherwise useless land (like my hilly, rocky farm).
It seems to me just an excuse to continue overpopulating the planet. Sure, we could develop new protein sources to feed 10 billion - but if we had kept our population to the 4 billion it was in the 1970s we could all be eating thick beef steaks and salmon without worrying about straining the carrying capacity of the planet.
Maybe we should focus on getting our population down to a sustainable level before we worry about new and exotic foods.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 3 weeks ago:
I still think that, environmentally consciously, we should all switch to a mostly plant based diet and explore meat alternatives without fear.
I don’t have an issue with this statement, in fact I have friends who grow beans and lentils and I cook and eat dry beans every day in addition to my lamb. Plant proteins are healthy and delicious, and they easily stand alongside other standard dishes on our plates. Everyone I know eats a lot of beans.
My issue with the bugs is the same as I have with soy protein. Soy protein has been snuck into all manner of processed foods to boost protein numbers while replacing the higher quality proteins that you would expect in those foods (i.e. many cheap chicken breasts are injected with a solution of salt water and soy protein to plump them up and make you think you got more “chicken”)
I feel like using insects this way just is another step in adulterating our food supply, separating those like you and me who know what we are eating from the “commoners” who will not.
I have no problem with explicitly eating bugs outright if you choose to, I just don’t want to have them snuck into my hamburger at a restaurant.
Interestingly my ex-wife was from Taiwan and had never eaten insects except as a novelty - so it must be a different part of Asia where it’s common. Taiwan tends to like fish, pork and chicken as well as tofu and black beans.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 3 weeks ago:
That’s the problem, it isn’t delicious. That’s why they keep coming up with schemes to use them as a protein additive, like “cricket flour”.
I raise lamb free range on pasture, no inputs other than grass, and that’s what I’ll be eating for the foreseeable future. Let me tell you, that’s delicious.
I would encourage anyone else concerned about factory farming to find a small producer, most of us will gladly even give you a tour and let you see our herds, we love to show off healthy animals on green grass. And we’re often cheaper than the supermarket these days, no greedy middlemen to mark it up.
- Comment on Goatse, like Michelangelo's David, should be an exception to normal rules of censorship, due to its status as part of our shared cultural heritage. 3 weeks ago:
Is goatse.cx still up? I would check but growing up with the internet as it was, I’ve seen enough Goatse in my lifetime that I really don’t need to see it again.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 3 weeks ago:
The difference is that shrimp are delicious? Last time you got a bug in your mouth what was your instinctive response?
The great reset is bogus but there’s definitely a “conspiracy” to get us to eat bugs… A boring, capitalist conspiracy. Just the next step in the race to the bottom, another cheap and low quality food that the unwashed masses can afford to keep them alive and trudging off to work.
I will eat bugs when I see the billionaires have them on their plates.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
I bet I know what sort of socks you wear
- Comment on So sweet 4 weeks ago:
Only if I’m truly in the middle of something that’s time or focus critical. Otherwise I’m always glad to hear from my friends.
I have a FWB who I text with 99% of the time but awhile ago she texts “Can I call you? I really need someone to talk to.” Of course! It was a joy to talk to her, she lives in the city, I’m out on the farm. Told her she should call more often.
Like the other comment I despise voicemails though. If I don’t pick up, text me. That’s even my voicemail message now… And still people leave voicemails 🤬
- Comment on Boston Dynamics introduces a fully electric humanoid robot that “exceeds human performance” 4 weeks ago:
Please assume the position
- Comment on YSK : Dark patterns among large companies are becoming more mainstream 4 weeks ago:
To be fair proper integration of an aftermarket VoIP app requires almost every permission a phone has, especially if the app wants to mirror your caller ID, and supports SMS and attaching various media.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
I think you’re misreading the point I’m trying to make. I’m not arguing that LLM is AGI or that it can understand anything.
I’m just questioning what the true use case of AGI would be that can’t be achieved by existing expert systems, real humans, or a combination of both.
Sure Deepseek or Copilot won’t answer your legal questions. But neither will a real programmer. Nor will a lawyer be any good at writing code.
However when the appropriate LLMs with the appropriate augmentations can be used to write code or legal contracts under human supervision, isn’t that good enough? Do we really need to develop a true human level intelligence when we already have 8 billion of those looking for something to do?
AGI is a fun theoretical concept, but I really don’t see the practical need for a “next step” past the point of expanding and refining our current deep learning models, or how it would improve our world.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
And it still can’t understand; its still just sleight of hand.
Yes, thus “passable imitation of understanding”.
The average consumer doesn’t understand tensors, weights and backprop. They haven’t even heard of such things. They ask it a question, like it was a sentient AGI. It gives them an answer.
Passable imitation.
You don’t need a data center except for training, either. There’s no exponential term as the models are executed sequentially. You can even flush the huge LLM off your GPU when you don’t actively need it.
I’ve already run basically this entire stack locally and integrated it with my home automation system, on a system with a 12GB Radeon and 32GB RAM. Just to see how well it would work and to impress my friends.
You yell out “$wakeword, it’s cold in here. Turn up the furnace” and it can bicker with you in near-realtime about energy costs before turning it up the requested amount.
- Comment on Life? What do you mean? This ain't life, it's surviving 5 weeks ago:
Nibbler: “What is one life, compared to the entire universe?”
Fry: “But it was my life!”
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
We may not even “need” AGI. The future of machine learning and robotics may well involve multiple wildly varying models working together.
LLMs are already very good at what they do (generating and parsing text and making a passable imitation of understanding it).
We already use them with other models, for example Whisper is a model that recognizes speech. You feed the output to an LLM to interpret it, use the LLM’s JSON output with a traditional parser to feed a motion control system, then back to an LLM to output text to feed to one of the many TTS models so it can “tell you what it’s going to do”.
Put it in a humanoid shell or a Spot dog and you have a helpful robot that looks a lot like AGI to the user. Nobody needs to know that it’s just 4 different machine learning algorithms in a trenchcoat.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
Most claim they can code, but if they were coders they would be coding
I dislike techbros as much as you, but this isn’t really a valid statement.
I can code, but I can’t sell a crypto scam to millions of rubes.
If I could, why would I waste my time writing code?
Many techbros are likely “good enough” coders who have better marketing skills and used their tech knowledge to leverage into business instead.
- Comment on Eww, Copilot AI might auto-launch with Windows 11 soon 5 weeks ago:
KDE used to be the feature complete, heavy, memory intensive DE. But now we aren’t running Linux on abandoned laptops but on modern hardware. The average PC is so powerful that it’s completely irrelevant. All in on KDE/Plasma as well
- Comment on What will happen to large companies once poor people have no more money to use? 5 weeks ago:
All the tradesmen in here to bootfuck this guy with our steel toes
- Comment on High quality channel 5 weeks ago:
Here in Canada “chew” refers almost exclusively to snuff (which is what you guys call dip. Real snuff is called “sniffing snuff” and is super rare lol)
If you want a real chew it’s just called Red Man or “Red Man style” and it pretty much has to be smuggled from the US. The market is almost entirely dominated here by Copenhagen.
I’ve been away from nicotine for years but on the rare chance that someone offers me a chew of Red Man I’ll go for it. That stuff is pretty good
- Comment on Germans: what genocide? 1 month ago:
I don’t get this WW3 talk that seems to only be here on Lemmy. Like, does anyone actually expect any countries with significant global influence to line up behind Hamas?
The closest I can think of is Iran, and they’re a regional power at best, and they prefer to work behind the scenes.
No, this will be a nasty little “tempest in a teacup” as always, with lots of onlookers wagging fingers but doing nothing. This is what all neighbouring nations are already doing - in fact they love the fact that Israel’s disproportionate response is damaging their reputation. They’re more than happy to stand by and watch, as they’re the ones who set Gaza up as a punching bag in the first place.
Ukraine is far more likely to evolve into a global conflict, especially with Ukraine’s position weakening and Poland chomping at the bit to jump in.
- Comment on C O L O N I Z E 1 month ago:
Fungus can consume nearly anything organic, but it has to be damp. Even “dry rot” is only dry when you see it, it was once wet for the mycelium to spread through it.
I grew up in a wet climate where we feared mold and fungus, now I live in a dry one where we run humidifiers. You won’t ever see mildew or black mold here without a constant moisture source.
- Comment on Roku explores taking over HDMI feeds with ads 1 month ago:
Thanks, I can see how it works out with a 7 way split and a service that “just works”.
I still run an old version of Vanced for screen off radio style music in my truck, though I mostly stream from my own collection now with Ampache/Ultrasonic. I’ve done a ton of ripping lately with Zotify, it pulls down whole albums and discographies from Spotify in decent quality, and combined with Beets everything gets tagged perfectly.
With the recent price increases in streaming services lately I’ve been concerned about the long term survival of the industry, and figured it was time to start rebuilding my own music library.
- Comment on Roku explores taking over HDMI feeds with ads 1 month ago:
I’m surprised that of all the services you would pay for YouTube, as I’ve never considered it. What advantages does a paid subscription have over uBlock/Sponsorblock?
- Comment on Unwanted dynamic range compression/ducking of audio on Android 1 month ago:
It’s a Sonim XP8, they’re an ultra-rugged industrial manufacturer. I’m a farmer and tradesman so I’m kind of stuck with them, we can’t get the ruggedized Samsungs here in Canada unfortunately.
- Comment on Unwanted dynamic range compression/ducking of audio on Android 1 month ago:
Missed your comment somehow. Unfortunately I tried that awhile ago as well as “Disable A2DP hardware offload” with no effect from either.
I’m actually considering calling the manufacturer and asking what they did to it
- Comment on Denuvo Unveils New Tech That Will Make It Easier for Devs to Track Down Leakers 1 month ago:
As a farmer Monsanto has done a lot of sketchy stuff, but I’d like to point out that “terminator crops” actually have a legitimate usage case. There’s few worse weeds than volunteer herbicide-resistant canola, and if it just didn’t come up next year it would be great.
Almost all modern crops are hybrids anyways which don’t breed true. Nobody is saving seed except in very specific cases and even small farmers aren’t even planting bin-run wheat as modern genetics outperform it so greatly.
If you want to save seed there are plenty of open-pollinated varieties out there but unfortunately most of them perform poorly compared to their modern hybrid counterparts, from field crops to garden vegetables.