cyd
@cyd@lemmy.world
- Comment on "Section 31" early review round-up 1 week ago:
Looks like Alex Kurtzman has done it again!
- Comment on Meta’s AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop 3 weeks ago:
LLMs aren’t capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection,
Eh, maybe, maybe not. 99% of the human-written stuff in IM chats, or posted to social media, is superficial fluff that a fine-tuned LLM should have no problem imitating. It’s still relatively easy to recognize AI models outputs in their default settings, because of their characteristic earnest/helpful tone and writing style, but that’s quite easily adjustable.
One example worth considering: people are already using fine tuned LLMs to copilot tabletop RPGs, with decent success. In that setting, you don’t need fine literature, just a “good enough” quality of prose. And that is already far exceeding the average quality that you see in social media.
- Comment on Facebook and Instagram to Unleash AI-Generated ‘Users’ No One Asked For 4 weeks ago:
Hot take: if they can get it to work, good! I welcome AI users who are smarter, better informed, and have better taste than the rest of us mouth breathing meatbags.
- Comment on Chinese companies are reportedly reluctant to adopt homegrown chips — domestic solutions are technologically too far behind 1 month ago:
See, this was always the problem with Chinese efforts to indigenize their semiconductor industry. Each individual Chinese firm had no incentive to use Chinese suppliers, rather than their more established competitors. Well, guess what, the US Government has solved that coordination problem for them. Just about every Chinese company, up and down the supply chain, now has an excellent reason to buy Chinese. Sure, they’ll take years to work out the kinks, and there will be lots of chances to point and laugh in the meantime. But in the long run, the Sullivan-Blinken strategy of squeezing the Chinese chip industry might end up being one of the most counterproductive geostrategic ideas of all time.
- Comment on Southeast Asian nations amend semiconductor strategies 2 months ago:
South Korea’s conservative ruling party, the People Power Party (PPP), is pushing for legislation that would give the semiconductor industry subsidies and an exemption from a national cap on working hours.
Yes, that’s what South Korea needs… longer working hours…
- Comment on how is final fantasy XVI 4 months ago:
It’s wild how CBU3 dumped FF14 design straight into FF16 and decided it was good enough. MMO gameplay makes a lot of design compromises to accommodate for the multiplayer shared-state world, network latency, etc. None of which make sense for a single player offline experience.
- Comment on TSMC Arizona struggles to overcome vast differences between Taiwanese and US work culture 5 months ago:
Funny thing is, TSMC in Taiwan is considered a premium employer. It offers much better pay and parks than other companies.
- Comment on JPEG is Dying - And that's a bad thing | 2kliksphilip 5 months ago:
People are quick to blame Google for the slow uptake of Jpeg XL, but I don’t think that can be the whole story. Lots of other vendors, including non-commercial free software projects, have also been slow to support it. Gimp for example still only supports it via a plugin.
But if it’s not just a matter of Google being assholes, what’s the actual issue with Jpeg XL uptake? No clue, does anyone know?
- Comment on [Adam Savage's Tested] Epic Star Trek Studio Scale Model Builds! 5 months ago:
Decent adorable Bandai kits when…
- Comment on The AI-focused COPIED Act would make removing digital watermarks illegal 6 months ago:
If this passes, this would have the perverse incentive of making China and the Middle East the leading suppliers of open source / open weight AI models…
- Comment on World’s 1st high-temperature superconducting tokamak built in China 7 months ago:
Just Google for Mihoyo and Energy Singularity. They invested $65M back in 2022.
- Comment on World’s 1st high-temperature superconducting tokamak built in China 7 months ago:
This is the one that’s partly funded by Mihoyo, using the absurd amounts of money they made with Genshin Impact.
The power of the anime waifu, in the palm of your hand…
- Comment on Free-Market Advocate, Elon Musk, Asks for U.S. Government to Put Tariffs on Chinese EV Imports 8 months ago:
“Businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.” – Milton Friedman
- Comment on Biden really, really doesn’t want China to flood the US with cheap EVs 8 months ago:
My phone is better at navigation etc anyways.
You could similarly argue that phone makers should concentrate on making and taking calls. Turns out, that’s not what consumers care about once a certain bar is cleared (a pretty low bar; call quality is notably bad on many modern cellphones). They care more about other stuff like… being good at navigation.
This has been put to the market test in China. For EV purchases, most consumers turn out not to care about the “car” aspects beyond a certain point. If the car drives okay and has acceptable safety, what matters is the Internet-based bells and whistles.
- Comment on How Airbnb accidentally screwed the US housing market and made $100 billion 8 months ago:
“The wealthy and corporations” have choices of how to invest their money. If housing supply is sufficiently elastic to meet demand, they’ll find somewhere else other than housing to put their money. Ain’t nobody trying to corner the Chinese real estate market in 2024, for instance.
There are a few places where land shortages genuinely constrain housing supply, like Singapore and Hong Kong. But the US has tons of land; things are simply not well optimized.
That, plus high interest rates, which is due to fiscal/monetary mismanagement.
- Comment on How Airbnb accidentally screwed the US housing market and made $100 billion 8 months ago:
US policymakers screwed themselves with crappy urban planning, leading to insufficient housing supply and bad transit options. Blaming AirBnB for high housing prices is like setting up a chain of dominos, and criticizing a guy who comes by and knocks it over. If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else, or the wind.
- Comment on Chuck Todd: The race to build a better internet — before it's too late 8 months ago:
I’m pretty skeptical about how much fundamental change is possible on this issue. So long as we give consumers a choice, the overwhelming evidence is that most people dgaf about their data, and are willing to sell it off.
This is a totally free exchange. Even when you plant the choice in front of users as an obnoxious and intrusive accept-cookies prompt, they’ll happily click Accept All even for sketchy websites (let alone something like Gmail). So you end up wasting everyone’s time for little benefit.
The only way around this situation is to enact heavy-handed centralized government controls, like how China regulates its internet giants. But this would be a decisive move away from the entire idea of a decentralized internet.
- Comment on Chuck Todd: The race to build a better internet — before it's too late 8 months ago:
If you pay $1 for Gmail, and Google pays you $1 for your data, isn’t that equivalent to where we are today?
- Comment on Is Tesla Feeling the BYD? A Chinese Giant Shakes Up the EV Electric Car Landscape 8 months ago:
- Comment on Is Tesla Feeling the BYD? A Chinese Giant Shakes Up the EV Electric Car Landscape 8 months ago:
So you’re just talking about the look of the car? Because BYD has been doing EVs far longer than Porsche, so if anyone is doing a rip-off of the tech, it would be Porsche.
As far as design goes, BYD’s aesthetics in recent years has a lot to do with them hiring big-shot European designers like Wolfgang Egger. If they’re pulling from the same talent pool as other top carmakers, it’s not so obvious why you’d accuse BYD of copying others, and not vice versa.
- Comment on Is Tesla Feeling the BYD? A Chinese Giant Shakes Up the EV Electric Car Landscape 8 months ago:
Source? Or is it just a matter of “it has the same shape as a western car, and a steering wheel = omfg IP theft”?
- Comment on ByteDance won't sell TikTok, would rather pull it from the US 8 months ago:
There are valid commercial reasons not to go through a forced sale with a ticking time limit, which will inevitably carry a steeply discounted price. Rather than getting robbed, it makes sense to hang on to the company and take profits from the rest of the world.
- Comment on Drone maker DJI facing U.S. FCC ban — the national security risk and part China-state ownership are key issues 8 months ago:
Funny thing is, those Chinese drones are being heavily used by Ukraine, because they’re more reliable than US-made drones. In 2023, Ukraine bought about 60% of the global supply of DJI’s Mavic quadcopters.
- Comment on Promoted on TikTok, ‘No Thanks’ boycott app targets products tied to Israel 8 months ago:
It’s gonna get pulled from app stores for “promoting antisemitism”. You don’t need to be the Kwisatz Haderach to see that will happen.
- Comment on ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail, sources say 8 months ago:
As I understand, using VPNs to access will be illegal in principle, and the VPNs can be on the hook for stuff penalties.
In practice, it will depend on how zealously the government plays the cat and mouse game. Kind of like China with VPNs, ironically enough.
- Comment on TikTok's CEO is feeling the pressure and users are freaking out 9 months ago:
I mean, you can use that approach to denigrate pretty much any activity people spend time on.
- Comment on How to Escape From the Iron Age? 9 months ago:
How much of the coal in a blast furnace is actually necessary for the carbon impregnation, as opposed to supplying the heat via combustion? Steel contains only a few percent carbon by weight, so it doesn’t seem like much carbon is needed (not to mention that the carbon in steel is essentially sequestered).
- Comment on The Tiny Ultrabright Laser that Can Melt Steel 9 months ago:
I think those use normal VCSELs. To justify using PCSELs, maybe it would be lidars for long range sensing, like range finding over dozens of meters or something.
- Comment on The Tiny Ultrabright Laser that Can Melt Steel 9 months ago:
This is a really neat technology that Noda (the author of the article) has been plugging away at for decades. The main problem, from my understanding, is that people haven’t been able to find applications.
We already have conventional laser diodes that work extremely well, they’re not that bright but bright enough to make laser pointers, disc read/write heads, etc., which are applications where miniaturization is important.
On the other hand, in industrial applications like cutting steel, we have fiber lasers. Those are about the size of a briefcase, compared to the photonic crystal lasers in this article which about a centimeter. But they can reach incredible brightness, about 1000x the output power of the photonic crystal lasers (and about 1,000,000 times that of ordinary laser diodes). And in industrial applications you don’t really need the laser to be miniaturized (especially since the power source itself will be a chonky piece of equipment).
So somehow, right now this neat tech is falling into the cracks. One day, I’m sure someone will find the perfect application for it, though.
- Comment on A 62-Year-Old German Man Got 217 Covid Shots—and Was Totally Fine 10 months ago:
He’s more mRNA than man now.
