Jrockwar

@Jrockwar@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VPN Comparison 2.0⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you ok?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨kurzgesagt – AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Kurzgesagt? I didn’t know this, how come?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Much Energy Does It Take to Power Billions of AI Queries?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  These figures are too cherry picked for the shock value. You could go the opposite end and say that (these are all true, I’ve tried my best to research them):

  8.5 Wh (average of all daily queries for a user) is also…

  • Equivalent to running a 2000 W hair dryer or a kettle for 20 seconds
  • Equivalent to idling a car during a traffic light and not turning off the engine
  • A quarter of the energy required to reheat a ready meal in the microwave (roughly 45 Wh)
  • The power usage of a Macbook screen over just 30 minutes.

  850 MWh (whole consumption of all AI queries in the world) is also equivalent to…

  • The power consumption of ONE single cruise ship for 12h (link)
  • Charging 0.002% of the 75 million electric cars in the world
  • The energy stored in the fuel tanks of 2000 petrol cars - a small stadium car park in Europe
  • The amount of energy the largest solar plant in Spain or Germany generate… In a couple of hours.

  So yes - AI bad… But for other reasons. This is a diversion. Datacentres powered by coal are bad. Cruise ships are worse.

  The problem isn’t that the whole world needs less than a solar farm’s worth of energy for AI. The bigger problem is the social damage of AI - including the fact that this “expansion at all costs” is justifying getting that energy from non-renewable sources.

  But seriously, one single cruise ship uses more energy than all of the AI in the world. They serve no useful purpose and there are hundreds of those.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Britons believe the UK is seen by the rest of the world as ‘weak’ and ‘soft touch’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Duh. It’s weak because of Brexit, it needs to be soft touch because it’s lost the influence to be anything else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lara Croft is a Sociopath⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My flatmate used to call that Tomb Raider (the first of the new trilogy) “PTSD Simulator”. It’s as you say, the first few deaths are entirely survival-driven, with her constantly crying and then she becomes an emotionless one-woman army.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At this point I think Keir Starmer is actually a covert conservative trying his hardest to undermine and destroy the Labour party for decades to come.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The paradox of tolerance. You’re quoting an racist remark - there’s no need to tolerate intolerance as the social contract is broken.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK phone retailers lock shop doors while trading to tackle rising thefts⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When the iPhone X was released (2017), the £1000 pricing was considered ridiculous. Most flagships at the time cost about £600 (this is what the 2016 iPhone 7 cost at launch, with the iPhone 7 Plus having a starting price of £720).

  Obviously this didn’t stop Apple from selling them like hotcakes and establishing an immediate +30% increase of the flagship smartphone prices.

  Today, a Galaxy Z Fold starts at £1800. This is a +146% increase over the 2017 release price of the Galaxy Note 7.

  According to the bank of England, we’ve seen a total inflation of 34% in the 2017-2025, while phones have increased their prices by >100%.

  So yeah, no surprise there. As phones keep rising in value, they are going to continue becoming an increasingly desirable target for thefts. A gym bag full of smartphone boxes can easily have over £20k at retail prices, and easily fetch £10k when sold at a hefty discount, but a smartphone store doesn’t have the security measures of a jewelry store. I can see how it’s attractive to thieves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨England Trials Smartphone Rail Payment System with Real-Time Phone Location Tracking⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Why do you consider the UK’s ticketing system outdated? There’s oyster in/around London and QR codes everywhere else.

  What are you missing, is location-based surveillance what would be needed to modernise it in your opinion?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Browser Company (Arc, Dia) Has Been Acquired by Atlassian⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What happened was, they realised that Arc was a niche product that had a fervient userbase but would never become a mainstream browser, so they declared the development was “complete” and they were moving on to Dia so that they could jump onto the AI bandwagon create the next generation of browser.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Browser Company (Arc, Dia) Has Been Acquired by Atlassian⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The best thing The Browser Company ever did was unintentionally making someone else decide to create Zen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Browser Company (Arc, Dia) Has Been Acquired by Atlassian⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m very mildly pro-AI, in the sense that I remain optimistic there will be at least a few cool use cases and I’d love to find them.

  So I tried Dia… And uninstalled it a few hours later. Why would I want to “chat with my tabs”? Even if I didn’t think this was a rubbish use case, every browser comes with a chatbot sidebar/extension/whatever, why would I want to change browsers just for that?

  Heavy pass. Also, after how they abandoned Arc, I don’t think they can be trusted to develop a product and not pull the rug from under the users when it becomes mildly inconvenient to keep working on it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are those of us who grew up on older games more attuned to latency?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The generation of Amstrad, Spectrum etc had the games on tape. I would say they were the closest thing to a console pre-NES, so 1980s. I had an amstrad that was handed down to me by a friend of an older sister and it had tapes like this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump administration accuses UK of failing to uphold human rights⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I won’t be the one calling the UK blameless, but that’s rich coming from the country that’s doing what they are with ICE (which is just the latest one in a long list).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In the countries where healthcare has existed (and worked) for decades, there are additional taxes to alcohol, sugar, tobacco, petrol to cover for this.

  And also yeah, and I have no problem whatsoever knowing that a small part of my salary goes towards saving the life of people who wouldn’t be able to afford private healthcare. That’s called empathy - and I wish that’d sink in as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump wanted a US-made iPhone. Apple gave him a gold statue.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because he might not be “Middle Eastern” or “Dictator” but he behaves exactly like “some sort of Middle Eastern Dictator”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Big tech has spent $155 billion on AI this year. It’s about to spend hundreds of billions more⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Imagine what we could have achieved globally if we had spent all that money on a different cause.

  We could have managed to establish a colony on Mars, or perhaps we could have even finished developing Star Citizen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ByteDance AI IDE Trae telemetry continues even after opt-out⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, if anyone is surprised after the two red flags that are “ByteDance” and “AI”,it’s on them.

• Petition to Repeal the Online Safety Actpetition.parliament.uk ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨unitedkingdom@feddit.uk⁩ | ⁨1⁩ ⁨comment⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“You can't be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or anything else that you've read or studied, you're supposed to pay for” Donald Trump said⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  🙌 Communist Trump is making all textbooks free 🙌

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should Humanity Continue? Glenn Reacts to Thiel Interview [20:56 | JUL 05 2025 | Glenn Greenwald]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So the topics discussed are sci-fi, and politics. Not technology then.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should Humanity Continue? Glenn Reacts to Thiel Interview [20:56 | JUL 05 2025 | Glenn Greenwald]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Who’s “Glenn” and why does he belong in “Technology”? Is he a robot?

  What does this post about people ramblings have to do with Technology?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Men are opening up about mental health to AI instead of humans⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think it’s only men either, but it’s worth considering the implications and potential causes for what is being said here.

  We have had not decades but centuries of macho culture, where mental health is a taboo for men because “I strong, me no cry” and we know that mental health struggles go underreported on men. This is just adding more evidence to a symptom that we already know, of a society that hasn’t been able to course correct because it’s too set in tradition to allow those who need help to seek it without feeling like garbage.

  While I’m not saying this is a problem exclusive to men, I think the causes and effects on women and men are rather different. We’ve now known for a while that women with mental health issues or disorders tend to go undiagnosed (even more so than unreported). The case of autism is particularly blatant, as women only started to get diagnosed in a meaningful proportion in the 80s (despite autism not being sex- or gender-driven). www.autism.org.uk/…/autistic-women-and-girls

  Similarly, that underdiagnosing came from the stereotyping of gender roles and the fact that being quiet and pretty equated being “feminine”, which is “good”, so can’t be autistic, because autistic is bad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I once had the great idea of drinking a litre of beetroot juice, which I had read is amazing for sports recovery because of something something helping blood carrying more oxygen or something like that.

  Instant diarrhea, and on top of it, beetroot tinted it looked just like blood, so up until I realised what was going on and the fact that it actually wasn’t blood, that was a scary experience.

  I don’t know whether beetroot is known to cause diarrhea or it was just my body noping the juice out of it, but I have steered clear of beetroot juice ever since!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this means we can make a torrent client with a built in function that uses 0.1% of 1 CPU core to train an ML model on anything you download. You can download anything legally with it then. 👌

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The emulator that lets you play NES games in 3D has left early access on Steam⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Still, being able to argue they’re not for profit is what typically has protected emulators from being sued to oblivion (and with Nintendo, even that’s risky)…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honda successfully launched and landed its own reusable rocket⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In different ways. For example, it’s very rare for a car to explode in a collision, other than in movies.

  One of the reasons that make hydrogen difficult to work with in this sense is that hydrogen (H₂) molecules are so small that they can permeate most materials, such as steel. Then it can get somewhat easily to wherever there is a spark, and chaos ensues. Annoyingly you don’t even need 100% Hydrogen for that to happen, as it can ignite with a concentration of just 4%.

  After we stopped using Hydrogen mostly as a consequence of Hindenburg’s accident, it’s taken years to perfect hydrogen fuel cells to a safety standard that can be used in cars. As far as I know, its use has been limited to rockets/space propulsion otherwise (where you can just throw millions at the problem to make it safer).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cancers can be detected in bloodstream three years prior to diagnosis⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Only 6M €? For an event of that size that feels a lot cheaper than I would have thought.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Digital Foundry: Yes, It's Faster: Switch 2 Back Compat vs Batman Arkham Knight + the Witcher 3⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A console in 2025 “runs at a stable 30” fps and that’s good news? Of course this is slightly faster than a mobile chip from 10 years ago, but that’s an incredibly low bar to set.