voluble

@voluble@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has anyone tried any 3d scanning solutions?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not sure of any beginner FAQs on scanning.

  I guess it all depends on how much scanning you plan to do, the size of things you want to scan, and how accurate you need the scans to be. Out of curiosity, what are you looking to scan? Is it something that can’t be modeled in CAD software?

  At the risk of giving you yet another option - Teaching Tech did a video on a neat scanning rig called the OpenScan Mini. Looks like someone linked OpenScan below as well. You build it yourself from electronic components, a pi, a pi camera, and some printed parts. Results look pretty decent for what it would cost to build, and probably worth the time and effort if you plan to do lots of scanning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA: Copyrighted Books Are Just Statistical Correlations to Our AI Models.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I only bring it up to make the point that not everybody is calling what Nvidia is doing ‘groundbreaking innovation’.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA: Copyrighted Books Are Just Statistical Correlations to Our AI Models.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, Nvidia is being sued by rightsholders in a class action lawsuit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why not serve fried chicken on Juneteenth? How is it different from serving corned beef on St. Patrick’s day?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This seems interesting. What’s the context here?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I don't know which one of you needed this information, but you're welcome.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As soon as I learned that Crank wasn’t cinéma vérité, I couldn’t take Jason Statham seriously ever again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sues Meta, citing chatbot’s reply as evidence of shadowban⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For real!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The FTC is probing Reddit’s AI licensing deals⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Just kind of dawned on me while looking at the number, Reddit’s licensing deal with Google is valued at $60 million per year. That’s really not very much money at all, considering the amount of data Reddit has and continues to accumulate. And chump change for Google, no doubt. Reveals how little leverage Reddit actually has at this point. This was their flagship deal, and the best they could get was $60mil per year.

  Also puts the API fiasco in a new light. “Look, we need to charge for API calls, because we’re going to be selling all your shit in a few months to Google, for the financial equivalent of a cup of coffee.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨is this the moment spez became Heisenberg? Reddit CEO warns users: "We know your dark secrets'⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Think it’s more of an allusion to lurking habits, active times, metadata, stuff not related to public posts. I’d imagine the average user has plenty of stuff they’ve browsed through that they wouldn’t want their family / co-workers, etc. to know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft's draconian Windows 11 restrictions will send an estimated 240 million PCs to the landfill when Windows 10 hits end of life in 2025⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Would also need to get a burner phone number w/ answering machine to take calls from 240 million grandmas, cheapskate businesses and cash-strapped public schools for any & all tech support questions until the end of time, because if there was an issue with system stability in any way whatsoever, or if the router went down or the printer stopped working, they’d assume it was the fault of ‘the guy who changed everything’.

  Linux is great & everything, but this sounds like a recipe for utter disaster, not a way to make an easy buck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 12 and the coming AI chip war⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Microsoft OS workload on an AI-optimized chip: (5%) consumer benefit - users can get access to Clippy+ with a Microsoft premium account subscription, that if users aren’t subscribed, they’re reminded every time they go into the settings application (15%) anti-piracy & copyright protection (80%) harvesting and categorizing all user activities, for sale to other companies, and delivery to governments

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 12 and the coming AI chip war⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not sure if you already know, but - sophisticated large language models can be run locally on basic consumer-grade hardware right now. LM Studio, which I’ve been playing with a bit, is a host for insanely powerful, free, and unrestricted LLMs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists show how ‘doing your own research’ leads to believing conspiracies — This effect arises because of the quality of information churned out by Google’s search engine⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Excellent point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kyutai is a French AI research lab with a $330 million budget that will make everything open source⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  $330m is not nothing. But, with a funding split between a telecom CEO, and a shipping & logistics CEO - person has to wonder what sort of direction & tuning the team might be encouraged to explore. How will they stack up against existing & proven open source non-profits with impressive releases like EleutherAI?

  These open source projects are neat, in that they give the average person the opportunity to peek under the hood of an LLM that they’d never be able to run on consumer level hardware. There are some interesting things to find, especially in the dataset snapshots that Eleuther made available.

  In general, kind of cool to see France being on the cutting edge of these things. And I think it’s worth saluting any project that moves to decentralizes power from states and megacorps, who seal wonderful, powerful things in black boxes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blueberry milkshakes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make above.

  In this case specifically, the outcome isn’t unclear. Let’s call the crab’s pain one unit of pain, and that unit can directly alleviate 20 units of pain across a handful of other beings. The utilitarian ought to prefer avoiding 19 units of net pain, than having 19 units of net pain occur.

  I read your initial post to be some sort of utilitarian moral argument, roughly, that less pain is better. Or something like that. That argument, in this case in particular, leads in the opposite direction than I think you want.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blueberry milkshakes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  For the sake of argument, let’s take for granted your statement, that ‘suffering should be reduced as much as possible’.

  If the discomfort of a single crab can prevent worse discomfort/suffering/death of many other beings, and results in reduced net pain, then the utilitarian line of reasoning seems to be that we might actually be morally obligated to take blood from crabs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blueberry milkshakes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Disclosure - Before you had replied, I edited out the word ‘psychotic’ above, felt it was unfair.

  Cheers, thanks for the thoughtful and reasonable reply. I agree with most of what you say. & it circles something I think about a lot but haven’t made much sense of (if there even is sense to make if it), which is, the role of bad feelings in moral decision making.

  I think though, the compassion line should be drawn somewhere, sometimes, with moral reason as a guide. To dip into the quagmire of philosophical thought experiments, you know, what if certain humans produced this special clotting factor, and we had to bleed them to get it, and it came with a risk of their mortality? I think reasonable people could agree, that would be an entirely different question to grapple with. So, you know, I would say it does matter, it’s not a black & white thing, where either everything is worthy of compassion or nothing is. The circumstance can, should, dictate the moral approach. Eating meat, fighting in wars, there might be a right or wrong that’s worth determining there. And knowing that, the moral and the practical are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

  And totally, I expect people to have differences when it comes to compassion. Suppose I’m just surprised at the outpouring of love for the gross horseshoe crab, in spite of its real usefulness for global human health. Or at least my understanding of it, which I admit, is not very deep.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blueberry milkshakes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve read good moral arguments for a veganism. I think it’s the right thing to do when it comes to diet. For what it’s worth, this isn’t really a discussion about diet.

  It isn’t a decision between a lentil burger and a beef burger, this is an animal resource that can assist in saving human lives. There are other clotting factors used in medicine, and that’s great, let’s use and develop those. But suppose something more lethal and dangerous than COVID comes along, and vaccines need to be produced quickly and globally. I think it would be foolish to wince if we needed to take crab blood to roll out a program that would save human lives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blueberry milkshakes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think I disagree with you.

  What I mean when I say moral is, I don’t see why it’s wrong if a bunch of invertebrates are subjugated, in pain, or die in order to provide something that improves the lives of humans. It’s not sad, it’s a good thing. “Oh but the crabs get stressed out, and 30% might die”, yeah, who cares, they’re crabs.

  Sure, I’m a human, and I have a particular perspective on these things. But, we are special. Anyone who considers a trolley problem with a crab on one track, and a human on the other and honestly says, “hey it doesn’t matter humans aren’t special”, is psychotic and needs help. In a purely academic, cosmic, arrangement of particles sense, OK, nothing is special. But in that condition, the suffering of animals isn’t event a question worth considering.

  The fact that so many accounts in this thread are going out of their way to give weight to the well-being of invertebrates, in a conversation about human well-being, is baffling.

  Should we be using existing clotting factors in medical settings that don’t rely on the blood of an endangered species? Probably, but crab discomfort is at the very bottom of the list of reasons why.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blueberry milkshakes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Ripple effects, sure, I’m with you there, sustainability considerations, which I haven’t seen anyone mentioning ITT.

  I completely disagree with you about the status of humanity. Is it really your view that the well-being of a crab has equivalent moral status to your own well-being?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blueberry milkshakes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the link and info.

  Not a reply directly to you, but to contrast the dominant view in the thread - what would it matter if even 100% of the crabs died? Sustainability considerations aside - a crab died for my delicious salad, who cares if they die for a life saving vaccine? Who cares if it’s painful and disorienting for the crab, it’s a crab. As humans, why should we prioritize crab life and well-being over our own?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We have had guns for 200 years but mass shootings only became common in the last 30. So what changed?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  One variable that I think doesn’t get looked at seriously is class size and school funding. Ask any North American teacher, and you’ll get a grim assessment on the trajectory of schooling since the 90’s. When teachers have more students than they can handle, it’s no surprise that things getting out of hand.

  I’d argue that part of the solution is more teachers per student. This enables better relationships between faculty and students, and better opportunities for mentorship. Build more schools, hire more teachers, pay them well, make school a place where teachers want to be, and where kids can thrive.

  But reforming the existing system is a hot potato that neither the left nor right wants to hold, so, here we are. The system itself is degraded to the point that it doesn’t have the resources to self-correct. We need vision, wisdom, funding, and leadership, to steer things in a new direction. I think that would go a long way in preventing a misguided kid from fermenting the idea that murdering people, or their own classmates, is an answer to their problems.

  I don’t mean to paint school shootings as simply a rebellion against a malfunctioning system, but, we really need to look at the system and make sure it’s serving the students that have no choice but to be there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT In Trouble: OpenAI may go bankrupt by 2024, AI bot costs company $700,000 every day⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know anything about anything, but part of me suspects that lots of good funding is still out there, it’s just being used more quietly and more scrupulously, & not being thrown at the first microdosing tech wanker with a great elevator pitch on how they’re going to make “the Tesla of dental floss”.