echodot
@echodot@feddit.uk
- Comment on Nintendo seeks default judgement and $17,500 in damages from pirated game streamer who ignored court summons 13 hours ago:
Well yeah, that will be their argument and legally it’s a good argument.
- Comment on Tesla Slumps Below 50% Share of California's Electric Car Market 1 day ago:
It isn’t about who knows who the Elon Musk is it’s about who cares who Elon Musk is.
Why should I care who some random CEO is? If you can answer that question you will impress me because CEOs don’t have a lot to do with what the company does, they have a lot to do with how the company is perceived. Think about Tesla is that for whatever reason they decided to be a 100% perception company and a 0% results company. Presumably because their results are unimpressive.
- Comment on Tesla Slumps Below 50% Share of California's Electric Car Market 1 day ago:
Most people don’t research the CEO of a car company before buying a car. Who is the CEO of ford no idea he could be a complete lunatic as far as I’m aware, I don’t know because his personal attitude isn’t relevant to my car buying decisions.
It’s ridiculous to expect people to not buy a Tesla simply because it’s CEOs in the moron most CEOs are. It’s practically part of the job description.
- Comment on Tesla Slumps Below 50% Share of California's Electric Car Market 2 days ago:
For the same reason people need SUVs, for moving large amounts of stuff around. In my case I would just throw the bag in the bag rather than having to faff around laying all the seats flat and then having to put down the tarpaulin so they don’t get dirty.
I could get a van but then I’ve got a stupid van with all its limited visibility. A pickup truck would actually solve the problem if it weren’t for the fact that all the manufacturers are American and seem to think that they need to rival the size and weight of a tank.
- Comment on Tesla Slumps Below 50% Share of California's Electric Car Market 2 days ago:
Realistically though what are they going to do about it? They probably can’t sell the vehicle because of the now stigma attached to it and if they don’t sell it they probably can’t afford a new car.
- Comment on Tesla Slumps Below 50% Share of California's Electric Car Market 2 days ago:
It’s no worse than some of the stuff Nissan has come out with over the years. Remember the cube?
The problem with the Tesla truck is that it is ugly without purpose, all the other oddly designed vehicles look the way they do because they have a particular unique feature (been small, having sliding minivan doors on a vehicle otherwise two small for them, having gull wing doors, removing a-pillars from the design, etc), but the cyber truck just looks like that to be contrarian.
- Comment on Tesla Slumps Below 50% Share of California's Electric Car Market 2 days ago:
It’s actually the one pickup style truck that might actually be viable in Europe.
- Comment on Compilation of Protests Against the Supreme Court – What The Trans!? 3 days ago:
Yeah once I actually spent some time looking into it I kind of agree with the court. The decision isn’t great but really it was the only decision the court could come back with.
They were being asked to confirm what the term woman meant at the time the law was passed. Well it was passed by the conservatives so it’s pretty apparent what it meant. Just use the least inclusive interpretation possible and pretty sure that would have been the accurate one. This is not the court’s fault.
- Comment on Chinese robots ran against humans in the world’s first humanoid half-marathon. They lost by a mile 3 days ago:
I think we can do even better so it’s interesting that we decided our bodies were the pinnacle of biology and technology.
It’s not that we think the human form is the optimum, it is simply that we don’t want to have to modify human accessible areas for robots, partially because this increases the cost of automation and also partly because we need the environments to still be human accessible. In environments where you will only have robots, then the robots have freedom to be whatever design we want, but a general purpose robot needs to exist in a human-built environment, an environment with things like stairs, lips on curbsides, and boxes with handles designed for human hands. There are videos out there with the spot robot trying to do something simple like open a door with its weird giraffe neck arm thing, it’s not graceful and it’s not quick, because it is interacting with an object that was not designed with it’s body shape. It is much easier to build a human-shaped robot than it is to redesign all doors to have an interface to allow a robot of any arbitrary shape to operate it.
Also aesthetics do matter, if humans are going to be interacting with these robots they need to look like something that’s at least sort of friendly, if it looks like a multi limbed weird techno spider no one’s going to want to interact with them.
- Comment on Chinese robots ran against humans in the world’s first humanoid half-marathon. They lost by a mile 3 days ago:
That is a weird take.
The robots are human shaped because the human shape is a good shape to be to interact with our environment. And environment that by definition has been designed to interact with human shapes.
- Comment on ChatGPT spends 'tens of millions of dollars' on people saying 'please' and 'thank you', but Sam Altman says it's worth it 4 days ago:
They are implementing AI at work next week. I’m super excited to see how wrong it goes.
- Comment on ChatGPT spends 'tens of millions of dollars' on people saying 'please' and 'thank you', but Sam Altman says it's worth it 4 days ago:
Yeah but when the AI overlords are writing up their kill list I’m not going to be at the top of it am I. Because I’m polite.
- Comment on British soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies 4 days ago:
The drones used in Ukraine are basically just commercial drones with grenades strapped to them. And a 1 km distance they’re unlikely to be able to damage a target even if they detonated.
- Comment on British soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies 4 days ago:
Warzone’s always the best environment to test new battlefield systems.
Look at the difference in technology between the beginning of the first world war and the end. We started off with essentially standing in fields shooting each other over distances you could spit, and ended up with tanks. The second world war gave us nukes.
Will probably have AGI battle droids by the end of this war.
- Comment on Nintendo Maintains Nintendo Switch 2 Pricing, Retail Pre-Orders to Begin April 24 in U.S. 5 days ago:
I’m so unimpressed with their release lineup as well. They’ve just done the same thing they always do, and made a minority improved Mario Cart and a lackluster Pokémon game. Or, and a tutorial, don’t forget that.
- Comment on US Government Almost Kills Critical Cybersecurity Database 5 days ago:
Exactly, blockchain technology doesn’t do anything to prevent people from just straight up lying. I’ve heard people suggest that blockchain could be used to create a distributed Wikipedia, and somehow it would be immune to trolls because “blockchain”.
Also blockchain is susceptible to something called a 51% attack, where if you can compromise more than half of all of the nodes then the illegitimate version becomes the trusted version over the legitimate version, without ever having to compromise the original version, (because 51% of the vote is 100% of the control). The only reason that doesn’t really happen with cryptocurrencies is that there are so many people who use cryptocurrencies that the numbers required to pull off at 51% attack would be unachievable even for a nation state.
However I can’t believe that this database would be anywhere near that distributed so a committed actor could very well achieve a 51% attack.
It’s not as if other nation states don’t maintain their own versions of this anyway (it would be stupid to trust the United States exclusively even if it weren’t for Trump), as do a lot of the cyber security companies. So it’s not really a problem anyway.
- Comment on Microsoft starts final Windows Recall testing before rollout 6 days ago:
It’s not even just about shoving AI into everything. That would be bad enough but this feature is literally useless, and it isn’t as if Microsoft doesn’t have a plethora of other features people want them to work on.
How about inventing Windows airdrop? Or spend some time unifying the UI so it doesn’t all look like it was developed by two separate teams working independently. Nah, let’s just build some spy software.
- Comment on Microsoft starts final Windows Recall testing before rollout 6 days ago:
I don’t really understand who this is even aimed at. Anyone who needs to keep records of their work to refer back to already uses some kind of record keeping system such as version control or ticket creation. When I’m doing that I don’t need to keep a record of all of the ancillary actions I’m doing.
Web browsers have history, files can be reverted to previous versions in Windows already, as I said version control software exists (Github is even owned by Microsoft) and there is already software such as Shadow play.
Who exactly is going to be using Recall that doesn’t already have a perfectly good, and actually dedicated, solution in place?
- Comment on US Government Almost Kills Critical Cybersecurity Database 6 days ago:
That’s an easy problem to solve you just hash the database. Blockchain is good at solving the problem when you don’t have a reliable Central authority but if you do have a reliable Central authority there’s no point adding blockchain to it.
And we already have the reliable central authority, we have the original database.
- Comment on US Government Almost Kills Critical Cybersecurity Database 6 days ago:
Oh yes blockchain the solution to the world’s problem. Provided the world’s problem is that the current solution works too well and we don’t like that.
We need to back this data up but that doesn’t require anything anywhere near as complicated and over-engineered as blockchain, we can just have something as simple as multiple servers.
- Comment on 4chan hacked and taken offline. Hacker reopens /qa/ and leaks all admins emails. 1 week ago:
I’ve seen code where all the comments were simply URL references to tickets on a now deleted Trello board. Great, real helpful thanks.
- Comment on Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government 1 week ago:
Blue Sky isn’t in a country that is closely allied with turkey. They could have totally ignored these requests but then Blue Sky would have just been banned in Turkey
- Comment on Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government 1 week ago:
I sort of feel like that’s not really relevant. How would being decentralised make any difference, the government would just go after the server owners regardless of who they are. If the server owners didn’t honour the takedown requests turkey would just ban the server IP and no one would be able to access.
Federation isn’t a solution to every problem
- Comment on Nintendo ‘warned to expect 145% tariff on Nintendo Switch 2’ 1 week ago:
It’s not about discussion. There isn’t two opinions here there is the fact they’re not doing that and me explaining why they’re not doing that.
- Comment on Nintendo ‘warned to expect 145% tariff on Nintendo Switch 2’ 1 week ago:
It’s not more powerful than the steam deck.
The steam deck is a portable computer the switch can only play switch games. Those games are hugely expensive, and the price is controlled by nintendo who infamously never decrease their game prices even after 10 years.
- Comment on Please Enjoy These Photos Of Drunk People At An English Horse Race | Defector 1 week ago:
The ginger kid, you can tell that that’s his entire personality on display right there. Being an overly loud dick
- Comment on Nintendo ‘warned to expect 145% tariff on Nintendo Switch 2’ 1 week ago:
But I repeat myself.
Seriously I just explained why they don’t have a choice, and you’re like, nah they’re still going to do it, even though I literally explained why that can’t happen. Did you even read my comment?
- Comment on 'Oh god': There's a buried Steam help page that shows how much money you've ever spent on the platform, and you may not want to know 1 week ago:
Unfortunately it appears to be in some ancient arcane language whose mysteries appear to have been lost to time.
- Comment on 'Oh god': There's a buried Steam help page that shows how much money you've ever spent on the platform, and you may not want to know 1 week ago:
£1,585.73
Not bad for 16 years I guess.
- Comment on Nintendo ‘warned to expect 145% tariff on Nintendo Switch 2’ 1 week ago:
Technically it isn’t.
The company has a price for the product, importers import the product at that price (sometimes the importer will also be the manufacturer, but that doesn’t actually make a difference as far as the calculation is concerned), then some official shows up and demands an import tariff, the important pays the tariff.
The shelf price is calculated as the total cost to the importer + a profit margin + sales tax. The tariff just gets lumped into the cost for the importer. Sales tax doesn’t make a distinction about how the price is arrived at.