Womble
@Womble@lemmy.world
- Comment on Peter Thiel Just Accidentally Made a Chilling Admission. Five Decades Ago, One Man Saw It Coming. 4 weeks ago:
Dont be a dick, people arent simping for Thiel just because they think the article you posted is over interpreting a single pause.
- Comment on UK Government responded to the "Repeal the Online Safety Act" Petition. 4 weeks ago:
Starmer is no where near Blair 2.0, Blair at least had charisma, a political plan and, at least before Iraq, genuinly had mass grass roots support. Starmer has none of them, he’s an apolitical middle maneger who has been pushed to the top of the party by a right wing clique in labour as a way to purge the left.
- Comment on introducing copyparty, the FOSS file server 4 weeks ago:
Yup, I tried to run the docker image with the suggested docker command and it errored out for lack of a config file (though it did offer a fix in the logs for mounting the current directory as read/write)
- Comment on UK police hold pro-Palestine protester, 80, for almost 27 hours and search house 4 weeks ago:
You are right, but also I doubt she was expecting her protesting to directly change anyone in power’s mind. The tactic is obviously to keep doing this with people who are very media friendly (little old grannies and the like) so stories keep getting into the papers of “lovely person arrested for protesting!” which does put pressure on the government.
- Comment on Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC 4 weeks ago:
Sure it wouldnt be rational to care about DRM being broken a small amount allowing limited amount copy copyright material to be copied.
What do you think their response would be?
- Comment on Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC 4 weeks ago:
No way they’d do that though, because then they’d have the mouse and the other members of the content mafia breathing down their necks.
- Comment on Bubble Trouble 5 weeks ago:
It depends, if they’re use a transformer or diffusion based archetecture I think it would be fair to include it in the same “AI wave” thats been breaking since the release of chat gpt publicly.
- Comment on Israel levelling thousands of Gaza civilian buildings in controlled demolitions - BBC News 5 weeks ago:
Verified footage shows large explosions unleashing plumes of dust and debris, as Israeli forces carry out controlled demolitions on tower blocks, schools and other infrastructure.
Multiple legal experts told BBC Verify that Israel may have committed war crimes under the Geneva Convention, which largely prohibits the destruction of infrastructure by an occupying power.
Gosh, such a mouthpiece for Israel
- Comment on UK to lower voting age to 16 5 weeks ago:
Given that in the 2024 election the two most left wing groups (lab+lib+green voting) were 18-24 women followed by 18-24 men, probably not.
- Comment on Chinese Scientists Create Cyborg Bees That Can Be Controlled Like Drones for Undercover Military Missions 1 month ago:
Why would you bother mind controlling bees in order to make them do the thing they would be doing anyway?
- Comment on Welcome to the Labour police state 1 month ago:
They are known to be bankrolled by James “Fergie” Chalmbers, American millionair heir, “communist” who by his own words “chants death to America every day” and is a supporter of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and has been on Russia state sponsored visits to the regions annexed byt Russia writing glowing praises of them.
It seems likely that at least Palestein action are useful idiots for the Russian state. Which isnt to say that banning them as a terrorsit group isnt massive overreach and completely undemocratic.
- Comment on Large Language Model Performance Doubles Every 7 Months 1 month ago:
If you are just talking transitor density I believe it still is, but even if not, my point was that it had exponential growth spanning over many decades.
- Comment on Large Language Model Performance Doubles Every 7 Months 1 month ago:
That said, exponentials don’t exist in the real world, we’re just seeing the middle of a sigmoid curve, which will soon yield diminishing returns.
Yes, but the tricky thing is we have no idea when the seemingly exponential growth will flip over into the plateuing phase. We could be there already or it could be another 30 years.
For comparison Moores law is almost certainly a sigmoid too, but weve been seeing exponential growth for 50 years now.
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 1 month ago:
From historical data, you can calculate the maximum lull where neither are providing enough.
The difficulty there is that there are a lot of places where you frequently get multiple weeks of both solar and wind at <10% capacity (google for dunkelflaute) that would need an implausible amount of storage to cover.
The OP article is already talking about 5x overbuilding solar with 17h of storage to get to 97% in the most favourable conditions possible. I dont see how you can get to an acceptably stable grif in most places without dispatchable power.
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 1 month ago:
97% is great (though that is just for vegas) but it is still a long way from enough. Its a truism of availability that each 9 of uptime is more difficult to get to than the last, i.e. 99.9% is significantly more difficult/expensive than 99%
Then get it from the sources that already exist.
The problem here is that you cant simultaneously say “Solar is so much better than everything else we should just build it” and “we’ll just use other sources to cover the gaps”. Either you calculate the costs needed to get solar up to very high availability or you advocate for mixed generation.
None of which is to say that solar shouldnt be deployed at scale, it should. We should be aware of its limitations howver and not fall prey to hype.
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 1 month ago:
97% sounds impressive, but thats equivalent to almost an hour of blackout every day. Developed societies demand +99.99% availability from their grids.
- Comment on UK | Glastonbury’s Kneecap censorship has backfired 1 month ago:
Compared to
It’s easy when you’re an obscure band to bellow “kill your local MP” or bray “up Hamas, up Hezbollah”.
Yeah, pretty much. Very few people would argue against stopping killing Gazan civilians (even if they are not willing to back the measures that would result in that, like applying real presure to Israel), that makes it a fairly apolictial thing to say. Advocating killing MPs or supporting Iranian proxies is certainly a lot more contencious.
- Comment on This bill opens the door to scandal, abuse and injustice, disabled activists say after assisted dying bill vote (UK) 1 month ago:
And yet, the overwhelming majority of people in the UK, including disabled people, want this change in the law. So much so that literally every single constituency in the UK has a majority in favour of it, most with 2/3s majorities or more.
The people arguing against it are pretty much all religious groups, often with funding from the USA, who are being coy about their motives. They often dont anounce that the same groups protesting this are the same groups who protest abortion for example
And yet still you still people like the tanky replying on this page trying to make out that this is kier starmer (who did nothing to promote this bill other than vote in its favour) personally organising a genocide of disabled people for the profit of American pharma companies.
- Comment on Anthropic tested Claude's(LLM, AI Chatbot) ability to manage a physical “storefront” to mixed results, as the AI struggled with pricing strategy and inventory management 1 month ago:
I doubt anyone expected it to work completely, but it is interesting to see to what extent it worked and how it failed (halucinations and sycophancy)
- Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not 1 month ago:
Except it isnt, because the judge dismissed that part of the suit, saying that people have complete right to digitise and train on works they have a legitimate copy have. So those damages are for making the unauthorised copy, per book.
And it is not STEALING as you put it, it is making an unauthorised copy, no one loses anything from a copy being made, if I steal your phone you no longer have that phone. I do find it sad how many people have drunk the capitalist IP maximalist stance and have somehow convinced themselves that advocating for Disney and the publishing cartel being allowed to dictate how people use works they have is somehow sticking up for the little guy
- Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not 1 month ago:
You think that 150,000 dollars, or roughly 180 weeks of full time pretax wages at 15$ an hour, is a reasonable fine for making a copy of one book which doe no material harm to the copyright holder?
- Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not 1 month ago:
The problem isnt anthropic get to use that defense, its that others dont. The fact the the world is in a place where people can be fined 5+ years of a western European average salary for making a copy of one (1) book that does not materially effect the copyright holder in any way is insane and it is good to point that out no matter who does it.
- Comment on Judge backs AI firm over use of copyrighted books 1 month ago:
Civil cases of copyright infringment are not theft, no matter what the MPIA have trained you to believe.
- Comment on DeepSeek accused of powering China’s military and mining US user data 2 months ago:
Gosh, its a good thing openAI and google dont thing for theUS government isnt it?
- Comment on Lime bikes dumped in canals and rivers 'posing pollution risk' 2 months ago:
There absolutely is, people break the disabling mechanism. I’ve had two go past me today with the obvious clack-clack-clack-clack of it.
- Comment on Some of your AI prompts could cause 50 times more CO2 emissions than others 2 months ago:
FWIW, a short query to a typical sized LLM takes about 1Wh of energy, there lots of variance on how big the model you are using and how long the input and outputs are but thats the correct order of magnitude. 1Wh is the amount of energy consumed by a 1kW electric kettle in 3.6 seconds or a 2kW hairdryer in 1.8 seconds.
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 2 months ago:
HK has literally never been independent, it went from being a Qing fishing village to a British concession, to a British overseas territory and then to a PRC special autonomous region.
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 2 months ago:
No, if another 100k Australians had come out and then kept protesting day in day out for months they would have got the aus government to back down and not support the war.
- Comment on Is Google about to destroy the web? 2 months ago:
www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
I’m not a huge fan of Ed Zitron generally, he leans towards histrionic too much for my tastes, but he makes a compelling case here.
- Comment on VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website. 2 months ago:
Given that I torrent without a VPN and it had nothing on there, and it also got my location wrong by over 500km, I dont think I’m too worried.
