scratchee
@scratchee@feddit.uk
- Comment on Apple reveals M3 Ultra, taking Apple silicon to a new extreme 3 days ago:
Agreed, I’d be entirely fine with legal enforcement of the ISO definitions in advertising, no need to air historical dirty laundry outside the profession
- Comment on Eutelsat almost triples its value on prospect of Ukraine replacing Starlink with OneWeb 3 days ago:
Yeah, it’ll definitely be worse using a less complete constellation, but at least you can probably trust them to not fuck around and ruin military operations out of malicious political flailing, or whatever it is that Musk is doing constantly, so that’ll be a nice change of pace.
- Comment on Apple reveals M3 Ultra, taking Apple silicon to a new extreme 3 days ago:
Agreed, but do you pick the de-facto standard of the entire industry (minus storage advertising) or the de joure standard of an outside body that has made a very slight headway into a very resistant industry.
The reality is that people will be confused no matter what you do, but at least less people will be confused if you ignore the mibibyte, because less people have even heard of it
- Comment on GARBAGEOLOGY 1 week ago:
I once had to stay in Birmingham after a cancelled train. On leaving the station I was accosted by a drunk demanding cigarettes, who started swearing at me after I admitted I didn’t smoke. That’s my only experience of Birmingham, I have to assume it’s typical.
- Comment on Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code 2 weeks ago:
Technically, the kernel doesn’t compile with pure standard C, they require strict aliasing to be disabled, so that alone doesn’t seem particularly crucial.
Not saying that standards aren’t useful, but they’re not some dividing line separating the true languages from the joke languages, they’re just a useful document that earns a language a few “good language” points, but those points can be earned other ways too.
For example, rust has pretty good versioning, so even if the devs did totall wreck the language in the next version, it’d maintain compatibility with older code just fine, which sort of invalidates your point, unless you’re worried that the devs turn malicious
- Comment on France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes 2 weeks ago:
Or a “star in a bottle”
- Comment on If any AI became 'misaligned' then the system would hide it just long enough to cause harm — controlling it is a fallacy 3 weeks ago:
Inhuman behaviour is a problem that scales with intelligence.
Evil cat? Lock it in a room whenever it does evil things.
Evil human? Call the police
Evil billionaire? Protest/push for law changes whenever his company does evil shit, hope it’s enough to blunt the worst of his behaviour.
Evil superhuman ai? Guess I’ll die.
- Comment on If any AI became 'misaligned' then the system would hide it just long enough to cause harm — controlling it is a fallacy 3 weeks ago:
A: That’s true until it isn’t. Preparing for/predicting things before they happen is our best hope for not sticking our collective heads into a guillotine any time soon.
B: corporations are only very weak analogues of superhuman intelligence, they’re different from us in “wisdom of crowds” sense (and ofc in the “too many cooks” sense).
But they’re basically just distilled from human intelligence and match our own style of intelligence somewhat closely as a consequence. Also, we’re pretty good at the alignment problem for corporations, they do largely what the combination of their investors, government, society, and workers want because they’re inner workings are fed through human brains at every stage and those humans even if incentivised with money will alter the behaviour of the corporation towards human preferences.
The fact even corporations that have thousands of intelligent human filters (most of whom are presumably in the middle of the human bell curve) monitoring every single mental process still manage to occasionally do terrible things is not a particularly compelling reason to think that a mind that has barely any human understanding or oversight into it’s internal function will be very safe to keep around.
- Comment on Tesla pulls out all the stops as Cybertruck sales grind to a halt 4 weeks ago:
Not OP, but regardless of it being ugly, it is novel and kind of goofy look, which has some appeal. Like buying a car designed by a child it’s sort of “fun”.
Otoh, I don’t have the cash to throw away on “fun”, and regardless, funding a nazi definitely ruins the fun, so even if I won the lottery, I’d have to find my fun elsewhere I suppose.
- Comment on Bloodletting recommended for Jersey residents after PFAS contamination 1 month ago:
I imagine they can’t because their blood is too ironic
- Comment on Vegan drink Oatly can’t call itself ‘milk’, judges rule 2 months ago:
Honestly prefer it to milk in tea. I still use milk at home since I can’t be arsed to have fancy milk for porridge and tea only but at the office I’ll go for the oat milk by preference.
- Comment on MPs vote in favour of historic bill to allow assisted dying after emotional debate 3 months ago:
The restrictions are pretty reasonable. The obvious “risk” of abuse is that this is a slippery slope and both the rules get relaxed and the safeguards lose their funding and attention over time, but the chance of that happening increases over time, there’s no way in hell they’ll be making a dent in the benefits bill for the next few years.
So I don’t think your suggested link between this and the current governments goal of reducing benefits is the truth, or even particularly credible.
Maybe there will be problems in 20 years, it’s certainly a reasonable fear and I don’t blame anyone who argued against it to avoid that risk, but I can’t seriously believe that anyone thinks the government is going to use this to start killing off benefit claimants in job lots.
Tldr: your ”truth” is a pretty dumb take
- Comment on Let me at 'em!! 5 months ago:
How big was that knife originally?!
- Comment on Campaigners tie baby slings to statues in call for better UK paternity leave 5 months ago:
We’ve already lucked into a solution to the population boom, the numbers will level off around 19 billion. Given how intractable population control is, we’re very lucky we’ve found this without some dystopian shitshow.
In the developed world we are approaching the opposite problem, we’re currently dependant on immigration to maintain our societies, but as the rest of the world stops growing we’ll have more trouble getting that immigration and won’t have the local young population to care for our elderly.
Given that we should be trying to figure out how to encourage a sustainable population whilst we still have time to do so. If we can choose between 1.9->2.2 children per couple as needed then we’ll be in a healthy position to slowly reduce the population to a comfortable level.
Right now our natural population decline in the developed world is too fast, probably because our society has made being a parent quite an individual burden. Of course, totally moving the costs to a societal model would be a disaster, but presumably there’s a middle ground where people are comfortable keeping the society going at a healthy rate.
- Comment on Protection zones around abortion clinics in place by October 5 months ago:
That’s exactly the answer given to you above - the line is murky and grey, there is no clear point that everyone agrees is the right point.
In such a circumstance, the right answer is open to interpretation, and the right solution for a society is to accept that the best person to make that decision is the person involved.
If you want my answer, it’s when brain cells develop enough to start looking like a functioning brain (somewhere around 16-20 weeks). Before that it’s just a brain dead mass of cells regardless of how it looks.
Clearly you have a different moment, and that’s fine, but you don’t get to ignore that the issue is open to interpretation. Otoh, I admit that both sides are guilty of trying to railroad a “simple” interpretation as the only right answer, it’s always tempting to force a simple answer and declare the problem solved, it’s harder to let people decide for themselves what the right answer is, but that’s the right thing to do when we as a society cannot reach a consensus, and we certainly don’t seem to have a consensus on this one.
- Comment on UK's first 'teacherless' AI classroom set to open in London 5 months ago:
Yeah, it sounds like a normal lesson plan with ai fairy dust sprinkled on top as a marketing gimmick.
- Comment on Bluetooth 6.0 adds centimeter-level accuracy for device tracking — upgraded version also improves device pairing 5 months ago:
I’m no audiophile either, I don’t care what profile it’s in in normal mode, but everything is instantly a disaster in headset mode.
I know AirPods have some non standard support to escape the Bluetooth mess on apple hardware.
I want a headset that works on windows, my phone, and mac, which means I’m stuck with standard support, which basically means I’m stuffed.
- Comment on Bluetooth 6.0 adds centimeter-level accuracy for device tracking — upgraded version also improves device pairing 5 months ago:
Sorry for linking to the alien, but see this discussion: reddit.com/…/bluetooth_headset_goes_to_low_audio_…
As I understand it, standard Bluetooth cannot support quality audio and microphone.
That said, lots of phones and headsets secretly support non standard profiles if you use the right hardware together, but at that point you can’t know if you’re going to get quality with your setup unless someone’s tested it thoroughly and half the time reviewers are either deaf or lying
- Comment on Bluetooth 6.0 adds centimeter-level accuracy for device tracking — upgraded version also improves device pairing 5 months ago:
I just want a headset that doesn’t descend into hissing at me in mono over a crackly 1940s phoneline whenever I dare to use the microphone.
- Comment on Can you trust Valve? Honest criticism of Steam. 6 months ago:
I trust Valve to be lazy and swim in their sea of profits rather than go searching for more.
They have thus far avoided serious levels of enshittification because they don’t seem motivated in maximising immediate profits and killing their golden goose.
The day they get replaced by a competitive non-monopoly is the day it becomes a race for the bottom, who can invent the most predatory way to drain profits from users? Nobody else will be able to compete, so they’ll all be copying each other on their way down.
Streaming services all over again.
Not all monopolies are bad.
- Comment on No one’s ready for this: Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke. 6 months ago:
I disagree, they are not talking about the online low trust sources that will indeed undergo massive changes, they’re talking about organisations with chains of trust, and they make a compelling case that they won’t be affected as much.
Not that you’re wrong either, but your points don’t really apply to their scenario. People who built their career in photography will have t more to lose, and more opportunity to be discovered, so they really don’t want to play silly games when a single proven fake would end their career for good. It’ll happen no doubt, but it’ll be rare and big news, a great embarrassment for everyone involved.
Online discourse, random photos from events, anything without that chain of trust (or where the “chain of trust” is built by people who don’t actually care), that’s where this is a game changer.
- Comment on Today's featured article on Wikipedia: Outer Wilds 6 months ago:
On the one hand, if you don’t enjoy the game that’s fine. It’s a masterpiece, but that doesn’t magically mean that everyone will enjoy it.
That said, if you want to enjoy it more, focus on one thing per loop, everything is designed to be completable in a single loop, (or maybe a few for the more complicated puzzles if you get stuck). And if something is frustrating, do something else.
Things really go wrong if you keep smashing your head against a brick wall or if you keep jumping around and never manage to finish anything.
We’re trained to think of death as a major failure by other games, it’s not in this one, it’s just jumping back home, repairing the ship, and starting from a central location and a known state.
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
Soon: “Open source software or pirated copies of photoshop only”
- Comment on Tesla Steers Onto Train Tracks It Apparently Mistook for a Road, Police Warn 7 months ago:
Reasoning is obviously useful, not convinced it’s required to be a good driver. In fact most driving decisions must be done rapidly, I doubt humans can be described as “reasoning” when we’re just reacting to events. Decisions that take long enough could be handed to a human (“should we rush for the ferry, or divert for the bridge?”). It’s only the middling bit between where we will maintain this big advantage (“that truck ahead is bouncing around, I don’t like how the load is secured so I’m going to back off”). that’s a big advantage, but how much of our time is spent with our minds fully focused and engaged anyway? Once we’re on autopilot, is there much reasoning going on?
Not that I think this will be quick, I expect at least another couple of decades before self driving cars can even start to compete with us outside of specific curated situations. And once they do they’ll continue to fuck up royally whenever the situation is weird and outside their training, causing big news stories. The key question will be whether they can compete with humans on average by outperforming us in quick responses and in consistently not getting distracted/tired/drunk.
- Comment on Tesla Steers Onto Train Tracks It Apparently Mistook for a Road, Police Warn 7 months ago:
They don’t have to be any good, they just have to be significantly better than humans. Right now they’re… probably about average, there’s plenty of drunk or stupid humans bringing the average down.
It’s true that isn’t good enough, unlike humans, self driving cars are will be judged together, so people will focus on their dumbest antics, but once their average is significantly better than human average, that will start to overrule the individual examples.
- Comment on Let's address the significant issue confronting the nation today.. Which Mr/Mrs Men are you? 8 months ago:
I got “little miss naughty”. I am a man in my mid 30s, I never do pranks, I don’t go out of my way to cause trouble.
How can it see parts of my soul that I thought were lost?
- Comment on Rover 8 months ago:
I always liked the extended version: extended version with distant future where we see it again
- Comment on natural sciences be like 10 months ago:
Hay-fever and melanomas: no, the beauty is not for you
- Comment on AMD stops certifying monitors, TVs under 144 Hz for FreeSync 11 months ago:
If anything 60hz monitors benefit far more. Variable refreshes becomes a nonissue if your refresh rate is high enough that just waiting for the next frame isn’t too long. The case that benefits the most is when a game is running just below 60 fps on a 60hz screen and missing frames regularly, causing lots of stutter where it has to wait for 16ms. It’s a much smaller issue at 144hz since a delay of 7ms is relatively subtle.
- Comment on People are worried that AI will take everyone’s jobs. We’ve been here before. 1 year ago:
Tldr: in this “revolution” we get to play the part of the horses from the Industrial Revolution.
The last revolution made more and better jobs for horses at the start. Then it made less and zero jobs for horses. This one could be the same for humans.
