scratchee
@scratchee@feddit.uk
- Comment on 2 days ago:
Sadly yes
- Comment on Doot doot 3 days ago:
Plus they cleverly evolved ahead of time to be camouflaged against all our plastic pollution, so all their predators keep choking on plastic bags.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
Because no matter how harmful he may have been in life, his death is probably more harmful.
We had enough problems without tit-for-tat assassinations of anyone that anyone else dislikes.
The Luigi assassination didn’t come out so bad since there wasn’t a strong political back and forth (there was some, but he wasn’t really a political/public figure, just an arsehole ceo, and didn’t make a great wedge issue), this one is much more dangerous, and yeah, probably it would have been better if he’d continued his harmful speeches from a limited platform than become and excuse for so many “justified” attacks on the left.
- Comment on Hello there 5 days ago:
Hey now, we have an unfair disadvantage, all the nutters are lumped in with us and bringing the side down.
- Comment on 'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop' 1 week ago:
Yeah, that’s fair
- Comment on Felt cute, might kill 4 people by radiation overdose later idk 🤪🤪 1 week ago:
The company did many things wrong, it’s an almost idealised example of total failure to take software seriously.
Most importantly they decided they didn’t need to test the software on their new machines because they’d already shipped previous machines running the software, so they “knew it worked”. The previous machines had hardware interlocks that made it impossible for the software to cause a massive dosing errors, the new machine was entirely software controlled.
Also they had exactly 1 “very smart” engineer build the software, who obviously wrote it for a hardware-safe machine. To be fair, I’m sure he was very smart, but safety critical and solo projects are not a great combo.
Also they had no mechanisms to ensure failures would be communicated to their engineer
sfor investigation (failures were reported to them and then dropped into a black hole and forgotten about).Also they didn’t even have any capability to test their machines after failures started popping up, because they knew the code worked perfectly so they didn’t need to waste any time or money on qa capability, massively slowing down their ability to fix things once people started dying
- Comment on 'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop' 1 week ago:
Software patents are pretty close to universally bad. Software moves fast and twenty years is ridiculous, when video codecs have grown to be biggest format and then been overtaken by their successors which in turn are overtaken by their own successors before the first codecs lose their patent then you know something is going wrong. Hardware patents have their place as you say, but software moves very quickly and can innovate just fine without the need for patents.
In theory you could make them viable by shortening the life, to just 5 years or something, but at that point the cost of administering them probably outweighs any benefits (if there would actually be any).
Copyright is another matter, I think we probably need that in some form (though the stupid length of copyright at the moment is even stupider for software)
- Comment on Plex got hacked. 2 weeks ago:
You can follow the law and still screw up the response/announcement pretty badly, and so many do not even manage that much.
So yeah. It’s satisfying when someone acts both professionally and conscientiously in a situation like this.
- Comment on What If There’s No AGI? 2 weeks ago:
Modern llms were a left field development.
Most ai research has serious and obvious scaling problems. It did well at first, but scaling up the training didn’t significantly improve the results. LLMs went from more of the same to a gold rush the day it was revealed that they scaled “well” (relatively speaking). They then went through orders of magnitude improvements very quickly because they could (unlike previous ai training models which wouldn’t have benefited like this).
We’ve had chatbots for decades, but with a the same low capability ceiling that most other old techniques had, they really were a different beast to modern LLMs with their stupidly excessive training regimes.
- Comment on Google quietly removes net-zero carbon goal from website amid rapid power-hungry AI data center buildout — industry-first sustainability pledge moved to background amidst AI energy crisis 2 weeks ago:
Do
n’tbe evil - Comment on What If There’s No AGI? 2 weeks ago:
Same logic would suggest we’d never compete with an eyeball, but we went from 10 minute photos to outperforming most of the eyes abilities in cheap consumer hardware in little more than a century.
And the eye is almost as crucial to survival as the brain.
That said, I do agree it seems likely we’ll borrow from biology on the computer problem. Brains have very impressive parallelism despite how terrible the design of neurons is. If we can grow a brain in the lab that would be very useful indeed. More useful if we could skip the chemical messaging somehow and get signals around at a speed that wasn’t embarrassingly slow, then we’d be way ahead of biology in the hardware performance game and would have a real chance of coming up with something like agi, even without the level of problem solving that billions of years of evolution can provide.
- Comment on What If There’s No AGI? 2 weeks ago:
Oh sure, the current ai craze is just a hype train based on one seemingly effective trick.
We have outperformed biology in a number of areas, and cannot compete in a number of others (yet), so I see it as a bit of a wash atm whether we’re better engineers than nature or worse atm.
The brain looks to be a tricky thing to compete with, but it has some really big limitations we don’t need to deal with (chemical neuron messaging really sucks by most measures).
So yeah, not saying we’ll do agi in the next few decades (and not with just LLMs, for sure), but I’d be surprised if we don’t figure something out once get computers a couple orders of magnitude faster so more than a handful of companies can afford to experiment.
- Comment on Four arrested in terror raids in West Midlands, Derbyshire and Yorkshire 2 weeks ago:
Is this actual terrorism or just supporting a group that blew up a parked military plane again?
- Comment on What If There’s No AGI? 2 weeks ago:
Possible, but seems unlikely.
Evolution managed it, and evolution isn’t as smart as us, it’s just got many many chances to guess right.
If we can’t figure it out we can find a way to get lucky like evolution did, it’ll be expensive and maybe needs us to get a more efficient computing platform (cheap brain-scale computers so we can make millions of attempts quickly).
So yeah. My money is that we’ll figure it out sooner or later.
Whether we’ll be smart enough to make it do what we want and not turn us all into paperclips or something is another question.
- Comment on Little Pea Shooters 3 weeks ago:
I guess the original claim works if you imagine it along a specific axis only (1 dimensionally) in that perspective you either fall quickly then leave slowly or fall slowly and leave quickly, matching up to a change in velocity along that axis.
But yeah, I wouldn’t have explained it that way.
- Comment on Little Pea Shooters 3 weeks ago:
You mentioned “from the perspective of the planet” before, and I think perhaps that’s the key, from the planet’s perspective you fall and rise with equal velocities and equal accelerations, but crucially the planet is moving relative to other things and curves your orbit, so whilst you might might have the same falling and rising speeds relative to it, they’re not in the same direction, so you’re velocity has changed, and from an external perspective you’ve gained velocity from it.
Imagine you start stationary relative to the sun, with Jupiter barrelling towards you (not on a collision course!). From Jupiter’s perspective you fall towards it, and so from the suns perspective you gain velocity opposite jupiters orbit, but you’re not directly head on so it twists your course (let’s say 90 degrees to keep things simple) then as you leave Jupiter it indeed decelerates you relative, but crucially you’re in a different direction now, (from jupiters perspective) you’re pointed right towards the sun, so as you pull away Jupiter is decelerating you in the sun direction (aka accelerates you away from the sun). So you were both accelerated in the anti-Jupiter-orbit direction and then again in the anti-sun direction. Added together those give you a vector which is non-zero, so you’ve gained speed from Jupiter.
- Comment on Over 450 Diablo developers at Blizzard have unionized 3 weeks ago:
Industries are made of people. People require goods and services. Goods and services are purchased with currency. Currency can be extracted from companies more effectively with the use of collective bargaining.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 3 weeks ago:
You’ve just made an enemy for life!
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 3 weeks ago:
Damned software devs, they ruined software!
- Comment on ‘It’s gruesome’: fears of grave-robbing amid rise in sale of human remains 4 weeks ago:
Stealing human remains is illegal, but selling (correctly sourced) human remains is legal.
I think their point is that it’s very hard to prove bones are illegally sourced, meaning they can only prosecute if they’re able to prove the bones were sourced illegally.
If instead it was always illegal to sell human remains (presumably with exceptions for medical/educational purposes), that might make policing them somewhat easier.
An alternate strategy might be to require strict tracking for human remains - you can sell a skull but it must have a certificate listing the full chain back to its original owner (presumably deceased). Failure to retain that chain of custody gets you in legal hot water regardless of how you obtained it. Possibly with a little extra security to prevent duplicate use of legitimate certification. (eg each sale is logged with a trusted 3rd party so you can’t keep claiming that every skull you sell is the same guy until one of them gets inspected, forcing you to find a new legitimate doner to act as cover).
- Comment on YOU HAVE NO POWER HERE 4 weeks ago:
I believe no blind spot, which is the place where all the nerves bundle together and pass through the sensing layer, leaving a hole in our vision (the brain works hard to hide this hole from our perception, but it’s still there and can cause accidents) Also maybe better vision in general?
- Comment on Protester arrested over ‘Plasticine Action’ T-shirt: ‘How ridiculous is this?’ 5 weeks ago:
Technically it’s nothing to do with Palestine itself, you can protest that fine.
The issue is the group Palestine action, which the gov declared a terror group because they wrecked some military planes, and we have a law forbidding the support for declared terror groups.
An overreaching dumb law applied badly by m a way to overreach even further. I admit this is not much better than arresting Palestine protestors directly, it’s a pretty thin cover…
- Comment on What's your thoughts on this? 5 weeks ago:
Fair point, after some googling I see I was significantly overestimating ais impact despite your comment previous comment, my bad.
- Comment on What's your thoughts on this? 5 weeks ago:
It currently is negligible. Depending on how long this hype train lasts it may stop being negligible. Coal is on the decline. Private jets and careless billionaires are growing problems, but not as fast as ai. All need handling one way or another.
- Comment on Farage adviser said UK would be better off if it had not fought in WW2 5 weeks ago:
Right, but to be fair Britain had no access to the nazi leaderships’ private writings at the time, and really couldn’t be sure if they felt that way, and we can’t be sure the nazis might have changed their minds in the face of a meeker and weaker British response.
So overall, I think perhaps the British response was pretty close to forced out, despite the theoretical full knowledge scenario of coexistence.
- Comment on UK government suggests deleting files to save water 1 month ago:
If evaporative cooling is the only solution then the market will adjust to the new cost by moving power generation towards the coasts or just increase the price, if there are other solutions they’ll become the economically more viable. Either way more water is conserved and you can always balance the cost benefit by adjusting the fine/tax to find a good balance.
- Comment on Cyclist injuries dropped by half after “hated” cycle lane installed, but mayor still claims scrapped lane largely used as “bike run” for drug dealers to “get through traffic" 1 month ago:
Criminals are famously environmentally conscious, and never have any spare cash for a pricy car as a mode of transport. Of course.
- Comment on Duckstation(one of the most popular PS1 Emulators) dev plans on eventually dropping Linux support due to Linux users, especially Arch Linux users. 1 month ago:
And android users are not obligated to give a good review after not receiving support.
I have no problem with his actions, (if he doesn’t have the resources/energy/time to support on all platforms, who can complain about that?), but I don’t think he’s very good at the whole communicating with other humans part of software that sadly in the OSS world tends to fall on the same devs that do the work, he could have avoided both this comment thread and the angry android user above with zero extra effort by simply phrasing things better.
The particular poor phrasing he chose seems to imply to me that he’s lumping all users of each platform together in his head, and each negative interaction builds on the previous, which isn’t the healthiest attitude, and does indeed make him look like an arsehole to anyone who’s just turned up and hasn’t yet done anything wrong.
- Comment on Duckstation(one of the most popular PS1 Emulators) dev plans on eventually dropping Linux support due to Linux users, especially Arch Linux users. 1 month ago:
Who said he was wrong? He basically guaranteed that android users will respond that way by refusing to support them, thus ensuring he will always be right about them
- Comment on Collective Shout Purge Sees Horror Games In Crosshairs 1 month ago:
But removing them from the specific games they object to would not lose any more revenue than removing the games entirely, and reduce the backlash significantly, as long as they could find 1 obscure payment provider to handle the obscure games and keep some form of access.