scratchee
@scratchee@feddit.uk
- Comment on VPN Comparison 2.0 3 days ago:
The age is useful when considering risk of enshitificarion. A well established and respected vpn has probably figured out how to run profitably, and will probably only go to shit after being sold out or a similar major internal upset, a 3 month old vpn may be offering below cost deals to undercut (or just catch up with) the market whilst the startup funding lasts, in which case they’ll have no choice but to start turning the screws once they have some customers
- Comment on ba bum tsst 3 days ago:
Ankle [eeoh] sore [us]
De-emphasising the bracketed bits
- Comment on EU Chat Control didnt pass - proving the media got to alot of you 3 days ago:
The difference between a fascist government and a democratic government can be distressingly thin, something we should all be aware of by now.
In this case, the EU has just proven it is currently on the right side of that divide. When extremely unpopular and authoritarian ideas were considered, the public felt able to voice their disapproval and the government felt they had to listen. That is a crucial step. Good for you all.
Sadly it likely will continue to require major work to keep the public on guard against future attempts like this one, but that’s life.
- Comment on crop candles 6 days ago:
I admit that when you said “big fan” I imagined a wind turbine in reverse.
Zooming into the picture, I see it’s more like desk fans on sticks. I’m sure they’re bigger than that really, but is it really too much to ask for a windmill that does work that way?
- Comment on Flock Safety and Texas Sheriff Claimed License Plate Search Was for a Missing Person. It Was an Abortion Investigation. 6 days ago:
Humans are brains in a fleshy spaceship. If there’s no brain then there’s no human, just an empty meat sack.
- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 6 days ago:
Agreed
- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 6 days ago:
I’m all for supporting an alternative, however it’s done.
But between the google walled garden and the apple one, I slightly prefer the apple one for having marginally better privacy.
Though as a dev with dev accounts for both, I already can run whatever the hell I want on my own devices, so i admit to having no real skin in that game.
- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 1 week ago:
Or maybe “if I have to be trapped in a walled garden, why would I pick Google’s shitty one?”
- Comment on Move Fast and Break Nothing | Waymo’s robotaxis are probably safer than ChatGPT. 1 week ago:
If near infrared (1000nm) can become uv with the wrong material, surely visible light from the sun can do the same and would become an even more dangerous wavelength? Or is this an effect that only happens to near-infrared? Ive not come across it before…
- Comment on Home secretary calls Gaza protests in wake of Manchester attack ‘un-British’ 1 week ago:
Words to live by
- Comment on oh cool 2 weeks ago:
The big sci fi win in stargate is how highly they rated internal consistency and having a scientific basis where possible. Apparently that was mostly because the actress playing Carter absolutely refused to tell bullshit gobbledegook and forced the writers to do it properly.
It’s subtle, and not always perfectly followed, but if you take the episode where they gate to the black hole, they have significant screen time justifying why the time dilation is so strong when the gravitational effects are so weak. It shouldn’t work that way and they acknowledge that explicitly, but obviously they wanted a fun time dilation story so they call it out and explain it as an unexpected side effect of the gate wormhole. So sure, they sometimes make science do what they need it to do for the story, but they try hard to justify it.
Star Trek meanwhile barely follows its own rules most of the time, let alone actually acknowledging real physics
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Sadly yes
- Comment on Doot doot 3 weeks 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 weeks 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 3 weeks 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' 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, that’s fair
- Comment on Felt cute, might kill 4 people by radiation overdose later idk 🤪🤪 4 weeks 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' 4 weeks 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. 5 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? 5 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 5 weeks ago:
Do
n’tbe evil - Comment on What If There’s No AGI? 5 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? 5 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 5 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? 5 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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? 1 month ago:
You’ve just made an enemy for life!
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 1 month ago:
Damned software devs, they ruined software!