scratchee
@scratchee@feddit.uk
- Comment on What's your favorite case of a game making fun of you? 4 hours ago:
Outer wilds, if you manage to
Tap for spoiler
Break the universe
You get the end credits but with a kazoo rendition.
Like, “well done dipshit, I guess this is the end”.
- Comment on MPs urge minister to adopt definition of Islamophobia amid rise in hate crime 1 day ago:
Assault is already a generic crime. But random assaults whilst serious are just a form of crime that hurts the country a bit but not a lot (individuals might get badly hurt, but a low level of assaults is just a nuisance from a societal level).
But hate crime is different, hate crimes beget hate crimes, and even a low level can grow rapidly, and once you have a racial/religious/whatever conflict you’re stuck with that for a few generations, so hate crimes are incredibly dangerous for society, so get stomped on very hard.
That’s the theory anyway.
- Comment on NHS makes morning-after pill available for free across pharmacies in England 5 days ago:
Yeah, that matches my understanding.
- Comment on NHS makes morning-after pill available for free across pharmacies in England 5 days ago:
Depends on your specific denomination of pro-life. I think some consider even the morning after pill to be a form of abortion.
But yeah, for everyone else it’s a definite win, including the less extremist pro-life crowd.
Tldr: a very hard change to hate, but of course the most hateful people will manage to somehow.
- Comment on Show your pride 6 days ago:
In everyday context yes, but it’s pretty common to use “colour” to refer to frequency outside the visible range, and it’s interesting to consider what interesting “colours” we are missing out on because they’re outside our visible range.
Silver/grey implies even response across the spectrum, and is the normal expectation.
If we couldn’t see yellow (red/green) then gold would presumably look silver to us, so are there silver/grey metals that would have an interesting colour if only we could see it?
- Comment on I'm fine with being stupid 1 week ago:
If you’re free to put the center vertex anywhere, then I’d think you could position it to avoid that…
- Comment on London woman’s £150 fine for pouring coffee down street drain revoked 1 week ago:
In this country our sewage and drainage are largely combined in the same sewers (we built the system before anyone had the idea of separating them, and now can’t afford to fix it), so hard to believe it could cause any problems, probably just improved the flavour of the broth a little
- Comment on Rachel Reeves ‘plots tax raid on solicitors and GPs in crackdown on UK’s wealthy’ 1 week ago:
Serious answer: the actually wealthy are too good at tax dodging, so taxing them is rarely effective, plus they can scare governments by threatening to fly their private jets to some other country if they were actually threatened with effective taxation.
I’ve heard it claimed that the only effective way to run a wealth tax is to do a single massive one off tax with no warning or lead time, that way the
cockroacheswealthy can’t run and hide in the woodwork quickly enough. - Comment on VPN Comparison 2.0 3 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks 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 3 weeks 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. 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago:
Agreed
- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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. 4 weeks 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’ 4 weeks ago:
Words to live by
- Comment on oh cool 5 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 1 month ago:
Sadly yes
- Comment on Doot doot 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 month ago:
Yeah, that’s fair
- Comment on Felt cute, might kill 4 people by radiation overdose later idk 🤪🤪 1 month 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 month 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. 1 month 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? 1 month 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 1 month ago:
Do
n’tbe evil - Comment on What If There’s No AGI? 1 month 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.