backgroundcow
@backgroundcow@lemmy.world
- Comment on The Genesis of a joke. 3 weeks ago:
I made this the other day.Image
- Comment on What has he done to deserve this? 3 months ago:
Nope, this redefinition isn’t necessary, it is a choice SI made. Nothing would have broken by keeping an exact relationship between amount of substance and mass, it would just have retained the meaning of Avogadro’s constant (experimentally determined vs a defined constant).
- Comment on What has he done to deserve this? 3 months ago:
… weighs one gram … An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.
Not only was this never true - the sentence would have to have say “An amount of carbon-12 atoms weighing 12 times this amount has exactly 1 mole atoms in it” (far less elegant) – but not even this is true any longer after the fuckup in redefining the mole in 2019, after which all these relations between amount of substance and mass are only approximate.
- Comment on OpenAI’s GPT Is a Recruiter’s Dream Tool. Tests Show There’s Racial Bias 8 months ago:
“I’ve created this amazing program that more or less precisely mimics the response of a human to any question!”
“What if I ask it a question where humans are well known to apply all kinds of biases? Will it give a completely unbiased answer, like some kind of paragon of virtue?”
“No”
<Surprised Pikachu face>
- Comment on Podman won't start Pihole with an error saying that it can't bind to port 53, as it is already in use, but nothing is using port 53. 8 months ago:
After checking that you can open port 53 udp yourself with, say, nc (which you tried), strace the binary that tries to open port 53 and fails, and find the system call that fails. You can compare it with an strace on nc to see how it differs.
If this doesn’t clue you in (e.g., you see two attempts to listen to the same port…) Next step would be to find in the source code where it falls (look for the error message printout) and start adding diagnostic printouts before the failing system call.
- Comment on OpenAI says it is investigating reports ChatGPT has become ‘lazy’ 11 months ago:
This is my guess as well. They have been limiting new signups for the paid service for a long time, which must mean they are overloaded; and then it makes a lot of sense to just degrade the quality of GPT-4 so they can serve all paying users. I just wish there was a way to know the “quality level” the service is operating at.
- Comment on OpenAI says it is investigating reports ChatGPT has become ‘lazy’ 11 months ago:
Was this around the time right after “custom GPTs” was introduced? I’ve seen posts since basically the beginning of ChatGPT claming it got stupid and thinking it was just confirmation bias. But somewhere around that point I felt a shift myself in GPT4:s ability to program; where it before found clever solutions to difficult problems, it now often struggles with basics.
- Comment on Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase. 1 year ago:
What are you talking about? Amazon’s digital video purchases don’t require any monthly access fee. He paid £5.99 with the idea that he’ll get to keep it indefinitely, just like a physical DVD. I don’t get why you think it is ok for a seller to revert the sale of a digital item at any time for just the purchase price but (I presume?) not other sales?
- Comment on Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase. 1 year ago:
Are you fine with me taking anything from your home as long as I pay you the purchase price + £5? Some of us we assign greater value to some of the things we own than the purchase price.
- Comment on Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase. 1 year ago:
People losing media this way should sue, with the argument that it was presented to end users as a “sale”, and it is not sufficient to merely compensate someone with the purchase price to undo a sale. Companies “selling” digital products should be forced to write agreements that allow them to redistribute content indefinitely.
- Comment on Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase. 1 year ago:
It’s because the licence holder of the movie decided Amazon can’t show it anymore. Perhaps they were asking Amazon to pay a high fee and it wants worth it.
I get that this is what the license holder wants. But, why can’t we just put into law that a license is not needed for a company to host, retransmit and play copyrighted media on behalf of a user once the license holder has been compensated as agreed for a sale?
- Comment on Now we know why Elon said he liked Star Trek 1 year ago:
“They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” // Carl Sagan.
- Comment on Announcing Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion - The Official Microsoft Blog 1 year ago:
- Comment on Unity backtracks, no runtime fee for <$1mil or for games on current/old versions 1 year ago:
There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.
A few things:
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Unity is still bleeding money. They have a product that could be the basis for a reasonably profitable company, but spening billions on a microtransaction company means it is not sufficient for their current leadership. It doesn’t seem wise to build your bussniess on the product of a company whose bussniess plan you fundamentally disagree with.
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It would be the best for the long term health of bussniess-to-bussnies services if we as a community manages to send the message that it doesn’t matter what any contract says - just trying to introduce retroactive fees is unforgivable and a death sentence to the company that tries it.
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- Comment on Beating GPT-4 on HumanEval with a Fine-Tuned CodeLlama-34B 1 year ago:
I understand LLaMA and some other models come with instructions that say that they cannot be used commercially. But, unless the creators can show that you have formally accepted a license agreement to that effect, on what legal grounds can that be enforceable?
If we look at the direction US law is moving, it seems the current legal theory is that AI generated works fall in the public domain. That means restricting their use commercially should be impossible regardless of other circumstances - public domain means that anyone can use them for anything. (But it also means that your commercial use isn’t protected from others likewise using the exact same output).
If we instead look at what possible legal grounds restrictions on the output of these models could be based on: if the creators of these models can show that you agreed to a license agreement they may be able to that. However, if you didn’t agree to a license agreement, I don’t see on what basis any restriction in the use of AI model output can be based on. Copyright don’t restrict use, it restricts redistribution. The creators of LLMs cannot reasonably take the position that output created from their models is a derivative work of the model, when their model itself is created from copyrighted works, many of which they have no right to redistribute. The whole basis of LLMs rest on that “training data” -> “model” produces a model that isn’t encumbered by the copyright of the training data. How can one take that position and simultaneously belive “model” -> “inferred output” produces copyright encumbered output? That would be a fundamentally inconsistent view.
(Note: the above is not legal advice, only free-form discussion.)
- Comment on ULTRARAM may be a silly name but it's the holy grail for memory tech and means your PC could hibernate for over 1,000 years 1 year ago:
AutoNomous Ultra inStinct ram
- Comment on Microsoft shuts down Cortana app on Windows 11 1 year ago:
Cortana is/was by far the best name of the digital assistants - probably because it was created by sci-fi story writers rather than a marketing department. They should just have upgraded her with the latest AI tech.
Who in their right mind thinks “Bing copilot” is a better name? It makes me picture something like the blow-up autopilot from airplane.
- Comment on X, formerly Twitter, commandeers '@music' handle from user with half a million followers 1 year ago:
I like calling it “x-twitter”, as it is short and makes sense when reading it out.
- Comment on Google's Web DRM is Worse than I Thought... 1 year ago:
So, what you are saying is that by checking this trust API, we can filter out everyone running unaltered big-media approved browsers and hardware? We’d end up splitting the web into two disjoint parts, one for big corporate and sheeple - and one more akin to the web of old comprised by skilled tech people and hobbyists? A rift that could finally bring an end to eternal September? … Are we sure this proposal a bad thing?
- Comment on Is there an open-source/not corporate-owned alternative for Google Docs? 1 year ago:
As a different, more techy, solution that can work depending on the people you collaborate with, is to use a hosted Git service for collaboration (if you want to stay completely open source, a self-hosted GitLab).
Then, change your publication workflow to write in Markdown, ReST, or one of the other ascii formats that previews correctly, and set up your CI to render the documents automatically into, e.g., pdf:s using a converter (which can be done as part of the CI). There are all kinds of converters from Markdown/REsT -> docs, presentation, etc. formats that are as competent - if not more so - than the usual office suites. This setup offers both online editing in the GitLab instance and offline by local cloning of the Git repo.
The side effect is that this system very seriously records and preserve your document history. You can see exactly who, at what point, changed, added, and removed things. For some types of documents, this can be very important.
