MajorasMaskForever
@MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world
- Comment on ‘The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it’: the terrifying truth about why Tesla’s cars keep crashing 1 week ago:
Working in the aerospace industry has given me a lot of insight into the different ways engineers rationalize the potential for harm that they cause. The most common is wilful ignorance or straight up denial. No, the products I work on can never hurt anyone, it’s just xyz I know personally engineers who work on weaponry and fall heavily into that camp and it blows my mind.
- Comment on Senate GOP budget bill has little-noticed provision that could hurt your Wi-Fi 2 weeks ago:
Lol whoops yeah, ARRL. I work in aerospace where we love our alphabet soup and I brainfarted AFRL.
I wasn’t trying to say that the band plan doesn’t exist for a reason, it absolutely does, some reasons which you pointed out exactly. I’ve definitely been around guys who treat the band plan like it is the law, and I imagine the original commenter had the misfortune of running into one of those guys and believed him at face value. Imho it’s one of the reasons ham radio has been dying as a hobby.
- Comment on Senate GOP budget bill has little-noticed provision that could hurt your Wi-Fi 2 weeks ago:
Nothing legally stops you from listening. To transmit, you are legally required to have a callsign (which you must broadcast during transmit) and your callsign must be licensed for that frequency.
If you break the law, it’s highly unlikely that the FCC themselves will hunt you down and fine you. If you’re using it to talk to others on the HAM bands, they’ll likely get pissed at you for not being licensed but actually tracking you down is difficult. Using it for your own personal projects, friend groups, etc, it’s unlikely anyone would notice you at all.
A license is like $15 for life (just need to occasionally tell the FCC you’re still alive), the test will teach you some stuff, I don’t see it as that onerous to play by the rules so I’d recommend following them.
- Comment on Senate GOP budget bill has little-noticed provision that could hurt your Wi-Fi 2 weeks ago:
A HAM license realistically is for two things:
#1 the test teaches you major items you should know about how radio works #2 how to not fuck shit up for everyone else
For the bands allocated to HAM radio in the US, as long as you’re not fucking shit up for everyone else the FCC doesn’t really care. A good example of that and my personal favorite rule is the power transmission rule of “only enough power to complete the transmission”. Functionally it’s so vague that I doubt anyone would ever actually get their license suspended over it.
The group AFRL has a pretty restrictive “band plan” that I think is where the above comment’s salt is coming from. A perception I have and have heard others talk about is the HAM community has a tendency to be borderline hostile to newcomers and are very gate-keepy, which AFRL in my experience embodies.
I have a license purely to play by the rules from a legal standpoint when I’m out in the rocky mountains hiking and camping with friends, makes communicating with different groups way easier
- Comment on We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent 2 weeks ago:
May I present to you:
The Marriam-Webster Dictionary
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artificial
Definition #3
- Comment on We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think the term AI has been used in a vague way, it’s that there’s a huge disconnect between how the technical fields use it vs general populace and marketing groups heavily abuse that disconnect.
Artificial has two meanings/use cases. One is to indicate something is fake (video game NPC, chess bots, vegan cheese). The end product looks close enough to the real thing that for its intended use case it works well enough. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, treat it like a duck even though we all know it’s a bunny with a costume on. LLMs on a technical level fit this definition.
The other definition is man made. Artificial diamonds are a great example of this, they’re still diamonds at the end of the day, they have all the same chemical makeups, same chemical and physical properties. The only difference is they came from a laboratory made my adult workers vs child slave labor.
My pet theory is science fiction got the general populace to think of artificial intelligence to be using the “man-made” definition instead of the “fake” definition that these companies are using. In the past the subtle nuance never caused a problem so we all just kinda ignored it
- Comment on You've got to stick up for the little guy 3 weeks ago:
That’s why there’s a Minecraft port on the Switch and the new Donkey Kong game has you blasting through rocks with your virtual monkey hands
- Comment on Trump social media site brought down by Iran hackers 3 weeks ago:
I think a better definition would be “achieve something in an unintended or uncommon way”. Fits the bill on what generally passes in the tech community as a “hack” while also covering some normal life stuff.
Getting a cheaper flight booked by using a IP address assigned to a different geographical location? Sure I’d call that a life hack. Getting a cheaper flight by booking a late night, early morning flight? No, those are deliberately cheaper
Also re: your other comment about not making a reply at all, sometimes for people like us it’s just better to not get into internet fights over semantics (no matter how much fun they can be)
- Comment on ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logic 5 weeks ago:
From a technology standpoint, nothing is stopping them. From a business standpoint: hubris.
To put time and effort into creating traditional logic based algorithms to compensate for this generic math model would be to admit what mathematicians and scientists have known for centuries. That models are good at finding patterns but they do not explain why a relationship exists (if it exists at all). The technology is fundamentally flawed for the use cases that OpenAI is trying to claim it can be used in, and programming around it would be to acknowledge that.
- Comment on Colorado’s governor vetoes landmark ban on rent-setting algorithms 1 month ago:
There’s enough nuance to that veto I disagree on that being superfluous a law existing on the books. It takes 50% of employees to vote in favor of forming a union. That part was not going to change under that bill. The repeal (and it’s subsequent veto) was entirely on the vote threshold to allow a union to charge all employees union dues regardless of membership status.
Now there’s is an argument that the law indirectly disincentives unions since in combination with another law unions in CO must act on behalf of all employees, regardless of membership status, so a union must do more work on less money since 50% of employees are needed to create a union for 100% of employees, but 75% of employees are needed to force all 100% of employees to pay for that extra representation. Most people if given the opportunity will act selfishly and won’t join the union and still reap the benefits. In that event, it’s pretty likely a union wouldn’t have the funds to perform necessary negotiations and representation ultimately leading the union to fail.
But that’s a set of laws and human behavior acting in concert, not a single law that on its own is entirely captured by another.
- Comment on Colorado’s governor vetoes landmark ban on rent-setting algorithms 1 month ago:
Had the bill passed nothing would have changed in Colorado. The bill was simply virtue signalling and grandstanding, taking no real action to the very real problem of rental prices in Colorado.
My criticism of the original comment is that this is not an instance of Democratic policy that is making people distance themselves from the party. If a person does distance themself from the party over an action like this, they did it because of the headline and how that headline made them feel in the moment
- Comment on Colorado’s governor vetoes landmark ban on rent-setting algorithms 1 month ago:
CO resident here:
Polis didn’t veto the bill because he wanted to have rent raised in Colorado, he vetoed the bill because what it was making illegal is already illegal here. Passing this new law would have done nothing except increase the number of laws on the books. Over the last few years Polis has made it a priority to remove superfluous laws from the books.
If this is causing Democrats to lose support, it’s not because of the policy, it’s because of the headline-only-reactions and refusal of so many voters to actually think about what it is they’re presented with
- Comment on Forbidden Tech 1 month ago:
Reaction time
In the US, using a cord like this will either be harmless or create effectively a dead short. Typical breakers will catch the latter but it will take tenths of a second for a breaker to react in which time the electricity could kill someone.
Depending on circuit conditions a GFCI might intervene as well, they’re typically faster at reacting (needing a few milliseconds) but for a cable designed to handle full residential power, it’s still enough to kill a person in that small window of time
- Comment on Report: Apple CEO “cares about nothing else” Than Building Breakout AR Glasses Before Meta 2 months ago:
It’s a still frame from Star Trek The Next Generation, episode The Game
The plot is a wearable device that is an AR “glasses” game that as you play the game it “makes you feel good” gets used to take over the Enterprise so terrorists can hijack it.
At the time I imagine it was intended to be part of anti-drug campaigns with the AR and companies curating what you see to distract from reality angle/sentiment being more relevant today
- Comment on China is quietly pushing ahead with massive 50,000Mbps broadband rollout to leapfrog rest of the world on internet speeds 5 months ago:
It’s so incredibly annoying when people use smaller order of magnitude descriptors simply so they can then write more zeros. A good chunk of the time too it feels like it’s done to distract from a different point or to exaggerate without technically lying.
Doesn’t help that technical jargon is only best used when communicating with someone in that field or understands it. Big number + alphabet soup always seems scary 😞
- Comment on Production quality often has in inverse relationship to information quality in youtube videos 7 months ago:
I feel the same way about Mark Rober. For me I think I’ve figured out that I don’t like how blatantly obvious it is that the only reason the video exists is to grab headlines and attention by being so outlandish. I figured that out when I couldn’t tolerate many LTT videos anymore but still liked other LMG channels and the WAN show
- Comment on Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands 8 months ago:
Why not Minot?