plenipotentprotogod

@plenipotentprotogod@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fat labrador topilogy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Topologically a dog is a sphere (assuming it keeps its mouth shut…

  Next time I want someone to stop talking, they’re going to be very confused when I tell them to “become topilogically spherical.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My phone, iPad, and laptop finally all use the same USB-C charger. The galaxy is at peace.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Now do yourself a favor and buy a good quality cable thats at least 10ft long and rated for 240W. The feeling of having one cable that can charge any of your devices from any seat on your couch is incredible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft 365's buggy Copilot 'Chat' has been summarizing confidential emails for a month — yet another AI privacy nightmare⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Even in the wide world of dubiously useful AI chatbots, Copilot really stands out for just how incompetent it is. The other day I was working on a PowerPoint presentation, and one of the slides included a photo with a kind of cluttered looking background. Now, I can probably count the number of things that AI is genuinely good at on one hand, and context aware image editing trends to be one of them, so I decided to click the Copilot button that Microsoft now has built directly into PowerPoint and see what happens. A chat window popped up and I concisely explained what I wanted it to do: “please remove the background from the photo on slide 5.” It responded on that infuriating obseqious tone that they all have and assured me that it would be happy to help with my request just as soon as I uploaded my presentation.

  What?

  The chatbot running inside an instance of PowerPoint with my presentation open is asking me to “upload” my presentation? I explained this to it, and it came back with some BS about being unable to access the presentation because a “token expired” before requesting again that I upload my presentation. I tried a little longer to convince it otherwise, but it just kept very politely insisting that it was unable to do what I was asking for until I uploaded my presentation.

  Eventually I gave up. The photo wasn’t that bad anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This MF is quadrupling down and dropping Alien files before dropping the full, unredacted Epstein Files. GODDAMN.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh yeah, this has happened multiple times, and the story is always the same:

  1. The government says they’re going to release info on UFOs. This caused a brief flury of interest fuel the general public which is reinforced by the conspiracy theorists who swear that this will finally be proof of little green men at area 51, or whatever.
  2. The government takes a while to follow through, during which time the general public slowly loses interest. The conspiracy theorists start getting impatient and publicly worrying that there must be a faction within the government that’s deliberately slow walking the release or even modifying the documents because they don’t want The Truth to get out.
  3. The documents are finally released. They consist of 99% dry, beauracratic paperwork and 0% admissions that aliens have every visited earth, but the conspiracy theorists dig through and pull out a few scraps that can be spun to make a good headline.
  4. The nation spends at most a week talking about “video taken out the window of a fighter jet of a mysterious floating orb thats porobably just a balloon” #27, or “eye witness account from a sleep deprived 18 year old soldier who swears he saw an alien space ship while on guard duty at 2am” #382.
  5. The national news cycle moves on, and most people promptly forget about the whole thing. Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists take whatever scraps they were able to find and add these to their rotating library of bulkshit to talk about. The initial promise that this was going to be irrefutable proof that aliens have visited earth is quietly forgotten. If it ever does come up, they blame that shadowy faction of the government which must have succeeded in watering down the release before publishing it.

  Rinse and repeat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “Gunpowder caliber guano” is an absolutely amazing way to call something batshit insane and I will be taking every available opportunity to use it in conversation from now on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In case you’re wondering how to get a list of all the apps installed on your phone, these instructions worked for me javathinking.com/…/how-to-get-the-list-of-all-app…

  I just wrote a quick script to check my list against the google doc. The official Merriam Webster app and the official Letterboxd app both got flagged.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Ways to Corrupt LLMs: The wacky things statistical-correlation machines like LLMs do – and how they might get us killed ⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Every time I see a headline like this I’m reminded of the time I heard someone describe the modern state of AI research as equivalent to the practice of alchemy.

  Long before anyone knew about atoms, molecules, atomic weights, or electron bonds, there were dudes who would just mix random chemicals together in an attempt to turn lead to gold, or create the elixir of life or whatever. Their methods were haphazard, their objectives impossible, and most probably poisoned themselves in the process, but those early stumbling steps eventually gave rise to the modern science of chemistry and all that came with it.

  AI researchers are modern alchemists. They have no idea how anything really works and their experiments result in disaster as often as not. There’s great potential but no clear path to it. We can only hope that we’ll make it out of the alchemy phase before society succumbs to the digital equivalent of mercury poisoning because it’s just so fun to play with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bed head⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  my name is Cow,
  and wen its nite,
  or wen the moon
  is shiyning brite,
  and all the men
  haf gon to bed -
  i sneak inside.
  i lik the head.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do you hate AI?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m hopeful that when the bubble pops it’ll be more like the dot com crash, which is to say that the fallout is mostly of the economic variety rather than the superfund variety. Sure, that’ll still suck in the short term. But it will ideally lead to the big players and VC firms backing away and leaving behind an oversupply of infrastructure and talent that can be soaked up at fire sale prices by the smaller, more responsible companies that are willing to stick out the downturn and do the unglamorous work of developing this technology into something that’s actually sustainable and beneficial to society.

  That’s my naive hope. I do recognize that there’s an unfortunately high probability that things won’t go that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New tech pulls lithium from dead batteries cheaper than you can buy it⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You say that like they havent been? The price per kWh for lithium batteries has been consistently falling for over a decade. I see no reason to believe that this tech wouldn’t result in further price decreases if it could be built at scale.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨car producers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Volkswagen AG Group

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where can I buy used computers, and are they on a discount now because of Windows 10 end of life?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Copy pasting my reply from the last time this came up:

  Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It’s also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department’s refresh cycle. The only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you’re willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  TBH I just use the Feeder app on my phone. Fully self-contained. No account, no server, no middleman of any kind. Just the app.

  I’ve been meaning to set up something more elaborate, but this really does work fine, and I like to mention it in these threads for anyone who’s interested in RSS but thinks it’s a big lift to set up. It can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Download an app and start adding publications that interest you. That’s all it takes to get started.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zuckerberg hailed AI ‘superintelligence’. Then his smart glasses failed on stage | Matthew Cantor⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Time to quote Dan Olson again. This was originally written about NFTs, but just replace “crypto” with “AI” and it’s still 100% relevant:

  When you drill down into it, you realize that the core of the crypto ecosystem … is a turf war between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy. Techno fetishists who look at people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, billionaires that have been minted via tech industry doors that have now been shut by market calcification, and are looking for a do-over, looking to synthesize a new market where they can be the one to ascend from a merely wealthy programmer to a hyper wealthy industrialist.

  From the incomparable line goes up

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Glizzy hole⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not sure if this is an intentional reference to the Lonely Island song “Sushi Glory Hole,” but either way here’s a link

  youtu.be/XbGchfT3yMs

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rocky rock rocking⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ceci n’est pas une rock

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Give permission. Don't give permission. They know where you are anyway⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The sample data shared in the article includes

  “c”: “ES”, // Country code,

  ES is usually used for Spain, so it looks like these tests were run from within the EU.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Soldering/De-soldering USB flash-drive Plugs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a fun thought experiment. If I’m understanding correctly, you’re writing a story where the character has a flash drive with important information. They have to remove the end to prevent the bad guys from getting access to it, then later replace the end to access the information themselves. Here’s my pitch (disclaimer: don’t actually try to do this. It would probably work, but if you have actual important files on a flash drive, this isn’t by any means how you should be trying to get at them)

  For removing the end, soldering would be safe if they have access to a soldering iron. If it’s an emergency scenario, then I’d say just snap the plug off. It’s a bit risky depending on how the drive is made, but if it’s done deliberately by someone who knows what they’re doing, then I would say they could plausibly take off the USB connector without permanently damaging any of the guts.

  For connecting the drive later, find a spare usb cable and cut it in half. It shouldn’t be hard to find one in an office. Even cutting the plug off a wired mouse or keyboard would work. Use a pocket knife or pair of scisors to strip the outer insulation off the cut end. This exposes four small wires. Strip the ends of those as well. Now, you just need a way of attaching each wire to the correct spot on the circuit board in the flash drive. Soldering would be best, but in a pinch, I’d look around the office for some of that sticky clay stuff they use to hang up posters. Pre-chewed gum might also work. Lay the stripped end of each wire over the correct spot on the board, then put a blob of the sticky stuff on top to hold it in place. Plug the other end into a computer, and you should be good to go.