GamingChairModel

@GamingChairModel@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your car’s tire sensors could be used to track you⁩ ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Because each sensor broadcasts a fixed unique ID, the same car can be recognized repeatedly without reading a license plate. This makes TPMS-based tracking cheaper, harder to detect, and more difficult to avoid than camera-based surveillance, and therefore a stronger privacy threat.

  This seems like a real stretch.

  Cameras and automated license plate recognition are absurdly cheap at this point. And cameras have much greater range and reliability than whatever wireless signal interception this is, which the researchers have said is effective up to 50 meters.

  Meanwhile, from the office where I sit (which happens to be more than 50 meters above street level), I can see a highway and read the license plates of all the cars maybe 100-300m away. Plug in a cheap phone as a simple webcam and I can probably log all the license plates that drive by, maybe even correlate that to makes and models of vehicles for redundancy.

  And who’s going to detect that I’ve got a cell phone camera pointed out of my office window, or that I’m running that type of image recognition on the phone?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material⁩ ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Am I out of touch? No, it’s the lawyers and judges who are wrong.

  Seriously though, these are the same people who made it so that you can own a piece of land, so whatever criticism you want to lob at that foundational role of who gets to say what the law is, it applies equally to all forms of property, a manmade concept to begin with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  A human can start off a process by their own design, but with the details implemented by phenomena not in their direct control, and still copyright the resulting work.

  If I take a funnel full of paint and let it drip onto a canvas in a pattern caused by the movement of a pendulum, and incorporate random movement from wind on a windy day, how would you assign a “percentage” of human creation there? What about letting the hot desert sun melt some crayons into another canvas where I placed the crayons but didn’t control the drip pattern? What if I record some barking dogs but auto tune it into a melody? Or photograph the natural beauty of a wave crashing onto shore? These are all things that can be copyrighted, even if they’re inherently dependent on natural phenomena not in the artist’s control, because the process itself is initiated or captured or designed by a human author.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  First of all, “Intellectual property[sic]” is a not a thing. There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, but they are all significantly different from each other. Trying to lump them together under a single term is disingenuous at best, and using the word “property” in that term is biased loaded language.

  You don’t get to redefine words like “property” or “intellectual property” how you see fit, completely untethered to the way the legal system uses those terms with specific meaning.

  Intellectual property rights include all of those things, in the same way that copyright can include copyright over text or musical compositions or sound recordings or photographs or building architectures. But note that copyright over each of those types of media is subject to its own rights and rules, and you’ll need to apply the correct rules to the correct contexts. But it’s still useful to group similar concepts together, and have a name for the category. That’s why people refer to intellectual property.

  A property right is a thing the owner is entitled to, and a natural right.

  This is a naive take. Property rights are natural rights? No, property rights are defined by the legal system of whatever sovereign nation you’re in. And they’re limited by whatever rules of that legal system are.

  If I own land in the U.S., I’m still required to pay taxes on it, and to enforce my property rights against adverse possession, lest I lose that property to the state or to a squatter. If I don’t record my ownership with the county recorder I might lose the property to someone else who comes along and records them buying it from the guy who sold it to me (and fraudulently sold it twice).

  Property rights can be chopped up and distributed in different ways. I might own a house but rent it to a tenant and have a mortgage on it from the bank, each of whom will have certain rights over that land, despite me being the owner.

  And property can apply to tangible things (a painting, a car), intangible things (a checking account balance at the bank, a certificateless share of stock in a corporation, a domain name registered with ICANN), and all sorts of concepts in between (the right to use a particular mailbox in a post office, an easement to use a driveway over my neighbor’s land, the right to use my name and image in a commercial, a futures contract that entitles me to take delivery of a whole bunch of wheat on a particular day at a particular time in the future). All of those are property, and recognized as property rights in U.S. law.

  What copyright actually is, is a temporary monopoly granted at the whim of Congress. It’s a license, not a right.

  Licenses are a right to do something. In fact, copyright owners assign licenses to others to use that intellectual property all the time.

  And the copyright itself is not property over an idea. It’s the right to copy something specific that has already been fixed in a particular physical medium. If you come up with an idea for a melody, you don’t own the copyright until you write it down.

  You’re just pretty far off base because you don’t understand how broad the word “property” is, and you don’t seem to want to examine just how man-made other forms of property are, and think that copyright is something special and different.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Motorola confirms GrapheneOS support for a future phone, bringing over features⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Motorola Mobility was spun off from Motorola in 2012 and sold to Google. Then Google sold it in 2014 to Lenovo, the Chinese company.

  Original Motorola, renamed Motorola Solutions, retained the rights to the Motorola name in everything except cell phones, and continued to manufacture radio and communications equipment and other signal processing equipment (including stuff like cable TV boxes). They remain a major contractor for militaries, law enforcement, and fire/EMS emergency responders.

  If we’re talking about Motorola cell phones, we’re talking about the Chinese owned company, not the American owned company.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Asus and Dell announce new mini PCs for Windows 365 | Goodbye local OS⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I have no idea why a thin client would need a 2.5Gbps NIC.

  I know bandwidth isn’t latency but for a thin client having a rock solid network connection to the virtual desktop server is pretty important for the user interface. I’m guessing pushing video and animations can require pretty high data rates, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why you can't get a signal at festivals and sports matches⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup.

  LTE can support something like 300-400 connections per band and there are 16 primary bands licensed in the US. 5G and mm wave open things up some more, including beam forming techniques that may allow an antenna array to communicate with two devices on the same frequency at the same time.

  But at the same time, each carrier only gets some of those bands, and they want to separate bands by physical space so that neighboring cells are using different bands, and in 3 dimensional space there can be a lot of neighbors. And 300 passive connections simply keeping the connection alive are different from 300 active users trying to actively transmit and receive significant data. Plus real world interference will always make devices come up short from the theoretical max performance.

  Temporary/mobile towers go a long way, though, for temporary surges in demand, like sporting events. Things have gotten a lot better on game days in certain places (especially small college towns whose populations basically double on game day, with everyone jammed into a single stadium for about 4 hours).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨President Donald Trump bans Anthropic from use in government systems⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, one of the two was a pure safety play, not even ethics.

  If I sell the military an ATV for shuffling things around on base, I might engineer a speed limiter to prevent the ATV from going faster than what its safety features are rated at. But a demand that I remove the governor so that the vehicle can go all lawful speeds totally misses the point. Whether it is illegal or unethical to do so, it’s still bad engineering to use dangerous technology beyond the scope of what it (and its safety features) has been designed for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the Memory Shortage Intentional?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m just not connecting the dots. The amount of money they’re spending on this is astronomical, and they are burning through the cash they have at a rate they can’t sustain, while they’re fighting for their future against Google, Anthropic, plus xAI and Perplexity and others, and maybe foreign competition like Deepseek that the government can’t fully shield them from. While also competing with major data center companies themselves, who may want to build data centers for other non-AI purposes, too. And those competitors have deep, deep pockets.

  If they don’t have a revenue model that actually keeps them afloat, then all their capital expenditures will end up going to benefit someone else.

  In other words, the central thesis that they want to choke out competition from on-device models kinda ignores that they’re facing a much more immediate, much more pressing threat from their data center competition. It’s like trying to corner the market on snow shovels when a hurricane is bearing down.

  Plus one important thing worth noting is that OpenAI purchased the option to buy that much memory, enough to persuade the memory manufacturers to change their own investment decisions for the next 5 years. They’re not necessarily going to actually buy that much. And in theory could sell that option to others. 40% of the market is enough to really move prices, but not enough to actually corner it and exclude others from buying memory. They’ll just have to make it more expensive for themselves at the same time that they make it more expensive, but not impossible, for their true competitors also outfitting data centers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New sodium ion battery stores twice the energy and desalinates seawater⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Like what?

  Wasn’t LFP commercialized at EV scale like a decade ago? It went from like 0% market share to majority market share in about a decade.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New sodium ion battery stores twice the energy and desalinates seawater⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah but firewood is like 5 kwh/kg, or 4 times the energy density of TNT. We drive around with wood in our cars all the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘A feedback loop with no brake’: how an AI doomsday report shook US markets⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s funny. I see the phrase “AI doomsday scenario” and I immediately picture devastating cascading consequences caused by someone mistakenly putting too much trust in some kind of agentic AI that does things poorly and breaks a lot of big important things.

  I’m just not seeing a scenario where AI causes devastating disruption based on its own ultra competence. I’m much more scared of AI incompetence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New sodium ion battery stores twice the energy and desalinates seawater⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a bunch of lithium ion chemistries that have come to market more recently.

  LFP sits in the low cost marker while NCA is the highest performing of the mass market batteries, and NMC is somewhere in between.

  Sodium might be coming for LFP’s low cost position, and is already beginning mass production (some Chinese manufacturers expect those models to hit the road in a few months).

  If you think rechargeable battery R&D from 10 years ago isn’t making it into mass produced products today, you’re just not paying attention.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge scolds Mark Zuckerberg's team for wearing Meta glasses to social media trial⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The judge controls when the jury is in the room. So the jury enters last, only after the judge orders them in. And the judge can order them out at any time to have discussions outside their presence, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are already sold out for the entire year, says Western Digital⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Same with RAM.

  Unfortunately, the RAM shortage is caused by a RAM component being diverted to specialized packages that can’t easily be converted into normal RAM. So even a bubble bursting won’t bring RAM onto the market.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New nickel-iron battery charges in seconds, survives 12,000 cycles⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well if you want to read about the many battery chemistries currently in use in EVs, there’s this article:

  insideevs.com/…/all-ev-battery-chemistries-explai…

  As the article explains, there are several chemistries that have already come and gone, and the current models being sold use a few competing chemistries with their tradeoffs. Some of the up and coming chemistries are also already being mass produced.

  So whatever it is you mean by “leap,” it sounds like it’s already been happening in the last 15-20 years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Website⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, but very cheap and sometimes free tools help a complete beginner do both, without any real technical knowledge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Visa/Mastercard requires all cardholders, cardholders’ banks, merchants, and merchants’ processors to follow the comprehensive set of rules for disputed transactions. That way the dispute process tends to be uniform across different banks and across different merchant/payment processors.

  The network sets the rules, while the banks implement those rules on behalf of the cardholder and the processor implements those rules on behalf of the merchant.

  So replacing the network will require a comprehensive replacement for the network’s dispute resolution rules (assigning who is responsible for paying when certain things happens) and procedures (how a cardholder can initiate a dispute and how that gets resolved).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lightbulbs⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would think that accurate color representation would’ve generally required the bright lights and broad spectrum coverage of sunlight, so I imagine people just…painted during the day, by daylight.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fahrenheit today is literally defined through Celsius

  The same as pretty much every unit they use

  At this point, that’s basically every unit other than the seven fundamental units. Degrees Celsius is defined from the fundamental unit Kelvin.

  Plus the actual definitions of those fundamental units were defined based on historical measurements tied to former definitions. Today the second is defined around the frequency of the cesium-133 atom, but it was traditionally measured as 1/(60 x 60 x 24) of the time of a single rotation of the earth, which stopped serving us when we realized the rotations had too much variation between days. The meter is currently defined around the speed of light and the second, but was previously defined in terms of what they thought the Earth’s circumference was, and then a metal bar they kept in Paris, then based on the wavelength of light emitted from a transition in krypton-86. Same with the kilogram, currently kept at Planck’s constant but previously based on a particular chunk of metal that was mysteriously losing mass over time, and before that defined from the density of 4°C water and the definition of the meter.

  Conventions are important. The history of how we got to particular conventions can often be messy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or, if the app has the private key for decryption for the user to be able to see the messages, what’s stopping the app from copying that decrypted text somewhere else?

  The thread model isn’t usually key management, it’s more about the insecure treatment of the decrypted message after decryption.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3197: Cost Savings⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Using space elevator technology (metal structural beams and metal guy cables) I think we can get things up to 100m geosynchronous “orbit” pretty easily.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Starlink Alternative that can't be blocked⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not feasible for a mass market consumer product like Starlink.

  Why not? That’s a service designed to serve millions of simultaneous users from nearly 10,000 satellites. These systems have to be designed to be at least somewhat resistant to unintentional interference, which means it is usually quite resistant to intentional jamming.

  Any modern RF protocol is going to use multiple frequencies, timing slots, and physical locations in three dimensional space.

  And so the reports out of Iran is that Starlink service is degraded in places but not fully blocked. It’s a cat and mouse game out there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Starlink Alternative that can't be blocked⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d think that there are practical limits to jamming. After all, jamming doesn’t just make radio impossible, it just makes the transmitter and receiver need to get closer together (so that their signal strength in that shorter distance is strong enough to overcome the jamming from further away). Most receivers filter out the frequencies they’re not looking for, so any jammer will need to actually be hitting that receiver with that specific frequency. And many modern antenna arrays rely on beamforming techniques less susceptible to unintentional interference or intentional jamming that is coming from a different direction than where it’s looking. Even less modern antennas can be heavily directional based on the physical design.

  If you’re trying to jam a city block, with a 100m radius, of any and all frequencies that radios use, that’s gonna take some serious power. Which will require cooling equipment if you want to keep it on continuously.

  If you’re trying to jam an entire city, though, that just might not be practical to hit literally every frequency that a satellite might be using.

  I don’t know enough about the actual power and equipment requirements, but it seems like blocking satellite communications between satellites you don’t control and transceivers scattered throughout a large territory is more difficult than you’re making it sound.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The AI explosion isn't just hurting the prices of computers and consoles – it's coming for TVs and audio tech too⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  90GB of both RAM+NAND combined. I’m guessing most of it is actual persistent storage for all the stuff the infotainment system uses (including imagery and offline map data for GPS, which is probably a big one), rather than actual memory in the sense of desktop computing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After Micron's greedy decision, SK Hynix could also exit consumer DRAM and NAND business⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Everything else that you said seems to fit the general thesis that they’re making a lot more money selling to AI companies.

  If those reasons were still true but the memory companies stood to not make as much money on those deals, I guarantee the memory manufacturers wouldn’t have taken the deal. They only care about money, and the other reasons you list are just the mechanisms for making more money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Project to Poison LLM Crawlers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a very common complaint among people administering websites. This particular AI poisoning service seems to be directed at those people.

  So maybe it’s not the majority of complaints about AI, but it’s a significant portion of the complaints about AI from site administrators.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Project to Poison LLM Crawlers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The Fediverse is designed specifically to publish its data for others to use in an open manner.

  Sure, and if the AI companies want to configure their crawlers to actually use APIs and ActivityPub to efficiently scrape that data, great. Problem is that there’s been crawlers that have done things very inefficiently (whether by malice, ignorance, or misconfiguration) and scrape the HTML of sites repeatedly, driving up some hosting costs and effectively DOSing some of the sites.

  If you put Honeypot URLs in the mix and keep out polite bots with robots.txt and keep out humans by hiding those links, you can serve poisoned responses only to the URLs that nobody should be visiting and not worry too much about collateral damage to legitimate visitors.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After Micron's greedy decision, SK Hynix could also exit consumer DRAM and NAND business⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s crazy is that they aren’t just doing this because they make more money with AI.

  No, they really are making more money by selling whole wafers rather than packaging and soldering onto DIMMs. The AI companies are throwing so much money at this that it’s just much more profitable for the memory companies to sell directly to them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Project to Poison LLM Crawlers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s why “bullshit,” as defined by Harry Frankfurt, is so useful for describing LLMs.

  A lie is a false statement that the speaker knows to be false. But bullshit is a statement made by a speaker who doesn’t care if it’s true or false.