GamingChairModel
@GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
- Comment on Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image 5 days ago:
I don’t think it’d be that simple.
Any given website URL could go viral at any moment. In the old days, that might look like a DDoS that brings down the site (aka the slashdot effect or hug of death), but these days many small sites are hosted on infrastructure that is protected against unexpectedly high traffic.
So if someone hosts deceptive content on their server and it can be viewed by billions, there would be a disconnect between a website’s reach and its accountability (to paraphrase Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben).
- Comment on Earth needs more energy. Atlanta’s Super Soaker creator may have a solution. 5 days ago:
The company describes this generator as a solid state device, but the diagrams show the reliance on fluid/flow of hydrogen between the hot side and the cold side for moving some protons around. That seems to be something in between the semiconductor-based solid state thermoelectric generators that are already commonly understood and some kind of generator with moving solid parts.
It still seems like a low maintenance solution to have a closed loop of hydrogen, but that seems like a potential maintenance/failure point, as well, to rely on the chamber to remain filled with hydrogen gas.
- Comment on Earth needs more energy. Atlanta’s Super Soaker creator may have a solution. 5 days ago:
The inventor/founder at the center of the article, Lonnie Johnson, was on the team at JPL that designed and implemented the thermoelectric generators (heated by radioactive decay from plutonium-238 pellets) on the Galileo spacecraft sent to Jupiter. So I would expect that he’s more familiar with the thermodynamic and engineering challenges than even a typical expert.
The PR fluff put out by the company mentions that the theoretical basis for this specific type of generator was worked out a while ago but needed materials science to advance to the point where this type of generator can be thermodynamically and commercially feasible.
Looking at how this generator is supposed to work, it’s interesting in that it does rely on the movement of fluid, but is supposed to be a totally closed loop, to be a bit different than the pure solid state, semiconductor-based Seebeck generators that are already well known.
The other area talked about in this article is that they believe that it can be effective with lower temperature differentials than any previous technology, which might make a huge difference in whether it can be deployed to more useful places and thereby make it economically feasible more easily than prior concepts.
In the end, if these generators can output some electric voltage/current, it might just take on similar generation characteristics as photovoltaics, which could mean that hooking these up to the grid could draw on some of the lessons learned from the rise of grid scale solar.
- Comment on When the AI bubble bursts.. 6 days ago:
Specifically, desktop RAM is slabs of silicon, placed into little packages, soldered onto circuit boards in DIMM form or similar, to be plugged into a motherboard slot for RAM.
The AI demand is for the silicon itself, using advanced packaging techniques to put them on the same package as the complex GPUs with very high bandwidth. So these same pieces of silicon are not even being put into DIMMs, so that if they fall out of use they’ll be pretty much intertwined with chips in form factors that a consumer can’t easily make use of.
There’s not really an easy way to bring that memory back into the consumer market, even after the AI bubble bursts.
- Comment on Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on? 1 week ago:
More along the lines of a “pizza finder” service that scours different menus and shows the pizza options at a bunch of places, whether those places exclusively offer pizza, specialize in pizza with some other options, or just offer pizza as one of several options. It would be perfectly reasonable for such a service to only return results related to pizza, without any implicit suggestion that each place it returns only has pizza available.
- Comment on The Algorithm That Detected a $610 Billion Fraud: How Machine Intelligence Exposed the AI Industry’s Circular Financing Scheme 1 week ago:
Financial analysts were sounding the alarm in October. On October 7, Bloomberg ran an influential article about the circular deals:
bloomberg.com/…/openai-s-nvidia-amd-deals-boost-1…
That built on earlier reporting where they described the deals as circular, as the deals were being announced. Each of these reports notes the financial analysts at different investment firms sounding the alarm.
From there, a robust discussion happened all over the financial press about whether these circular deals were truly unstable. By the time Gamers Nexus ran that video the financial press was already kinda getting sick of the story.
Whatever the hell these trading algorithms were doing on November 20, they definitely weren’t ahead of the curve on investor knowledge and belief.
- Comment on Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead 1 week ago:
it’s like AI companies went from buying 10 memories as usual to 1000000,
I mean, they basically did. OpenAI announced a few months ago that they reached deals to buy 900,000 wafers of DRAM per month, representing 40% of global production capacity. For a single company. There are several other companies competing at those scales, too.
- Comment on Seems legit 1 week ago:
Plenty of the AI functions on phones are on-device. I know the iPhone is capable of several text-based processing (summarizing, translating) offline, and they have an API for third party developers to use on-device models. And the Pixels have Gemini Nano on-device for certain offline functions.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Grok Goes Haywire, Boasts About Billionaire’s Pee-Drinking Skills and ‘Blowjob Prowess’ 3 weeks ago:
but I don’t think most are designed to control people’s opinions
Yeah I’m on team chaos theory. People can plan and design shit all they want, but the complexity will lead to unexpected behavior, always. How harmful that unwanted behavior is, or how easy it is to control or contain, is often unknown in advance, but invented things tend to develop far, far outside the initial vision of the creators.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
Being able to point a camera at something and have AI tell me “that’s a red bicycle” is a cool novelty the first few times, but I already knew that information just by looking at it.
Visual search is already useful. People go through the effort of posting requests to social media or forums asking “what is this thing” or “help me ID these shoes and where I can buy them” or “what kind of spider is this” all the time. They’re not searching for red bicycles, they’re taking pictures of a specific Bianchi model and asking what year it was manufactured. Automating the process and improving the reliability/accuracy of that search will improve day to day life.
And I have strong reservations about the fundamental issues of inference engines being used to generate things (LLMs and diffusers and things like that), but image recognition, speech to text, and translation are areas where these tools excel today.
- Comment on Are Cars Just Becoming Giant Smartphones on Wheels? 2 months ago:
The eyebrow raiser in the Slate’s base configuration is that it doesn’t come with any audio systems: no radio antenna/tuner, no speakers. It remains to be seen how upgradeable the base configuration is for audio, how involved of a task it will be to install speakers in the dash or doors, installing antennas (especially for AM, which are tricky for interference from EV systems), etc.
I’d imagine that most people would choose to spend few thousand on that audio upgrade up to the bare minimum expectations one would have for a new vehicle, so that cuts into the affordability of the package.
- Comment on Are Cars Just Becoming Giant Smartphones on Wheels? 2 months ago:
The analog dials were an illusion. That information has been processed digitally for at least the last 25 years.
- Comment on "Very dramatic shift" - Linus Tech Tips opens up about the channel's declining viewership 2 months ago:
What I’m saying is if YouTube is sharing $10 million of revenue with channel owners in a month that has 1,000,000,000 total views across YouTube, that’s a penny per view.
Then, if the next month the reconfigure the view counts to exclude certain bots or views under a particular number, you might see the overall view count drop from 1,000,000,000 to 500,000,000, while still hitting the same overall revenue. At that point, it’s $0.02 per view, so a channel that sees their view count drop in half may still see the same revenue despite the drop in view count.
If it’s a methodology change across all of YouTube, a channel that stays equally popular as a percentage of all views will see the revenue stay the same, even if the view counts drop (because every other channel is seeing their view counts drop, too).
- Comment on "Very dramatic shift" - Linus Tech Tips opens up about the channel's declining viewership 3 months ago:
Isn’t that the formula? They take all of the revenue, set aside the percentage they’ve set for revenue share, and then divide that among all channels based on viewer counts. Dropping viewership for all channels proportionally means that the same amount of revenue will still be distributed to the channels in the previous ratios.
- Comment on Big Surprise—Nobody Wants 8K TVs 3 months ago:
Most 4k streams are 8-20 Mbps. A UHD runs at 128 Mbps.
Bitrate is only one variable in overall perceived quality. There are all sorts of tricks that can significantly reduce file size (and thus bitrate of a stream) without a perceptible loss of quality. And somewhat counterintuitively, the compression tricks work a lot better on higher resolution source video, which is why each quadrupling in pixels (doubling height and width) doesn’t quadruple file size.
The codec matters (h.264 vs h.265/HEVC vs VP9 vs AV1), and so do the settings actually used to encode. Netflix famously is willing to spend a lot more computational power on encoding, because they have a relatively small number of videos and many, many users watching the same videos. In contrast, YouTube and Facebook don’t even bother re-encoding into a more efficient codec like AV1 until a video gets enough views that they think they can make up the cost of additional processing with the savings of lower bandwidth.
Video encoding is a very complex topic, and simple bitrate comparisons only barely scratch the surface in perceived quality.
- Comment on WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed 3 months ago:
Article is paywalled for me.
Does it describe the methodology of how they use the transmitter and receiver?
What specifically are they transmitting? Is it actually wifi signals within the 802.11 protocols, or is “wifi” just shorthand for emitting radio waves in the same spectrum bands as wifi?
- Comment on WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed 3 months ago:
Yeah I’m with you.
“Using this technological advancement to improve health care is good”
“Not in countries where health care is publicly run”
“What” is the correct response here.
- Comment on FTC chair Andrew Ferguson warns Google not to filter or suppress emails sent by Republicans over Gmail 3 months ago:
“The only difference between the two emails was the link,” the memo said. “ActBlue delivered. WinRed got flagged. That is not a coincidence.”
It could also be that winred is more often associated with spam because emails with winred links use a style more associated with other actual spam. Like if spammers use words like Trump a lot to try to scam victims, and a lot of those emails get flagged as spam, then the word Trump itself becomes more highly correlated with spam. And since the word Trump is highly associated with winred links, maybe winred gets caught up in the rule set/heuristics that associate Trump fundraisers with spam.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 3 months ago:
You were talking about $1.34 in damages, which doesn’t sound like downtime or disruption.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 3 months ago:
you will get prison for DDoS in USA
Who said anything about DDoS? I’m using ad blockers and saving/caching/archiving websites with a single computer, and not causing damage. I’m just using the website in a way the owner doesn’t like. That’s not a crime, nor should it be.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 3 months ago:
Thats a crime yeah and if Alphabet co wants to sue you for $1.34 damages then they have that right
So yeah, I stand by my statement that anyone thinks this is a crime, or should be a crime, has a poor understanding of either the technology or the law. In this case, even mentioning Alphabet suing for damages means that you don’t know the difference between criminal law and civil law.
press charges for the criminal act of intentional disruption of services
That’s not a crime, and again reveals gaps in your knowledge on this topic.
- Comment on Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. 3 months ago:
No, but it is a starting point for passing some kind of sanity check. Someone who was making $81k in 1990 was making an exceedingly high salary in the general population, and computer-related professions weren’t exactly known for high salaries until maybe the 2000’s.
bls.gov/…/white-collar-pay-private-goods-producin… with government statistics showing that in March 1990, entry level programmers were making on average about $27k. Senior programmers were making about $34k. Systems analysts (which I understand to have primarily been mainframe programmers in 1990) were making low 30s at the entry level and high 60s at the most senior level. Going up the management track, only the fourth and highest level was making above $80k, and it seems to me that those are going to be high level executives.
So yeah, $81k is a very senior level in the 1990s tech industry, probably significantly less common than today’s $200k tech jobs.
- Comment on do what you love 3 months ago:
I was a dual major Electrical Engineering/Philosophy. The rigorous logic in some branches of philosophy was very helpful for programming principles. And the the philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of mind has overlaps with and supplements modern AI theory pretty well.
I’m out of the tech world now but if I were hiring entry level software developers, I’d consider a philosophy degree to be a plus, at least for people who have the threshold competency in actual programming.
- Comment on Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. 3 months ago:
You have to expect that OP, who is well established in his field, to compare accordingly, not with average pay of 1990.
I’m talking about a number that is 1.4x the 95th percentile generally. It’d be weird to assume that programmers were getting paid that much more than doctors and lawyers and bankers.
According to this survey series, median IEEE members were making about $58k (which was also the average for 35-year-olds in the survey. Electrical engineering is a closely related discipline to programming.
So yeah, an $81k salary was really, really high in 1990. I suspect the original comment was thinking of the 90’s in general, and chose a salary from later in the decade while running the inflation numbers back to 1990, using the wrong conversion factor for inflation.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 3 months ago:
I’m gonna continue to use ad blockers and yt-dlp, and if you think I’m a criminal for doing so, I’m gonna say you don’t understand either technology or criminal law.
- Comment on Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. 3 months ago:
Who is making $165k out of college?
Computer science and engineering grads at the top of their class at top schools who choose not to go to grad school. This thread claims to cite Department of Education data to show median salaries 3 years after graduation, and some of them are higher than $165k. Sure, that’s 3 years out, but it’s also median, so one would expect 75th or 90th percentile number to be higher.
Anecdotally, I know people from Stanford/MIT who did get their first jobs in the Bay Area for more than $150k more than 10 years ago, so it was definitely possible.
But this NYT article has stories about graduates from Purdue, Oregon State, and Georgetown which are good schools but also generally weren’t the schools producing many graduates landing in those $150k jobs as that very top tier. I would assume the kids graduating from Cal Tech, MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley are still doing well. But the middle is getting left behind.
- Comment on Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. 3 months ago:
Were people getting paid $81k in 1990? This site shows that 95th percentile in 1990 was $58k, and doesn’t have more granular data than that above the 95th percentile. So someone making $81k was definitely a 5 percenter, maybe even a 2 percenter.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 3 months ago:
to decide for what purpose it gets used for
Yeah, fuck everything about that. If I’m a site visitor I should be able to do what I want with the data you send me. If I bypass your ads, or use your words to write a newspaper article that you don’t like, tough shit. Publishing information is choosing not to control what happens to the information after it leaves your control.
Don’t like it? Make me sign an NDA. And even then, violating an NDA isn’t a crime, much less a felony punishable by years of prison time.
Interpreting the CFAA to cover scraping is absurd and draconian.
- Comment on Reddit is using AI to determine users beliefs, values, stances and more based on their activity (posts and comments) summarizing it to Subreddit Mods. 3 months ago:
What counts as an algorithm? Surely it can’t be the actual definition of algorithm.
Because in most forum software (even the older stuff that predates reddit or social media) if I just click on a username, that fetches from the database every comment that the user has ever made, usually sorted in reverse chronological order. That technically fits the definition of an algorithm, and presents that user’s authored content in a manner that correlates the comments with the same user, regardless of where it originally appeared (in specific threads).
So if it generates a webpage that shows the person once made a comment in a cooking subreddit that says “I’m a Muslim and I love the halal version” next to a comment posted to a college admissions subreddit that says “I graduated from Harvard in 2019” next to a comment posted to a gardening subreddit that says “I live in Berlin,” does reddit violate the GDPR by assembling this information all in one place?
- Comment on Reddit is using AI to determine users beliefs, values, stances and more based on their activity (posts and comments) summarizing it to Subreddit Mods. 3 months ago:
I don’t understand.
If someone writes a reddit post and says “I’m fasting for Ramadan,” can I not infer from that public post that the user is probably Muslim?