TheGrandNagus
@TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
- Comment on Gemini will now automatically summarize your long emails unless you opt out 5 days ago:
Google makes a lot of money, and summarising stuff uses a surprisingly small amount of energy. You can do it trivially on-device on a laptop and on plenty of phones.
When it comes to LLMs, training the models is generally the thing that requires ridiculous amounts of energy.
This is dumb as fuck, though. I don’t want Google’s LLM to miss out critical details in my emails. That shit could be important. If people want this they should opt in.
- Comment on The UK government is considering mandatory chemical castration for sex offenders – it’s an ethical and legal minefield 6 days ago:
You’d still be let out after your normal sentence, nobody that sets the laws is advocating keeping them there forever.
To be clear, I disagree with it, it seems crazy to me.
I’m just pointing out that this reporting is saying something very different to all other reporting I’ve seen on this topic. I’ve not seen anywhere else report it as being forced.
- Comment on The UK government is considering mandatory chemical castration for sex offenders – it’s an ethical and legal minefield 6 days ago:
This is the first I’ve heard of it being mandatory. All other reporting I’ve seen is prisoners being able to opt in, for a reduced sentence.
- Comment on Telegram and xAI agreed a one-year deal to distribute Grok; Telegram will get $300M in cash and equity from xAI and 50% of subscription revenue 1 week ago:
Donations and grants.
- Comment on Thames Water fined £122.7m in biggest ever penalty 1 week ago:
Nationalising now would cost hundreds of billions.
Or, if you went down the banana republic route of forcibly nationalising without any compensation, and ignored the laws that currently prevent that, investment into the UK would plummet.
Investment in the UK already took a big hit from Brexit, we don’t need to make it worse.
The government is already the operator of last resort for the water companies. That means if the companies go bust any nobody steps in to buy them, the government takes over automatically.
I say the government should state they won’t be bailing out these water companies if they fail. That’s how it should be for any private investment.
When Thames and others go bust, the government steps in and takes over automatically as Operator Of Last Resort, with a tremendously lower cost to public finances.
- Comment on Thames Water fined £122.7m in biggest ever penalty 1 week ago:
Not from the government they haven’t.
- Comment on Thames Water fined £122.7m in biggest ever penalty 1 week ago:
They aren’t allowed to raise their prices.
- Comment on Thames Water fined £122.7m in biggest ever penalty 1 week ago:
They can’t be raised to cover it.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
It’s so frustrating that we have all this technology, and we choose to use it for bad purposes.
- Comment on Half-Life 3 Has Been Designed to be ‘The Final Chapter’, It’s Claimed 1 week ago:
Alyx is not HL3, and I don’t get it when people say it is.
HL2E2 ended on a cliffhanger, we were partway through a story that never received an ending.
Alyx is a prequel to HL2.
If Peter Jackson never released LOTR: Return Of The King, but still went ahead with The Hobbit, that would not make it a conclusion to the LOTR trilogy, it would still just be a prequel film.
- Comment on The Telegraph has deleted this sob story 1 week ago:
It objectively is.
- Comment on German court sends Volkswagen execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal 1 week ago:
You are genuinely the first other person I’ve ever seen online who seems aware that this was an industry-wide thing, not a VW thing.
- Comment on German court sends Volkswagen execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal 1 week ago:
If it makes you feel any better, all brands had illegally high emissions. People only tie it to VW so much because they were the first to be tested, and they owned up to it, meaning media could call them out on it without fear of libel.
VW wasn’t even close to the worst offender.
- Comment on The Telegraph has deleted this sob story 1 week ago:
A household with that income is very rich.
Jesus, toffs are so separated from reality it’s unbelievable.
- Comment on Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews. 1 week ago:
Wikipedia has a far wider reach, doesn’t have competitors in quite the same way Mozilla does, and needs far less money than Mozilla.
It takes hundreds of millions every year to maintain a modern web engine, have top-tier security, etc. It’s harder than maintaining an OS, even.
I just don’t see enough people getting in on that.
You mention Patreon. Alright, let’s go with that. The largest Patreon project by far earns less than $3m per year. Mozilla would need probably 150x that.
- Comment on Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews. 1 week ago:
Maybe you would. The vast vast majority wouldn’t.
Not many people care about privacy from big tech, and those that do probably know what FOSS is and would know that they can trivially get Firefox for free.
I also doubt that Mozilla could get the hundreds of millions per year that they need to maintain a modern web browser engine, keep up to date on security, etc.
- Comment on Tesla Full-Self Driving Veers Off Road, Hits Tree, and Flips Car for No Obvious Reason (No Serious Injuries, but Scary) 1 week ago:
A human also (hopefully anyway) wouldn’t drive if you put a cone over their head.
Like yeah, if you purposely block the car’s vision, it should refuse to drive.
- Comment on Digg founder Kevin Rose offers to buy Pocket from Mozilla 1 week ago:
Pocket is something that I think sounds super neat in theory, but I never actually personally found any use for it.
And while I don’t think it was wrong for Mozilla to try to find an avenue for a more diversified income, I feel like they overpaid for Pocket, and it was the wrong thing to try to make money from.
- Comment on Trump says a 25% tariff "must be paid by Apple" on iPhones not made in the US, says he told Tim Cook long ago that iPhones sold in the US must be made in the US 1 week ago:
I think I will. Thanks for your input though.
- Comment on In 2025, Apple still makes it hard to play your own MP3s, so I wrote my own app 1 week ago:
Your mistake is thinking there’s some hive mind.
An absolutely tiny amount of people want fewer first party apps.
The vast majority would like all software to be available on all desktop OSes.
- Comment on Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews. 1 week ago:
Nobody is paying a subscription to use a browser they can get for free.
- Comment on Still booting after all these years: The people stuck using ancient Windows computers 2 weeks ago:
You consider Win8 a refinement of Win7?
To me refinement means small changes to make something better. It doesn’t mean completely changing the entire UX.
- Comment on Still booting after all these years: The people stuck using ancient Windows computers 2 weeks ago:
I’m not looking at it through a modern lense. It was very insecure at the time, too. I worked in a PC repair shop and at the time that business was a money printer in terms of getting rid of endless malware.
Although yes, the predecessors were worse.
They did, it was called “Windows 8” and nobody liked it.
I would not consider Win8 a “refinement” of Win7 lol, they changed the entire UX.
- Comment on Still booting after all these years: The people stuck using ancient Windows computers 2 weeks ago:
Idk, it was horrendously insecure, would freeze a lot, and missing creature comforts like window tiling.
If they kept refining Win7 it would’ve been great.
- Comment on Google to Integrate Gemini AI into Android Auto for Smarter In-Car Experience 2 weeks ago:
Fallacy fallacy.
- Comment on Netflix will show generative AI ads midway through streams in 2026 3 weeks ago:
That absolutely won’t happen.
Everybody on Lemmy and Reddit were saying the same when they banned account sharing and price increases. In reality their subscriber numbers went through the roof and so did their profits.
- Comment on Nvidia reportedly raises GPU prices by 10-15% as manufacturing costs surge — tariffs and TSMC price hikes filter down to retailers 3 weeks ago:
Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult for AMD and Intel to make any big difference in the short term.
On the Intel GPU side, bluntly, they are far behind in tech, so they have to mitigate that with more aggressive pricing.
Don’t believe me? Look at the process node they use and the die size of their chips, now look at the performance and power efficiency they get compared to similar mode/die size Radeon or Geforce cards. That means Intel has to spend a lot more but can’t charge anywhere near as much.
Intel doesn’t make money from their GPUs yet. They literally don’t want to sell too many cards because they generally lose money on each one sold. They’re spending right now to build expertise and expertise before doing a bigger push later.
On the AMD side, there’s some good news in that their latest generation is pretty great and has massively outsold their previous generations.
The bad news is that even if AMD has doubled sales or whatever, they were already such a small part of the overall pie that Nvidia (85%+ of the market) shitting the bed isn’t something AMD can suddenly fix.
It’d be like if all carmakers except Mazda shat the bed, Mazda can’t suddenly expand and fix the market.
Whenever there’s excess demand for CPUs, AMD would also prefer to service that market. It’s far higher margin.
- Comment on AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented 3 weeks ago:
Nope. I’d still say social media/social media algorithms.
Imagine if social media didn’t exist (beyond small, tight-knit communities like forums about [topic], or BBS communities), but all these AI tools still did.
Susan creates an AI generated image of illegal immigrants punching toddlers, then puts it on her “news” blog full of other AI content generated to push an agenda.
Who would see it? How would it spread? Maybe a few people she knows. It’d be pretty localised, and she’d be quickly known as a crank.
Add social media to the mix, and all of a sudden she has tens of thousands of eyes on her, which brings more and more. People argue against it, and that entrenches the other side even more. News media sees the amount of attention it gets and they feel they have to report, and the whole thing keeps growing. Wealthy people who can benefit from the bullshit start funding it and it continues to grow still.
You don’t need AI to do this, it just makes it even easier. You do need social media to do this. The whole model simply wouldn’t work without it.
- Comment on Thanks to the american FPTP voting system, Nigel Farage could obtain an absolute majority with a minority of the votes 3 weeks ago:
Yes. One of the only benefits of FPTP is that for most of its history it has stopped tiny, insane, extreme, populist parties getting a foothold, and instead encouraged relative stability. For all the issues we have, the UK has been a phenomenally stable democracy over the years.
That is no longer a protection against Reform, as they’ve broken past the “not being popular enough to gain any traction under FPTP barrier”.
- Comment on Man arrested after fires at homes linked to PM 3 weeks ago:
Set fire to his house, a flat “linked” to him (family member perhaps?), and his old car.
We live in an unhealthy democracy when people are being this extremist and violent over a political figure so bland he makes Gordon Brown look fun and care-free.
