31337
@31337@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on It is very therapeutic to garden, though. 5 days ago:
A lot of industrial produced food is cheap because of child, forced, and otherwise exploited labor (undocumented workers, for example). Heavily mechanized farming (mostly used for grains) is cheap because of the vast amount of fossil fuel “energy slaves” used. And that’s only cheap because the costs are externalized.
Anyways, growing your own food can definitely be cheaper than buying it. Of course, not if you start plants under lights, build raised beds and fill them with purchased soil, buy organic pelletized fertilizer, or stuff like that. It can be nearly free to grow your own food (if you don’t count the cost of your own labor) by saving seeds and intercepting materials from waste streams (wood chips, lawn clippings, manure, used coffee grounds, etc) to “feed your soil.”
- Comment on US to impose tariffs on Chinese EVs next week 1 week ago:
I think part of the problem is that new cars are bought mostly by fairly well-off individuals; with other people buying used cars. Economy cars sell poorly in the U.S.
- Comment on TikTok sues the US government over ban 1 week ago:
China can’t arrest people in the U.S. The U.S. and state governments can.
- Comment on TikTok sues the US government over ban 1 week ago:
Doesn’t really matter unless you live under it. Instagram and Twitter or more dangerous to U.S. citizens.
- Comment on How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money 1 week ago:
Sorry, I was unclear. Chippers are not the tools I was thinking of that would be cheaper to buy (a low quality version of) than rent. Was thinking more about stuff like torque wrenches and rotary hammers. Chipper rental prices were just one thing I was looking at recently that seemed way out of line with what other people from other regions were paying.
- Comment on How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money 1 week ago:
Rentals seem extremely expensive in my area. $100/day for a shitty 4" wood chipper, $300/day for 6" chipper. For some tools, it’s often about the same price or cheaper to buy a tool from Harbor Freight than to rent.
- Comment on How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money 1 week ago:
Libraries don’t make a profit, AFAIK. Non-profits and co-ops are things too.
- Comment on The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines 4 weeks ago:
CK2 was a complete game at launch IIRC. They just kept releasing new DLC for it for many years, much of which was outside the scope of the original game (playing as Arabic rulers, vikings, Indians, etc). I think that’s fine. Them selling music, portraits, and new models separately was kinda shitty though.
- Comment on Microsoft is once again injecting pop-up ads into Google Chrome on Windows in a bid to get people to switch to Bing 2 months ago:
Kagi is pretty good, but expensive. I like that listicles are put in their own small section so you can ignore them. You can boost, pin, demote, or block results from certain domains. You can create and quickly switch between domain list presets to search only specific sets of sites. The only thing I don’t like is the exerpts below results don’t bold what you’re looking for like Google does.
- Comment on ‘It went nuts’: Thousands join UK parents calling for smartphone-free childhood 2 months ago:
I think many worked. On the farm, in mines, in factories. Farmers would intentionally have many children just for extra labor. School hours and breaks are, in part, the way they are to let children work on the farm.
- Comment on Christians think gay people are trying to convert them to being gay *because Christians try to convert people to being Christian*. 2 months ago:
Meh, you can’t disregard the current medical and scientific consensus because it may turn out to be wrong in the future. This is the same thing the pro-fossil-fuel and tobacco organizations used to do. You work with the best information you’ve got.
Even if gayness and trans-ness was a social contagion (I don’t think it is), what would be wrong with that? The argument seems to be implying that being gay or trans is bad.
- Comment on Reddit has reportedly signed over its content to train AI models 2 months ago:
I wish there was a license for content like the GPL, that states if you use this content to train generative AI, the model must be open source. Not sure that would legally be enforceable though (due to fair-use).
- Comment on OpenAI collapses media reality with Sora AI video generator | If trusting video from anonymous sources on social media was a bad idea before, it's an even worse idea now 2 months ago:
OpenAI is no longer “pure.” They are not open. They do not publish the details of any of the discoveries they’ve made (which used to be standard practice, even in the private sector). Their leadership is now in the “effective accelerationism” camp that worships capitalism, and sees developing AGI as their moral obligation, regardless of what harm it may cause to society. (They are also delusional, because it’s very unlikely AGI will be developed anytime soon).
- Comment on I miss windows 2 months ago:
Wages are usually much lower in rural areas (if there are even jobs available), so this still applies. And, as others have said, there’s plenty of pollution caused by farms and factories in rural areas. I grew up in a rural area, and still remember the seasonal smell of cow manure, and the river that was so polluted you could only eat 1 fish per month from it. I also got a check from a class action lawsuit because a waste disposal facility caught on fire and spewed toxic smoke all over a 50 mile radius. And a local factory got caught just dumping toxic waste in the ground.
- Comment on Tipping culture npcs 2 months ago:
It just incentivizes being an asshole. Assholes give zero tips and get to keep more of their money, while normal people have to pay the empathy tax.
- Comment on YouTube now suggests new content *by colour* 3 months ago:
Thanks :) I’ve always been extremely pro-decentralization (that does not use blockchains to “solve” byzantine fault tolerance and sybil vulnerabilities). I’m fine with things being somewhat less efficient if they’re decentralized, and fine with creators and fans eating the costs about things they’re passionate about (though it would probably turn semi-decentralized with companies offering seeding/content-delivery services at low cost). The rise of symmetric home fiber connections further increases viability. But, I agree that it likely will never become mainstream.
- Comment on Music Piracy Is Back, Baby 3 months ago:
Thankfully, my ISP informs me if someone on my network shares movies on Bittorent without a VPN. Do ISPs typically do the same for music on the ed2k and gnutella networks?
- Comment on YouTube now suggests new content *by colour* 3 months ago:
I believe it works like Bittorent (and things like Windows updates) where there is a swarm of peers that simultaneously upload and download to/from eachother, so the original creator, or any single user, doesn’t necessarily need much bandwidth. There are some disadvantages to this, but it is manageable, and works for many other things. If it actually became a thing, I imagine sponsored/patreon-funded creators would pay someone to seed their videos to ensure availability and quality. Fans would probably help too. Technically, it’s a viable option.
But yeah, with how walled-garden the Internet has become, it probably won’t become popular without massive amounts of marketing and doing things like signing exclusivity deals with popular creators, which needs a lot of money.
- Comment on YouTube now suggests new content *by colour* 3 months ago:
Not much server storage and bandwidth is needed if using p2p, like peertube.
- Comment on Mark Zuckerberg says sorry to families of children who committed suicide — after rejecting suggestion to set up a compensation fund to help the families get counseling 3 months ago:
Meta could’ve done a lot of things to prevent this. Internal documents show Zuckerberg repeatedly rejected suggestions to improve child safety. Meta lobbies congress to prevent any regulation. Meta controls the algorithms and knows they promote bad behavior such as dog piling, but this bad behavior increases “engagement” and revenue, so they refuse to change it. (Meta briefly changed its algorithms for a few months during the 2020 election to decrease the promotion of disinformation and hate speech, because they were under more scrutiny, but then changed it back after the election).
- Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription 3 months ago:
This may be true at the moment, but Amazon can control how shitty the non-prime experience is.
Personally, I’m trying to avoid Amazon altogether. It’s much worse now, and flooded with cheap defective shit. I’ve also been noticing that a lot of manufacturers don’t sell on Amazon (guessing Amazon takes a big cut).
- Comment on Mark Zuckerberg indicates Meta is spending billions of dollars on Nvidia AI chips 3 months ago:
Spending is definitely looks exponential at the moment: Image
Most breakthroughs have historically been made by university researchers, then put into use by corporations. Arguably, including most of the latest developments,. But university researchers were never going to get access to the $100 million in compute time to train something like GPT-4, lol.
The human brain has 100 trillion connections. GPT-4 has 1.76 trillion parameters (which are analogous to connections). It took 25k GPUs to train, so in theory, I guess it could be possible to train a human-like intelligence using 1.4 million GPUs. Transformers (the T in GPT) are not like human brains though. They “learn” once, then do not learn or add “memories” while they’re being used. They can’t really do things like planning either. There are algorithms for “lifelong learning” and planning, but I don’t think they scale to such large models, datasets, or real-world environments. I think there needs to be a lot theoretical breakthroughs to make AGI possible, and I’m not sure if more money will help that much. I suppose AGI could be achieved by trial and error (i.e. trying ideas and testing if they work without mathematically proving if or how well they’d work) instead of rigorous theoretical work.
- Comment on X appears to be juicing MrBeast’s views to woo the YouTuber to the platform, pushing video upload into users’ feeds as an unlabeled ad 3 months ago:
Meh, I’ve never watched a video of his, but seems like it’s just a modern day game show/home makeover/dystopian feel-good story sort of thing. Neither good or bad. It’s good that he helps some people, bad that the people and many, many more need help.
- Comment on New to lemmy, anything I should know? 3 months ago:
Linux needs still needs more THC malority, IMO.
- Comment on Mark Zuckerberg indicates Meta is spending billions of dollars on Nvidia AI chips 3 months ago:
Quality. Yeah, using the extra compute to increase speed of development iterations would be a benefit. They could train a bunch of models in parallel and either pick the best model to use or use them all as an ensemble or something.
My guess is that the main reason for all the GPUs is they’re going to offer hosting and training infrastructure for everyone. That would align with the strategy of releasing models as “open” then trying to entice people into their cloud ecosystem. Or, maybe they really are trying to achieve AGI as they state in the article. I don’t really know of any ML architectures that would allow for AGI though (besides the theoretical, incomputable AIXI).
- Comment on Mark Zuckerberg indicates Meta is spending billions of dollars on Nvidia AI chips 3 months ago:
The equivalent of 600k H100s seems pretty extreme though. IDK how many OpenAI has access to, but it’s estimated they “only” used 25k to train GPT4. OpenAI has, in the past, claimed the diminishing returns on just scaling their model past GPT4s size probably isn’t worth it. So, maybe Meta is planning on experimenting with new ANN architectures, or planning on mass deployment of models?
- Submitted 3 months ago to technology@lemmy.world | 34 comments
- Comment on A literal child taking orders in a fast food restaurant in the US 4 months ago:
I started working at 15. The owner/manager of my first job would give the 15-17 year-old girls he hired drugs in exchange for sexual favors. Also had us work past legal hours and all the other normal exploitative shit people should expect.
Second job I had also had pedo managers. Asking us questions like, “what was the craziest places you had sex at?” during group orientation. I also had to dispute the hours I was paid for on nearly every paycheck I got.
I’m guessing experiences like this aren’t universal, but the fact that my first 2 jobs as a child were very exploitative, it’s probably not uncommon.
I think scheduling and being on time could be picked up quickly by adults.
- Comment on Fear Mongering About Range Anxiety Has To Stop — CT Governor Calls Out EV Opponents 4 months ago:
??? The cheapest new vehicle I’ve seen is $18k. If you’re talking about used vehicles, you can get used EVs even cheaper since they tend to lose value faster. I just checked autotrader, and they have a Leaf with only 40k miles for $9k. You’re going to have a hard time finding a decent vehicle of any kind under $5k. I really don’t understand what kind of point you’re trying to argue about. Yes, vehicles are expensive, but many people need one. I spent most of my life only being able to afford vehicles that barely ran, and repairing them myself (often improvising without having the correct tools).
- Comment on The four houses dads belong to. 4 months ago:
Fucking Ridgid got me, because on paper, they have lifetime warranties on their batteries. But after buying an expensive combo, they made it an absolute hassle to register my tools, so I kinda doubt they’ll honor their warranty. Now I’m Ridgid + Dewalt. My corded tools and hand tools are whatever brand; harbor freight or walmart if not used often, Milwaukee, DeWalt, etc if I expect to use them often.
