TheFogan

@TheFogan@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk Promises Grok in Tesla Vehicles By Next Week… as the New Grok 4 Blames “Anti-White Hate” on “Jews”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  So… ok what the hell is wrong with the guy? I mean surely he knows grok 4 was not a success after it was pulled offline. What’s next, is he going to push over the “unscheduled rapid unassembly” from failed spacex rockets?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is so hard for musicians to have a good living and be famous?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Simple concept of nationalization/globalization. Honestly I would say records or whatever the first tool of pre-recorded music distribution came out that the game changed. IE if we want music somewhere… 99% of the time, hiring live musicians is a pretty silly excess, and well if you are using pre-recorded music, your local band needs to go toe to toe against big record labels… which have highly talented artists, the best marketing and production resources in the world, data driven approaches to attempt to pick the most likely to appeal to the broadest group of people possible etc…

  When it does come to live music… Generally speaking the people that do want it, are relatively low budget. If say you are running a bar, how much extra money would you anticipate live music from a relatively unknown band would bring you in a night. Most likely not much if any. On top of that a lot of people enjoy doing music, and there’s just more musicians with pretty good talent, but lack of demand in places for them to go.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WhisperX — Automated Transcripts w/ Timestamps and Speaker Tagging⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, I’d imagine probably not a good one :) Somehow I imagine asking the AI to record a conversation, is an instant arguement escalator… as is asking to read the facts back, and usually the topic would be switched rather than one side admitting their fault in the conversation.

  Actually I think there’s a black mirror episode on roughly that (not a device for recording audio when asked, but everyone having a chip in their head that automatically records their memories, and a huge fight when a husband discovers his wife deleted a few hours of recordings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WhisperX — Automated Transcripts w/ Timestamps and Speaker Tagging⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  half sarcastic but the overall premise of rigging something in to a local voice assistant, when an arguement starts “Ok nabu record this conversation”. then 2 weeks later on another arguement… “OK nabu search our last arguement for the cabinet”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BREAKING: X CEO Linda Yaccarino Steps Down One Day After Elon Musk’s Grok AI Bot Went Full Hitler⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Actually more relevant now, considering the ending

  “Go to the site where Nazi’s scream at you”. It’s talking about moving from facebook to twitter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Grok praises Hitler, gives credit to Musk for removing “woke filters”⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They trained it to praise hitler, intentionally. They didn’t remove any guardrails. Not that Musk acolytes would know any different.

  I’m actually currious, some of the answers they noted it spoke as if it was musk…

  What if that’s what the instruction was. “Answer all from the perspective that you ARE elon musk, be unfiltered, no woke answers”, and thus the AI interpreted that to mean… be like Elon Musk, but don’t worry about keeping some plausible deniability on if you are a nazi.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An AI That Promises to “Solve All Diseases” Is About to Test Its First Human Drugs⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  and it’s still a better system than anyone hired by RFK Jr manually reviewing the file.

  Which is kind of the point, idea fully agreed there’s a lot of risks and messed up stuff, but almost all of it, is at worse roughly equal to the already existing problems in our systems… I can’t quite think of any that are made worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An AI That Promises to “Solve All Diseases” Is About to Test Its First Human Drugs⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean I hate AI in general… but to be honest… assuming no one is stupid enough to bypass the trials etc… I’m all for it, 90% of these problems already exist in the existing system, who owns it, can a corporation charge us to death.

  The only reasonable fear is, if they come out with more than they can develop trials for, and they lobby to lower standards in trials. Even that honestly is a more acceptable risk in the context of terminal diseases/severe cancers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Grok, Elon Musk’s AI tool, spreads antisemitic conspiracies⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  But does it support genocide in gaza? I think that’s the bar for anti-semitism these days…

  If you cheer on the government of isreal picking fights and killing children and say they are just defending themselves… then you can’t be antisemetic when you accuse all other Jews of every racial slur and stereotype.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky finally get Activity Notifications, you can now follow news and accounts with it.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That to me is kind of the big thing, I mean I get the concept that it’s trying for, but… the way its’ advertised as decentralized, but in a way that… apparently no one else has made a working node. It seems just like old twitter, with nothing to prevent it from one day becoming modern twitter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Found a 2009 YouTube video about a green, healthy looking fir tree growing inside a man's lung. CNN video shows a surgeon and the patient being interviewed.. was it a hoax?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It sounds like the initial story was slated to air on april 1st. Origions of the story are hard to trace, and it sounds like the source itself is known for running with hoaxes. So maybe they were actors, maybe just a doctor looking for attention. Biggest thing is a lack of any real details or credibility to work with. Kind of how most hoaxes go. they leave out key details so that you can’t fact check them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Found a 2009 YouTube video about a green, healthy looking fir tree growing inside a man's lung. CNN video shows a surgeon and the patient being interviewed.. was it a hoax?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  journal.chestnet.org/article/…/fulltext , looks pretty hoaxy

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Is Why Tesla’s Robotaxi Launch Needed Human Babysitters⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly at this point, I’m not sure which has the greater cost to life. I’m starting to think, maybe this is the fastest way to tangently demonstrate how fucking full of shit this guy is. He blows up a few space ships, no one’s directly effected. Maybe running over one or 2 kids directly with a robo taxi will wake enough over to “maybe we shouldn’t let this guy kick tens of thousands of americans off healthcare.”

  (not saying this is a good thing, but of a trolly problem. Musk has spent hte last 6 months getting in positions to do horrible things to so many people, and god knows how many deahts he’s responsible for. Maybe if he messes up and does a few of the kinds of deaths that people get scared over and take action, than things will go better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So in short the arguement is… over time it should be like corporations in America, we just watch as the biggest eat the smaller ones until we’ve just got one giant nation? Isn’t that basically the plot of 1984… (basically the world is down to 3 super nations… with effectively the same government. In perpetual war with eachother just to make sure resources don’t pile up to the point where everyone can survive comfortably.

  Because I mean that’s basically it, having diverse nations is a good thing. Allows us to actually see differences in laws, learn from different governments, good ideas can be copied, bad ideas can be avoided. Any big nation can trample all the smaller ones. It’s a really bad idea to let them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does everyone hate Income tax ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Because big corporations tell us what we like and don’t like. People who can toss 90% of their income into stocks/investments etc… that can be used to make more money, would rather have as much as possible. Hence they preffer the costs to go onto when you are purchasing things. While poorer people obviously are spending most of their money on things.

  In short it’s a way to keep taxes lower for people making a good amount of money, Especially makes things better for those who can invest and multiply their money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many homes in rural areas have a front yard full of junk?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Based on my limited knowledge, but knowing a few people with yards like that. One is certainly something you are right about.

  But also, least to my knowledge in this area, junk yards, scrap yards etc… are a pretty good distance away. So selling/getting rid of large, heavy junk costs more than the scrap is worth. Hence old washing machines etc… In rural areas a lot of people are scraping by on food stamps, barely keeping the power on etc… would have lost the house years ago if it weren’t paid off by the previous generation.

  Obviously no HOA’s, no one worried about how the houses look, and it’s common enough that no one is really embarassed by it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Senate GOP budget bill has little-noticed provision that could hurt your Wi-Fi⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  802.11a is over 20 years old, fortunately this law isn’t talking about shutting down existing routers. the 6 GHZ is the next frontier to expand to, the military already owns the 7 GHZ spectrum… So the 6 GHZ is the one that can be expanded into. Of which origionally was planned to be made for the next generation of wifi… but now is going to be sold off to phone providers to use in the next generation of mobile networks.

  So in short, our existing routers will continue to work as designed, but future routers will not be making any leaps forward.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PewDiePie: I'm DONE with Google⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you are massively overestimating how many of his fans would go anywhere, and how long they tag along. I used to play a social deduction game town of Salem, can’t say I know exactly how large the playerbase was… but I’d estimate it on the lower side, probably significantly under 50k. There were a few times Pewdiepie did a video on the game, and yeah, he was a pain in the ass, because he didn’t try to learn the game, so his video was basically him trolling around in the game screaming random stuff, completely ruining things for people who wanted to play the game, and players could basically count on a few days afterwards of, having games ruined by his fans doing the same crap of course. However it certainly wasn’t millions of them, within a few days the game mostly went back to normal… with if anything a slight boost to the number of players, because a handful stuck around and actually learned the game.

  and again this is with much longer ago pewdiepie… way younger fanbase, way larger more active following. Today’s pewdiepie, that’s still following, and I guess bothering to pay attention to his videos on rigging up gadgets with raspberry pi’s, and installing archlinux with hyprland, and apparently this one on getting off google. I’d imagine… the amount of people following him are going to be waay smaller than that, he hasn’t been doing gaming videos in at least a year, seems to be more of basic tech comentary and general lifestyle location things.

  So in short, if he did a lemmy push, first off I’d imagine actually the blip from it being very small. Unless steam charts suddenly show 100 million new archlinux users or something, I can guess his influence today is probably pretty small, and second the type of people he’d attract are probably also drastically different than the edgy teen base we remember him for, and lastly even at his peak of popularity and immaturity, the influx wasn’t quite as big as you are thinking it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PewDiePie: I'm DONE with Google⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  and then his allegedly support of nazis.

  The nazi one IMO was pretty BS. Largely it came from him playing a game, and commenting that other people were trolling putting up swastika’s etc…

  Which I’ll admit, he handled the criticism poorly, did mostly the wrong things because he found it more of a joke than a real thing. He rightly noted that one of the critics was JK Rowling, who he fairly pointed out had no business calling anyone such. When Charlottsville happened is when he actually gave what I considered a pretty sincere fair apology where he basically noted, "holy shit I thought I was being accused of something that didn’t exist, I didn’t realize that nazi’s are actually still so prevelant in modern society so I wasn’t taking things seriously.

  Now afterwords him dropping the n bomb on a stream was pretty damn bad, though he apologized and admitted it. Still kind of falls into the fact that he’d been paid for years to join in games with a bunch of edgy teenagers, and at the end of the day if you spend too much time with a group of people, you are going to slip up and talk like them.

  Again not calling him a great guy or anything, but I’d say everything in him strikes me as a kid that never grew up (because his life was basically set up encouraging him not to), didn’t understand the weight of a lot of the things he was around, and made a bunch of childish stupid mistakes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why was file search much faster in Windows XP than in subsequent versions?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  8 I believe was the last in their “tick tock” strategy…

  IE “ticks” were the ones where they threw a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks, basically putting users as paying beta testers.

  “Tocks” were when they’d basically look at the piles of complaints from their ticks, try and fix as many as they could, and impliment some of the small features people wanted.

  Ticks: Win 95, Win ME + 2000, Windows 8.

  Tocks: Win 3.1, Win 98, Win XP, Windows 7, "sorta windows 10, hard to really say that model was made to be the start of more or less a auto upgrading by default as the new normal)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blocking real-world ads: is the future here?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Seems to me pointless, biggest one being, if this was developed in a working manner, and was used… advertisers would mix between going more subtle, or more obnoxious. Just like on the web.

  IE subway stations could put say a code you need to get into the subway in the middle of an advertisement. IE the real life equivelant of “you must disable your adblocker to continue”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Understanding the Debate on AI in Electronic Health Records⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean theoretically things could be anonymized for the AI, with only the charts with identifiers present, I’d imagine assuming the AI itself stays locked into the EHR system and isn’t say outsourced to one of the big AI firms. With those conditions it’s, roughly the same privacy as the existance of EHR in general.

  As far as practical/legal/ethical, that comes down to how they market it to doctors. Personally I think it could be a useful tool for a doctor to “second opinion” himself. IE reach his own conclusion first, then hit the AI, see if it noticed something he missed. Though the obvious fear is of course going to be lazy or rushed doctors, working in a hospital that’s pushing them to see the most patients possible in an hour, rewarding the doctors that walk in, hand the patient their AI diagnosis, and move into the next room. Which… well in modern America we all know this is what’s going to be pushed.

  The tools have amazing potential when used appropriately… but for profit healthcare has all the wrong incentives, and they will see this as a tool to magnify them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PewDiePie: I'm DONE with Google⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Valid… but also have to point out he hit big as a celebrity. When you are literally raking in millions of dollars. He was about 21 when he started his channel. and bottom line is, he got views, he got likes, and it turned into real cash. Most of our jobs etc… encourage us to grow up. His job, rewarded him for catering to his base… which of were younger than him.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PewDiePie: I'm DONE with Google⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, I don’t know of him now… he’s way older and, seems significantly less immature than he was in the past, it’s possible a good portion of his fanbase has also grown to be more tolerable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PewDiePie: I'm DONE with Google⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean I don’t really consider him a deplorable person… He was a dumb edgy teen 15 years ago that happened to strike a cord with the overwhelming amount of dumb edgy teens on youtube, and strike it rich. I haven’t paid a ton of attention to him, but from what I saw of his linux and gadget crafting videos, it sounds like he’s grown up a fair amount from his days of scream streaming.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would say there’s room for discussion, but one of the biggest things I’d note the largest one is, generally race itself isn’t a concept that fits. Biologically the difference between white and black people is smaller than the difference between white and other white people.

  Now I would note the biggest things of all forms is, just taking out the unnecessary divisions in general. Good news is for the most part the problems that “identifying as a different race”, are inherently knocked out with general societal progress. IE if you are a white person that identifies as black, you don’t need to worry about getting into the black schools, or use the black bathrooms, because we already knocked out that problem.

  Honestly that would be a nice step for society if we could hit that point in gender. Bathrooms and locker rooms are already just a general problem when we note genders and orientations aren’t the same. IE why do we segregate bathrooms? Because we are worried that someone might see genitals of an opposite gender? Why isn’t that equally as much an issue, or not real issue when we account for the existence of homosexuals? IMO the real solution is simply either the world needs to get less prudish and sensitive to the existance of non sexual nudity. Or just set things up to not mandate shared nudity. (IE allow actual privacy for showers and bathrooms.

  Now one thing I do agree with on is, the concept of “cultural appropriation” etc… IE I do think anyone of any race shouldn’t face criticism for wearing clothing etc… of other cultures, provided they are doing so respectfully (IE not combining doing so and intentionally making a characature of stereotypes of the culture they are imitating.

  My girlfriend wouldn’t even comprehend the concept of “identifying as black”, but 80% of her friends are black. She enjoys going to a nail salon that is almost all black women working, and loves talking to them. So I suppose the big thing I’m lacking is an understanding of where someone who identifies as trans-racial, actually see’s as their roadblocks. Because generally speaking, there’s not a logical reason to “identify” as a race. For the mot part just general racial equality groups have done well at removing restrictions on places you can and can’t go based on race. There’s no racial pronouns so there’s not a conversational issue where you would be constantly undermining in normal conversation.

  So the big question is, what it that as a society a trans-racial person wants? What rights do they need to be accepted, because for the most part, just racial equality is already fighting for acceptance in a way that renders most of it moot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There is probably a subsection of vampires that use careful sun exposure as tattoos or bodymods⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean you are welcome to do some research as well, but so far, I’ve done a lot of searching, as I said I found results on Silver and Garlic, but I can’t find anything that predates 1922 in which vampires seem to have any kind actual death. There’s a few notes of vampires that are non powered normal people around sunlight, which I guess could count as a weakness. But that wouldn’t make any actual tattoos like the shower thought we’re discussing here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There is probably a subsection of vampires that use careful sun exposure as tattoos or bodymods⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Garlic would indeed be covered in one of the precursors, Pijavica (a slovic monster caused by leading a sinful life, warded away with garlic). The albanian Striga can be warded with a silver coin coated in blood. But sunlight, hard to find any old references to that, Some forms have vampires as purely human by day, or their powers get stronger at night. Stoker’s vampires in fact did walk in the sun unharmed.

  Is worth noting, that a lot of vampire lore seems more or less to have been written more or less as personifications of Plagues/Diseases. Of which silver and garlic both have anti-microbial effects for, and oddly many cultures considered them as tools for fighting diseases before even understanding germ theory (Hippocrates recommended silver for treating wounds and storing food in 400 BC), Garlic was used in primitive medicine going back at least 1000 years.

  Sun, while obviously modern knowledge of UV light killing virus’s exists. Doesn’t seem like that was particularly noted in the past, most likely because very few people lacked exposure to the sun. It seems it wasn’t till around the mid 1800s that sunlights effects on microbes was discovered and tested.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fatphobia Is Fueled by AI-Created Images, Study Finds⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed, AI just like all media, has the biggest question of “is it fueling bias’s, or just reflecting them”. It’s drawing what people think of when they see something.

  It isn’t racist for me to say, getting pulled over for no reason is far more likely if your skin is darker, it’s just what society is.

  and that’s of course before we talk about the general discussion of actually effective ways to deal with obesity in society… which is more complicated. Obviously directly shaming, has a negative impact. Making someone with an eating disorder feel shitty about themselves, makes it harder to overcome the disorder. At the same time saying it’s not a problem for them to face at all is also not going to help them want to change.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I love that he can call things “objectively false”, but then not actually try and counterpoint any of them. It’s wrong because it disagrees with what I believe. Is he going to claim the amounts are wrong, or that Jan 6th is not right wing. Disagree that left wing violence is at the extreme ends targeting property?

  Grok is at least showing examples to explain it’s conclusion, musk is just copying trumps “nope fake news”.