ricecake
@ricecake@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs 51 minutes ago:
Yeah, the conventional ones still draw a good chunk of power, and they’re not clean but they’re not dirty. Same as how a grocery store isn’t good for the environment but you’re not looking at them first for places to clean.
They tend to be boring, and are usually not a public thing but just something owned by a company to house their computers. The only reason I know about the ones near me is I used to work at one and people would move jobs to or from other ones. (As an aside, a datacenter is a great place to nap if you like white noise).
For a sense of scale:
This is the site of an open AI data center. The yellow square is about 1 square mile and mostly encompasses the area they plan to/have filled.
That angle shows more build out.
This photo has two normal data centers in it. The yellow square is also about 1 square mile. I’ve highlighted the data centers in red. One is to the left of the square near the middle, and the other is down from the right side near the big piles of what looks like rocks. (Spoilers: it’s rocks. They make asphalt). The sprawling complex in the upper right is a refrigerated grocery store distribution complex. The middle on the other side of the block from the asphalt is a coal power plant.
Of the things in this picture, I’m most upset about the giant freeway interchange. Coal is shit, but it’s a modern plant so it’s not belching soot, just co2, and the utility is phasing it out anyway. The grocery traffic is mostly dead except between the hours of midnight and 7am when they do restocks.
I can hear the freeway if I go outside. - Comment on Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs 2 hours ago:
I think the part you’re missing is that 1) it’s my community too 2) they’re not talking about AI data centers, or new data centers or anything like that, they’re petitioning to ban all data centers, and 3) we have multiple data centers in the city already that no one complained about until AI data centers became a thing people felt concerned about.
There’s a major difference between the 2 square mile hyper scale AI data center that requires a nuclear reactor and a full water treatment plant to cool and the 2 acre data center that’s air cooled and has no more ground pollution than any other parking lot and essentially a warehouse.
The state government has two in the city, at least, for processing electronic tax records, applications and hosting service sites. We have a few national insurance companies that need to process all the things they process. A research university, and a web hosting company round out the list of ones I know about.This is my entire point about why sometimes it’s really necessary to point out that what someone is referring to is only a small part of what the words they’re using describe. The language being imprecise doesn’t matter until someone proposes a law outlawing chemicals, shuttering all data centers, or banning AI.
LLMs are problematic. My fancy rice maker isn’t.
- Comment on Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs 17 hours ago:
I take your point. :)
It’s worth mentioning in my opinion though, because if someone were to say “we should ban chemicals” it’d be worthwhile to point out what that actually means.
I don’t actually think the broadness of the category is intentionally abused, it’s just that it’s an incredibly common thing to remove anything from the AI category that’s explicable.
I feel slightly more hanlons razor about it since there’s people in my city talking about and petitioning on the popular notion of banning all data centers from the state, and how it would be awful if s data center came here. I know what they mean, but it’s not what they’re trying to get the law to do, and our city already has six data centers I know of off the top of my head. The language drift is fine, but when it starts to conflate with policy it’s another issue.
- Comment on Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs 19 hours ago:
blog.mozilla.org/…/mozillas-next-chapter-anthony-…
The root of the current discussion.
- Comment on Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs 19 hours ago:
A conservative guess would be around 60 people.
bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi
You can click around and see the bug reports they’re working on. There are a few, to say the least.
www.firefox.com/en-US/releases/
This is a way to see what’s in each release. The ones on the left are major releases and tend to have bigger features, and the others tend to be bug fixes.
Web browsers start with core functionality that’s very complex. Then you tack on that they’re being used for things like banking, and managing the critical details of people’s lives. That means security galore, which is hard and constant. Then you have ad people, who are also something that’s hard to defend against.
Then there’s the constant flood of new features you have to implement to keep up with Google.Chrome has 1,000 to 4,000 people working on it. Mozzila employs about 700 to work on firefox, with maybe 1,000 additional open source developers.
My initial guess was very wrong.
- Comment on Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs 20 hours ago:
It’s less a vague umbrella and more an academic category. It just feels odd to call it vague in the same way you wouldn’t call “chemistry” vague, despite it having applications ranging from hand soap to toxic waste.
- Comment on Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs 1 day ago:
Yeah, ocr is a type of AI. The big advantage of modern techniques is that it can factor in context a bit better. It’s the same principle but a different mechanism for how you know a red hexagon with S__P on it says stop, even if the sign is dented, a letter fully fell off, it’s raining and dark.
It also means it’s sometimes wildly inaccurate, like in cases where it’s just so much more likely that it said something else. Like how on a bright sunny day, with perfect clarity, and a crisp new sign with extra good visuals, you’ll hit the breaks for a sign that’s a red hexagon that says §¥¢¶. It’s just very unlikely that that would coincidentally be on a red hexagon near the road, so it’s more likely you saw wrong and it was actually the normal thing.
- Comment on Parents opt kids out of school computers, insisting on pen-and-paper instead 1 week ago:
You’re taking what they said a fair bit further than they actually said. They said a class a day for technology literacy, and you reacted like they advocated for nothing except advanced computing.
Teaching tech literacy is part of the basics.
You can say it should be learned on their own time, but why not say that of drawing and color theory? Math, history, civics?
Some parts of primary and secondary education are about teaching you how to live in the society you’ll be living in. Technology is part of that. - Comment on Modern problems require modern solutions 1 week ago:
I mean, I get that. As I said, it’s the surprise that confuses me. I understand “ugh, why are we putting profit in _____”. It’s that someone would go “whoah, hold on, people are running daycares for money?”
- Comment on Modern problems require modern solutions 1 week ago:
I’m honestly slightly confused by this response. Any business type will end up with some that do well, open more locations and get some manner of central office. It’ll inevitably be some manner of corporation because that just how we structure any business beyond small. The daycare is where the kids go and the office their handles local stuff like contact forms and medical notes, and corporate office handles billing and such.
Like, yeah it’s weird for something as personal as childcare to be a franchise, but no one gets too worked up about corporate pharmacies and that’s literally trusting a stranger giving you a bottle of drugs to eat not to hand you the poison they keep a few feet over.
It’s weird and kinda dystopian, but I’m confused by the shock.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 1 week ago:
…yale.edu/…/buy-borrow-die-options-reforming-tax-…
It’s actually a real thing.
Since taxes are paid when an asset is sold, not when it goes up in value, your net worth goes up with no tax liability change. When you die, the purchase price for tax purposes resets. Now the inheritor sells the assets. Since the sale price is essentially the same as the taxation price, there’s no taxes.
You’re borrowing today’s money against tomorrow’s value and taking the difference out of your death messing with taxes to free up the value.
From a financial perspective the time horizon for return doesn’t matter, only that the return is balanced against the time. From that perspective, the people giving the loan have no reason to really care since it makes them look good and they’ll at least not be working there when and if it goes wrong. - Comment on Why do they turn Federation into a dystopia? 2 weeks ago:
And significantly, if you needed someone to actually do a job that wasn’t made obsolete by the removal of material scarcity you’d need to find a way to make it meaningfully enticing to them. Material scarcity is the driver for so much suckage that it’s almost mind boggling how much would change if we even made a significant dent on it.
- Comment on Why do they turn Federation into a dystopia? 2 weeks ago:
Waste and trash also aren’t an issue because of the aforementioned replicators. Waste and trash become the food. Energy is cheap, next to free, and about as clean as can be.
Why would you live in squalor when you can just as easily push a button and teleport the trash and grime into the nothing?
Education is cheap and easy because we have both plenty of educated people, and sentient AI. Same for medicine.It’s one of the few pieces of media that has traditionally outright agreed with the spirit of what you’re saying. There’s no need to shit on its message that if we find the cause to work together, we have it within us to develop fully automated luxury gay space communism because we’re more alike than we are different, and an exploration of those differences will bring us together.
The difference between a post scarcity society and the good place is that it’s not that there’s no problems, it’s that there’s no significant material problems. And it’s not like the entire galaxy was like that.
Cynicism becoming conflated with realism is boring.
At it’s heart, the expanse was explicitly not post scarcity, so comparing it’s treatment of inequality with one where those problems have been solved is silly. It’s like saying the expanse is unrealistic because their spaceships are too fast, and Apollo 13 is a more realistic portrayal. - Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Well, first off he wasn’t actually doing it after Celsius existed as a temperature scale. He made it a solid 18 years beforehand.
Second, there are some issues. Specifically, ice freezes at 0, but it doesn’t stop getting colder. So if you have a bit of ice, that doesn’t tell you the temperature, just that it’s below a threshold. Boiling is more convenient because liquid water can’t get above 100, but you do have to consider side pressure.
Fahrenheit used brine because as it freezes it forces salt out of the ice, making it more resistant to freezing. It self stabilizes its temperature, which is immensely handy.None of the people designing their scales envisioned that using the basic reference points for common calibration would be a thing. Just like how we don’t calibrate them with brine, ice, steam or butts today, instead relying on how we marked down how electrical resistance changes as a function of temperature and then calibrated reference numbers to get the scale right.
It’s important to remember that the people in the past were largely not stupid, they simply hadn’t found out something we take for granted or they had priorities that we don’t.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
So you get in the bathtub with the bike pump and have the hose connected to a nozzle going out. You might need something stronger that shrinkwrap depending on what you get, but your bathtub is invariably able to handle 1 atmosphere of pressure.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Or, hear me out: a bathtub, some shrinkwrap, a bicycle pump and so e good old fashioned grit and determination.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
I’m one of those people who knows we should standardize, bit also finds Fahrenheit just very convenient.
Like, when people say it’s 50 out, I immediately know that it’s going to feel about halfway between what I know 0 and 100 feel like. No one can even put up the pretext of doing that with Celsius, because not even the most pedantic person ever bothers to tell you when it’s 100 c out.
In seriousness though, the Fahrenheit scale isn’t non-sense, it’s just addressing things we don’t much need help with anymore. The zero point was chosen as a temperature you can create reliably without particularly sophisticated tools, and the range is so freezing and boiling are 180 degrees apart, putting them on the opposite sides of a dial.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Ugh, I’m one of those people who will defend imperial as not being irrational, just built ad-hoc for purposes that aren’t in alignment with modern ones and … No, that’s not what Fahrenheit is.
Fahrenheit was trying to make a temperature scale that was easy to recreate to ease the calibration of thermometers. Zero is a temperature that can be created in your garage with some ice, salt and water. 100 was his best, ultimately inaccurate, attempt to measure human body temperature, since it’s another easy calibration point, and from there water was defined as 32 and 212 so that they were 180 degrees apart, which would fit will on a temperature dial.
Not irrational, not a comfort scale, and not in alignment with current needs.It’s pure coincidence that it kinda lines up with comfortable outdoor temperatures in the opinion of a good chunk of a population living in the northern part of the western hemisphere.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 5 weeks ago:
So for the first part, I don’t disagree at all. I just don’t think the logistics or theoretical necessity is a bearing on the symbolic-ness of it. Same for the effectiveness of it. Even if it changed literally nothing and no one would ever know I still wouldn’t shake hands with someone I considered evil.
I don’t see defining a subset of what you consider evil, like dissemination of hate speech, to be a downside.
There’s a lot of complex questions around a platform curating ideological content which could possibly make them loose certain platform protections. Right now most platforms are roughly content neutral because it allows them to be viewed as platforms, rather than publishers. This is more a response to the claim that there’s no reason for them not to remove ice. It may or may not be compelling, but it’s a real reason.
As for the use of the word “service”, sometimes my hands type slower than my brain thinks. My intent was to convey “those who develop and control the mastodon license”. Hopefully my original statement makes more sense in that context.
Those are the people providing the printing press schematic analog. Obviously an idea can’t support an ideology in that sense.I’m not of the opinion either supports them in a way that’s worth getting angry over.
We also aren’t talking about being angry at ISPs for being willing to deliver packets to and from ice or Nazis, or any of the other entities that do less then the most they could possibly do to distance themselves. - Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 5 weeks ago:
Says the fact that it’s come up multiple times amongst a wide swath of the open source community, and look about you. Those licenses aren’t used. One or two exist and have a vanishingly small usage level and a couple more I have been “in progress” for years.
The people who write most of the open source licenses have explanations for why it’s not compatible.Group behavior is a collective decision and a reflection of the group.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 5 weeks ago:
No, you’re not understanding what I’m saying. I’m not the person you were replying to.
Mastodon is a piece of software. It has a license, just like bluesky or any other. You can put a clause in the license saying the software cannot be used for the dissemination of hate speech. The open source community has discussed this and decided it goes against the principles of free software and open source.If you’re mad at one and not the other, you’re applying different standards because being part of the fediverse weighs more.
Personally I hold platforms to a different standard and so I’m neither mad at mastodon nor bluesky. I just think it’s hypocritical to be mad at someone for publishing a fascists letter but not be mad at the person who gave the same fascist a printing press.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 5 weeks ago:
So the mastodon service supports Nazis.
nobody owns it and anyone can run it
They could have chosen a license that forbid usage for spreading hate. They put “free software” and “open source” above blocking hate speech.
They’re providing software to Nazis, and I don’t really see how that makes them better than providing a place to post. - Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 2 months ago:
Yup, that’s a good one.
Purely for discussions sake, I’d say that the video game entity is making a choice, but it lacks volition.
No freewill or consciousness, but it’s selecting a course of action based on environment circumstances. - Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 2 months ago:
It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.
You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.
The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 2 months ago:
www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ if you’re actually interested in donating.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 2 months ago:
Right now browser usage patterns are shifting because people are trying new things. Most of those new things are AI integration. If those new things prove popular or have staying power remains to be seen.
Firefox , in my estimation, is looking to leverage their existing reputation for privacy focus while also adding new technologies that people seem at least interested in trying.
A larger user base means that people will pay more for ads, which if they maintain their user control and privacy standards users are less likely to disable on the default landing screen.It’s why they keep getting flac for working on privacy preserving advertising technology: they want you to use Firefox because they don’t stop you from disabling the bullshit, and they hope to do the bullshit in a way that makes you not mind leaving it on.
All the AI stuff was mentioned in the same context as discussion about how they need to seek money in ways that aren’t simply being paid by Google.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 2 months ago:
Their CEO makes more than I think CEOs should earn in general, but the rest of their executives earn relatively normal to low salaries for their roles and the sector.
Non-profit doesn’t mean everyone works for free.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 2 months ago:
But that’s just saying that instead of using Firefox and not turning on the feature, you’ll use a less maintained version of Firefox where they didn’t enable the feature. I don’t feel like those projects have much value add in the privacy spectrum compared to Firefox, particularly when one of them was owned by an advertising company, and neither of them actually has the resources to maintain or operate a browser in isolation, which is a major concern regarding security and privacy both.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 2 months ago:
A very vocal portion of the user base, but we don’t actually know what absolute portion cares. I’m personally unlikely to use possible AI features outside translation, but Mozilla has generally done enough that I don’t feel particularly worried they’re going to mess with my privacy or force me to use a feature I don’t want.
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 2 months ago:
Contrary to popular belief, the US isn’t actually unusually litigious. European countries are just as litigious and Germany, Sweden and Austria all have higher numbers.
The reason we have more “nonsense” lawsuits is because we have a culture that says caveat emptor is a sound defense and negligence on one parties side is equally the fault of the injured party.
“Why didn’t you look at your food before biting the metal fillings? It’s your responsibility to make sure what you eat is safe” and “you walked on my icy sidewalk, you slipped, and now you want me to pay for your ambulance? I should have put down salt, but you should have known better than to walk there” are both reasonable statements to a lot of Americans. Hell, we have special derogatory terms for lawyers that work with individuals who have been non-criminally injured by someone else.On paper, paying the other parties legal fees if you lose sounds good, but what it does it keep individuals who can’t afford to pay legal someone else’s fees to withold valid legal complaints. In an ideal world they would proceed because they were right, but we live in a world where sometimes the person in the right looses, or they reasonably thought they were and were wrong. Due diligence or actual correctness is no assurance of justice, so a lawsuit is a gamble and a more expensive one if you also have to pay the other parties costs, and if they’re a business which has lawyers on staff they might not even view a crippling legal cost as an increased expense.
On the other side that business just tells their lawyer to file the paperwork, they’re already paying for the legal consult so they’re advised going in if it’s a good idea, and if they lose they’re out a few weeks of lawyer salary.Lawsuits are a mark of people using societies tools to resolve disputes. There being more in places with higher trust in social institutions makes sense. People are willing to use the system and they trust it’ll deliver justice.
The US is up there because people need to use lawsuits to make up for our lack in social safety nets, and our preposterous number of businesses are constantly using them to settle disputes.We should eliminate the court fees entirely and provide the trial lawyer equivalent of a public defender.
A bolt in your oatmeal is a good reason to sue, and if you can’t afford a lawyer to help you pay to get your tooth put back in it doesn’t seem unreasonable for society to give you access to someone to help you find a path to remunerations.
