ricecake
@ricecake@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 2 days ago:
And you didn’t even read past the first sentence I see.
Saying they’re the same because they both use a neural network is roughly equivalent to saying things are they same because they’re both manipulating kinetic energy.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 3 days ago:
… How if flying a spaceship different from driving a car? They’re both controlled applications of kinetic energy to move people or objects.
At the end of the day, it’s all a pile of transistors and the only thing that is of import is the intent behind usage.
In one case it’s saying you can use a neural net to take something rendered at resolution A/4 and make it visually indistinguishable from the same render at resolution A.
The other is rendering something and radically changing the artistic or visual style.Upsampling can be replicated within some margin by lowering framerate and letting the GPU work longer on each frame. It strives to restore detail left out from working quicker by guessing.
You cannot turn this feature off and get similar results by lowering the frame rate. It aims to add detail that was never present by guessing.Upsampling methods have been produced that don’t use neural networks. The differences in behavior are in the realm of efficiency, and in many cases you would be hard pressed to tell which is which. The neural network is an implementation detail.
In the other case, the changes are more broad than can be captured by non AI techniques easily. The generative capabilities are central to the feature.Process matters, but zooming out too far makes everything identical, and the intent matters too. “I want to see your art better” as opposed to “I want to make your art better”.
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 1 week ago:
That’s not bullying, that’s enforcing social mores.
- Comment on https://www.androidauthority.com/desktop-mode-march-pixel-drop-3646069/ 2 weeks ago:
There’s hardware required to shunt the display out the USB port and since it’s not a super in demand feature they usually don’t implement it. As such the software for looking nice while doing it isn’t as developed.
But yes, it’s been in developer settings for years, and was usable if your hardware supported it.
- Comment on https://www.androidauthority.com/desktop-mode-march-pixel-drop-3646069/ 2 weeks ago:
Yes. And now it’s native in all android! Samsung helped make it!
It’s good when things get better.
- Comment on The list is realistically so much longer. 2 weeks ago:
There’s no precedent at all. Precedent implies that it happened, which it didn’t.
Something being thought of and dismissed is just not evidence for that thing being done.It’s not like it was even that original of an idea. There had been two plane hijackings by cubans in the past year. Proposing “what if a third went wrong” is hardly a masterclasses in outside the box thinking.
We’ve done other false flag operations. Other terrible things to domestic civilians.
Using that time we didn’t actually do anything as an example is just odd.Personally, I think people like it just because it has a cooler name. “Mongoose” just doesn’t have the same ring.
- Comment on The list is realistically so much longer. 2 weeks ago:
And? What happened next? Did they do an operation Northwoods? Did we go to war with Cuba? Was Johnson more aggressive on Cuba than Kennedy, or was he actually more engaged on diplomatic fronts?
I’m not forgetting anything. It just doesn’t fit with any narrative that makes a lick of goddamned sense. Like, Kennedy rejected Northwoods because he was worried the troops might be needed in Europe, so starting a war in Cuba would be a bad move.
He was strongly in favor of every other operation they proposed as part of the larger plan.Why would a massive conspiracy exist to kill Kennedy for rejecting a plan and then… Not do the plan?
- Comment on The list is realistically so much longer. 2 weeks ago:
I agree, and feel similarly about the inclusion of operation Northwoods.
It’s most prominently a horrifying plan that was rejected and remained classified, with the proposer being replaced shortly afterwards (it’s entirely possible that’s a coincidence).Someone thinking of something horrible and then not doing it isn’t evidence that they would do something similar. There’s no particular reason to think they hid evidence because they admitted in the same deeply classified documents to doing far worse things.
- Comment on Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs 2 weeks 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 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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... 4 weeks 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? 5 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? 5 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month ago:
Or, hear me out: a bathtub, some shrinkwrap, a bicycle pump and so e good old fashioned grit and determination.
- Comment on 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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.
