Telorand
@Telorand@reddthat.com
- Comment on Framework temporarily pausing some laptop sales in the US due to tariffs. 2 hours ago:
Kinda skeptical myself. For anyone unaware, they tried to make an Aptera model several years ago before all the trade fuckery, and despite making waves and turning heads, they eventually had to call it quits due to lack of funding.
I hope they succeed this time, now that people want EVs, but my expectations of success are low.
- Comment on What Will Remain for People to Do? The future of labor in a world with increasingly productive AI. 15 hours ago:
Not going to read most of this paper, because it reads like a freshman thesis, and it fundamentally oversells or misunderstands the existing limits on AI.
In closing, I consider the limits to these limits as AI gradually, but relentlessly, becomes ever-more capable.
The AI technofacists building these systems have explicitly said they’ve hit a wall. They’re having to invest in their own power plants just to run these models. They have scores of racks of GPUs, so they’re dependent upon the silicon market. AI isn’t becoming “ever more capable,” it’s merely pushing the limits of what they have left.
And all the while, these projects are still propped up almost entirely by venture capital. They’re an answer to a problem nobody is having.
Put another way, if the leaders of the AI companies are right in their predictions, and we do build AGI in the short- to medium-term, will these limits be able to withstand such remarkable progress?
Again, the leaders are doing their damnedest to convince investors that this stuff will pay off one day. The reality is that they have yet to do anything close to that, and investors are going to get tired of pumping money into something that doesn’t return on that investment.
AI is not some panacea that will magically make ultracapitalists more wealthy, and the sooner they realize that, the sooner we can all move on—like we did with the Metaverse and blockchain.
- Comment on Amazon Wishlist Alternative? 18 hours ago:
We’re focused on pop-up mealshares, so it would mostly be supplies to help with that, but we also give out toiletries and outdoor living supplies.
Yeah, charity work is classic overconsumption. /s
- Comment on Revealed: The shocking far-right agenda behind the surveillance tech used by ICE and the FBI. 20 hours ago:
Remember, when you aim to misbehave, black bloc is your friend.
- Comment on Did the EU just propose to add back doors to encryption mechanisms? 1 day ago:
They said they would leave the EU. They didn’t say people couldn’t use their service via a VPN (which is the solution they suggested).
- Comment on Non-AI Slop version of the MIT "quantum highway" communicationdevelopment 1 day ago:
Neat. That’s way more interesting than the pop science hype pieces.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
Can’t have all those qbits driving on the highways for free! /s
- Comment on “It Wouldn’t Be Surprising If, in Two Years’ Time, There Was a Film Made Completely Through AI”: Says Hayao Miyazaki’s Own Son 2 days ago:
Maybe we just don’t like AI, and billionaire fuckwads just need to suck it up and move on, like how Zuck bet the farm that the Metaverse was going to be the next hot thing and now has to pretend he didn’t spend gobs of money on it.
But no, it’s the cancel-culture mob. 😂 JFC, what a take.
- Comment on “It Wouldn’t Be Surprising If, in Two Years’ Time, There Was a Film Made Completely Through AI”: Says Hayao Miyazaki’s Own Son 2 days ago:
I liked that one. I’m supremely doubtful he’s correct, but I don’t think his directorial prowess has anything to do with it.
- Comment on EU considers tariffs on digital services Big Tech 4 days ago:
Same. Hard times are coming, and I have a suspicion it’s going to be worse than 2008.
- Comment on EU considers tariffs on digital services Big Tech 4 days ago:
As an American, I’m already subscribed to !buycanadian@lemmy.ca and !buyeuropean@feddit.uk.
I’ll eat those tariffs to ensure the companies that stood at Trump’s side feel it in their stock portfolios.
- Comment on EU considers tariffs on digital services Big Tech 4 days ago:
The purpose of tariffs (in a normal world) is to make it harder for domestic entities to buy international goods. Typically, this will spur growth of a particular sector of industry within a country over time.
The way Trump is using them as a battering ram in an attempt to punish other countries, rather than incentivize steady growth, is why the US market is tanking and likely headed to another recession (or worse).
By retaliating in kind, the EU will be incentivizing their citizens and companies not to buy from the US. This will hurt companies that are based in the US, like Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc., further sending the US economy into freefall and bolstering the European economy, since they aren’t trying to punish every single trade partner in existence.
There may be other ways they try to move money around to avoid the tariffs, but governments are aware of how big businesses operate and often try to close those kinds of loopholes. Since this has become a global political issue, I would imagine they’ll be keeping a more watchful eye than normal on things.
- Comment on Sam Altman’s World launches Mini Apps 1.2, lets devs build-to-earn 4 days ago:
Mini Apps version 1.2 makes mini apps load faster within the World mobile app, adds haptic feedback, enables customization, and allows you to pin your favorite mini apps to your phone’s home screen without needing to open the Worldcoin Wallet app, according to the company.
Eww, why would I want to have a garbage cryptocoin app that opens other apps?
Cryptobros are so weird. Like, their brains have been so thoroughly addled that they can’t see reality except through crypto
- Comment on AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%. 5 days ago:
Yeah, I know it’s not precisely correct, but it’s a fable that’s commonly understood as an example of over-engineering. I’m open to better and more factual examples, if you have any!
- Comment on AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%. 5 days ago:
You may be right. It’s just easier to get the sentiment across that way than expound about how it’s ridiculously complex and overbuilt to achieve menial results.
- Comment on AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%. 5 days ago:
AI: The “pen that can write in zero gravity” when pencils exist.
- Comment on MIT introduced a smart assistant for LLM 5 days ago:
This framework was tested on nine complex challenges. It achieved an 85 percent success rate, whereas the best baseline only achieved a 39 percent success rate. This suggests its applications in various multistep planning tasks, such as scheduling airline crews or managing machine time in a factory.
85% isn’t good. It’s a vast improvement, but it’s not a good rate at scale. If you have 100,000 actions, 15,000 are wrong. If you have 1M customers, 150K are calling customer support.
Also, even if we’re talking about smaller scales like scheduling airline crews or managing machine time, how is AI not overkill? You have to have relatively massive amounts of hardware for the payoff of what a handful of people could do. Or a “dumb” algorithm. Or a signup sheet. And now we’re adding additional computing overhead?
AI is still a solution in search of a problem.
- Comment on Stop calling them tech companies: GenAI and SaaS — are they really tech? It’s time to call a spade a spade. 6 days ago:
I would, but I just switched to LibreWolf, and in the process, my settings got wiped out, so I’m still rebuilding.
Surprisingly, there’s still plenty of websites that don’t need much JavaScript at all, so I think it’s better to just start fresh for your personal use.
NoScript is pretty straightforward. Default behavior is to block most JavaScript, but they have a few that have been let through to keep the web mostly functioning. You can go into settings and change the default behaviors or just ignore all that and start whitelisting things as you go.
- Comment on Stop calling them tech companies: GenAI and SaaS — are they really tech? It’s time to call a spade a spade. 6 days ago:
Yes! NoScript is my tool of choice.
It can sometimes be annoying to have to whitelist things, but after seeing that when I allow the main domain (and maybe their CDN) through the filter, and ten more domains will try to do whatever it is they do—Google Tags and Analytics, some data broker, some cookie tracker, etc.—I’m willing to take that extra step just to keep all these companies from snarfing up my data.
A little annoyance is a small price to pay, in my mind.
- Comment on Stop calling them tech companies: GenAI and SaaS — are they really tech? It’s time to call a spade a spade. 6 days ago:
I run a whitelist. I’d rather be more private than know what to blacklist (and there’s often a lot of extra JavaScript that gets called, mostly for tracking).
It’s not that tedious. You just add as you use the internet. Refresh the page when you’ve whitelisted.
- Comment on Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution. 1 week ago:
I took a general comment and said something very specific. What you saw as dual meaning, I saw as one. OP did not make their intended meaning clear.
Maybe we can be better than Reddit and be more charitable with each other here, yeah?
- Comment on What the Technofascists and Religious Fanatics Have in Common: End Days Theology 1 week ago:
Related and from a “history of religion in the US” POV.
- Comment on Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution. 1 week ago:
Bruh, why are you taking umbrage? Chill, I didn’t shit on your birthday cake.
- Comment on Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution. 1 week ago:
That’s not the only problem. They’re making content, so finding “the right person” will inevitably be less important than finding a person. Can’t fall out of the Almighty Algorithm’s favor, amirite?
- Comment on Samsung’s latest stick vac can alert you to calls and text messages 1 week ago:
Sounds like The Perfect Product!
/s
- Comment on DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse 1 week ago:
AGI is definitely just around the corner! We just need to throw more money and the energy produced by half the country at it!
- Comment on DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse 1 week ago:
He’s not. He wins either way. The government crumbles, he gets to remake it in his image. He fails, he gets to claim he made the government more efficient, and the fact that it’s limping along is just the result of “necessary” pruning.
This is all theater. He doesn’t actually care about the outcome or the American people.
- Comment on DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse 1 week ago:
My company actually wrote their flagship software in COBOL starting in the 80s, and we’re only now six years into rewriting everything in a more modern language with probably four years to go.
I can’t imagine trying to start such a project like rewriting all of Social Security and thinking it will take months. You have to be a special kind of fatuous to unironically think that.
- Comment on DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse 1 week ago:
How this will go:
“Okay Grok. Convert this COBOL code into Python.”
“Certainly! Here you go.”
System crashes and exposes all Americans’ SSNs
“Fuckin’ DEI hires…!”
- Comment on YSK that in the US, denaturalization, the process of revoking a person's citizenship, does not require proof "Beyond reasonable doubt" 1 week ago:
Brain drain, the collapse of public universities that rely on international students (which is probably many), and making tourists, legal residents, and non-natural-born citizens afraid to come or stay here.
Constantly attacking foreigners will make them leave or never show up, leaving the US a little dumber, a little poorer, making a little less economic/scientific/social progress, and a little more white.
And it’s that last piece that they’ll trumpet among their propaganda outlets and call it a victory.