tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Nine in ten honey samples from UK retailers fail authenticity test 1 week ago:
Lynne Ingram, a Somerset beekeeper and the chair of the Honey Authenticity Network UK, said: “The market is being flooded by cheap, imported adulterated honey and it is undermining the business of genuine honey producers. The public are being misinformed, because they are buying what they think is genuine honey.”
The UK is one of the biggest importers of cheap Chinese honey, which is known to be targeted by fraudsters. Honey importers say supply chains and provenance are carefully audited, but there has been no consensus on how technical tests should be applied, or which are most reliable.
A fun bit of perspective that I like to mention in discussions about this. Roll back a bit over a century:
[Scientific American, November 2, 1907](www.scientificamerican.com/…/artificial-honey/]
Artificial Honey
Prof. Herzfeld, of Germany, recently brought out some interesting points regarding the manufacture of artificial honey in Europe. It is noticed that when we bring about the inversion of refined sugar in an almost complete manner and under well determined conditions, this sugar solidifies in the same way as natural honey after standing for a long time, and it ran be easily redissolved by heating. Owing to the increased production of artificial honey, the bee cultivators have been agitating the question so as to protect themselves, and it is proposed to secure legislation to this effect, one point being to oblige the manufacturers to add some kind of product which will indicate the artificial product. On the other hand, it is found that the addition of inverted sugar to natural honey tends to improve its quality and especially to render it more easiIy digested. Seeing that sugar is about the only alimentary matter which is produced in an absolutely pure state, its addition to honey cannot be strictly considered as an adulteration. Bees often take products from flowers which have a bad taste; and the chemist Keller found that honey coming from the chestnut tree sometimes has a disagreeable flavor. From wheat flowers we find a honey which has a taste resembling bitter almonds, and honey from asparagus flowers is most unpalatable. Honey taken from the colza plant is of an oily nature, an.d that taken from onions has the taste of the latter. In such cases, the honey is much improved by the addition of inverted sugar. Prof. Herzfeld gives a practical method for preparing this form of sugar. We take 1 kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of high-quality refined sugar in a clean enamelware vessel, and add 300 cubic centimeters (10 fluid ounces) of water and 1.1 grammes (17 grains) tartaric acid. This is heated at 110 deg. C. over an open fire, stirring all the while, and is kept at this heat until the liquid takes on a fine golden yellow color, such operation lasting for about three quarters of an hour. By this very simpIe process we can easily produce artificial honey. Numerous extracts are now on the market for giving the aroma of honey, but none of them will replace the natural honey. However, if we take the artificial product made as above and add to it a natural honey having a strong aroma, such as that which is produced from heath, we can obtain an excellent semi-honey.
- Comment on Apex Legends is taking away its support for the Steam Deck and Linux 2 weeks ago:
I mean, the problem is kind of fundamental. They have a competitive multiplayer game. Many competitive multiplayer games are vulnerable to cheating if you can manipulate the client software; some software just can’t really be hardened and still deal with latency and such reasonably. Consoles are reasonably well locked down. PCs are not, and trying to clamp down on them at all is a pain – there are lots of holes to modify the software. Linux is specifically made to be open and thus modifiable. You’re never going to get major Linux distros committing to a closed system.
Frankly, my answer has been “Consoles are really the right answer for competitive multiplayer, not PCs.” It’s not just the cheating issue, but that you also want a level playing field, and PCs fundamentally are not that. Someone can, to at least some degree, pay to win with higher framerates or resolution or a more-responsive system on a PC.
My guess is that the most-realistic way to do do games like this on the PC is to introduce some kind of trusted hardware sufficient to handle all the critical data in a game, like a PCI card or something, and then stick critical portions of the game on that trusted hardware. But that infrastructure doesn’t exist today, and it’s still trying to make an open system imperfectly act like a closed one.
I think that the real answer here is to use consoles for that, because they already are what game developers are after – a locked-down, non-expandable system. In the specific context of competitive multiplayer games, that’s desirable. I don’t like it for most other things, but consoles are well-suited to that.
My own personal guess is the even longer run answer is going to be a slow shift away from multiplayer games.
Inexpensive, low-latency, long-range data connectivity started to give multiplayer games a boost around 2000-ish. Suddenly, it was possible to play a lot of games against people remotely. And there are neat things you can do with multiplayer games. Humans are a sophisticated, “smarter game AI”. They have their own problems, like sometimes doing things that aren’t fun for other players – like cheating – but if you can rely on other players, you don’t have to write a lot of complicated game AI.
The problem is that it also comes with a lot of drawbacks. You can’t pause most multiplayer games, and even when you do, it’s disruptive. If you’re, say, raising a kid who can get themselves into trouble, not being able to simply stand up and walk away from the keyboard is kinda limiting. You cannot play a multiplayer game without data connectivity. At some point, the game isn’t going to be playable any more, as the player base falls off and central servers go away. You have to deal with other people exploiting the game in various ways that aren’t fun for other players. That could be a game’s meta evolving to use strategies that aren’t very much fun to counter, or cheating, or people just abusing other people. Yeah, you can try to structure a game to discourage that, but we’ve been working on that for many years and griefing and such is still a thing.
Writing game AI is hard and expensive, but I think that in the long run, what we’re going to do is to see game AI take up a lot of the slack. I think that we’re going to to see advances in generic game AI engines, the sort of way we do graphics or sound engines, where one company makes a game AI software package that is reused in many, many games and only slightly tweaked by the game developers.
Multiplayer games are always going to be around, short of us hitting human-level AI. But I think that the trend will be towards single-player games over time, just because of those technical limitations I mentioned. I think that where multiplayer happens, it’ll be more-frequently with people that someone knows – someone’s friends or spouse or such – and where someone specifically wants to interact with that other person, and where the human isn’t just a faceless random person filling in for a smart piece of game AI that doesn’t exist. That’d also hopefully solve the cheating problem.
- Comment on DayZ creator reveals a "Kerbal Space Program killer" with kittens and challenges license owners to sue him 2 weeks ago:
Plus, there’s no point. Like, if you want to make a good KSP successor, lots of people would be happy to buy it. Why unnecessarily start a fight that risks the game?
- Comment on What is your favorite Halloween older game? 2 weeks ago:
I don’t know about Halloween as such, but ghost-themed, I guess Ghost Master. Twenty years old now, but try to make use of various ghosts with different abilities to drive people out of various buildings and houses.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Never is a long time.
- Comment on Castlevania to get official stage adaptation by Japan's all-female Takarazuka Revue 2 weeks ago:
And thus a piece of Eastern European folklore that was popularized in a novel by a Irish writer and then spread via mostly American movies became a Japanese video game series now at least partially developed in Spain and begets a play acted by Japanese female actors.
- Comment on [Recommendations] Text-based Interactive Fiction games recommendations from Itch.io 3 weeks ago:
Thanks. Bookmarking.
- Comment on Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers | "Spreading misinformation suddenly becomes a noble goal," Redditor says. 3 weeks ago:
Apparently, some London residents are getting fed up with social media influencers whose reviews make long lines of tourists at their favorite restaurants, sometimes just for the likes.
As Gizmodo deduced, the trend seemed to start on the r/London subreddit, where a user complained about a spot in Borough Market being “ruined by influencers” on Monday:
“Last 2 times I have been there has been a queue of over 200 people, and the ones with the food are just doing the selfie shit for their [I]nsta[gram] pages and then throwing most of the food away.”
So, I don’t know what the situation is in London.
But COVID-19 really clobbered a lot of commercial establishments, and particularly eateries. I’m guessing that at least some traffic might be a return of the public to restaurants, with the supply of restaurant capacity at a low due to having gone through hard times over the past our years or so.
kagis
Ah, right. This is Europe, and while the US got hit by higher energy costs too, the Ukraine invasion really dicked up energy prices in Europe for a while. And then you have the hangover from the COVID-19-related spending happening, as inflation bites, and reducing spending on restaurants is an easy thing to cut on one’s budget. And this points out that restaurants are a labor-intensive industry, and Brexit has driven labor costs up by cutting the labor pool.
ft.com/…/a36ad5fd-db20-4ba8-89ea-e185838c8aa0
UK restaurant sector hit by cost of living and Covid legacy
Stuart Devine thought his chain of fish and chip restaurants in Aberdeen had survived the worst when the UK government lifted Covid-19 lockdowns for good in spring 2021 and customers returned to enjoy the classic British meal.
But before the Ashvale could fully recover it was dealt another blow, when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 disrupted global supply chains and sent energy and food prices soaring.
Devine’s struggles are shared by roughly 40 per cent of UK restaurant owners, who are operating at or below break-even point, after the sector was hit by a perfect storm of pandemic shutdowns and the cost of living crisis, according to data from UKHospitality.
The trade body estimates that up to 30 per cent of businesses in the sector have closed since Covid struck. About 1,169 restaurants shut in the past year alone, equivalent to more than three a day, according to UKHospitality and consultancy CGA by NIQ.
“The money coming from the front door is just not enough to offset the significant cost of doing business that the restaurants are facing,” said Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKHospitality.
While energy prices have fallen from their peak over the past 12 months, restaurants continue to bear the brunt of elevated food costs. The particularly labour intensive industry has also struggled with staff shortages, worsened by Brexit, and to keep pace with the statutory minimum wage. It stands at £10.42 an hour and will rise to £11.44 in April.
Devine said “the hardest thing is that the only thing you can do is put your prices up”, noting that there was a limit to how much lifting prices could help at a time of already weak consumer confidence and tight household budgets.
So the combination of all those things would tend to have squeezed the supply of restaurants, and it might be that if there’s enough demand to consistently fill restaurants in London, expand existing or open new ones, that things will tend to return to a more-normal state.
- Comment on AI-powered weapons scanners used in NYC subway found zero guns in one month test 3 weeks ago:
In total, there were 118 false positives — a rate of 4.29%.
Earlier this year, investors filed a class-action lawsuit, accusing company executives of overstating the devices’ capabilities and claiming that “Evolv does not reliably detect knives or guns.”
I mean, I’d be more concerned about the false positive rate than the false negative rate, given the context. Like, if you miss a gun, whatever. That’s just the status quo, which has been working. Some money gets wasted on the machine. But if you are incorrectly stopping more than 1 in 25 New Yorkers from getting on their train, and apply that to all subway riders, that sounds like a monumental clusterfuck.
- Comment on I'll share a troubling fact with you if you share one with me 3 weeks ago:
If a nuclear missile is launched at the United States the President has just 6 minutes to come to terms with that and decide to launch a counter attack or not.
US nuclear deterrence in 2024 doesn’t rely on launch-on-warning, but on the expectation that no hostile power has the ability to locate and destroy the US ballistic missile fleet prior to them performing their counterlaunches.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_strike
In nuclear strategy, a retaliatory strike or second-strike capability is a country’s assured ability to respond to a nuclear attack with powerful nuclear retaliation against the attacker. To have such an ability (and to convince an opponent of its viability) is considered vital in nuclear deterrence, as otherwise the other side might attempt to try to win a nuclear war in one massive first strike against its opponent’s own nuclear forces.
Submarine-launched ballistic missiles are the traditional, but very expensive, method of providing a second strike capability, though they need to be supported by a reliable method of identifying who the attacker is.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_on_warning
Launch on warning (LOW), or fire on warning, is a strategy of nuclear weapon retaliation where a retaliatory strike is launched upon warning of enemy nuclear attack and while its missiles are still in the air, before detonation occurs.
In 1997, a US official stated that the US had the technical capability for launch on warning but did not intend to use a launch on warning posture and that the position had not changed in the 1997 presidential decision directive on nuclear weapon doctrine.
- Comment on Nvidia blocks access to video card driver updates for users from Russia and Belarus. 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, I was gonna say…GPUs have to be more significant today for general compute than they’ve ever been.
Okay, yeah, maybe you don’t need one for CAD acceleration in 2024, but that has to be a vanishingly small thing compared to parallel compute on stuff like AI work.
- Comment on Nvidia blocks access to video card driver updates for users from Russia and Belarus. 3 weeks ago:
Did NVIDIA stop selling videocards in Russia?
kagis
pcmag.com/…/nvidia-to-stop-all-product-sales-to-r…
Nvidia Stops All Product Sales to Russia
March 5, 2022
I don’t think that it matters a huge amount, since companies are just gonna re-export them out of China or Kazakhstan or wherever. I mean, it’s not like the hardware has some kind of region-locking. It’s a piece of consumer hardware, sold and resold anonymously all over the place. It’s not some kind of specialized military hardware.
kagis
hardwaretimes.com/nvidia-loses-just-2-of-its-reve…
In October [2022], NVIDIA officially shut down all its operations in Russia as sales of both data center and consumer graphics cards were wrapped up. At the time, around 240 employees worked for the Santa Clara-based company. These folks were given the option to either relocate abroad or look for other jobs.
Furthermore, NVIDIA hardware has been banned from sale via official channels.
Fortunately for Team Green, the Russian Federation represented a minor market for its wide portfolio. Disclosures from the Q3 2022 earnings report indicate that the Federation accounted for just 2% of its revenue and 4% for the gaming business.
Although channel partners are forbidden to sell the latest GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards, Russian gamers can still procure them from the grey market.
It’ll probably add cost and some risk of getting ripped off and no manufacturer’s warranty, but I would be surprised if someone who wanted a new GPU couldn’t continue to get ahold of one in Russia, given the funds.
- Comment on Nvidia blocks access to video card driver updates for users from Russia and Belarus. 3 weeks ago:
You can operate a VPN service in Russia legally, but it is obligated to block state-specified stuff internally to the VPN.
www.cloudwards.net/russian-vpn-ban/
VPN vendors have to get approval from the authorities to operate within the Russian borders. Usually, this means the provider has to comply with Russia’s censorship demands, like connecting to the FSIS.
- Comment on Nvidia blocks access to video card driver updates for users from Russia and Belarus. 3 weeks ago:
Most sanctions, aside from ones aimed at individuals, are going to have indirect effect. That is, they will produce pressure on Russia in aggregate, and that means that they’ll impact the typical citizen.
But that being said, there have been a lot of sanctions applied, and…the impact on Nvidia drivers isn’t, I think, really a huge one relative to those. Like, things like cutting off access to all kinds of electronics parts and payment system access and stuff are going to be, I’d say, a lot more impactful to a typical person in Russia, even if the impact is secondary.
- Comment on Google is now watermarking its AI-generated text. 3 weeks ago:
Other than as a mind game, I don’t see the point.
Google provides a centralized service. They own the generator system.
You could solve the whole problem much more simply and reliably by just retaining a copy of all generated text at Google – the quantities of data will be miniscule compared to what Google regularly deals with – and then just indexing it and letting someone do a fuzzy search for a given passage of text to see whether it’s been generated. Hell, Google probably already retains a copy to data-mine what people are doing anyway, and they know how to do search. And then they could even tell you who generated the text and when.
- Comment on Baidu CEO warns AI is just an inevitable bubble — 99% of AI companies are at risk of failing when the bubble bursts 3 weeks ago:
“probably 1% of the companies will stand out and become huge and will create a lot of value, or will create tremendous value for the people, for society. And I think we are just going through this kind of process.”
Baidu is huge. Sounds like good news for Baidu!
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 3 weeks ago:
Ah, thanks, yeah. And given that that lists a lot more instances than does the defed.xyz site, my guess is that defed.xyz is incomplete.
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 3 weeks ago:
At least the latter one is just showing which instances the named instance has defederated from, not which instances have defederated from the named instance.
That’s easy to get by checking /instances on a given instance already.
The problem is that you’d need some kind of spider that crawls all of the instances to get the reverse of that.
The former one does seem to show it.
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 4 weeks ago:
They don’t seem to get into friction over it. I’ve never heard of @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com or mods on their communities banning people for being statists. Granted, I don’t subscribe to any communities there, but I haven’t seen a stream of comments complaining about interactions with them.
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 4 weeks ago:
slowly being edged out of the wider lemmy experience.
If your home instance is lemmy.ml and it’s just people using communities on instances other than lemmy.ml, then you still get the full experience.
If instances are defederating with lemmy.ml, then you’re missing content.
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 4 weeks ago:
crows
There’s !corvids@sopuli.xyz, but it doesn’t have much activity.
- Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ? 4 weeks ago:
Yes.
Lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net definitely.
Lemmy.ml has some less-bonkers communities, but !world@lemmy.ml generates some of the most complaints, and I’m willing to paint with a broad brush on this one. There’s only one community that I can think of that doesn’t presently have a non-lemmy.ml alternative, and that’s !mechanicalkeyboards@lemmy.ml, and !ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world has overlap. Also, aside from issues with instance policy, I think that lemmy.ml in particular is not a great instance for major communities, because it’s the “dev” instance and Lemmy has had some serious periods of problems where stuff slipped through testing and led to major problems. Lemmy.world did not hit this, because the admins there are more-conservative about updating, held off until they were sure that new releases were solid. My own home instance at lemmy.today crashed into repeated serious problems with new releases, and the admin decided that in the future, he would also be more conservative about updates.
I also think that it’s broader than disagreeing with someone. I’m not a furry or trans, for example, but I’ve no problem with pawb.social or lemmy.blahaj.zone and have never seen any complaints about moderation on those special-interest instances. However, there’s an entire community, !MeanwhileOnGrad@sh.itjust.works, that highlights a lot of stuff that often I’d call pretty unreasonable off in .ml land.
That being said, a number of major lemmy instances have defederated with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, and I chose my home instance of lemmy.today specifically because it did not defederate with instances. I want to personally make the call on instance content and on users on an instance. I’ve only ever blocked one user, and they were just relentlessly spamming images in communities, and I’ve never blocked an instance. I normally just view communities by subscribed, look at a “whitelist” of communities, not “all” plus a blacklist, though.
- Comment on What websites still feel like the old internet? 4 weeks ago:
Kernel.org, home of the Linux kernel, hasn’t changed much.
Kernel.org today:
Kernel.org in 1998:
- Comment on What websites still feel like the old internet? 4 weeks ago:
Not a website, but since you mention BBSes…one thing that would look pretty familiar to a 1990s Internet user would be most of the text-based MUDs that are around.
The MUD Connector is still around, and still has a list.
While I suspect that dedicated MUDders use dedicated clients, the base protocol is still normally telnet, a protocol that predates Internet Protocol itself.
- Comment on Starfield Design Director Responds To Shattered Space Criticism 5 weeks ago:
I feel the same way.
- Comment on BBC Weather app bug forecasts hurricane force winds in UK 5 weeks ago:
…nasa.gov/…/hubble-shows-winds-in-jupiters-great-…
The massive storm’s crimson-colored clouds spin counterclockwise at speeds that exceed 400 miles per hour – and the vortex is bigger than Earth itself. The red spot is legendary in part because humans have observed it for more than 150 years.
This is like Mach 18.
- Comment on TSMC's 2nm process will reportedly get another price hike — $30,000 per wafer for latest cutting-edge tech 1 month ago:
If you’re referring to the 13&14th Gen chips then yes, Intel is saying it’s on the software side.
Yes, I was, but there was also some initial manufacturing issue with oxidation. That wasn’t the bulk of the issues that they were running into, though.
- Comment on TSMC's 2nm process will reportedly get another price hike — $30,000 per wafer for latest cutting-edge tech 1 month ago:
It does sound like most of that was not actually manufacturing, but design.
- Comment on Three Mile Island owner seeks $1.6 billion federal loan to restart nuclear plant for Microsoft AI facility 1 month ago:
Thanks!
- Comment on Three Mile Island owner seeks $1.6 billion federal loan to restart nuclear plant for Microsoft AI facility 1 month ago:
considers
If it gets a federal subsidy, that subsidy is going to really primarily benefit Pennsylvania, yes?
I mean, yes, power from it maybe – if Microsoft isn’t schlorping all of it up – help support the grid in the region a bit. But if Microsoft’s building a datacenter in Pennsylvania and this is subsidizing a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, the benefit’s really principally going to Pennsylvania alone, other than in the limited sense that it reduces carbon dioxide emissions.
California or Nevada, say, isn’t going to benefit from that either way.
Like, if there’s some sort of federal subsidy accessible to any state that wants to do nuclear power build-out and that this is just how Pennsylvania chooses to make use of it, that might be one thing.