SirEDCaLot
@SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
- Comment on The AI Backlash Is Here: Why Backlash Against Gemini, Sora, ChatGPT Is Spreading in 2025 - Newsweek 16 hours ago:
The crazy thing is, none of these articles seem to want to admit that AI is bad.
As the old quote goes- “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, “You are mad, you are not like us.””
In such an environment, nobody wants to admit they are not mad, lest they be attacked.
Or as someone else said- I want a future where machines cook and clean and do menial work, so us humans can focus on art and poetry and writing. Instead we have a world where machines create art and poetry and books, so the humans can focus on cleaning and menial work. I don’t like this timeline.
- Comment on It just keeps getting worse - Firefox to "evolve into a modern AI browser" 18 hours ago:
Exactly this. I would love to see just one tech company stand up and say we are not doing AI, our AI budget is $0 and our product will not ship with AI. If you really want to use AI with our system you can download a plug-in or something but we won’t waste our time writing one.
They would get a million users overnight.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 18 hours ago:
You are confusing the spread of ideology with the spread of a conquistadorial government. Remember, most of the Germans who supported Hitler didn’t realize the Jews were being massacred. And we didn’t go to war to stop Nazi ideology, we went to war to stop Germany from conquering the entire fucking world through military means.
The problem with using force to stop an ideology is that to the people who might follow that ideology, the fact that you care enough to use force against a belief system must mean there is something important in that belief system they should be checking out. Trying to stop an ideology with force only makes that ideology stronger, gives it validation.
If you want to stop an ideology, ridicule it. Make fun of those who believe in it. Talk about how stupid they are. Talk about how they are morons not worth your time. Don’t give that ideology the validation of deserving force.The other problem with violence, is it prevents dialogue. If you are hitting somebody while talking to them, they are not going to hear what you are saying.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 3 days ago:
Hitler was defeated by being nice to him
In that sense you’re right- some people only understand and respect force, and the only way to stop them is to use force against them. The analogy of Hitler might be compared to hardened criminals- being nice to a criminal won’t stop them from victimizing you.
This is a different battle though. The small % of racists who want to burn minorities’ houses down, they must be met with force.
Force doesn’t win hearts and minds though. Force is intertwined with fear- ‘if you do xxx, force will be used against you’. So it might stop some church burnings, but it doesn’t stop racism. Force doesn’t win ‘hearts and minds’. Force doesn’t convince a racist that they were wrong. It might make them too afraid to speak up, but it doesn’t win them over, and they will only take their message underground, where it will thrive.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 3 days ago:
Can you point to some other times in history where the threat of being beaten up has been effective in eradicating an ideology?
I can point to plenty of instances where driving an ideology underground only fuels its growth…
And look at the simple logic of it- if the guy in the big KKK hood says ‘the establishment doesn’t want you to acknowledge this’ and he then gets beaten up by mainstream majority people, you’ve just proved him right in the eyes of a would-be follower.
It’s like if you found someone who knows nothing about astronomy, and told them ‘today the sun will rise at 7:15am and set at 5:43pm, and the moon is mostly made of bleu cheese’ you’ve predicted two things correctly so that gives you credibility when they consider the 3rd.
If I said that to you, you’d say ‘you looked that up on Google, anyone can do that, and it’s well known the moon is made of rock’. But you are knowledgeable about astronomy (on a basic level at least).This works with the KKK person because chances are the KKK person has had limited or no actual contact and understanding with black people. So he sees news reports of inner city black people doing crimes and it becomes easy to convince him black people are somehow inferior. And ‘THEY don’t want you to know the truth’ is a powerful message for someone already interested in counterculture / dislike of the mainstream.
That’s why Daryl Davis is effective- he sits down with the racist, who has a mental image of what a ‘black person’ is, and he’s not that. It’s like putting you on a rocket and flying you out to the moon and saying ‘okay we’re here, where’s the cheese?’
And that’s why violence ISN’T effective- because the racist is expecting violence, so being violent only reinforces their belief.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 3 days ago:
I think we need both of these —punching Nazis and talking with them to change their views.
Can you explain to me how punching Nazis works to reduce Naziism and racism? What is the mechanism of action? Like how specifically does getting punched make someone less racist?
That is a genuine question and I’d love an answer.
I personally believe that punching racists only creates more hatred. The racist will be angry at the one who punched him, and thus less open to anti-racist messaging.
- Comment on Control Resonant - Announcement Trailer | PS5 Games 3 days ago:
I general, I agree 100%.
There’s an exception for Remedy though. They have a strong track record of not releasing underwhelming unfinished crap.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 4 days ago:
Why?
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 5 days ago:
I think that’s called conflict exhaustion. You’re sick of fighting, sick of holding your nose and respecting things and people you find repugnant, while there’s little/no serious progress in your direction, it seems like there’s more racism and hatred than ever. So part of you is ready to set the world on fire if it gets rid of MAGA and all the thinly veiled (or not so thinly veiled) racism and intolerance.
Just keep in mind that the dark wolf actually serves those nazi punks. Punching them only makes them stronger.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 6 days ago:
Exactly 100%
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 6 days ago:
No worries my friend. I know it’s hard, but it’s useful to always assume good faith.
“The monster never sees a monster in the mirror. We all have good reasons and justifications for what we do.” – J. Michael Straczynski
That applies to us too.
I think it especially applied in 2016, first time in my life that all pretense of respectful debate went away, replaced with ‘unfriend me if you like Trump’ as a mainstream accepted even encouraged position to have.
I talk to a lot of people who supported Trump. Most of them talked about tariffs, manufacturing, jobs, there was a dream of bringing back American industry and rolling back outsourcing. Yes there was some assholes, but there were plenty of good American folks who just wanted to keep their jobs.
But if you listened to Democrats, the only valid reason anyone would vote for Trump is because they are a tiki torch wielding racist misogynist sexist xenophobic islamophobic basket of deplorables. The public discourse broke down for good, it was all just insults from both sides.Nobody saw a monster in the mirror. We only saw an opposition supporting a guy who was basically openly racist and creeped on his own daughter.
But they didn’t see a monster in the mirror either. They only saw an ivory tower elite whipping ourselves into a frenzy over which bathroom someone uses while the middle class is dying.That’s why, in my opinion at least, it is always vitally important to generally assume good faith on the part of your opposition. Because if there is good faith, then we repair the cracks that are dividing the country. And if there really isn’t good faith, then we are all totally fucked anyway so it doesn’t make any goddamn difference.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 6 days ago:
People who I used to think were smart and empathetic were jumping on the “fuck your feelings” bandwagon.
I don’t know your friends. But I’d argue there’s at least some reasoning for this.
If trade policies like globalization have harmed your economic status, offshoring a lot of the jobs you’d previously held, and you were having trouble feeding your family, wouldn’t you vote for the person you thought could fix this? Wouldn’t you say ‘fuck your feelings, I need to feed my family so I’m sorry if you have trouble putting the sex you want on your passport I’m more worried about feeding my family’? At least in concept?I think that’s where a lot of that sentiment came from. The people of the nation are hurting, and part of Trump’s message always was ‘I see you hurting and I want to fix it’. Dems are totally tone deaf in their messaging. A huge % of the populace gets left out of the ‘American Dream’ and they say nothing. And in recent years they focus a lot on social justice issues and identity politics while ignoring the elephant in the room. It’s why those good people are saying fuck your feelings (IMHO at least), because if the choice is your feelings or their livelihood, then of course they’ll tell your feelings to shove off.
Of course it didn’t work out that way- government cutbacks, tariffs, foreign policy, all handled in such a ham-fisted non-strategic way that whatever benefit might have been gained was instead lost. And now it’s the little guy suffering, so you see a lot of people renouncing their votes.
All I’m saying is keep in mind some of those people who said ‘fuck your feelings’ thought they were fighting for a greater good. I don’t believe they turned malicious. Some did I’m sure, but not all of them.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 6 days ago:
This thread got me thinking a little more about Mr. Davis.
We talk about ‘not tolerating intolerance’ but I think there’s a second level-- there’s the intolerance (the actions of the racist), and then there’s the intolerant (the racists themselves). It’s easy and simple to group the two together- we don’t want racism, we don’t want the KKK, we don’t want KKK members, all of you go fuck yourselves with your burning cross and go die in a fire (preferably in another county).
I don’t think Mr. Davis would tolerate intolerance any more than you or I. But I think what he does is tolerate the intolerant person, engage them in conversation, treat them like a human being. And THAT can help fix intolerance- by reaching out to the intolerant people and trying to bring them into the larger community and heal them, rather than shunning them and reinforcing their stereotypes.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 6 days ago:
It’s BY tolerating it (or more specifically, the people who espouse it) that he fights it.
And I think that’s the key difference- tolerating intolerance (the action), vs tolerating the intolerant (the people).
I think we would all (probably including Mr. Davis) agree that the action of intolerance should not be tolerated. For example, if a local movie theater wants to have ‘whites only’ movie nights, that should not be tolerated and in fact we should all aggressively fight back against such things wherever they happen.
But what of the intolerant person? What of the theater owner in the above example? Should we run him out of town? Tar and feather him? Refuse to talk to him?
The KKK folks he encountered are used to intolerance- threats, shouting, protests, etc. They know they’re not popular, but that helps feed the belief that they are right. They’re used to it. They’re NOT used to being welcomed by anti-racists.And thus Mr. Davis got through to the racist- by tolerating the intolerant, not by tolerating intolerance. It’s a subtle but vital difference.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 week ago:
This guy obviously didn’t get that memo
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 1 week ago:
I couldn’t agree more. Acting like a million dollar company is important.
A million dollar company would recognize that reliable, continuous production and sales is more important to growth than the occasional hickup or a few extra bucks in the payroll budget. Thus, the million dollar company would hire sufficient staff that an occasional absence, even at a critical moment, would not harm production or sales.
And a million dollar company would recognize that hiring sufficient staff is a wiser and more cost effective strategy than a possible labor lawsuit along with the associated bad PR.
- Comment on Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead 2 weeks ago:
If only that was a legal cause of action…
- Comment on Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead 2 weeks ago:
What’s there to sue for? Companies shut down product lines and brands all the time.
- Comment on Japan Unveils Human Washing Machine, Now You Can Get Washed Like Laundry 2 weeks ago:
That’s why I said, different approaches.
My approach is targeted at somebody who just wants to get clean as quickly as possible, and the machine can help them do that faster and with less effort than a manual shower.
If you are going for luxury, or if you need help doing it like an elderly person, then the sit-down submerging spa is absolutely the way to go.
- Comment on Japan Unveils Human Washing Machine, Now You Can Get Washed Like Laundry 2 weeks ago:
How so?
I think there’s two different approaches to this. This chair is obviously designed as a luxury experience, as the process takes a full 15 minutes.
My idea is designed for efficiency, to reduce the amount of time it takes to bathe in the morning without reducing cleanliness. - Comment on Japan Unveils Human Washing Machine, Now You Can Get Washed Like Laundry 2 weeks ago:
Interesting idea. Seriously over-engineered though.
If you want a ‘human washer’ you don’t need a $350k fancy chair with heart rate monitors. Just take a page out of the automatic car wash.
Human stands in a stall. Shower allows human washing of hair and face. Then just hold arms out making a diamond in front of you (think TSA body scanner position, but with arms forward instead of upward) and a 360° robotic sprayer starts at the neck and goes down spraying soapy water, then back up again with a slight up angle to get the groin and armpits. Shower comes back on to de-shampoo hair, then the same 360 robot does two passes with clean water to rinse everything off.
If you get fancy with machine vision and body position sensors, the 360 wand could flip 90° to do the hair and would be angled backward a bit so it doesn’t get water or soap in your face.
You could build this for a lot less than $350k. And instead of $1500 worth of body sensors you have a $50 waterproof emergency stop button.
- Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs 3 weeks ago:
Never said they were my friend. They might have been once, in the ‘Don’t be evil’ era, but that era is long past.
They are however somewhat more interested in open standards than Apple. Android for example uses OGG a bunch under the hood.
- Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs 3 weeks ago:
Nobody knows what to do with it because it’s proprietary and requires a license. If it was not encumbered, windows would ship with a decoder built-in for free and nobody would have a problem. If Apple devices didn’t use it by default, no one would have a problem because they just wouldn’t use it for anything ever.
If Apple got sick of paying the fee, they could switch to AVIF or JPEG XL or anything else. It wouldn’t be hard, just bake native support into the next OS of everything, and have the next iPhone take pictures in that format by default. The rest of the world will catch up right quick.
Actually come to think of it I’m kind of surprised Google doesn’t do that. Make the native Android camera shoot in AVIF by default…
- Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs 3 weeks ago:
Yeah but look at the AV1 hardware support matrix. A lot of current mobile silicon supports decode, not nearly as much supports encode. To have AV1 truly replace MP4/MP5 a hardware encode is necessary so you can do video calls in AV1.
The one who could really make this happen is Apple. If they decided to move away from MPEG-LA and embraced open codecs (AV1 / VP9 / Opus / FLAC / AVIF / JPEGXL / JPEG2000), supporting them in software, hardware, and their services (imessage/ichat/facetime, music store, video store) that would single handedly push the industry.
They did that with HEIC- before iPhones switched to HEIC by default nobody bothered with the encumbered format. Now it’s become de facto standard. That SHOULD have been something open like AVIF, JPEG XL, etc.
- Comment on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang complains about stock price slide during all-hands meeting — says market did not appreciate company’s ‘incredible’ quarter 3 weeks ago:
I’m kinda in the same boat. My main box was used, only a couple hundred bucks and it’s served me pretty well. Same thing with all my other personal PCs for the last 5-7 years.
If you’re not gaming, the benefit of going new is pretty limited. The hardware outpaced the software. - Comment on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang complains about stock price slide during all-hands meeting — says market did not appreciate company’s ‘incredible’ quarter 3 weeks ago:
Perhaps, but if that involves desoldering BGA chips and remounting them on new cards, do you really think someone’s gonna bother to do that?
Especially if the chips are optimized for AI and don’t perform well for games? - Comment on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang complains about stock price slide during all-hands meeting — says market did not appreciate company’s ‘incredible’ quarter 3 weeks ago:
Sadly I think you may be disappointed. The GPUs used for AI are not typical graphics GPUs, they aren’t on PCIe cards with video ports. They are set up in configurations designed to cram as many chips as possible into as small a space as possible while still providing power and cooling for 100% output on all of them.
- Comment on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang complains about stock price slide during all-hands meeting — says market did not appreciate company’s ‘incredible’ quarter 3 weeks ago:
The stock is down because the Overton window has shifted. Two or three months ago, AI was the future and question that was lunacy. Now it is a mainstream point of discussion that AI is a giant bubble, that it is entirely likely to pop at some point, and that the efforts pushing it so hard are bordering on irrational given the actual capability of the product.
If AI bubble pops, Nvidia loses. No more big tech companies with blank checks and open orders for AI chips that basically amount to ‘please send us as many AI chips as you can manufacture whatever it costs we will pay’.
And, if anything there may be a surplus of AI chips and hardware in the market as companies that have built entire data centers for AI suddenly realize that paying millions for electricity so online idiots can generate videos of cats racing Roombas down F1 tracks is not a trillion-dollar business model.
- Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs 3 weeks ago:
Yes this is absolutely ridiculous.
This is also a good reason to avoid proprietary codecs. H.265 may be a great codec, but the licensing fees are basically a tax on the world.
The best solution would be an overall switch to AV1. But silicon support for that is not nearly as widespread.
- Comment on Windows 11 to add an AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders, warns of security risk 4 weeks ago:
A nice thought.
Unfortunately the only ones who switch will be people 1. Know that it is even possible to switch/that they have an option to switch, and 2. Have the technical knowledge to back up their data, then download and install Linux, that 3. Don’t have to run Windows for other reasons and/or haven’t already switched.Unfortunately with all three qualifiers you aren’t left with a giant number. Certainly no mass exodus.