LWD
@LWD@lemm.ee
- Comment on Do you remember Windows 95? How about Windows 96? 3 weeks ago:
Based on your descriptions of the integration between Windows 96 and Office, I did get the feeling you might run into even more issues if more software wasn’t installed alongside Windows as well.
I’m all Mac and Virtual Box doesn’t run on M-series hardware.
I had no idea!
And hopefully my comment didn’t come across as a dig against your article - it just promises to be a potentially fascinating follow-up. Especially when, even today, Windows Explorer feels like it added previews of files as little more than an afterthought (and occasionally as a PowerToy).
- Comment on Do you remember Windows 95? How about Windows 96? 3 weeks ago:
This is a very good article, but this part peeved me on a petty level (as well as explaining why there’s precious little in the way of screenshots):
While I can’t find any uploads that are set to run on their website in a virtual computing session, the files are available to download if you felt like spinning up a piece of computing history.
The opportunity to do a little investigative journalism is right there, and the blog author didn’t take it
- Comment on Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship explodes on test stand 3 weeks ago:
I hate to be this guy
Then don’t be. I’m not sure why you feel the need to glaze the world’s richest political agent, unless…
Are you a SpaceX employee? You’ve said this in the past.
Most people at SpaceX genuinely love the mission and will work longer hours because it’s almost a passion.
We’re pretty well-compensated too.
- Comment on Here's your first look at the rebooted Digg | TechCrunch 3 weeks ago:
So not only was the AI put front and center, it was also put in first?!
I’ve looked at plenty of alpha software before, and I’ve seen plenty of incomplete features. I understand that one has to give an unfinished product leeway. But devs do not simply accidentally add a whole feature into an app. Or if this was somehow all a huge coincidental mistake, they made a massive PR blunder.
- Comment on 16 Billion Apple, Facebook, Google And Other Passwords Leaked — Act Now 3 weeks ago:
What is this article? Besides terrible, I mean. This article is terrible.
First of all, this isn’t a new leak. It’s not even a combination of old leaks. It’s just somebody noticing that a bunch of leaks existed and did an Excel Sum operation on the passwords on them.
According to Vilius Petkauskas at Cybernews, whose researchers have been investigating the leakage since the start of the year, “30 exposed datasets containing from tens of millions to over 3.5 billion records each,” have been discovered. In total, Petkauskas has confirmed, the number of compromised records has now hit 16 billion. Let that sink in for a bit.
And to add insult to injury, the article has this gem:
Is This The GOAT When It Comes To Passwords Leaking?
Password compromise is no joke.
Certainly not with writing like this.
- Comment on American attitudes about AI today mirror poll answers about the rise of the internet in the '90s 3 weeks ago:
I was paraphrasing and trying to be nice. Fine, you didn’t say humans yearn for the workplace. You said humans existentially require the workplace.
I think if AI replaces humans in the workplace, even with UBI, humans would cease to exist shortly thereafter as our lives will have become meaningless
- Comment on The 16‑kilobyte curtain. How Russia’s new data‑capping censorship is throttling Cloudflare 3 weeks ago:
According to technical experts, internet service providers across the country have begun implementing a rule that limits data transfers from sites using Cloudflare to just the first 16 kilobytes. This technique is relatively subtle but effective: very lightweight, basic websites can still load, creating a façade of normal internet function, while modern, media-rich sites are effectively broken.
16 KB per website? What part of the normal internet is that small? What part of the indie web is that small?
e.g. look at the smallest sites on 512kb.club
- Comment on Here's your first look at the rebooted Digg | TechCrunch 3 weeks ago:
I see no reason to engage with, or trust anything created by, a bullshit generator. If Digg claims to “care” about the humans, then making the top comment into a brick wall (which has zero accountability) is a funny way of showing it.
But then again, I’m sure their privacy policy also says they care about your privacy.
- Comment on Here's your first look at the rebooted Digg | TechCrunch 3 weeks ago:
this would-be Reddit competitor, built for the AI era
Oh no…
The founders think that the internet is being flooded with bots and AI agents, which will create demand for online communities like Digg that foster real human connections.
Okay, Digg has my attention again.
Beneath posts, Digg is leveraging AI to summarize the article’s content.
And they lost me again.
- Comment on Chinese AI outfits smuggling suitcases full of hard drives to evade U.S. chip restrictions — training AI models in Malaysia using rented servers 4 weeks ago:
OpenAI has gotten virtually unlimited funding for years. It has first dibs and deep discounts on Microsoft data centers.
And somehow, despite every single trade restriction, multiple random startup companies in China (that don’t even know how to secure their own databases) manage to make LLMs that outperform it.
I’m not saying that because Chinese companies are uniquely cool. I’m saying that because this whole AI thing is uniquely stupid.
- Comment on [JS Required] MiniMax M1 model claims Chinese LLM crown from DeepSeek - plus it's true open-source 4 weeks ago:
I figured as much. Even this line…
M1’s capabilities are top-tier among open-source models
… is right above a chart that calls it “open-weight”.
I dislike the conflation of terms that the OSI has helped legitimize. Up until LLMs, nobody called binary blobs “open-source” just because they were compiled using open-source tooling. That would be ridiculous
- Comment on [JS Required] MiniMax M1 model claims Chinese LLM crown from DeepSeek - plus it's true open-source 4 weeks ago:
I’ve been able to run distillations of Deepseek R1 up to 70B
Where do you find those?
There is a version of Deepseek R1 “patched” with western values called R1-1776 that will answer topics censored by the Chinese government, however.
Thank you for mentioning this, as I finally confronted my own preconceptions and actually found an article by Perplexity that demonstrated R1 itself has demonstrable pro-China bias.
Although Perplexity’s own description should cause anybody who understands the nature of LLMs to pause. They describe it in their header as a
version of the DeepSeek-R1 model that has been post-trained to provide unbiased, accurate, and factual information.
That’s a bold (read: bullshit) statement, considering the only altered its biases on China. I wouldn’t consider the original model to be unbiased either, but apparently perplexity is giving them a pass on everything else. I guess it’s part of the grand corporate lie that claims “AI is unbiased,” a delusion that perplexity needs to maintain.
- Comment on American attitudes about AI today mirror poll answers about the rise of the internet in the '90s 4 weeks ago:
That’s because search engines have reached the stage of enshittification where they no longer need to be good. Instead, they want you to spend as much time there as possible.
LLMs are still being sold as “the better option” - including by the exact same search giants who intentionally ruined their own search results. And many of them are already prioritizing agreeableness over “truthfulness.” And we’re still in the LLM honeymoon phase, where companies are losing billions of dollars on a yearly basis and undercharging their users.
- Comment on [JS Required] MiniMax M1 model claims Chinese LLM crown from DeepSeek - plus it's true open-source 4 weeks ago:
If you’re talking about the distillations, AFAIK they take somebody else’s model and run it through their (actually open-source) distiller. I tried a couple of those models because I was curious. The distilled Qwen model is cagey about Tianmen Square, but Qwen was made by Alibaba. The distillation of a US-made model did not have this problem.
I don’t have enough RAM to run the full DeepSeek R1, but AFAIK it doesn’t have this problem. Maybe it does.
In case it isn’t clear, BTW, I do despise LLMs and AI in general. The biggest issue with them isn’t the glaring lies (not Tianmen Square, and certainly not the “it’s woke!” complaints about generating images of black founding fathers, but the subtle and insidious little details like agreeableness - trying to get people to spend a little more time with them, which apparently turns once-reasonable people into members of micro-cults.
- Comment on [JS Required] MiniMax M1 model claims Chinese LLM crown from DeepSeek - plus it's true open-source 4 weeks ago:
What exactly makes this more “open source” than DeepSeek? The linked page doesn’t make that particularly clear.
DeepSeek doesn’t release their training data (but they release a hell of a lot of other stuff), and I think that’s about as “open” as these companies can get before they risk running afoul of copyright issues. Since you can’t compile the model from scratch, it’s not really open source. It’s just freeware. But that’s true for both models, as far as I can tell.
- Comment on [JS Required] MiniMax M1 model claims Chinese LLM crown from DeepSeek - plus it's true open-source 4 weeks ago:
DeepSeek imposes similar restrictions, but only on their website. You can self-host and then enjoy relatively truthful (as truthful as a bullshit generator can be) answers about both Tianmen Square, Palestine, and South Africa (something American-made bullshit generators apparently like making up, to appease their corporate overlords or conspiracy theorists respectively).
- Comment on getoffpocket.com, my guide to Pocket alternatives, just got a redesign 4 weeks ago:
You’re sponsored and accepting donations? Somebody better fork this guide before the GitHub gets yanked
- Comment on Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up 4 weeks ago:
Today [October 28, 2024] Germ announces pre-seed funding from investors K5 Global via partner Daniel Marcotte, Mozilla Ventures, Gaingels, and angel investors including Nick Sullivan, Jessica Millstone of Copper Wire Ventures, and Adam Sah.
- Comment on Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up 4 weeks ago:
It’s pretty tone-deaf to criticize layoffs on the same article that acknowledges their historic dependence on Google’s rapidly collapsing monopoly. Where is the money going to come from?
If you scroll up, you’ll see the part of the article that mentions Mozilla wasting tens of millions of dollars on AI.
Where is the money going to come from?
- Comment on Is Internet Content Too Engaging? 4 weeks ago:
I don’t like this article or this author’s conclusions. They answer the question “is internet content too engaging?” with “no, and besides, won’t you think of the free market?”
This article is unfortunate evidence that powerful groups who are critical of social media tend to be against the concept of free will itself (hello, Amy Coney Barrett), while powerful people who run social media are against the concept of reducing harm on their platforms at all.
A report by the American Psychological Association states that “using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”
Uh huh.
Meta’s internal research that prompted concern about the effect of Instagram on teenage girls actually found that most users reported Instagram either had no impact or made things better.
ACCORDING TO FUCKING FACEBOOK.
…proponents of “addictive design” theories misunderstand the impact that regulation and liability will have on media competition. In a world where content is abundant and attention is scarce, platforms that manage to reach a critical mass of users compete not just on size but also on curation quality…
TikTok provides a good example. TikTok didn’t overtake established platforms like YouTube by having more users or more content; it succeeded by creating a better algorithm that more effectively curated content to individual preferences.
Again, doubt. Sure, the free market provided a more addictive alternative to an already addictive product. It resembles a slot machine more than the previous version.
I have no idea how the author thinks this is a slam dunk in their favor, when it’s clearly the opposite.
- Comment on Patreon plans to consolidate its Pro and Premium plans starting August 5, taking a 10% commission, rather than the current 8% for Pro and 12% for Premium users 4 weeks ago:
“Why we’re updating our pricing” mostly says more people are using it than ever, not that they’ve made enough changes to warrant getting extra money.
And I guess that’s technically true. If people are too locked into their platform, then that’s a great reason for them to update their pricing: to benefit themselves over creators.
- Comment on Matrix is cooked 4 weeks ago:
Replace “VC funded companies” with “enshittifiers” for a better view at how many people may read your comment
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.world | 31 comments
- Comment on Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash 5 weeks ago:
“Pause” and not “Stop” is concerning.
Is it just me, or was the addition of AI summaries basically predetermined? The AI panel probably would only be attended by a small portion of editors (introducing selection bias) and it’s unclear how much of the panel was dedicated to simply promoting the concept.
I imagine the backlash comes from a much wider selection of editors.
- Comment on China’s new DeepSeek censors even more than old models 5 weeks ago:
What an incredible link.
Before the article, I see a pseudoscience ad.
Support your body’s natural ability to detox with [brand name] foot pads
I scroll down below the article and
5G DEFENSE POWDER
and
Colloidal silver
and a telepathy ad
The contagious mind audiobook
Discover how to use morphic resonance to bypass censorship, share knowledge and spread freedom!and an article that says
Demonic globalists maintain control through a SCARCITY ECONOMY that keeps humans enslaved
And another ad
Survive the Global Reset
9-hour audiobook from Mike Adams is available to download - Submitted 4 months ago to technology@lemmy.world | 269 comments