BananaTrifleViolin
@BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
- Comment on A literal depiction of how capitalism invades all aspects of life 5 days ago:
True, but this is likely to be helping fund the reconstruction/repair work. So it’s kinda benefits everyone if it’s saving money from the public purse.
- Comment on How ‘Zionist’ became a slur on the US left 6 days ago:
Zionism has always been highly controversial. It is a political movement but it’s proponents try and paint it as a central and indelible part of Jewish identity - trying to make it seem to attack zionism is to attack Judaism. This is of course utter bullshit.
It’s a common tactic of the zionist movement to try and equate anti-zionism with being anti-semetic. But zionism is a nationalist political ideology, not an ethnic identity.
It is not anti-semetic to attack zionism, just as it is not unamerican to attack the Republican Party.
- Comment on Windows 10 reaches 70% market share as Windows 11 keeps declining 2 weeks ago:
The other possibility here is that Statcounter is trash.
People are taking its findings as if they’re gospel yet it is a very crude way of measuring how many users there are for an OS. It basically just measures how many users of each OS it sees each month - it is very difficult to consistently correct that data month to month, or match the same data to the same user each month. Lots of people use ad blockers and other privacy tools in their browsers which could easily break the sort of tracking Statcounter relies on.
Essentially, flucations in their data may just reflect the poor accuracy of their data rather than actual swings of 1%.
- Comment on Elon Musk goes ‘absolutely hard core’ in another round of Tesla layoffs 2 weeks ago:
Nope, a car company with no car design team won’t be making new models.
Tesla shows what’s wrong with capitalism - companies bloat on speculation driven in this case by a show man. Tesla is a house of cards - it squandered it’s first-move advantage, the competition are now building better EVs, and it’s self-drive technology is a lemon because Elon decided to remove all the essential sensors in his solution to reduce cost.
Meanwhile his competitors are getting licenses to self drive and Tesla have jackshit. Robo-taxis are coming but they won’t have the Tesla logo on them.
- Comment on Tesla Lays Off Employee Who Slept In Car To Work Longer Hours 2 weeks ago:
Tesla is an massively overvalued stock and has been for a long time. When they announced their recent dire sales, the share price actually rebounded because the clown Mush spouted his usual nonsense about the real value in the company - self drive and robotaxis - but it’s been widely reported for some time that the companies tech is a dud because Musk decided to remove all the expensive components that actually make the technology work. They lost their first-move advantage; their competitors have caught up and surpassed them both on EVs and self-drive tech.
The guy is a joke, the company is a joke.
- Comment on ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail, sources say 3 weeks ago:
Makes sense from a business point of view. Why sell to create a new competitor with the same technology and an impregnable market base in the USA?
Better to force US competition to start from scratch.
- Comment on TikTok's CEO is feeling the pressure and users are freaking out 3 weeks ago:
Either TikTok will win in court and overrun the law (possible), be sold (unlikely) or shut down (likely).
Multiple competitors will appear in the meantime hoping to get the displaced activity. TikTok is hugely profitable and a dominant replacement in the US would make a lot of money. This will be seen as an opportunity to make a lot of money for the winner.
I can see Meta trying to make a TikTok like clone, Google trying to leverage YouTube shorts, and Elon Musk trying to revive Vine at Twitter, plus lots of startups vying to win the audience.
The deadline is after the US election - this could also all be political grandstanding and the politicians expectation might be that the law won’t stand up in court anyway.
- Comment on Why I ditched Gmail for Proton Mail 3 weeks ago:
Your emails are.more private in the same sense that if you have a letter with something on it, turning it over means someone can’t read it over your shoulder, but they could have read it before it got to you.
Google has access to the contents of your inbox, Proton mail does not. But the protocols are unchanged and unencrypted email is accessible in transit.
So moving to Proton is a definite improvement, particularly as email remains a basic means of communication. But as you say if you wand secure communication then it is very flawed.
- Comment on Mr Bates vs Post Office drama lost £1m, ITV boss says 3 weeks ago:
I think his point was more the state of broadcast television at the moment. There has been a major advertising slump in UK TV - for example channel 4 is in dire straits, cutting 17% of their workforce, stopping commissioning an holding lots of shows back from broadcast as an accounting ploy to not pay production companies until the next financial year.
ITV on paper are doing much better but to find their biggest hit of the year actually lost money says alot about the state of UK broadcast TV. The first run advertising and the UK streaming catch up money (or fragments of subscriptions to ITVX) haven’t made the show profitable.
Shows now need to be saleable abroad to make money and a show like this just doesn’t sell enough to make profit.
Its bad news because it means ITV and others are less incentivised to make these types of shows and instead retreat back to cheaper shows (reality and quizzes), and stuff that will sell abroad. Stuff that sells abroad is not necessarily bad but it does push to more generic types of TV over culturally important or unique shows that would only appeal here.
There isn’t really a solution to this in the commercial sector. Advertising might bounce back but probably not as that money is now directed at the Internet and social media, not TV.
The BBC could be a champion for this type of stuff but it’s doing badly too as the license fee has not kept up with inflation for years, so it’s having to make very deep cuts to keep as much of its many commitments going as possible.
Meanwhile American streamers including Netflix are gobbling up the market and UK broadcasters can’t compete with the shear scale of their operations.
Personally I think the funding for the BBC needs to go up substantially, and maybe slices of new money even become available for any broadcaster to apply for to ensure culturally important shows can be funded. The commercially viable stuff will always have funding but the more niche and UK specific stuff needs to be protected and probably subsidised to maintain a cultural voice and support diversity in the output of our creative industries.
- Comment on So much for free speech on X; Musk confirms new users must soon pay to post 4 weeks ago:
Who is going to pay to post on twitter? Not only has he destroyed what was there but he’s stopping any route for growth with new users. Most people won’t bother.
He really has managed to destroy that company with his knee jerk decisions.
- Comment on Why AI is going to be a shitshow. 5 weeks ago:
The other huge issue is when they confidently tell you incorrect information. If you trust the AI tool you are basically looking at the world through a filter and one that can be wrong.
In a rush for market share these companies have released broken or half baked software.
I worry about a generation of students coming through who don’t know the cardinal rule of researching any topic: go to the source. If you’re casually goofling a topic that may be impractical but you might at least go to a source you trust (such as Wikipedia, although that is also very flawed approach!).
Chat bots add another layer of error and distance from the source, as well as all the censorship and data manipulation we’re seeing.
- Comment on Good time 1 month ago:
Napster launched in June 1999. It shut down in July 2001. It was a short run but I don’t think a lot of young people were spending $10 on an album.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Long term, why would it be limited to $1000?
This is honestly an issue about the long term prospects of our species. More and more production is becoming automated, resources owned, and complex work likely going to AIs. This causes a fundamental breakdown of our current system - people working is largely “redundant” in a world of automation; people are less and less of a “resource” and capitalism begins to make less and less sense.
We’re playing with the idea of UBI now, but we’re going to need solutions to this problem. Whoever owns the robots, AIs, land/resources owns everything. Either we let this be concentrated in the hands of an arisocratic class of billionaires, or we rebuild the system and accept capitalism is over. If people can’t “sell” their time through work, then how are people going to live.
I know it all sounds very science-fiction but this is the reality our world is sleep walking into. Instead of coming up with plans to dace this, our politicians are unsurprisingly pissing about focusing on nonsense and tinkering at the fringes of the problem at best.
- Comment on "Best" Mac browser: Your view 2 months ago:
I don’t have a Mac but I can offer you a viewpoint: in general it is better to compartmentalise your data and if you’re using products by the big tech companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta etc) then to separate date between them as much as possible. In other words, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
If you’re on a Mac, you’re in Apple’s ecosystem. In some ways they provide better privacy as they’re not as dependent on advertising like Google for example, however they do have advertising buisness and are still mining your data and profiling you as it’s their business to sell you stuff whether that’s more Apple hardware or digital content.
So I personally wouldn’t be using all their various apps without knowing in detail what data is going to them. Web browsers, email and calendars are data gold mines, as are anywhere you shop for content such as App stores, music, video etc.
If I were on Apple, I would be using Firefox so as to wall off as much as my data from Apple as possible. I’d also consider Thunderbird for email & calendar to remove Apple from that data trove. I personally also pay for my email service rather than using anything bundled in (i.e. iCloud) - the reason being you’re not beholden to one provider longterm and can access and migrate your data on other devices (e.g. not Apple in the case of iCloud).
Apple tries to sell itself as a bastion of privacy. It’s not - it’s probably a bit better than some of it’s competitors but it still is involved in user tracking and selling data to advertisers. They made a fanfare about letting users disable advertiser tracking on iPhones but what they didn’t make as much noise about is that they actually built the tracking tools in the first place, and they’ve been building their advertising business as the services side of Apple is big money (it’s app store, it’s content etc)
- Comment on "Best" Mac browser: Your view 2 months ago:
I’m not sure how much better privacy Chromium has; it is “degoogled” by default but that doesn’t mean it’s necessairly more private.
If you wanted better privacy and control then Librewolf is probably the better option - it is Firefox stripped of the telemetry tools, default google search links (which are minimal in Firefox, just default search engine) and privacy hardened (including HTTPS only & default install of Ublock Origin extension)
- Comment on Children to stop getting puberty blockers at gender identity clinics, says NHS England 2 months ago:
I’ve never heard it that use of puberty blockers tbh. That is ethically dubious.
They are also used in children with precocious puberty - that is onset of puberty at an unusually early age. This is not being banned by the new guidance; it is specifically around the use in gender reassignment following the scandals around the Tavistock clinic.
- Comment on Why are mental hospitals run like prisons? 2 months ago:
I hope you recover soon. I’ve been depressed in the past and convinced that suicide is the right path. It is not - when you’re mentally ill you lose perspective and people telling you “it’ll get better” or “life is worth living” but thay will seem hollow.
If you find it difficult to understand why people want you to live then maybe think of it this way: what have you got to lose? If you’ve decided it’s over and there is no point, then you might as well try the support and the medication because you’ve got nothing left to lose.
I’m glad I took the support and the meds. It did get better, and that was the route for me to heal and change the direction of my life.
I hope you try, and maybe realise that it wouldn’t be a true decision if you’re too mentally unwell to make a rational decision.
- Comment on Why are mental hospitals run like prisons? 2 months ago:
Two reasons.
One is to ensure people do not come to harm or allow harm to others. As harsh as it seems, the whole point is to stop people from killing themselves or enabling someone else to kill themselves.
The other is to prevent illegal drugs coming in to mental health units. Unfortunately mental health services are also overwhelmed by social issues and drug use is rife. The units don’t want to deal with high patients who can be aggressive or even OD.
It can seem harsh but it’s not like a prison. A prison is punishment, while a mental health unit is often a place to hold someone in a crisis so they can’t harm themselves. The loss of freedom and dignity can feel like punishment, particularly on over stretched understaffed units but they’re trying to save lives. It’s a blunt tool as a last resort.
- Comment on How does delisting a game make/save money? 2 months ago:
This sort of makes sense but not for quite the same reasons. This may be an attempt to simplify their licensing arrangements so they can resell them. It’s easier to cancel all the licensing agreements in one go so they can then make a fresh exclusive arrangement with a single company.
It’s less about competing with the existing games (which they already control through licensing) and more to do with being able to sell or use the licensing cleanly without worrying about pre-existinf commitments.
Like, for each new game either you do legal compliance to make sure you’re not breaching your previous agreements OR you cancel all the agreements in one go and you never have to bother worrying about it. Saves money but also makes you the sort of company businesses will be wary doing deals with. But they probably have a deal with a big publisher lined up or intend to take the whole thing in house.
- Comment on What Do People Think of Apple's Vision Pro Headsets? 2 months ago:
It’s the first expensive iteration of something that could become viable if costs come down as production scales up.
In fairness to Apple, it’s a powerful device and is the sort of device VR manufacturers are trying to converging towards. Their’s is an all in one unit, with powerful on board processing so it gives high quality VR without tethering. It also has a lot of sensors built in, both negating the need for external sensors and hand control devices.
Compare that to other high end VR, and the competition remains high end tethered devices such as the Valve Index which is an expensive headset, limited to a room with sensors, tethered to a decent gaming PC, and requiring hand controllers to interact with the world. At the other end you have cheaper all-in-one devices like the Quest 2 which try to do what the Vision Pro does to an extent but are too limited techwise due to the price point they’re targetting.
A valve index is about £1k, and a decent gaming PC is about £1-2k depending on how high end you go. The Vision Pro is £2.7k ($3.5k, but pre-tax); more expensive and perhaps offering less than the PC would beyond VR but still not crazy far away numbers wise. And it is offering a paradigm shift towards how VR is likely to be in the future.
All the stuff about it being a “new” device type (“spatial computing”) is marketing nonsense - this is an AR/VR headset but it is one that’s ahead of it’s time as an expensive gamble by Apple to take a stake in the future. Expect a Vision Pro 2 in the next year or two with similar power but a lower price, but also I’d expect other manufacturers such as Meta and Valve to be converging on the same type of device from the other direction. But I’d honestly expect it to be more like 5+ years before such devices with similar specs to the Vision Pro are mass market and “affordable”. Like, £3k for a headset would be a no to me; but £1.5k for something that did that… that’d be expensive but getting into an affordable luxury for me. And is they were convincing around some of the “spatial computing” type productivity apps missing from game centred VR being a UIP, then it’s more like considering a new lap top and a £1.5-2k devices starts becoming a real consideration.
And as an expensive gamble it seems to be paying off. Supposedly 200,000 sold so far at $3.5k a pop - thats $700m in revenue. Even if it’s not massively profitable per device, thats a good user base for such an expensive product and hints this could be something that does well as the price comes down. This is well away from mass market appeal, but I can see a trajectory where this becomes affordable as a luxury computing device first before eventually becoming mass market.
- Comment on Amazon "search through reviews" is blindly just running an AI model now 2 months ago:
Just don’t buy off Amazon. I buy electrical goods from other retailers because Amazon provided products are pooled with 3rd party products in their warehouses - which means lots of counterfeit electricals even if you select something sold by amazon directly. Not worth the danger of a fire in your home buying a shitty knock off full price off amazon.
All the other shit you can literally buy on Ebay - they’re the same sellers reselling the same chinese crap. The reviews are meaningless.
- Comment on Do you ever worry that you're secretly a psychopath that unknowingly manipulates people around you? 2 months ago:
It’s good to be self aware and self critical but I think you’re over analysing yourself and putting negative labels on you.
A true psychopath wouldn’t care or have the ability to care.
The way you describe yourself you sound like you’re intelligent and insightful, and it’s unsurprising you would get on with older people if you’re more mature than others of your age.
You do need to be careful about inadvertently manipulating other people to your way of thinking - but anyone needs to be careful fit that, particularly if they’re skilled in being persuasive. Just because you can persuade people to your way of thinking does not mean you are always right. I’m able to do the same in real life but half to stop myself and think - it’s really important to learn to be open to other positions before you rush in and try to change people’s minds.
Having said all that, that is not “gaslighting”. You may need to understand what your friend is saying. It may be that actually you are doing a good thing in persuading them. Or it may be you’re inadvertently doing harm.
Or it may just be that your friend is very impressionable - some people are a bit like pillows - they will take on the opinion of the last person they spoke to much like a pillow takes an indent from the l last head they laid on. That’d be their problem, now yours.
Overall though, you seem to take quite a negative view of yourself or are worrying you are a “bad person” (although a psychopath isn’t bad, they’re just built differently; but obviously that seems bad to a lot of people). The fact you worry about being a psychopath shows you are not one, but also it shows you seem to be feel bad or guilty about who you are. You should explore why that is. As others have said, therapy can be a good way to do that. But having self awareness and a degree of self criticism (within limits) is alreadt a powerful thing.
- Comment on Matrix multiplication breakthrough could lead to faster, more efficient AI models 2 months ago:
Yeah we’re in the middle of the idiocy of an AI speculative boom. People will try and bend anything to include AI for attention or to make money, and “journalists” will lap up this crap. Bring on the bust.
- Comment on New York Times takedown domino effect hits nearly 2000 Wordle clones 2 months ago:
This to me sounds like a misuse of DMCA - it’s original open source code not stolen code, so the only “infringement” is dubious around whether you can clone a game or if a game belongs to whoever “owns” it. I can see they could have grounds to take the project to court to establish whether their copyright ownership of Wordle prevents anyone making their own version, but using DMCA for independently made code seems like a big overstep. Two corporations (Microsoft and the NYT) making decisions about whether software can be posted, and the poorly thought out DMCA rearing it’s head again.
- Submitted 2 months ago to technology@lemmy.world | 10 comments
- Comment on A 62-Year-Old German Man Got 217 Covid Shots—and Was Totally Fine 2 months ago:
Yeah the actions of one probably mentally ill. Person is nothing more than a curio.
Someone using a vaccine 217 times is interesting from a science curiosity point of view but useless when it comes to safety or efficacy. All it tells us is that repeatedly using the vaccine in someone who never had a problem with it didn’t cause problems. 1 person taking the vaccine 217 times is useless - even just 217 people taking the vaccine 1 time tells us much more.
- Comment on To the top 1% truly smart people the other 99% are dumb as a box of rocks. But exactly how fucking stupid is that 99% ? 2 months ago:
I think it’s important to understand that a role does not equate to intelligence. There is a spread of intelligence in all of society and in all roles.
Look at medickne: there are 10s of thousands of doctors but they are not selected for “intelligence”. Sure, passing high school exams is part of it but those are often biased towards memory. But other parts of selection are around social biases through interviews, university selection processes at. Also in places like the US selection is based around wealth - you’re more likely to get a place in a medical school. If you can fund it versus not.
So already you have a mix of intelligence in the field. Then within that you will have intelligent people and idiots. Someone had to place last in their medical school year, and someone had to be the worst in the entire years cohort across all medical schools.
I’m a doctor and I’ve met plenty of doctors who are fucking idiots frankly. People who sail through exams because of good memories for example - they are not intelligent. Intelligence is more than that - problem solving, creativity etc - but memory is mostly what we test for because it’s easy and lazy way to test students. The other elements of being a doctor are taught but not tested well - instead people gravitate to sub specialties that rely on specific skills beyond memory.
Being a doctor or an engineer or a dentist does not automatically mean you are intelligent. Our whole society is geared around lazy testing and metrics of academic success, and there are also other elements to those jobs where you can succeed regardless of intelligence (for example how much intelligence does it take to extract a tooth? Or take out an appendix 100 times?). You can succeed in these careers without high intelligence. That is not to say doctors are stupid either (the upper quality of medical practitioners can be incredible), just that the minimum standard is lower than people imagine.
And for me personally the brightest person I ever knew works in advertising. I’ve met a lot of very intelligent people in Medicine but also a lot of idiots. I’ve met a lot of intelligent people in scientific research fields, but also in computing and business and through family etc. Job titles are not a good metric alone - a blunt but flawed metric at best.
- Comment on To the top 1% truly smart people the other 99% are dumb as a box of rocks. But exactly how fucking stupid is that 99% ? 2 months ago:
The 99% are not as dumb as a box of rocks.
Have a look at Normal Distributions. If you look at IQ scores, 100 is by definition “average” - that is the peak where the normal curve is. 50% will be at or below 100 IQ and 50% will be at or above 100. The actual numbers beyond that depend on the test and that validity of such tests are hightl contentious (due to cultural biases and biases of what is tested - intelligence is difficult to define but is more than memory and even problem solving).
Assuming a simple symmetric normal distribution, 97% will be within 2 standard deviations of the mean. About 1.5% will be above that and 1.5% below that.
But that is not to say that anyone from 50-97.7 is unintelligent. Plus people have different skills and areas of intelligence. Someone may be in the top 1% when it comes to mathematical ability but not when it comes to English literature. Also someone may be incredibly artistically creative but useless at maths.
So there may be different normal distributions for different facets of intelligence. A different 1% of people may be at the top for maths ability compared to the 1% of people at the top of science or writing or medicine. That’s also not to suggest that everyone is a genius at something, but rather that there is more variability and value in people at the top end of the curve than just the top 1% by one measure.
Most people are not as dumb as rocks. However it is true that by definition over half the population will have a below average IQ. However I’m sure a large majority of people imagine themselves to be in the top 50% - no one wants to believe they are unintelligent.
Unfortunately stupid people who believe they are intelligent are a dangerous thing - just look at some of the politicians spouting moronic nonsense yet are high profile and powerful. Now multiply that out to all areas of life and you have a problem. About half the people you meet in life are likely to be below average intelligence - assuming you mix freely and randomly. If you don’t mix freely then you may be in a biased bubble where you spend time with people of a similar intelligence and not appreciate the true variation. I think that is more important than worrying about the 1%.
- Comment on To the top 1% truly smart people the other 99% are dumb as a box of rocks. But exactly how fucking stupid is that 99% ? 2 months ago:
Your assumption that intelligence means social tradeoffs is a nonsense. Intelligent people are more likely to be diagnosed with autism., adhd etc but that’s from very low numbers in the population and also likely an in built bias. For example it’s reasonable to assume more intelligent people are more likely to be aware there is an issue and go and seek a diagnosis. That doesn’t mean the diagnosis is more common with intelligent people.
It is also a stereotype to assume intelligent people are emotionally incapable.
Frankly, we live in a society where the majority seemingly wish to see intelligence as some form of disability in itself. It’s bizarre. I have to say I see this coming from US culture more than anywhere else (nerd and geek as insults for being intelligent for example; there aren’t UK English equivalents).
We seem to be living in a society which celebrates mediocrity of intelligence and paints intelligence as something to be suspicious of or a bad thing. The most famous and lauded people are sports stars, music stars, film stars. A few writers, business people and scientists get a look in but ultimately we celebrate people doing pointless things like running faster more than we celebrate people winning Nobel prizes for science or pushing forward technology and medicine.
- Comment on Public trust in AI is sinking across the board 2 months ago:
Trust in AI is falling because the tools are poor - they’re half baked and rushed to market in a gold rush. AI makes glaring errors and lies - euohemistically called “hallucinations”, they are fundamental flaws which makes the tools largely useless. How do you know if it is telling you a correct answer or hallucinating?
On top of that, AI companies have been stealing data from across the Web to train tools which essentially remix that data to create “new” things. That AI art is based on many hundreds of works of human artists which have “trained” the algorithm.
And then we have the Gemini debacle where the AI is providing information based around opaque biases baked into the system but unknown to the end user.
The AI gold rush is a nonsense and inflated share prices will pop. AI tools are definitely here to stay, and they do have a lot of potential, but we’re in the early days of a messy launch that had damaged people’s trust in these tools.
If you want examples of the coming market bubble collapse look at Nvidia - it’s value has exploded and it’s making lots of profit. But it’s driven by large companies stock piling their chips to “get ahead” in the AI market. Problem is, no one has managed to monetise these new tools yet. Its all built on assumptions that this technology will eventually reap rewards so we muststake a claim now.
Anyone remember the dotcom bubble? Welcome to the AI bubble. The burst won’t destroy AI but will damage a lot of speculators.