datendefekt
@datendefekt@lemmy.ml
I’m also on Mastodon
- Comment on Patient gamers, which games have you discovered/played this week? 1 week ago:
Slogging through FFXIII here. It’s super linear and repetitive, but just what I need right now.
- Comment on Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions 2 months ago:
Keep in mind that that was a demo to sell Copilot.
The issue that I’ve got with GenAI is that it has no expert knowledge in your field, knows nothing of your organization, your processes, your products or your problems. It might miss something important and it’s your responsibility to review the output. It also makes stuff up instead of admitting not knowing, gives you different answers for the same prompt, and forgets everything when you exhaust the context window.
So if I’ve got emails full of fluff it might work, but if you’ve got requirements from your client or some regulation you need to implement you’ll have to review the output. And then what’s the point?
- Comment on Constellation Energy plans to invest $1.6B to revive the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania and sell all the output to Microsoft for AI energy demands. 2 months ago:
Wait, so you think nuclear reactors spew out uranium?
Didn’t say that. But I also don’t think that it magically appears in the plant.
While coal powerplants don’t spew out radioactive coal ash??
Please stop this whataboutism.
Nobody cares to recycle concrete.
Not true. Making concrete creates huge amounts of CO2 during production. Sand is becoming a valuable resource. Recycling concrete for aggregate absolutely is a thing, but that’s a different topic.
I wont talk about storing waste, because I dont know why it is marketed as prohibitively expensive.
Convenient. Then I will because I’m not finished. You have to ensure containment of the barrels for decades, if not centuries. The mine has to be in geologically inactive area, and you have to be certain that no ground water will seep into the mine in the foreseeable future. We don’t want ground water in the mine, its cold and wet and seeps through everywhere.
And you have to figure out how to keep idiots from breaking into the mine in 150 years and using spent rods to heat their homes. If you think that’s far fetched I encourage you to read about the Goiânia accident , one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters. Some kids found the radioactive source of an abandoned xray machine while playing around.
- Comment on Constellation Energy plans to invest $1.6B to revive the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania and sell all the output to Microsoft for AI energy demands. 2 months ago:
Uranium is a heavy metal and of course its poisonous. Just like lead, but radioactive. Why aren’t we using uranium glassware or uranium paint anymore if it’s supposedly not poisonous?
When was the last time a solar farm or a wind park had a catastrophic accident leading to large parts of land being uninhabitable for decades, even centuries?
Of course they are explodey. It’s a fission reaction that has to be constantly modulated and cooled to not go critical.
The other argument is the cost of properly storing waste and decommissioning the plant, which is often conviently ignored. Not much of a NPP can be recycled, unlike solar.
- Comment on Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions 2 months ago:
Like most things with environmental impact, we just let later generations deal with it. Somehow.
- Comment on Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions 2 months ago:
Microsoft jumped fully on the AI hype bandwagon with their partnership in OpenAI and their strategy of forcing GenAI down our throats. Instead of realizing that GenAI is not much more than a novel parlor trick that can’t really solve problems, they are now fully committing.
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, and reactivating 3 Mile Island is estimated at $1.6 billion. And any return on this investments are not guaranteed. Generally, AI is failing to live up to its promises and there is hardly any GenAI use case that actually makes money.
This actually has the potential of greatly damaging Microsoft, so I wouldn’t say all their decisions are financially rational and sound.
- Comment on Constellation Energy plans to invest $1.6B to revive the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania and sell all the output to Microsoft for AI energy demands. 2 months ago:
Nuclear has its advantages, but there is hardly anything as cheap and maintenance free as solar+batteries. Anyone can set it up, and it just runs all by itself for years and years.
In Europe, the price for electricity on the spot market regularly goes in the negative. Jep, you can get paid money to consume electricity because it’s so abundant.
Look at France, their new NPP is taking 12 years and 12million euros more than planned. Is it really worth all that financial and environmentalist risk building something poisonous and explodey that needs constant attention?
- Comment on Submit Your Cool Site/Blogs 2 months ago:
I’ve been trying to get into Gemini for a while now. There site aggregators and everything, but I’ve yet to find something personally engaging.
- Comment on US: Alaska man busted with 10,000+ child sex abuse images despite his many encrypted apps 2 months ago:
AFAIK chat contents are stored unencrypted on the server.
- Comment on Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good | Kagi Blog 2 months ago:
I gave into the hype and tried out kagi. Have to admit, it really is astonishing gkw much of the internet you miss out on using Bing or google.
If it’s really worth the amount of money they ask is a different question, but at the moment there isn’t an alternative equivalent.
- Comment on European iPhones are more fun now 2 months ago:
Just like with USB-C, which the EU regulated and now the iPad and IPhone have.
- Comment on Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads 3 months ago:
My organization has blocked all browsers other than Edge and Chrome - and has also blocked all plugins except for UBlock. For security reasons, of course.
- Comment on Some bad code just broke a billion Windows machines 4 months ago:
“type notes like a medieval peasant.”
Huh. I thought medieval peasants were usually illiterate? Even less computer literate?
- Comment on Russia using Kaliningrad as a base to disrupt EU satellites, report says 4 months ago:
They were being dicks even in the 80s. I remember the Russian Woodpecker. My father was a amateur radio operator and there were whole frequency bands that were unusable because of that prat-prat-prat-prat.
- Comment on Are there any games you're planning to pick up during the Steam and GOG sales? 4 months ago:
Can’t recommended DE enough, and for that price it’s a must buy.
- Comment on Are there any games you're planning to pick up during the Steam and GOG sales? 4 months ago:
My backlog has reached that point where I need to be a responsible adult and finally beat some games, so this time I’ll pass.
But the PS games like Horizon: Zero Dawn are tempting.
- Comment on Apple Intelligence won't launch in EU in 2024 due to antitrust regulation, company says 5 months ago:
And nothing of value was lost…
- Comment on Apple introduces M4 chip 6 months ago:
I get the sarcasm, but isn’t that exactly what E-Paper tablets are really good at?
- Comment on Fifty Years of the Personal Computer Operating System 6 months ago:
One Friday afternoon, Gary called the engineering staff together and announced that he would give them all a raise over the weekend. On Monday, when they returned to work, contractors began raising the building to make room in the basement for a new Digital Equipment Corporation VAX 11/750 computer system. After several weeks, supported by heavy wooden beams and house jacks, the engineers’ desks were five feet higher.
I’d have loved to work for him!
- Comment on Older patient gamers: what is your preferred gaming platform? 6 months ago:
Yep, OP uses his Switch way more than expected. The Deck is an extremely flexible device in a similar form factor. I’ve been able to beat so many games in my backlog with it, just excellent.
- Comment on UK: Almost a quarter of kids aged 5-7 have smartphones 7 months ago:
Beyond the proven addictive effects of handing a dopamine device to your kid, there are legal ramifications many parents aren’t aware of.
WhatsApp and TikTok aren’t just there like air, free for all to consume. They are service providers and both sides are bound by a contract, the EULA. IIRC, WhatsApp recently reduced it minimum age from 16 to 12. So if you install WhatsApp on your 8 year old’s phone, you have broken the contract.
- Comment on Tidal’s subscription is getting simpler and cheaper — yes, you read that right 8 months ago:
That writeup from Xiph is excellent. The comparison with adding ultraviolet and infrared to video makes so much sense. But you’re dealing with audiophiles who seriously consider getting hi-end power and ethernet cables. I read somewhere that there was a listening test with speakers connected with hanger wire - and audiophiles couldn’t tell.
In the end, it’s all physics. I could never hear a quality improvement beyond normal 16bit, 320kbps, no matter how demanding the music.
- Comment on Tidal’s subscription is getting simpler and cheaper — yes, you read that right 8 months ago:
A few years ago I did listening comparisons of Amazon Music, Spotify, Deezer, Tidal and Quobuzz. At least for my ears, Tidal was way better, with engaging dynamic range and clarity. Quobuzz was just a little better, while listening to Spotify and Amazon Music was like FM radio in comparison, loud and compressed.
Pricewise, they’re all somewhat similar. I went with Tidal because it has good quality, a good catalogue, and pays the artists better.
- Comment on My jaw hit the floor when I watched an AI master one of the world's toughest physical games in just six hours 9 months ago:
Hey, I also had a toy like that! Cool!
- Comment on Google workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'glassy-eyed' 9 months ago:
Who could’ve imagined that Google is becoming just as mediocre and boring as any other large corporation. What a surprise!
- Comment on Boffins find AI models tend to escalate conflicts to all-out nuclear war 9 months ago:
Do the LLMs have any knowledge of the effects of violence or the consequences of their decisions? Do they know that resorting to nuclear war will lead to their destruction?
I think that this shows that LLMs are not intelligent, in that they repeat what they’ve been fed, without any deeper understanding.
- Comment on Google’s CEO faces employee questions about layoffs — “Why has there been such an extraordinary effort to limit the internal visibility of layoffs announcements?” 9 months ago:
We’re just expected to bow to authority.
Even if you’re the authority yourself? Also: that sounds like a great place for con-men 🤔
- Comment on Google’s CEO faces employee questions about layoffs — “Why has there been such an extraordinary effort to limit the internal visibility of layoffs announcements?” 9 months ago:
Being a bit closer to the C-Level of a larger company, I can assert that lack of vision and jumping on bandwagons is not exclusive to one nationality.
- Comment on The Chinese typewriter from the 1930s 10 months ago:
I thoroughly recommend the book “The Chinese Typewriter”. It goes through the various challenges that the Chinese language pose. How do you order characters, like in an alphabet? How it was encoded in Morse, or later on, in ASCII. And of course, the various attempts at Chinese typewriting. Actually quite fascinating!