stsquad
@stsquad@lemmy.ml
FLOSS virtualization hacker, occasional brewer
- Comment on Microsoft has pulled back on over a gigawatt of planned data center capacity, suggesting that they do not think there is a growth future in generative AI 6 days ago:
Context is king which is why even the biggest models get tied in knots when I try them on my niche coding problems. I’ve been playing a bit with NotebookLM which promises to be interesting with enough reference material but unfortunately when I tried to add the Vulcan specs it complained it couldn’t accept them (copyright maybe?).
We have recently been given clearance to use the Gemini Pro tools with Google office at work. While we are still not using them for code generation I have found the transcription and meeting summary tools very useful and certainly a time saver.
- Comment on What ever happened to QAnon? 6 days ago:
I don’t doubt the a MAGA crowd leant into the Q conspiracy and were happy to co-opt it’s adherents into it’s electoral base. However is there any evidence that links its genesis to the like of Banon? Most of what I heard (from across the pond, indirectly) was more traditional wedge issues like anti-DEI and anti-trans rhetoric.
- Comment on What ever happened to QAnon? 6 days ago:
A corrupted Mrs Davies?
- Comment on Now that Trump is getting real chummy with Putin where does that leave China? 6 days ago:
You need to pair 1984 with Huxley’s Brave New World to see where we actually ended up.
- Comment on What are the exact ramifications and consequences of the recent meeting with Zelenskyy and Trump/JD? 6 days ago:
It didn’t work out for Littlefinger in the end.
- Submitted 6 days ago to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world | 23 comments
- Comment on Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think Google drive supports encryption.
- Comment on WFH with privacy? 85% of Brit bosses are snooping on staff 5 weeks ago:
I just spec a machine up to the defined limit and then buy it, install and claim back on expenses. I’m fact “do I have root on my machine” is one of my standard interview questions.
- Comment on DJI will no longer stop drones from flying over airports, wildfires, and the White House 1 month ago:
Ultimately it’s the drone operators responsibility to ensure they aren’t violating airspace rules.
- Comment on Deadline to record historic footpaths to be scrapped 2 months ago:
While I’ve been updating open street map I’ve also taken the time to report right off way violations via my councils web portal. The problem is most of the paths around here are permissive national park paths and there is no canonical catalog available digitally to cross check against. I don’t know if they should also be registered as a right of way?
- Comment on Broadcom reverses controversial plan in effort to cull VMware migrations 2 months ago:
What exactly is the USP for VMware that makes it worth the premium? Is it just installed inertia?
- Comment on Roblox announces new measures to protect under-13s from other players 3 months ago:
We already do - and play it with them on our family creative and survival servers.
- Comment on Roblox announces new measures to protect under-13s from other players 3 months ago:
I regret ever giving my kids access to Roblox. They haven’t had any bad interactions as far as I know but the content mill of poor knock offs is just depressing. They learnt the highlights of Squid Game from “games” that went viral on the platform.
My youngest wants to graduate to Fortnite and hyper-monetisation aside I’ve agreed they can have it on the family playstation if they drop Roblox.
- Comment on Elon Musk May Have Made a Huge Mistake on Full Self-Driving That It's Too Late to Correct. 4 months ago:
I can see the argument that visible light should be enough given we humans can drive with just two eyes and a few mirrors. However that argument probably misses the millions of years of evolution of our neural networks have gone through while hunting and tracking threats that happens to make predicting where other cars might be mostly fine.
I have a feeling regulators aren’t going to be happy with a claim of driving better than the average human. FSD should be aiming to be at least 10x better than the best human drivers and we’re a long way off from that.
- Comment on Russia says it might build its own Linux community after removal of several kernel maintainers. 4 months ago:
It depends what they want to do. They can fork and take on the burden of maintaining the whole tree in which case good luck with that, linux is too much of a fire hose to enable a 3rd party to assemble something similar making different choices about what they merge. Otherwise they can maintain a re-based fork that tracks the Torvalds tree and then congratulations you’ve just invented a feature tree that can do contribution with extra steps.
- Comment on A TikTok alternative called Loops is coming for the fediverse | Users own their content, and Loops doesn’t sell or provide videos to third-party advertisers or train AI on them. It will be open source 4 months ago:
I don’t think algorithms themselves are to bland but what they are tuned for. While engagement/eyeball hours for the adserver is the prime metric the quality of experience will be subservient to it. If the algorithms could better measure your mood and stimulation levels and maximise for that the effect would be less toxic. Ideally if it realised you were just mindlessly consuming it could suggest maybe you’ve done enough today and to try something else. But that I fear that is not something the owners of the various ecosystems want.
- Comment on What kind of special knowledge or equipment does piracy groups have? 4 months ago:
In all DRM devices there are private signed certificates that can be used to establish a secure authenticated connection. To get at them you need to crack/hack/file the top of the chip to exfiltrate the certificate. More modern “Trusted Computing” like platforms include verified boot chains so even if you extract the certificate you couldn’t use it because you also need to sign the boot chain to ensure no code has been altered.
- Comment on What kind of special knowledge or equipment does piracy groups have? 4 months ago:
Absolutely - modern pirates are extracting the digital streams with the DRM removed. However they closely guard the methods of operation because once the exploits or compromised keys are known they can be revoked and they have to start cracking again. They likely have hardware with reverse engineered firmware which won’t honour key revocation but still needs to be kept upto date with recent-ish keys.
For example the Blu-Ray encryption protocols are well enough known you can get things working if you have the volume keys. However getting hold of them is tricky and you have to be careful your Blu-Ray doesn’t read a disk that revokes the old keys.
For streaming things are a little easier because if you get the right side of the DRM you can simply copy the stream. However things like HDCP and moving DRM into secure enclaves are trying to ensure that the decryption process cannot be watched from the outside. I’m sure their are compromised HDCP devices but again once their keys get leaked they will no longer be able to accept a digital stream of data (or may negotiate down to a sub-HD rate).
- Comment on Fallout 4 is a great game with big flaws 4 months ago:
Lemmy really needs to support post combining somehow so you can see the story once (and maybe even combine the threads in the UI?).
- Comment on xkcd #2992: UK Coal 5 months ago:
We still have a lot of slag heaps in the top of some of our local hills. They make for some interesting mountain bike runs but they aren’t exactly diverse in floor coverage. Some pits are now tourist attractions but I don’t know what ongoing work is done to maintain the abandoned ones.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
What do people expect? Those servers aren’t free to run and they’re is only so much VC money to burn. That said I wouldn’t pay the various subscription levels that are currently being asked for. I pay for API use which is basically pay as you go. It also makes you think “does this task really need the non-free tier to complete?”.
- Comment on Ukraine Bans Telegram Use For State, Military Officials. 5 months ago:
I assume that is too cover the intelligence officers monitoring the Russian milbloggers.
- Comment on Starlink is increasingly interfering with astronomy, scientists say 5 months ago:
I can imagine it but it certainly won’t be practical to implement in our lifetimes. There are certainly some observatories that benefit from being based in space (optical and infrared) and even gravitational detectors such as laser interferometers. However aside from the wide capture area radio telescopes need large amounts of compute to separate the signal from the noise. The amount of data that needs to be processed makes space based radio observatories very hard to implement.
Maybe the dark side of the moon will make a decent observatory one day but we haven’t set foot on the place for decades, let alone built anything so complex.
- Comment on Starlink is increasingly interfering with astronomy, scientists say 5 months ago:
You would be hard pushed to build something like the SKA in space given it spans multiple countries and a significant arc of the earth.
- Comment on How Telegram's Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr 6 months ago:
They won’t directly support it because in their view the Google Play process is a more secure way of verifying they supplied the binaries than is possible of f-droid. If reproducible builds were possible maybe there could be some mechanism to verify a given binary is built from a given commit of the source tree.
- Comment on YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers 6 months ago:
When did this change? AIUI creators got a larger cut of YouTube premium views compared to ad share.
- Comment on What are the biggest red flags when talking with a Trek "fan"? 6 months ago:
I’m watching Voyager with my kids. Janeway is pretty bad ass given her position as the sole federation representative in the delta sector. We are however using a watchlist and skipping the filler episodes rather than going for the completionist approach.
- Comment on Potential reasons for undershooting gravity 6 months ago:
Did you sparge the grain when you were done mashing?
- Comment on What exactly was Yotta doing with people's money? Right now they are basically a gambling platform. But from my understanding they were a no lose lottery. But exactly what was going on in that compan 7 months ago:
So similar to premium bonds? Usually those are government backed though.
- Comment on What exactly was Yotta doing with people's money? Right now they are basically a gambling platform. But from my understanding they were a no lose lottery. But exactly what was going on in that compan 7 months ago:
The phrase “no loose lotary” should be a red flag right away.