Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Belgium Targets Internet Archive's 'Open Library' in Sweeping Site Blocking Order⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow, your entire “argument” is literally nothing more than a collection of Strawmen, False Dichotomy Falacies and McCarthist-style slogans (yeah, sure mate, any critique of anything at all in modern Capitalism must be “Socialism”).

  Five paragraphs of tribalist muppet kneejerk slogans deployed in defense of the notion that Ideas should be Property, no less.

  Only Socialists would want to have published Scientific Papers freely available to all and for there to be archives of published digital works in the day and age of zero cost publishing and distribution on the Internet: the evils of Socialism can only be avoid if for absolutelly everything, somebody somewhere is getting paid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Belgium Targets Internet Archive's 'Open Library' in Sweeping Site Blocking Order⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  You can see how trully Freedom-loving mainstream Liberal parties are, even in Europe, by looking at the domains were Freedom Of Ideas clashes with Ideas As Property such as science publishing: almost all of those “Liberal” mainstream parties side with the Owner Class in expanding and increasing enforcement of the “though shall not share without paying” Intellectual Property laws that let some make money of something they are only able to own due to such laws (those laws are literally anti-natura in that ideas are naturally shared), rather than with the natural freedom of sharing.

  The way States support and impose Intellectual Property is really just a facet of the broader societal problem of politics in Capitalist nations (even those disguised as “Democracy”) not really working for the many.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  True, such a low number of production units design would really only make sense if you could find an off the shelf solution to drive multiple displays.

  If these displays are not supposed to be animated and they’re reasonably low resolution (say, 800x600 20bit RGB or less), they could be connected via SPI and pretty much every microcontroller out there has multiple SPI ports, so even a cheap SBC would work for that). However I expect that getting XWindows or Wayland in Linux to work with such displays would be a PITA.

  I’ve only ever got software running under Linux to control a tiny 2-tone display via I2C - on an Orange Pi SBC - and it’s totally its own thing which happens to be running under Linux sending low-level commands via the I2C dev and not at all integrated with X-Windows or Wayland. This would also work fine if the comms was via SPI (in fact the code barelly changes since I’m using a library that does most of the low-level work for me).

  To just display a static image or a sequence of static images loaded from storage in a bunch of screens low-resolution enough to support SPI (so 800x600 or less) I expect something like that would be fine.

  The more I think about it, there more I expect this thing could run on a single $50 SBC as long as the connector exposes at least an SPI device and 8 independent I/O lines (given how SPI works, shared SPI bus is fine with one separate Chip Select line for each screen as long as the SPI device under Linux can run on a mode that lets your code control the CS line itself, and the other 4 I/O lines are for touch detection) assuming touch position is irrelevant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Human replaceable printed paper labels, manual stick.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  What I describe goes well beyond things with screens.

  For example computer mice have a microcontroller inside (and unless it serves a mechanical function, not much more than that) and cars have several, only one of which actual handles a proper screen (it’s actually a microprocessor rather than a mere microcontroller).

  The simplest microcontrollers have nowhere near enough memory to handle any half-way decent display (some nothing at all, some can just about handle a two-tone 320x200 display over I2C or SPI, some can handle 640x480 16-bit RGB but without animations as they don’t have enough memory to actual have a buffer for image composition) and yet they keep getting sold in massive numbers.

  Pretty much all digital electronics out there no matter how invisible to users has been replaced by embedded microcontrollers or, in a some use cases, single function controllers (which are basically microcontroller programs converted into integrated circuits).

  Embedded computing was a massive revolution in digital electronics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The difference in what can be done and the amount of work that needs to go into it between discrete digital electronics and just having a microcontroller there is HUGE.

  Also with microcontrollers and microprocessors most of the work moves from Electronics Engineering and circuit-design space to Software Engineering and software development, and the latter experts are easier to find plus the development cycle is way more friendly when it’s just code which you can change and upload at will rather than physical circuits.

  Even more entertaining, microcontrollers are so stupidly cheap (the most basic ones cost a few cents) that throwing in a microcontroller is almost always significantly cheaper than doing the control stuff with discrete electronics.

  I actually got an EE degree back when we embedded circuits were just starting to be used so I didn’t really get taught how to use them, then went for a career in software instead of electronics and came back to digital electronics years later and it’s like night and day between the discrete digital electronics age and the everything is a computing device era.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Is it just me who feels that having one processing unit per display is a waste?

  I mean, I get it why they did it (it’s way easier to just have one SBC per-display, both on the hardware and the software sides), but if designing such a system I would still try to come up with a single board solution if only because waste gets on my nerves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless things have changed massively in the UK in the last 5 years or so, in my actual experience you don’t unless you actually make a profit.

  The yearly baseline costs of opening and operating a Limited company in the UK are pretty low (less than £100 if I remember it correctly).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK Government responded to the "Repeal the Online Safety Act" Petition.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  “You plebs should know your place”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For starters, the whole “Progressive” thing is an American concept born out of the American environment (with its very deep religious moralistic strain amongst a large fraction of the population) and does not really applicable to Britain because, at least until recently, they didn’t really have regressive tendencies.

  Beyond that Labour hasn’t been Leftwing since Tony Blair took over in the 80s and started talking about it being New Labour - they’re Neoliberals and quite strongly so, so pretty rightwing.

  What they did was performative Identity Politics like in the US: theatrics in the Moral space to make them seem different from the other mainstream party, rather than actually having genuine Liberal Principles.

  Of late they even ditched that and seem to be trying to outfascist the Fascists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨mensa⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As I see it, that’s both a problem of low self-confidence and passiveness (or maybe underdeveloped values).

  For the first, we all have several qualities, but people often don’t recognize or value certain qualities, especially people driven mainly by what they think others value and hence end up valuing pretty much just the qualities modern Society focuses on - namely Wealth, Beauty and Brains - which is a typical low self-confidence thing.

  For the rest, as I see it, having some inherent quality that one was born with isn’t exactly something deserving of much pride because it’s not something one did anything to achieve. If that much one’s parents deserve the recognition for the “achievement”, though they didn’t actually do it on purpose, so maybe not even them. Having pride in being born with a high IQ makes about as much sense as having pride in being born in a rich family: it’s masturbatory ego stroking about one’s luck rather than a celebration of one’s successes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too bad we can't have good public transportation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, the point of Neoliberalism is to de facto destroy Democracy by making the powers controlled by voters (the State) be secondary to the power of Money.

  I guess the end stage will be something similar to Feudalism, or maybe just Fascism (a number of very Neoliberal nations have of late become a lot more Fascist).

  In the transition stage, the politicians are needed keep up the Theatre Of Democracy and distract the masses with ever louder shows of conflict around things which Money doesn’t really care about (hence the Identity Politics Wars).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too bad we can't have good public transportation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Whilst I can’t speak in an informed way about Japan, I can about The Netherlands and they have been degrading in terms of quality of public services during the Neoliberal era.

  Certainly by the time I left (about 15 years ago) the trend was well establish in that country of having Scandinavian levels of tax (but only for people, not for companies) and ever more American-level of public services. For example, they don’t have a National Health Service (instead they have Health Insurance) even though taxes there for individuals are significantly higher than in countries which do have one such as Britain or Portugal.

  They also use to have a high level of public housing but haven’t been building much of it in the last few decades and now have a giant realestate bubble.

  The Netherlands is a great example of how even countries which started with a higher level of policies geared towards the good of the many, having those decay over time as we get further and further away from the post-War era, especially during the Neoliberal years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too bad we can't have good public transportation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That requires political will to achieve and objective other than wealth maximization, or in other words a political philosophy other than Capitalism which, at least sometimes, is dominant over Capitalism.

  The whole point of Neoliberalism from the beginning was eliminate those and make Capitalism the dominat political* philosophy rather than just a trade philosophy, so almost 50 years into it the effects are all around us and painful to see.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too bad we can't have good public transportation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In Capitalist nations, the further we are from the era of peak Unions and in general civil society movements (which was just after WWII) the slower infrastructure improves from one year to the next, something visible not just in trains but at all levels (even National Health Services for those countries which have them).

  The same thing will happen in China now that they’re getting more Capitalist than Socialist.

  It was never the Capitalist part doing the kind of improvements that benefit most people, it was the stuff outside Capitalism (that used it as a Trade Philosophy only) constraining it and guiding it for policy ends which were independent of Capitalism.

  This of course accelerated with Neoliberalism, since that stuff is mainly about making Capitalism the sole definer of policy, or in other words make Capitalism unconstrained and unguided by interests other than those of Money.

  Capitalism is reasonably decent at optimizing Trade in the short and mid-term, but is completelly shit for non-Trade interests such as Quality Of Life, as well as for anything which doesn’t have direct action-consequence links cycles such as situations whose negative effects are very delayed in time or emergent in nature (i.e. things that appear due to the accumulation of the actions of many actors, such as Global Warming).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨mensa⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  People at the peak Dunning-Kruger point of intelligence - just above average intelligent enough to feel they’re “above” most people but not enough to properly understand the full nature of intelligence and its limits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨mensa⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s my impression that people tend to be more attracted to the unusual, so if you’ve grown up surrounded by big booty latinas, they’re not as appealing as otherwise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨mensa⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As far as I can tell, most people out there have expectations about high IQ people which are straight out of Hollywood films and wholly unrealistic, so best just leave then with whatever de facto impression of brightness they have about you than mention a number and trigger the “Mental Superman” expectations.

  Also going around parading your IQ falls straight into the rule “the more a person brags about some great personal quality, the less strong it is” - if you’re really that bright, brave, strong, beautiful, confident and so on, there is no need to mention it since it’s generally obvious to others.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Petition to tell MasterCard, Visa, and activist groups to stop censoring legal fictional content⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I seriously suspect they’re a psyops to help dissipate people’s righteous anger - people are pissed of a something, sign a meaningless petition in something like change.org, get their “I’ve done something” psychological kick and, having satisfied their need to do something, don’t actually go ahead and do anything effective.

  Defusing the anger against injustices of the very people who tend to be more aware of what’s going on and more concerned about it, before it turns into action or even causes civil society movements to rise, is a pretty useful mechanism for established powers in those countries which peddle the illusion of freedom to their citizenry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rule34 blocked the UK entirely rather than comply due to the new law.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Big Brother states (which the UK is certainly headed towards)

  When the Snowden Revelations came out, the UK had even more civil society surveillance than the US.

  As a consequence of those revelations, in the US some of the surveillance was walked back, whilst in the UK the Government just passed a law that retroactively made the whole thing legal, issued a bunch of D-Notices (the UK system of Press Censorship) to shut up the Press, got the Editor of the newspaper that brought it out in the UK (The Guardian) kicked out, and the Press there never talked about it again.

  Also, let’s not forget the UK has the biggest number of surveillance cameras per-capita in the World.

  Oh, and they have special and separate Surveillance Tribunal (the Investigatory Powers Tribunal) were the lawyers for the side other than the State are not allowed to be present in certain sessions, see certain evidence or even get informed of the final judgement unless their side wins,

  They have the most extreme regime of Civil Society Surveillance in Europe, and in the World are probably second only to the likes of North Korea and China.

  Britain is well beyond merely “headed towards” Big Brother and has been for at least a decade.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft concedes that 'The Outer Worlds 2' retail price was too high — Xbox says it "will keep our full priced holiday releases at $69.99," with refunds incoming⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not even “content at it’s zenith” - AAA games nowadays are pushed out both expensive and broken, plus they come with the risk of some form of enshittification being sneaked in later (be it promised content that we’re told “couldn’t make it into the launch” being sold later as overpriced DLCs or even monetisation).

  I would say that the zenith of most AAA games (in the sense of peak enjoyment) is at least a year after release once most bugs have been fixed and the threat of enshittification has passed, sometimes never (for those games that did got enshittified).

  IMHO, the best value, not just in terms of fun-per-$ but also in avoidance of unpleasant feelings (such as feeling that you’ve been swindled by a game maker or are being taken advantage of) is in buying games which are at least 2 years old, or in the case of some publishers like Nintendo, it’s never.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No Windows, no such Windows “features”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC

  As does Linux.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GET BOMBADEERED, IDIOT⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Only a couple more million years of natural evolution before we beetles capable of jet-powered flight…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that "AI" in itself is highly unspecific term⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Intelligent” is itself a highly unspecific term which covers quite a lot of different things.

  What you’re think is “reasoning” or “rationalizing”, and LLMs can’t do that at all.

  However what LLMs (and most Machine Learning implementations) can do is “pattern matching” which is also an element of intelligence: it’s what gives us and most animals the ability to recognize things such as food or predators without actually thinking about it (you just see, say, a cat, and you know without thinking that it’s a cat even though cat’s don’t all look the same), plus in humans it’s also what’s behind intuition.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hubris go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Neural Networks, which are the base technology of what nowadays gets called AI, are just great automated pattern detection systems, which in the last couple of years with the invention of things like adversarial training can also be made to output content that match those patterns.

  The simpler stuff that just does pattern recognition without the fancy outputting stuff that matches the pattern was already, way back 3 decades ago, recognized at being able to process large datasets and spot patterns which humans hadn’t been able to spot: for example there was this NN trained to find tumors in photos which seemed to work perfectly in testing but didn’t work at all in practice, and it turned out that the NN had been trained with pictures were all those with tumors had a ruler next to it showing its size and those without tumors did not, so the pattern derived in training by the NN for “tumor present” was actually the presence of the ruler.

  Anyways, it’s mainly this simpler and older stuff that can be used to help with scientific discovery by spotting in large datasets patterns which we humans have not, mainly because they can much faster and more easily trawl through an entire haystack to find the needles than we humans can, but like in the “tumor detection NN” example above, sometimes the patterns aren’t in the data but in the way the data was obtained.

  The fancy stuff that actually outputs content that matches patterns detected in the data, such as LLMs and image generation, and which is fueling the current AI bubble, is totally irrelevant for this kind of use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rough draft NAS is complete!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Dust is going to be a problem (well, maybe not that much electrically, but it maks it a pita to keep clean) after some months, especially for the Raspberry Pi.

  Consider getting (or, even better, 3D printing) an enclosure for it at least (maybe the HDDs will be fine as they are since the fan keeps the air moving and dust probably can’t actually settle down on it).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI that determines how much you personally will pay for a ticket⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Most people don’t even boycot companies for doing this shit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI that determines how much you personally will pay for a ticket⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  worst deals given to the poorest people, who are least likely to have other options

  Financially, giving the higher price to those who have fewer options is exactly “what it should be” so it makes sense that a pattern finding algorithm trained to maximize profit produces such a result.

  It’s Ethically and Morally that this is the very opposite of “what it should be”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI that determines how much you personally will pay for a ticket⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The higher a percentage of your income is the price of something, the more reason there is to allocate time to find the best price - if something costs you an amount which you earn in 5 minutes, it’s not really worth it to spend time looking for the better price, if it costs 2 and amount which you earn in 2 months, it’s definitelly worth to spend many hours looking around.

  Granted, as you say, many don’t have the time to do this, and in my experience most people don’t really make the mental connection between an amount they’re considering spending and how long do they have to work to earn it hence don’t really look around enough when it’s economically logical to do it.

  That said, for the reason I gave above, the rich don’t really care about things that “just” cost a couple thousand of dollars, which is why they casually just rent a private jet for a trip - there’s a whole industry for that - or even own one and employ a pilot for it fulltime.