Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨At Davos, NVIDIA, Microsoft CEOs deny AI bubble⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Like when the coach of a big sports team is interviewed on the half-time break of a game they’re losing, this guy will of course going to say they’re still going to win.

  It would only be news if he confessed they were fucked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bo'le of wa'er⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In Portuguese from Portugal, one of the words for “queue” is “bicha”,

  In Portuguese from Brasil, “bicha” is a slang word for homosexual.

  So the common Portuguese expression to tell somebody one’s going to stand on a queue - “vou para a bicha” (literally “I’m going to the queue”) - has a whole different meaning for Brasilians.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bo'le of wa'er⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  He has blood on his bloody nose.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah.

  Whilst I didn’t explicitly list that category as such, if you think about it, my AI for video surveillance and AI for scientific research examples are both in it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  AI isn’t at all reliable.

  Worse, it has a uniform distribution of failures in the domain of seriousness of consequences - i.e. it’s just as likely to make small mistakes with miniscule consequences as major mistakes with deadly consequences - which is worse than even the most junior of professionals.

  (This is why, for example, an LLM can advise a person with suicidal ideas to kill themselves)

  Then on top of this, it will simply not learn: if it makes a major deadly mistake today and you try to correct it, it’s just as likely to make a major deadly mistake tomorrow as it would be if you didn’t try to correct it. Even if you have access to actually adjust the model itself, correcting on kind of mistake just moves the problem around and is akin to trying to stop the tide on a beach with a sand wall - the only way to succeed is to have a sand wall for the whole beach, by which point it’s in practice not a beach anymore.

  You can compensate for this by having human oversight on the AI, but at that point you’re just back at having to pay humans for the work being done, so now instead of having to the cost of a human to do the work, you have the cost of the AI to do the work + the cost of the human to check the work of the AI and the human has to check the entirety of the work just to make sure and, worse, unlike a human the AI work will never improve and it will never include the kinds of improvements that humans doing the same work will over time discover in order to make later work or other elements of the work be easier to do (i.e. the product of experience).

  This seriously limits the use of AI to things were the consequences of failure can never be very bad (and if you also include businesses, “not very bad” includes things like “not significantly damage client relations” which is much broader than merely “no be life threathening”), so mostly entertainment and situations were the AI alerts humans for a potential situation found within a massive dataset were if the AI fails to spot it, it’s alright (so for example, face recognition in video streams for the purpose of general surveillance, were humans were watching those video streams are just or more likely to miss it) and if the AI incorrectly spots something that isn’t there the subsequent human validation can dismiss it as a false positive.

  So AI is a nice new technological tool in a big toolbox, not a technological and business revolution justifying the stock market valuations around it and investment money sunk into it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump Is Obsessed With Oil. But Chinese Batteries Will Soon Run the World⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, well, there’s no oil in Europe either, so ICE cars are even worse for a self-sustaining Europe (at least Lithum is only consumed once for an EV car, whilst oil is need all the time for ICE cars)

  Your entire “argument” is one big cherry picked excuse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump Is Obsessed With Oil. But Chinese Batteries Will Soon Run the World⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience, how many people think like that really depends on the country of Europe: my own native Portugal is far more shit when it comes to Environmentalism in general - especially around cars as the country has a very 1980s mindset on them and a car is still seen as symbol of status - whilst for example The Netherlands is almost the the opposite.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump Is Obsessed With Oil. But Chinese Batteries Will Soon Run the World⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well informed people knew that it wasn’t safe already for quite a while.

  Most people did not, most companies did not, most public institutions either did not or could make believed they did not.

  That’s changing (as are lots of other things) because Trump is being far more loud about how Europe is an adversary of America than previous administrations.

  There was quite a lot of fighting against treating America as a safe haven for the data of Europeans from people in the know in Tech and IT Security in Europe but we lost, but now crooked politicians can’t make believe America or American companies are safe for the data of Europeans anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Title is rule⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Explanation

  Mullvad just gives your machine an IP address from a range reserved for internal networks and which is not valid to use as a public IP on the internet, and then does NAT translation like your home router does.

  NAT translation just uses a gateway/router as a front on the Internet (thus, with a public IP address) for a bunch of machines with non-public IP addresses: if a connection comes from an inside machine to a machine on the internet it just replaces the source IP & port address on the outbound connection with its own public IP and available port so that if the external internet machine connects back, it knows which internal machine is supposed to receive that connection.

  So if you machine on the internal network side connects out to another machine on the Internet, at least for a while (until it purges than information from memory because it’s not being used) the NAT server will treat connections from that machine to it (remember, the NAT server is the one with a valid public IP address) as actually meant to go to your machine.

  However if a connection comes from a machine outside which your own machine has never before connected to (which is the case when you start seeding and you machine ends up in the list of seeders of a torrent), since your machine never connected to that one in the first place the NAT server doesn’t know which internal machine that connection is supposed to go to, so it never gets to that machine.

  The way to have your machine reachable by any random external machine when you’re using NAT is called Port Forwarding which is a mechanism to reserver one of the IP ports on the NAT server so that any connection to that port is always forwarded to a specific internal machine.

  Mullvad doesn’t support port forwarding, hence the problems with seeding.

  TL;DR What you can do

  After downloading a torrent, leave it seeding. Since during the download stage your machine connected with pretty much all machines in the swarm (even if just to check what they have available) the NAT server has them associated with your machine in its list so that if any of those machines tries to connected back the connection gets forwarded to your machine, hence requests from any of those machines to download blocks come through and get served by your machine.

  However new machines that join the swarm won’t be able to reach your machine because Mullvad’s NAT server doesn’t know them hence doesn’t know it should forward their connections to your machine.

  This is the same reason why if you just start seeding from scratch nothing ever manages to connect to your machine - none of the machines outside trying to reach yours is in the list that the NAT server has of machines your own has reached earlier so their connections to the public IP of the server don’t get forwarded to your machine.

  In my experience just leaving it seeding after downloading is enough to have at least a 2:1 seed to download ratio in most torrents, so if your objective is to give back to the community as much or more than you take, that’s enough IMHO.

  If however you just want to seed for other reasons, then you won’t be able to do it with Mullvad. Either get a VPN provider that supports port foward or rent a seedbox and use that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump Is Obsessed With Oil. But Chinese Batteries Will Soon Run the World⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Europe just did a 180 on the commitment for no ICE cars to be sold from 2035 onwards under pressure of just a handful of big automakers.

  And when I say Europe, I actually mean crooked European politicians rather than the public in general.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump Is Obsessed With Oil. But Chinese Batteries Will Soon Run the World⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, China has very purposefully put itself at the forefront of the first technological revolution of the 21st century and done this at multiple levels (solar panel production, battery tech, EVs)

  Meanwhile the American elites have decided that 19th century technology is were they want to be. Well, that and dead ending killing the country’s lead in the Tech revolution by going down a branch with no future in the form of LLMs and making everybody lose trust in keeping their data in anything owned by American companies.

  And, of course, the crooked politicians here in Europe are actually following America more than China in this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m doing my part by replacing the aging PCs of my close family with Mini PCs running Linux.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not at all surprising that fatcats looks at the juicy profits that Apple makes with their iOS closed garden and think “I want me some of that” - wanting to be a monopolist with captive customers makes the most business sense and is the most natural thing in a Capitalist Economic and Political environment.

  Most of the economic activity around Technology nowadays is rent-seeking and only the part which isn’t at all about money - open source - isn’t about corraling people into closed spaces, removing their choices and then extracting the most money possible from people who now have no other option.

  It’s kind like already 20 or 30 years ago Banks looked at cash payments and though that they should find a way to get comissions on those, same as they did with card payments, so already back they they were pushing things like electronic wallets (back then those were basically a special kind of card) and keep pushing it for decades (often with the support of governments, since 100% electronic payments are great for civil society surveillance), and nowadays in some countries there are pretty much no cash payments.

  So yeah, these people will totally try and get together with hardware makers with a dominant market position to slowly close down PC technology - for example the whole point of TPM is to take control away from the owners of the hardware and the “trusted” in “trusted platform” (aka TPM) isn’t about it being trusted by the owner of the hardware, it’s about it being trusted by the business selling the OS, who in turn can sell access to the thus gatekept environment to software making businesses.

  I believe the whole requirement for TPM 2.0 in Windows 11 even though it doesn’t actually need it is just a step in a broader strategy to turn PCs into a closed platform controlled by Microsoft.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Good luck⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For a moment there I actually imagined a washing machine with a rolling drum full of dishes and glasses it …

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Good luck⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Gotta leave your comfort zone to grow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, ok, that makes sense.

  I suppose the only part that my post adds is that in my experience for native English-speakers the tendency to learn the language of the country they live in is less than for non-native English speakers who are also not locals, because - thanks to English being the global lingua franca, almost everybody finds it easy to switch to English when confronted with a person who doesn’t speak their local language well but does speak English well, which makes it a lot harder in the early stage to learn the language of the locals (you need to be really assertive about wanting to try to speak the local language).

  Certainly that was my experience in most of Europe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you are from the US and stay there, English is the global Lingua Franca, the local Lingua Franca, the language of the country you live in and your mother tongue, and thus you will likely never learn a second language to fluency levels.

  Well, sorta.

  In my experience with British colleagues when living in The Netherlands (were you can definitelly get away with speaking only English), whilst some of them never really became fluent in Dutch, others would become fluent in it.

  You see, even with English being a lingua franca, many if not most of the locals (how many depends on the country and even area of the country - for example you’re better of speaking broken German with the locals in Berlin than English) are actually more comfortable if you speak their language, which make your life easier. Also the authorities will often only communicated in the local language (in The Netherlands the central authorities would actually send you documents in English, but for example the local city hall did everything in Dutch).

  That said, if you’re an English speaker you can definitelly get away with not learning another language even when living elsewhere in Europe plus I’ve observed that in the early stages of learning the local language often when a native English speaker tried to speak in the local language the locals would switch to English, which for me (a native Portuguse speaker) was less likely, probably because the locals could tell from a person’s accent if they came from an English-speaking country hence they for sure knew English whilst with me even if they recognized my accent they couldn’t be sure that I spoke English.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I am from Portugal - which is a very peripheral region in Europe, bordering only Spain - but do speak several European languages, and one of my most interesting experiences in that sense you describe was in a train in Austria on my way to a ski resort, an intercity train which was coming from a city in Germany on its way to a city in Switzerland just making its way up the Austrian-Alps valleys, and were I happened to sit across from two guys, one Austrian and one French, and we stroke up a conversation.

  So it turns out the French guy was a surf promoter, who actually would often go to Ericeira in Portugal (were at a certain time in the year there are some of the largest tube waves in the World, so once it was “discovered” it became a bit of a Surf Meca) only he didnt spoke Portuguese, but he did spoke Spanish.

  So what followed of a bit over an hour was a conversation floating from language to language, as we tended to go at it in French and Spanish but would switch to German to include the Austrian guy and if German wasn’t enough (my German is only passable) we would switch to English since the Austrian guy also spoke it, and then at one point we found out we could both speak some Italian so we both switched to it for a bit, just because we could.

  For me, who am from a very peripheral country in Europe, this was the single greatest “multicultural Europe” experience I ever had.

  That said, I lived in other European countries than just my homeland and in my experience this kind of thing is more likely in places which are in the middle of Europe near a couple of borders and not at all in countries which only border one or two other countries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience when I lived in Holland, compared to me my friends and colleagues from English-speaking countries had the additional problems in trying to learn Dutch that people would tend to switch to English when they heard them speak in Dutch (probably because they picked up from their accent that they were native English speakers) plus their own fallback when they had trouble expressing themselves or understanding others in Dutch was the “lowest energy” language of all - their native one.

  Meanwhile me - being a native Portuguese speaker - suffered a lot less from the “Dutch people switching to English when faced with my crap Dutch language skills” early on problem (probably because from my accent they couldn’t be sure that I actually spoke English and they themselves did not speak Portuguese) and my fallback language when my Dutch skills weren’t sufficient was just a different foreign language.

  So some of my British colleagues over there who had lived there for almost 20 years still spoke only barelly passable Dutch whilst I powered through in about 5 years from zero to the level of Dutch being maybe my second best foreign language, and it would’ve been faster if I didn’t mostly work in English-speaking environments (the leap in progression when I actually ended up in a work environment were the working language was Dutch was amazing, though keeping up was a massive headache during the first 3 or 4 months).

  That said, some other of my British colleagues did speak good Dutch, so really trying hard and persisting worked for them too (an interesting trick was when a Dutch person switched to English on you, just keeping on speaking in Dutch).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Speak for yourself: I built on learning 2 foreign languages in highschool to end up speaking 7 languages (granted, only about 5 at a level of easilly maintaining a conversation).

  The more languages you learn and the more you use them, the easier it is to add more languages to the pile.

  Also, at least for European languages, because they generally are related, learning a few helps with learning others: for example, my speaking Dutch helped me learn German and there are even weird effect like me being able to pick up words in Norwegian because they’re similar to the same words in the other two or when somebody gave us an example of Welsh in a trip to Wales I actually figured out he was counting to 10, both because some numbers were similar to the same numbers in other languages plus there is a specific rythm in counting to 10.

  As I see it, the more languages you know, the more “hooks” you have to pick stuff up in other languages.

  That said, you have to actually try and practice them: for example, most of my French language was learned in highschool, so when I went to France or even Quebec in Canada I tried to as much as possible speak French, which helps with retaining and even expanding it so my French Language skills are much better now than when I originally learned it in a school environment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's end Anti-Circumvention. We should own the things we buy!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Whilst I have no evidence for it (it’s not like we have an alternate timeline to compare to), I believe that the changes to Intellectual Property legislation in the last couple of decades have actually slowed down innovation, probably severely so.

  Certainly in Tech it feels like there’s less of a culture of tinkering and hacking (in the original sense of the word) nowadays than back in the 80s and 90s, even though with the Internet and the easy access to information on it one would expect the very opposite.

  Instead of countless crazy ideas like in the age of the generalisation of computing, open source and the birth of the Internet, we instead have closed environments gatekept by large companies for the purposed of extracting rents from everybody, all of which made possible by bought for legislation to create such situations.

  I mean, outside the natural process of moving everything done before from analog to digital-online (i.e. a natural over time migration to the new environments made available by the inventions of computing and the global open network that date back to before it) the greatest “innovations” in Tech of the last 30 years were making computers small enough to fit in your pocket (i.e. smartphones) - a natural consequence of the Moore Law - and a mediocre content generator.

  Now wonder that China, with their “we don’t give a shit about IP” posture has powered through from Tech backwater to taking the lead from the West on various technologies even though (from what I’ve heard) their educational systems don’t reward innovative thinking.

  So in my view only if Europe ditches the IP legislation pushed by the US in Trade Treaties does it have a chance to be part of any upcoming Tech revolutions rather than stagnating right alongside in the US whilst trying to extract ever diminishing rents from the tail ends of the adoption phases of last century’s technologies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dell says the quiet part out loud: Consumers don't actually care about AI PCs — "AI probably confuses them more than it helps them"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is pretty much a “all Tech companies have to jump on the AI hype train” pressure on publicly traded companies and those who need lots of investor money, and little if at all customer pressure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dell says the quiet part out loud: Consumers don't actually care about AI PCs — "AI probably confuses them more than it helps them"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  God forbid people want the compute they are paying for to actually do what they want, and not work at cross purposes for the company and its various data sales clients.

  I think that way of thinking is still pretty niche.

  Hope it’s becoming more widespread, but in my experience most people don’t actually concern themselves with “my device does some stuff in the background that goes beyond what I want it for” - in their ignorance of Technology, they just assume it’s something that’s necessary.

  I think were people have problems is mainly at the level of “this device is slower at doing what I want it to do than the older one” (i.e. AI makes it slower), “this device costs more than the other one without doing what I want it to do any better” (i.e. unwilling to pay more for AI) or “this device does what I want it to do worse than before/that-one” (i.e. AI forced on users, actually making the experience of using that device worse).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Code made up of severally parts with inconsistently styles of coding and design is going to FUCK YOU UP in the middle and long terms unless you never again have to touch that code.

  It’s only faster if you’re doing small enough projects that an LLM can generate the whole thing in one go (so, almost certainly, not working as professional at a level beyond junior) and it’s something you will never have to maintain (i.e. prototyping).

  Using an LLM is like giving the work to a large group of junior developers were each time you give them work it’s a random one that picks up the task and you can’t actually teach them: even when it works, what you get is riddled with bad practices and design errors that are not even consistently the same between tasks so when you piece the software together it’s from the very start the kind of spaghetti mess you see in a project with lots of years in production which has been maintained by lots of different people who didn’t even try to follow each others coding style.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ubisoft Closes Canadian Studio After It Unionizes⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s double funny because it’s pretty much the opposite of what it was meant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ubisoft Closes Canadian Studio After It Unionizes⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Generally the more money that depends on their systems being functional without errors or interruptions, the more an industry is willing to pay for devs.

  However in addition to that there is also the supply-demand effect: in demand specialists in rare areas get paid more than people doing the kind of work for which there are a lot more experiences professionals around.

  3D graphics programmers would benefit from the second effect but not as much the first.

  As a comparison, for example Quants (who program complex mathematical models used in asset valuation software for complex assets such as derivatives) in Investment Banking in London - thus who gain from both effects - about a decade ago had salaries of around £300k per year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ubisoft Closes Canadian Studio After It Unionizes⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not by chance that for example the Investment Banking industry pays a lot more money to developers than the wider IT industry - a system breaking down for an hour or two there can cost millions because, for example, trader’s can’t actually trade certain assets.

  Generally the more money that depends on their systems being functional without errors or interruptions, the more an industry is willing to pay for devs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ubisoft Closes Canadian Studio After It Unionizes⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If your income comes mainly from your work, you’re Working Class (even if you own you own business), if your income comes mainly from the money made by the money you have (in assets or even “investments”) you’re Owner Class.

  Certainly, modern politics only ever divides people in those two classes, with mainstream parties generaly only working for the good of the Owner Class which is how you end up with falling salaries in real terms and growing Asset valuations in the form of bubbles on all kinds of assets, most notably stocks and realestate (notice how most mainstream politicians see the rising of both stockmarkets and also house prices - tough of late, they don’t say it about the latter quite as openly - as being good things).

  The single greatest scam of modern Neoliberal Capitalism was making people who own their means of production but still have to work for a living think they’re not Working Class and hence Neoliberal Capitalism was actually working for them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Raspberry Pis are cheaper than Mini PCs again⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A Mini PC with an N100 (exact same performance as the microprocessor in the Pi5 according to this) and 8GB RAM will cost you around $140, which per what a previous poster dug out is exactly the same price as a Pi4 with only 4GB if we’re talking about something with the equivalent kit (i.e. with box, power supply and HDMI cable)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Raspberry Pis are cheaper than Mini PCs again⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Funny enough I recently bought an N100 Mini-PC with 8GB (as a Christmas present to replace somebody’s aged Windows 8 PC) for just a bit over $140 (more precisely €123, so $143 at today’s exchange rate).

  According to this the performance of the microprocessor on the Pi5 is at the same level as that of the N100.

  So basically if you buy a Mini PC with an N100 and 8GB memory you can roughly get the performance of the Pi5 at the price of a Pi4 with 4GB.