Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Finally, a USB standard that can provide the data AND power requirements of a city.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  “The massive ceramic connector and 10 inch thick cable immediatelly make obvious that the USB-D connector has been designed from the ground up to be able to power the latest generation of Graphics Card”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I believe so based on what I saw from affar, but I’m more intimatelly familiar with Britain - especially the more subtle element of politics and policy - since I lived there during that period.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I just want to inject here my experience in Britain during the 2008 Crash and its aftermath:

  In Britain, the Finance Industry was 17% of GDP, so when the Crash happened the country was disproportionally hit.

  After the crash the autorities chose to protect Asset Owner above all:

  • Interest rates were lowered to 0%, thus protecting lenders (i.e. those with the money to lend or ownership of Banks which in the modern system can de facto create money: if you don’t believe me, read the paper “Money Creation In The Modern Economy” from the Bank Of England) from debt defaults, indirectly protecting Asset owners by avoiding asset firesales from collateral confiscated after a default thus avoiding the associate asset price falls, most notably for Land and Housing (in the UK the housing bubble never really stopped being inflated and Land Ownership is the core of Old Wealth)
  • Banks were unconditionally saved by the state taking a share in them. That Public share was then put under management of a group made up of bankers “so that the government doesn’t interfere in the market”.De facto pressure for changing from the very practices that had cause the Crash was removed and most of the people having the blame for the failures of the Crash kept their positions of privilege.
  • All this was paid by most people through Austerity. Public services were cut, Social Security (aka "Benefits) were reduced, salaries stagnated.

  By 2015 the incomes of the top wealthier 10% of the population were growing in real terms 23% per year whilst the bottom 90% were seeing their incomes fall 1% per year in real terms.

  This was roughly how thing were going for about a decade after the Crash. UK inequality is nowadays huge, social mobility near non-existent, average incomes when measured in a currency other than the pound - which went down following Brexit - have stagneted, overall economic growth anemic and concentrated in highest wealth layers since the official “growth” is mostly asset prices going up.

  This is the process by which the billionaires make sure they win: everybody gets hit more or less in a Crash, but in during the subsequent period when the state is supposedly trying to fix it, you get also sorts of “extreme measures required by extreme times” that, “curiously”, help the billionaires the most, so some years later everybody but the wealthiest slices of society are worst of whilst the wealthiest are much richer even than before the Crash.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of countries in Europe already have their own country-wide payment systems.

  What we’re seeing now in Europe is the stage where those multiple country-specific systems become interoperable and a new international payment system appears.

  Canada only needs the kind of thing which has long been available in countries like The Netherlands and Portugal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  At least in Europe housing is at the moment proportionally to incomes just as bad as in the US.

  Totally agree on Health, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Having lived in a couple of countries in Europe, from The Netherlands which has Proportional Vote system and a thus a multitude of small parties to Britain with a First Past The Post system like the US and thus pretty much a Two Party System, I’ve concluded that at least in Politics stability is just like standing water - it invariably turns into a swamp.

  We need some amount of constant change to bring up and flush out the rot that innevitably accumulates in the murky waters of a system were power is always in the hands of a subset of people who are all in the same social circles, went to the same schools and whose sons and daughters marry each other.

  Not “Daily Revolution”, just regular change so that any funny business going on outside the public eye risks being brought to light, destroyed and the guilty people punished because power has changed has to people who aren’t mates of the crooks that did it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Western Digital details 14-platter 3.5-inch HAMR HDD designs with 140 TB and beyond⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s my point - it makes sense for high demand for GPUs and RAM to leak into lower supply and hence higher price for other high density microchips that use the same process and are made in the same fabs - something which your experience seems to confirm - but HDDs are mechanical magnetic storage devices were the only microchip is a pretty basic controller.

  HDDs are about as related to GPUs and RAM as power sources.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Western Digital details 14-platter 3.5-inch HAMR HDD designs with 140 TB and beyond⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Punched Paper Quantum AI is the next Revolution in Computing!

  You heard it here first.

  Invest Now!!!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Start-up idea⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Worry not, some of what’s perfectly fine nowadays will eventually be forbidden because how harmful it is for people, from micro-plastics that are being found even in men’s gonads to the excessive amounts of nitrous oxides emitted by diesel engine that kill over ten thousand people per year in Europe alone.

  We probably still breathe and eat a lot of highly carcinogenic shit, just different shit from back in the days when asbestos was considered a great fire-proof substance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Western Digital details 14-platter 3.5-inch HAMR HDD designs with 140 TB and beyond⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless things have changed recently LLMs don’t really used slow data stores with very high capacity such as HDDs, at least not beyond the training stage.

  The prices that have been pushed up are for GPUs and DRAM (which in turn possibly feeds down to other chips done in the same kind of fab), whilst this stuff is magnetic data storage on movable disk plates, a very different tech.

  I expect these things at most will only be affected very indirectly (for example, if memory prices go up because of all the datacenters targetting AI applications, there might be fewer datacenters set up for other kinds of server side application which are more data-centric, which would impact demand for ultra high-capacity HDDs).

  No that it makes a difference to us run-of-the-mill techies as consumers - even if HDDs get cheaper, with many times more expensive GPUs and RAM we can hardly put together new systems using these things, so at best it might just get a bit cheaper to expand one’s large storage NAS (the slower kind just storing data that doesn’t get accessed often, as the other kind uses SDDs).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If God had wanted us to have nearly unlimited clean energy, He would have placed a fusion reactor into the sky.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  All it takes is a water pipe painted black zigzagging inside a box which is black inside and has the sun facing side replaced by glass.

  You can get hot water from something like that even in Winter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lightbulbs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Mate, I have a Masters in Electronics Engineering and a partial degree in Physics.

  You’re either confusing some other application with what I was talking about - the emitters used in LED light bulbs - or you mentally over-generalized something you heard to a domain where it doesn’t apply or used it out of context.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Every accusation [is] a confession

  That is indeed something which has been very visibly and very often proven, again and again and again, in the last couple of years.

  I reckon it was always so, but we just forgot it during the period after WWII and the ressurging of the far-right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The “funny” thing is that anybody thinking that a mere 5 years ago would have been deemed a conspiracy nutter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lightbulbs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A phospor absorbs the incoming light and then uses it as power for its own emission process, in a processes called “fluorescence” rather than “filtering”. It’s a very efficient process because almost all of the light coming absorbed by the fluorescent material ends up used to emit light.

  A filter just cuts out (literally “filters out”) things other than what it’s supposed to let through. Filters just block stuff and thus cannot have on their output anything that’s not present on their input. Further, filtering can be very inefficient because everything that the filter doesn’t let through just ends up as waste heat.

  Filtering doesn’t make any sence for light emitted by a diode junction because that specific light emission process emits light of a single wavelength - it’s a totally different process from incandescence, which only emits photons whose energy exactly matches a specific quantum gap in that junction, hence all have the exact same wavelength so there are no other wavelengths to filter out and if you filter out that specific wavelength no light at all goes through because there’s nothing else there.

  Calling a phospor a “filter” is like calling a system with a solar panel connected to a green LED a “filter” - sure, the spectrum of the light coming in is not the same as that of the light going out, but that’s pretty much the only way the thing behaves the same as a filter - it does not share any of the other characteristics of a filter.

  Anybody with a Physics or Engineering background will react the same as me when somebody describes a fluorescent material in front of a light source “a filter” because per the scientific and engineering definitions “fluorescence” is not at all the same as “filtering”.

  Whatever source you learned information about LED lights from, it’s really bad and shows no domain expertise, which is probably why you ended up with some things right in your explanations and others horribly wrong. If I was to guess, I would say that you “learned” it from AI, as getting the general stuff mostly right and the domain expertise details incredibly wrong is a common problem of AI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lightbulbs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not even close to reality.

  Read the material linked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lightbulbs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Here are the LED drop voltages for reference.

  LEDs aren’t just more efficient at those voltages, those are literally the difference in voltage between one side of the LED and the other side when in operation - if you feed it less than that the LED will simply not work. (Note that these drop voltages are not actually an absolute value but rather a very steep curve relative to current, but for simplification we can treat those as absolute ON/OFF voltage values).

  Also the phosphor doesn’t filter light - rather it absorbs light and re-emits it in different wavelengths, the process being such that the emitted light covers a range of wavelengths even if the input light has a single wavelength as is the case for LEDs - so it’s not at all light manipulation by filtering and mixing light sources.

  That said I went looking at how phosphor is used in LEDs nowadays and judging from this they don’t use red LEDs emitters at all nowadays, only blue and UV ones, and then chose a phosphor (which can be any substance, not just Phosphorous) whose emission range is towards the desired light range.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lightbulbs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  From what I read last time I properly looked into this (so, almost a decade ago when I was considering setting up a business importing LED lamps), the blue light emitting diode junction simply uses less power to emit the same amount of light.

  Electrically speaking it’s no bigger or lesser a problem in terms of circuitry to have just blue diodes or blue + red diodes in there since they’re bundled in blocks of diodes in series (and then multiple blocks are in parallel) and the only thing that differs between those two kinds of junctions from a circuit point of view is the drop voltage of one kind of diode being different from that of the other (diode junctions done with different dopants have different drop voltages), something you take into account in the design stage when deciding how many LED diodes you use per block or what DC voltage will your 110v/220V AC input be converted to.

  More specifically for LED light bulbs, the messy stuff in terms of electronics is the circuitry that converts the 220v/110v AC input into a lower voltage DC suitable for the LEDs whilst limiting the current (as diodes only ability to “limit” current is them burning out from overheating due to too much current), not the actual LEDs.

  But I’ll put it even simpler: if the problem was indeed simplicity as you believe, then LED bulbs with only red LEDs would also be very common as they’re simpler than blue+red ones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lightbulbs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally I just go for warm white for places which should be cozy and cold white for places with a more utilitarian use.

  Cold white LED light bulbs are actually more efficient, so I’ll even get more light out of the same power lamp making it easier to see what I’m doing (which is what you generally need lights for in an utilitarian use location).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lightbulbs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As a side note, the reason why cold white LED light bulbs are a thing is because they’re a bit more efficient than warmer light colors.

  The reason is because they all just have 2 kinds of light emiting diode (LED) junctions inside - red and blue - plus a phosphorus layer on top that smooths those two perfect lightwave color peaks in the wavelength domain into a broader light spectrum, and the blue is more efficient than the red, so lamps with a higher proportion of blue emitters to red emitters - and which hence emit more light towards the blue end of the spectrum (i.e. a colder white) - will emit more light for the same power consuption than those with more red emitters and hence whose light is more towards the red side of the spectrum (i.e. a warmer white).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Also to add to this, the life-cycle of a TV display is mismatched from the live-cycle of media playing hardware or just hardware for general computing: one needs to update the latter more often in order to keep up with things like new video codecs (as for performance those things are actually implemented in hardware) as well as more in general being capable to running newer software.

  I’ve actually had a separate media box for my TV for over a decade an in my experience you go through 3 or 4 media boxes for every time you change TVs, partly because of new video codes coming out and partly because the computing hardware for those things is usually on the low-end so newer software won’t run as well. In fact I eventually settled down on having a generic Mini-PC with Linux and Kodi as my media box (which is pretty much the same to use in your living room since you can get a wireless remote for it) and it doubles down as a server on the background (remotely managed via ssh), something which wouldn’t at all be possible with computing hardware integrated in the TV.

  In summary, having the computing stuff separate from the TV is cheaper and less frustrating (you don’t need to endure slow software after a few years because the hardware is part of an expensive TV that you don’t want to throw out), as well as giving you far more options to do whatever you want (lets just say that if your network connected media box is enshittified, it’s pretty cheap to replace it or even go the way I went and replace it with a system you fully control)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the best engineering school in the world. You can take free courses at MIT online.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Only in “international university rankings” that treat essentially classes being given in the English language as about 1/3 of the score or as they call it, “easiness for international students”.

  Or in other words, “for international students” they’re one of the best in the World, to a large extent because all lessons are in English - all else being the same, universities in English-speaking countries will always come above universities in non-English speaking countries.

  Also a lot of the other quality metrics (such as number of published papers) actually measure research proeficiency rather than teaching quality, which whilst relevant for post-grads, isn’t quite as relevant for most students.

  Whether if measured from the point of view of the main student community they serve rather than “international post-grad student” MIT is the best in the World is unclear.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨At Davos, NVIDIA, Microsoft CEOs deny AI bubble⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.