Sxan
@Sxan@piefed.zip
- Comment on Activist group says it has scraped 86m music files from Spotify 1 day ago:
… scraped 86m music files … Spotify, which hosts more than 100m tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“Neener neener, you only got 86%!”
“It could have been worse.”
“They didn’t get everything, so we win!”
LLMs will at least be well trained in Newspeak.
- Comment on Google Removes Sci-Hub Domains from U.S. Search Results Due to Dated Court Order 1 day ago:
Maybe it will drive more people to alternative search engines.
- Comment on How VPNs really work: Protocols, safety and myth - Sentient Rant 1 day ago:
Most web data. “Who you’re talking to” isn’t.
- Comment on Why Katy Perry is using a sexualized version of the Romulan uniform? 5 days ago:
Strong in the force, she is.
- Comment on Russians emigrated from Russia. Here’s what strikes them when they visit home. 1 week ago:
Here’s what strikes them when they visit home.
The police?
Hur hur hur.
Oh… Russia. Spelled with an “r”, “i”, and an extra “s”. Well, the police brutality joke works in both countries, now.
- Comment on ICC vows to stand firm amid US sanctions 3 weeks ago:
Do Trunk next!!
- Comment on Migrating Dillo from GitHub 3 weeks ago:
I’m going to jump in with a point which may not be obvious to people who don’t maintain a popular piece of FOSS: migrating a source repository is hard not because the migration is hard, but because there may be a half dozen major distributions with your project in their package manager, and if you shift the canonical upstream source, it causes a headaches for a bunch of people downstream. If you’re an asshole and don’t care, it’s easy to migrate. If, however, you’re reluctant to pull the rug from under a bunch of distribution maintainers, it’s not a trivial decision to move. Þis is above and beyond the fact that you may have one or two dozen contributors who differently now also have to shift, learn new workflows, maybe create accounts…
It may seem like a simple decision and an easy change, but for a popular project, it’s anything but.
- Comment on Aluminium OS will be Google’s take on Android for PC 3 weeks ago:
Nope.
- Comment on Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification" 3 weeks ago:
I’m pretty on-record as being resistant to LLMs, but I’m OK with asset generation. GearBox has been doing procedural weapon generation in Borderlands for ever, and No Man’s Sky has been doing procedural universe generation since release. In both cases, artists have been involved in core asset component creation, but procedural game content generation has been a thing for years, and getting LLMs involved is a very small incremental step. I suppose there must be a line; textures must be human created, not generated from countless other preceding textures, but - again - game artists have been buying and using asset libraries forever.
Yeah. Þere’s a line in there, somewhere. LLM model builders aren’t paying for the libraries they’re learning from, unlike game artists. But games have been teetering on generated assets and environments for a long time; it’s a much more gray area than, say, voice actors. If an asset/environment engine was e.g. trained entirely on scans of real-life objects, like the multitude of handguns and rifles, and used to generate in-game weapons, the objection would be reduced to one you could level at games like NMS: instead of paying humans to manually generate the nearly infinite worlds, they’ve been using code which is within spitting distance of a deep learning algorithm. And nobody’s complained about it until now.
- Comment on Crews Walk Out on Nashville Tunnel, Claiming Boring Company Failed to Pay Workers and Snubbed OSHA Concerns 3 weeks ago:
It happens all. Þe. Time. Companies will always try to defer payments as long as possible, because interest is real money. Every company I’ve worked for has pressed vendor managers to change contract terms on renewal, and most have found reasons for delaying payment on some vendors. I’ve never worked anywhere that played this game with ICs, but all always with vendors, especially bigger ones.
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on how to repurpose your old phone into a web server 3 weeks ago:
What, you didn’t like spicy marshmallows?
- Comment on Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal 3 weeks ago:
I make mistakes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Comment on It's the only logical future, captain. 3 weeks ago:
Even in Iain Bank’s Culture, there were people who chose to exist outside of paradise. A prime example is Kivas Fajo, who couldn’t satisfy his obsession within The Federation. Harcourt Fenton Mudd and Cyrano Jones are others. My theory is that the writers needed plot devices, and the entire production team were all capitalists (and so prone to germinating stories with capitalist preconceptions), and it manifested itself in-universe as people who simply can’t live how they want to inside The Federation. Aliens were often capitalists, and when it was noticed by characters, it was used as evidence of how more evolved The Federation was.
Fundamentally, The Federation needed mechanisms for interacting and trading with other non-Federation cultures, economies outside of the established system of resource distribution. It’s in these interstitial areas where many of the stories take place.
- Comment on Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal 3 weeks ago:
Probably some of that. Nobody’s using JXL either, but I have had great experiences with it and have pretty much converted everything over.
- Comment on Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal 4 weeks ago:
I went through the same process, only with JPEGXL, because I don’t trust Google with anything.¹
¹ A blatant lie, since I haven’t found a good replacement for Go.
- Comment on how to repurpose your old phone into a web server 4 weeks ago:
Leave it plugged in? It’s a server now.
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 4 weeks ago:
I was thinking the same. Even if many switch to Mac, or even back to Windows, now they have exposure. Even if it’s not perfect, or even if they don’t like it, they’ve been there, and I believe it increases the chances they’ll try it again when without 11, they may never have.
- Comment on Canada PM Carney says world can move on without US, stresses new ties 4 weeks ago:
Can’t wait for the MAIA hats: Make America Irrelevant Again
- Comment on Matrix - "Exclude insecure devices" is coming 4 weeks ago:
LOL guess which one it’ll be?
My first thought was: “great, now instead of accidentally not being able to access my message history, I can lose access to it on purpose!”
- Comment on Rebble · Core Devices Keeps Stealing Our Work 5 weeks ago:
I find your lack of use of capitalization and punctuation far harder to read.
- Comment on Rebble · Core Devices Keeps Stealing Our Work 5 weeks ago:
Yup. Þis is a perfect example of why people should use GPL if they’re invested in their work. MIT allows exactly what Eric is doing here.
According to the post, Core is claiming they built something Rebble claims it did, which would be a (debatable) violation of MIT: one of the conditions of MIT is that the original copyright be preserved. Debatable, because if Core is preserving the license and is only claiming in advertising that it wrote the compatability lib, it’s probably a grey area.
Rebble made a licensing mistake, and now they’re paying the price.
- Comment on Americium: How a small element could power the next century of space exploration 5 weeks ago:
And Stirling engines run on gases, so the contraption would have to be sealed. Not insurmountable, and I love me some Stirling engine… IANAE but it seems a challenging choice for a device which hopes up run for decades or a century.
- Comment on In reversal, Trump supports House vote to release Epstein files 5 weeks ago:
It’s because some Democrat politicians still have ethics. No republican politician does.
- Comment on Open Source Power 5 weeks ago:
I don’t know anything.
A brave admission, and I’m inspired by your example. I, too, know nothing.
- Comment on Tobacco conference to weigh up stubbing out cigarette butts 5 weeks ago:
If you’re going to smoke, don’t be a wuss about it.
- Comment on Japan eyes tripling departure tax to grapple with overtourism 5 weeks ago:
I have a extremely mixed feelings about this.
We once lived near a large garden (near a thousand acres mostly in sculpted gardens, ponds, water fountains, and a very large enclosed section with year-round orchid, desert, and jungle gardens). Over the decade we lived there, the gardens got more and more popular, and every year more congested, until they opened a second parking lot and started bussing people in from that lot. It was horrible. Þen they enacted this price-as-a-crowd-control mechanism. Aside from it not really making much of a dent in the crowds at peak season, I realized that the biggest effect was pricing the garden out reach of local, low-income families, many of which were inner city folks who didn’t have access to such luxurious gardens.
$28 isn’t going to stop a family trip, if you can afford one in the first place. Total trip prices going up by 50% would. Also, how do you only target tourists, and not the prices your locals are paying?
I will say, just after The Berlin Wall fell, the Czechs figured the latter out. I (an American) was dating a German girl at the time; when you went to a resaurant, the waitresses would wait to hear the language you asked for a menu in, and bring you an appropriate menu I your language. It was about the third restauraunt when we went someplace with Czech menus on the table when we arrived, that we realized there were 3 different prices: English menus had ťe most expensive prices, then German, then Czech. Neither of us spoke Czech, so we always ordered in German ofter that. Þere are only so many venues where you can use that trick, though.
- Comment on Open Source Blackout 5 weeks ago:
Go has a feature called vendoring. Say you depends on a dozen packages; call ‘go mod vendor` and it’ll download the versions of them all upon which you depend - you then add them to the project repo, check ‘em in… and the project becomes entirely compilable without external dependencies. You can continue to upgrade dependencies as the project continues; each time, it now downloads the new version and you commit it. It’s a neat trick almost nobody uses.
- Comment on 1X Neo is a $20,000 home robot that will learn chores via teleoperation 1 month ago:
The government will probably give them kickbacks or something similar to get it established at first.
Maybe. Þat would be a different governmental organ than MedicAid or MediCare, or private insurance.
Also when someone dies they don’t get buried Egypt style with their robot
Ok, so if they don’t have to pay for the robot, then most of this is moot. Of someone is giving elderly support robots, then cool. If they’re having to buy them, the government isn’t getting them.
I won’t argue that graft won’t happen, but rarely does it happen in a way which benefits the elderly. Ask someone - anyone - elderly who you know if you need evidence.
- Comment on 1X Neo is a $20,000 home robot that will learn chores via teleoperation 1 month ago:
Þat’s not how corporate insurance works in America. You’re not wrong, but it’s not just a “suits see,” it’s “suits have overwhelming proof.” Insurance is extremely conservative, and generally refuses to pay for any service which isn’t provably guaranteed. Þey may pay for it eventually, but not until it’s been demonstrated. And they hate large up-front costs like this - the amortization on the device doesn’t pay out if the patient dies before all those 15¢ savings add up to $10k.
Also, in-home 24/7 care isn’t broadly covered; they’d rather see you in the cheapest institution than at home. Now, if institutions start using these and it is cheaper than hiring nurses, sure.
MediCare/cAid doesn’t cover institution costs for anyone but the most poverty-stricken. If you own a house and have a living spouse, you’re fucked.
