Womble
@Womble@piefed.world
- Comment on UK agrees to let US use British bases to strike Iranian sites targeting Strait of Hormuz 1 week ago:
As per the article you linked, Iran had prior to that fired at Cyprus, but not hit anything, but looks like you’re right that none of the missiles/drones actually made it to land until after the position changed, fair enough.
But prior to that Iran had already hit: * Saudi (28th of Feb) * UAE (1st march, so same day as the position changed but it says its early in the morning so I assume before) * Bahrain (multiple attacks starting 28th feb) * Qatar (starting 28th of feb)
and others.
- Comment on UK agrees to let US use British bases to strike Iranian sites targeting Strait of Hormuz 2 weeks ago:
Ok bud, you definitely sound like a sane person worth discussing with.
- Comment on UK agrees to let US use British bases to strike Iranian sites targeting Strait of Hormuz 2 weeks ago:
The UK’s military base on Cypress was attacked in the opening weekend of the war. At the time the UK was not allowing the US to use any of its bases. Once that (and attacks on the gulf states who also werent participating in the war) happened the UK shifted to allowing the US to use its bases for “defensive” strikes.
- Comment on NVIDIA Says You're "Completely Wrong" About DLSS 5 Being Slop - Gamers Nexus 2 weeks ago:
The wisdom of crowds is a real thing, but, it only applies when people are making decisions independently of each other. That is decidedly not the case when we are talking about an social media pile on about something.
- Comment on How Much Do LLMs Hallucinate in Document Q&A Scenarios? A 172-Billion-Token Study Across Temperatures, Context Lengths, and Hardware Platforms [TLDR: 25%] 3 weeks ago:
I wouldnt read too much into the lower scores, they include some absolutely tiny models. The one 70% lower than the top score at 24% correct is a 1B model from 2024. Honestly that it can do any information retrival from a 32k context is impressive.
- Comment on Trump: 'I am not happy with the UK' 4 weeks ago:
Yes, to vote in the most progressive government the country has ever had, but then voted Churchill back in about 7 years later.
- Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism | Rutger Bregmanwww.theguardian.com ↗Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.world | 86 comments
- Comment on Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?" 5 weeks ago:
I’m not saying its anything other than morally repugnant, obviously, but in the example of a password with billions or trillions of combinations and where you can check the answers given torture pretty obviously is better than guessing.
That’s not a scenario that is ever likely to come up, and wouldn’t be justifiable even if it did, but pretending it wouldnt be effective is ridiculous.
- Comment on Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?" 5 weeks ago:
Torture can be a useful way of extracting information if you have a way to instantly verify it, which actually makes it a good analogy to LLMs. If I want to know the password to your laptop and torture you until you give me the correct password and I log in then that works.
- Comment on 'It's Possible to jailbreak F-35 like iPhone', Says Dutch State Secretary of Defense Tuinman 1 month ago:
Im not misunderstanding at all, but do you really think governments make multi-billion dollar purchaces without haveing technical experts go over things with a fine tooth comb. Again if only one customer nation, of which there are dozens, found something like this it would wipe out the entire export market for US high tech weapons, why would they do that when they have effective soft power ways of achiving the same thing?
- Comment on 'It's Possible to jailbreak F-35 like iPhone', Says Dutch State Secretary of Defense Tuinman 1 month ago:
Do you honestly think that all the countries buying these planes havent inspected them? Even if they were incredibly well disguised the chance of them being discovered would essentially stop the US from selling military hardware abroad again as it would be hard proof that they couldnt be trusted.
There is no reason to do that when, as others have pointed out, they can just restrict access to parts, updates and mission planning software.
- Comment on Dutch Defence Secretary Boldly Claims F-35 Software Could Be 'Jailbroken' 1 month ago:
That must come as news to the French that they arent allowed to do what they do in NATO.
- Comment on Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software 1 month ago:
But also:
Google is still up 100% from where it was may last year, even taking that drop into account.
- Comment on DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don't want AI 2 months ago:
Search results have been degrading for a lot longer than LLMs have been a thing. Peak usefulness for them was around a decade ago.
- Comment on New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline 2 months ago:
CO2 doesn’t vary much in concentration by how close you are to an emission source unless you are literally sucking air out of a tailpipe. You might get a 10-20% increase in the centre of a city instead of the countryside, hardly enough to make up for being somewhere with so much energy coming in that they frequently have to curtail it (which could then be used for this instead).
This isnt CCS which cheaply turns CO2 into an inert form of carbon, its an expensive process for turning CO2 into a very useful form.
- Comment on New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline 2 months ago:
Sure, but you cant store that electricity as electricity. IMO this is most interesting as a energy storage technology, so the comparison isnt what that gasoline would do in an ICE car compared to an EV, its to what it would cost compared to battery storage (or compressed air or whatever other technology) to store a few weeks of output on the order of months.
- Comment on New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline 2 months ago:
I wonder is a scaled up version of this could work for grid-scale medium length storage. Smoothing out weeks of dunkleflaute is the main blocker to going to a primarily renewable grid. Gasoline is a lot easier to store than hydrogen and large scale gasoline generators should get close to the efficiency of natural gas peaker plants.
- Comment on [Video] The Rational National | UK Green Party Stuns With Huge Surge & Brilliant New Political Ad 2 months ago:
Just on a technical level that is an amazing ad compared to the usual political soundbites in front of a few images.
- Comment on How to turn off Gemini in Gmail — and why you should | Proton 2 months ago:
That doesn’t make any sense as a reason to turn off Gemini in your inbox though. Either you are ok with having your emails scanned and used in ML systems, in which case why bother turning off the feature; or you aren’t and turning off the feature doesn’t help you.
- Comment on How to turn off Gemini in Gmail — and why you should | Proton 2 months ago:
Google promises(new window) that Gmail’s 3 billion users will benefit from a “personal, proactive inbox assistant”. But given that these features are free, what’s the catch? Make no mistake, Google isn’t doing this out of generosity. The contents of your inbox are valuable to the company.
Email used to be a more private space where your communications could potentially be intercepted by bad actors, but largely your data was your own.
I dont think that is true wrt gmail is it? Google have been scanning your messages and using that for machine learning based ad targeting since it was released.
- Comment on Data centers will consume 70 percent of memory chips made in 2026 - supply shortfall will cause the chip shortage to spread to other segments | Tom's Hardware 2 months ago:
Sure, it probably wont take then as long, but its still misleading to portray “China reaches milestone a western company did a quarter of a century ago” as being equivalent as catching up.
- Comment on Data centers will consume 70 percent of memory chips made in 2026 - supply shortfall will cause the chip shortage to spread to other segments | Tom's Hardware 2 months ago:
China “has EUV” lithography in the same way ASML had it in 2001:
ASML built its first working prototype of EUV technology in 2001, and told Reuters it took nearly two decades and billions of euros in R&D spending before it produced its first commercially-available chips in 2019.
They are still an awful long way behind the west in this regard.
- Comment on Make Microsoft's CEO cry by installing Chrome's 'Microslop' extension 2 months ago:
Those are how to install Linux inside windows.
- Comment on Trump threatens tariffs on nations that don’t back US takeover of Greenland 2 months ago:
Typical trash tier journalism from the canary, apparently no comment on an on the spot question about military matters (US using UK bases) to a minister who isnt in charge of that (she’s minister for development in Africa) is somehow “UK backs US powerplay for Greenland”
- Comment on Former chemical plant in North Wales, UK, could become AI data center 2 months ago:
The UK does not have regional electricity pricing. This is actually an issue as it means energy intensive businesses arent attracted to places close to large sources of renewable power (the North East and Scotland) and instead crowd into the overheated South East.
But it also means that the locals wont be helping with the leccy bill any more than someone in Aberdeen is.
- Comment on NHS England quietly removes open source policy web pages 2 months ago:
It should be pointed out that NHS England is a management layer and is in the process of being dismantled so that NHS services in England are managed directly by the NHS and not a third layer between hospitals/doctors and the Department of health.
- Comment on It just keeps getting worse - Firefox to "evolve into a modern AI browser" 3 months ago:
The number of people suggesting that the appropriate responce to an optional feature for the standard bearer foss browser is to jump to a chrome based browser and further cement google’s dominance is depressing.
- Comment on Rachel Reeves Says Progressive People Should Be Zionists 3 months ago:
Outsourcing your critical thinking to someone maintaining a list of personae non grata sounds like a terrible idea.
- Comment on Rich People Are Becoming Less Willing to Help With the World’s Problems 4 months ago:
The wealth of the USA compared to other devoloped countries has shot away over the past 10-15 years, it's not entirely clear why.
- Comment on Channel Tunnel says UK investment 'non-viable' as it halts projects 4 months ago:
No they're more like business property taxes, they're complicated but usually defined as a fraction of what the market rate rent would be on the property the business is using.
