Womble
@Womble@piefed.world
- Comment on Rich People Are Becoming Less Willing to Help With the World’s Problems 1 week 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 1 week 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.
- Comment on 'I heat my Essex home with a data centre in the shed' 2 weeks ago:
Its eco-friendly because the waste heat is being used to heat the home methane isnt being burnt to provide that heat. Data centres are needed unless you want to scrap the internet entirely.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 2 weeks ago:
Its not a Microsoft thing, also I have no idea what you are aggetated about, is there some sort of pop culture MCP that is terrible for it to be linked to? Searching for it the only thing other that Model context protocol I find is "make contribution payments", "Metcalfe Copeman & Pettefar LLP Solicitors" and "MCP fixings" so whatever it is, I imagine MS are unaware of it.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 2 weeks ago:
Thing is, thats fine if you're doing something like working on a version controlled codebase where you can just roll back whatever the agent does if you dont like it. The idea of using a windows computer that had an AI fucking around with system settings and registry entries gives me shivers. Thats before getting into the possibilities of hostile actors managing to prompt your AI to do something like give up sensitive information by getting it to read malicious information on a website.
- Comment on Controversial startup's plan to 'sell sunlight' using giant mirrors in space would be 'catastrophic' and 'horrifying,' astronomers warn 3 weeks ago:
Your point about poinitng (ha!) is incorrect, its pretty trivial to maintain pointing at the target. Hubble achived 7mas pointing accuracy over extended periods (thats ~0.000002degrees) with technology more than 30 years out of date. That gives you ~1.2m accuracy from geostationary orbit, which seems fine.
The real point is getting a mirror which is large enough and perfect enough into orbit is completely infeasible. As you rightly say, the maximum potential power it can provide is equal to solar insolation time its area.
- Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops 3 weeks ago:
Definitely a possibility! But dealing with "only being a normal profitable company" is a very different problem to "oops, we were selling $10 for $5 and VCs have stopped giving us money to burn, and people are using self hosted models too", which is the possible outcome for the big AI labs.
- Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops 4 weeks ago:
I'm not a fan of them either, I wish AMD would step up and compete with them better (Just get ROCm into a good place FFS!), but they are definitely not one of the companies most exposed to an AI pop. They'll stop being insanely profitable but they are not anywhere near the position of openAI and the likes who have massive negative profit.
- Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops 4 weeks ago:
From a quick look they have ~40B USD in liabilities and make ~115B USD gross profit. Being able to pay off the entirety off their debt with 4 months of profit seems pretty healthy to me.
- Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops 4 weeks ago:
It wont be Nvidia unless they play things incredibly badly, they're the only ones making actual profit by selling shovels in the goldrush.
- Comment on An in-space construction firm says it can help build massive data centers in orbit 4 weeks ago:
Mining raw resources that are more easily availabe on asteroids than on earth seems like the most likely candidate. There are metalic asteroids that have significant quantities of valuable metals like gold, titanium, iridium etc.
- Comment on Bill Gates warns AI will take over most jobs and leave humans working just two days a week 5 weeks ago:
If we are, then I entirely misinterpreted them.
On re-reading it seems like thats quite possible! The first and second line seem to agree with me but the third is taking the opposite postion though so who knows.
- Comment on Bill Gates warns AI will take over most jobs and leave humans working just two days a week 5 weeks ago:
Are we on the same website? Lemmy as a rule hates AI with a blind passion and will downvote anything that isnt frothing at the mouth hatred of it. Hence the downvotes on this post, people see it has AI in the title and isnt calling it slop or saying its cooking the planet and so it gets downvoted.
- Comment on OpenAI launches an AI-powered browser: ChatGPT Atlas 1 month ago:
The killer feature for other AI-powered browsers has been the built-in chatbot that sits in a side panel and automatically has context for whatever’s on your screen. It may sound minor, but many users spend all day copying and pasting text or dragging files and links into ChatGPT, just to provide context. The sidecar feature removes that friction and makes for a smoother user experience.
Really sounds like exactly what you'd want be focusing on if you were the leading AI company and are on the verge of AGI just like you promised...
- Comment on Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC and let AI control it 1 month ago:
Assuming you are just a regular person using Windows, you are not their customer, at best you're a handy side revenue stream and data source. Their actual customers are giant enterprises who are actively trying to fire people and smaller business locked into their ecosystem by needed to interact with other businesses (who are also locked into their ecosystem).
- Comment on Japanese Government Calls on Sora 2 Maker OpenAI to Refrain From Copyright Infringement, Says Characters From Manga and Anime Are 'Irreplaceable Treasures' That Japan Boasts to the World 1 month ago:
I'm not even sure that IP being owned by non-natural persons is the problem, for example I could see a coop collectively owning copyrights/patents relevant to their work. The problem is the frankly ridiculous amount of time granted for copyrights and obvious methods being patented.
Change both of those and you keep the benefit of innovative individuals/small groups having legal protection from large corporations muscling in and stealing their work and get rid of most of the damage done by the current system.
- Comment on The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe 1 month ago:
You do accept that bad software has been written, yes? and that some of that software is performing important functions? So how is saying "It needs to be written better in the first place" of any use at all when discussing legacy software?
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites are falling to Earth at an alarming rate 1 month ago:
No, but given there are aproximately 6000 impacts a year from rocks of various sizes making it all the way to the ground a handful of extra impacts isnt going to make any significant difference. Maybe your chance of being hit by space debris in your lifetime rises from one in a billion to 1.1 in a billion.
- Comment on Here's what would happen if the UK abolished landlords overnight 1 month ago:
You're missing the key word there which is "overnight". Sudden dramatic changes rarely work out well for anyone other than people speculating (or having inside knowledge) on where the cards will fall.
Phasing out landlords over, say, 3 years would be a great idea, banning them tomorrow would not be.
- Comment on The most important person in Britain you’ve never heard of 1 month ago:
I think the point there is that the government of the day cant just overrule him by saying so. If it comes down to it, in an supply emergency his word goes until the government either change the law or get one of these "Order in Council" directives signed off by the king.
It doesnt mean that much as it seems very unlikely that the monarch would refuse the PM something like that, but crises are where the unthinkable happens.
- Comment on Michelle Mone demands Keir Starmer ends 'vendetta' against her in letter to PM 1 month ago:
Look she's been made a peer of the realm, it is unacceptable to attempt to punish her for committing crimes. What's more its discriminatory as the state would never try to prosecute old money peers!
- Comment on The Epstein Scandal Finally Takes Down a Politician 2 months ago:
Well for a start felonies arent a thing in the UK, and havent been for 60 years, but also if it is genuinely due to error and HMRC dont think its been done deliberately as tax evasion then yes you can just self report and pay the tax owed plus late fees.
- Comment on The Unbearable Inefficiency of Fossil Fuels 2 months ago:
You recharge your storage device (a metal tank) by pouring in more liquid over 30 seconds. That ease of use combined with how energy dense oil derivatives are is such a massive benefit for them.
The problem with fossil fuels is that they are slowly choking our planet, except for that they are phenomenal energy sources on who's backs the modern world was built. That is why it is so hard for us to transition away from them.
- Comment on Organs Cannot Simply Be Classified as Male or Female 2 months ago:
Its not binary but it is strongly clustered into two groups with a small number of outliers from those groups.
- Comment on How huge London far-right march lifted the lid on a toxic transatlantic soup 2 months ago:
Corbyn in the UK is the main counterexample I can think of, but even then that was for less than five years in opposition to the entire political and media establishment conspiring to bring him down, including the right of his own party (and in fairness, he repeatedly shot himself in the foot and handed them easy wins).
- Comment on Britain trained Israeli soldiers fighting in Gaza 2 months ago:
Racsism is likely part of it, but the real value is in having a solid ally that can be used as a base to project power across the largest oil producing region in the world.
How long Israel remains seen as a solid ally given their recent unhinged and mask off behaviour remains to be seen. To me it does feel like there is a sea change in opinion on them, both from everyday people and from politicos.
- Comment on 5 Signs the AI Bubble is About to Burst 2 months ago:
The post I was replying to was saying
people will stop using it for all the things they're currently using it for
They will when AI companies can no longer afford to eat their own costs and start charging users a non-subsidized price.
i.e. people will stop using AI when user have to pay the "real" price (what this is is left unspecified and an exercise to the reader to figure out). My point was that even if the AI price from those provided to infinity AI usage wouldnt drop to zero like they imply.
- Comment on 5 Signs the AI Bubble is About to Burst 2 months ago:
There are free open models you can go and download right now, that are better than SOTA 12-18 months ago, and that cost you less to run on a gaming PC than playing COD does. Even if openai, anthropic et al disappeared without a trace tomorrow AI wouldnt go away.
- Comment on 5 Signs the AI Bubble is About to Burst 2 months ago:
Quantum entangled communications that are impossible to evesdrop on exist now, cloud computing is the money machine that allows Amazon to keep expanding, virtualisation is used by effectively every company using computers at scale. (blockchain, I'll admit, was pretty much all hype and vapourware other than laundering drug money and allowing speculation)
Just because there is marketing hype around a term doesnt mean there isnt anything of value there.
- Comment on The Epstein Scandal Finally Takes Down a Politician 2 months ago:
Even calling it tax evasion is a stretch, she had a complicated situation involving a trust set up for the house she had with her ex to insure her severely disabled son would be taken care of, then she claimed her new flat was her primary residence leading to a lower rate of stamp duty. She got some advice that said it was ok but was then told she should seek specialist legal advice to check that which she didnt and now has to pay back 40k.
Its not good, and she was right to step down, especially as housing minister, but its hardly a grievous sin.