PhilipTheBucket
@PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 0 comments
- Comment on Amazon faces ‘leader’s dilemma’ — fight AI shopping bots or join them 1 week ago:
It’s a trend that poses a threat to Amazon’s margins and relationships with customers. When a consumer uses ChatGPT to initiate a purchase, for example, OpenAI collects “a small fee” from each transaction.
“With an agent on ChatGPT, retailers risk relinquishing transactions on their site to pay a toll on someone else’s highway for the same transaction,” Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, said in an interview.
Gee, Mr. Amazon, that sounds terrible. Only some kind of monster would make you pay a “small” fee for every single transaction between two third parties, just because they set up a server to have it take place on. I’m so sorry that that happened to you.
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 3 comments
- Comment on Google's mail system helpfully classified this notice of a class action settlement AGAINST GOOGLE as spam 1 week ago:
They do it because users’ brains are like those of the lizard or planarium. They want to “punish” the email they just got because it annoyed them, and so they press whatever button will give them the closest equivalent of “punching” the email to try to make it stop.
Marking the email minutes from the weekly team meeting as “spam” doesn’t make it stop, and creates other problems sometimes, but that’s not the level they are operating on when they do it. (There is some accidental sense in which marking something as spam makes Google marginally more likely to put similar stuff into your “spam” folder in the future, but that’s pure coincidence as far as why they’re doing it.) They just want to hit.
It’s actually exactly the same reason some Lemmy users call anything or anyone they don’t like “transphobia” or “zionism.” They don’t actually mean that that person supports the state of Israel in a literal sense. They’re just doing it because they can’t physically hit the person speaking, and that’s the closest analogue available to punish them and try to shut them up.
- Comment on AI Vending Machine Was Tricked into Giving Away Everything 2 weeks ago:
Yeah. I have actually set up machine learning systems incorporating LLMs to do things sort of vaguely similar to this. That little statement about how the context window may have gotten to where the old stuff aged out of it, so that all the context it could see was conversations with the staffers about the glorious communist revolution, indicates to me that they don’t know the first thing about what the fuck they are doing. That’s just not how you do it, even if an LLM is one component of how you want to do it.
- Comment on AI Vending Machine Was Tricked into Giving Away Everything 2 weeks ago:
I think it was definitely meant to be. They probably intended for a certain amount of good-natured ribbing to take place about it when it did weird stuff sometimes. But I do think that the Wall Street Journal getting it through to their readers that AI is a bunch of malfunctioning shit that will definitely lose you money wasn’t the goal.
- Comment on AI Vending Machine Was Tricked into Giving Away Everything 2 weeks ago:
Claude claimed it was a test of how the technology would fare in the real world. The interview at the end, where the Anthropic person tries to tell the journalist that she needs to prepare for this kind of thing to happen more and more to people’s businesses, and she deadpans that she doesn’t feel like she needs to prepare right now for too many people to be handing over their businesses to this thing and he misses it completely and just tells her that they definitely will.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 21 comments
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 4 comments
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 5 comments
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org | 1 comment
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Honestly, Librewolf is pretty functional. It used to break all kinds of stuff, but now it’s just a couple of sites with fingerprint protection issues, and there’s a couple-of-clicks way to disable the strict fingerprint protection on any site you care about where it’s causing problems.
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 0 comments
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 0 comments
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 17 comments
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
It’s worse now. There are a lot of apartment building facilities management systems on the public internet now with poor security.
Want to make yourself a fob to get into the building, or into someone’s apartment? Want to get a listing of when those people enter and exit the building and when they’re generally not home? Well, now you can. It’s not a real high percentage of buildings that have their management systems exposed that way, but in raw numbers, there are a whole fucking bunch of them.
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 5 comments
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 0 comments
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 2 comments
- Comment on Sometimes I feel nothing will change for the better and I feel frustrated about it. 2 months ago:
Yeah, because everything was fine and everyone got soft and complacent.
Like it or not, we’re coming to the end of that, we’ve not even scratched the surface of how bad it’s actually going to get. The people and communities that smarten up will (sometimes) survive, and more and more, the ones that do not will not.
- Comment on Experts urge Government to ban supermarket bacon after link to 50,000 cancer cases 2 months ago:
I think it is nitrates. I mean, I am sure there are other preservatives that are harmful but nitrates is the class of chemical that usually is what is killing people in this context. Almost any type of “processed” meat is going to give you significantly elevated risk of cancer if you eat it regularly.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
Kirk was kissing black ladies back when that was basically illegal. What the fuck is this? Don’t blame the “they put politics in my Trek” crowd on Trek crowd, man, those dudes were always just idiots.
- Comment on Experts urge Government to ban supermarket bacon after link to 50,000 cancer cases 2 months ago:
You can absolutely make things that both taste good and also don’t cause cancer. This isn’t like “being vegan will extend your lifespan so everyone has to be vegan” type of thing, it is very directly a specific preservative they chose to put in that is straight-up killing people.
- Comment on Bill Gates warns AI will take over most jobs and leave humans working just two days a week 2 months ago:
The one thing that this whole analysis is missing is this: There is a ton of work to do. The oceans are dying. The planet is boiling. The garbage is stacking up, endless and endless. There are crimes big and small going undiscovered, or un-processed and dealt with in a trustworthy fashion if they are discovered. There are wars, there are dangerous materials that need to be removed from the soil and the rivers, and the policies need to be set up and enforced to stop their cousins from replacing them within the year. WE’RE NOT FUCKING DONE. This illusion is wholly wrong, that capitalism has created that it is fine to drive the car off the cliff, as long as we keep paying salaries and dividends up until the moment of impact comes
Yes, we’ve gotten more effecient and powerful in our ability to translate a human into an effective change in conditions at the earth’s surface. But the problems have gotten bigger, too, and more urgent to the point that they threaten our entire species. Just because we can now keep growing the food and doing layout for the advertisements with only 15 hours a week, doesn’t mean that’s all we need to fucking do.
- Comment on Bill Gates warns AI will take over most jobs and leave humans working just two days a week 2 months ago:
There is a vital question coming up. When the machines do all the work, does that mean everyone eats? Or no one?
Right now it is “no one” roughly speaking. That must change. There is no future for anyone there, just nightmares unfolding and unfolding.
- Comment on Apparently Palantir can access the content of social media accounts that were deleted a decade ago. 2 months ago:
Also, remember that this is cherry-picking the worst possible way of phrasing the worst possible excerpts they can pick out from over ten years of random shitposting. You have no idea what the context was for any of this stuff. You don’t know if the part he “agreed” with was the same as the part of the whole other person’s message that said white people were racist and stupid. And so on.
- Comment on Why don't police use rubber bullets instead of live rounds? I get if someone is holding a loaded weapon. But wouldn't a rubber bullet have the same effect with out putting holes in another person? 2 months ago:
- “Rubber” bullets are a massive metal ball wrapped in a thin sheet of rubber. They carry about half the kinetic energy of a bullet, they can still crack your skull or destroy a part of your body that they hit. There is a reason people started pushing for the terminology “less lethal” instead of “nonlethal.”
- That said you actually raise kind of a good question I think. I suspect that a lot of the reason is nothing more than that the guns that shoot “rubber” bullets effectively are big and cumbersome. You can’t run fast while holding one, carry one around on your belt and then pull it out in a fraction of a second, et cetera. They actually do try to do what you’re talking about with Tasers, there’s a whole process, except that Tasers are unreliable so they have to have a second cop with a gun drawn most of the time.
- Replacing guns with “rubber” bullets… a lot of the time when they are shooting they are thinking in terms of a gunfight with an armed suspect, so they don’t want to be in a situation where the “rubber” bullets aren’t penetrating a car but the bullets coming back at them are penetrating their car, something like that. If it is deadly force involved they don’t want to be at a disadvantage.
- Replacing Tasers with rubber bullets… IDK, I think “rubber” bullets are probably more lethal than Tasers and you’re definitely going to fuck somebody up any time you hit them with one. The vast majority of the time, the Taser just sucks and then you take the probes out and you’re done, you don’t have any cracked ribs or destroyed eyeballs or anything. Most of the scenarios where they would be using a “rubber” bullet, US cops at least will use a 40mm “beanbag round” which won’t cause nearly the same type of injuries.
I won’t say your suggestion is automatically a bad idea but I think those are some of the reasons you so rarely see them except in “crowd control” type of scenarios where some of the existing nonlethal options aren’t viable, and also where they have some additional desire to cause injuries in the people they’re “control"ing. Basically you can choose a Taser which is unreliable, pepper spray which is short range and will fuck you up too sometimes, or a 40mm or rubber bullet which needs a big cumbersome launcher (and the “rubber” bullet may cause significant injuries anyway).
- Comment on The C programming language is like debating a philosopher and Python is like debating someone who ate an edible 2 months ago:
I mean yeah lol. That’s why I said “mostly.” But my point was, more or less, that modern power tools can do stuff that you simply can’t do with C, but C is still a venerable tool to me. I like it. The old pros can make fantastic custom cabinets, they do framing almost as fast as someone with a nail gun, it’s just that it’s not practical for most people to try to get skilled enough to be able to make solid stuff (and of course you can never make a skyscraper with just hand tools.)
Once you start finding yourself using malloc() all that much, you’re probably using the wrong tool, and it’s also just objectively less secure than other safer languages. But clean C code has a kind of beauty to me that is hard to replicate in the more powerful languages.
- Comment on The C programming language is like debating a philosopher and Python is like debating someone who ate an edible 2 months ago:
In my analogy, the tool is the programming language, and the worker is the programmer in that language. Mostly.
- Comment on ‘Girl, Take Your Crazy Pills!’: Antidepressants Recast as a Hot Lifestyle Accessory 2 months ago:
Completely agree. The forces of the medical establishment have been trying to get me to take antidepressants. I have so far resisted. Among other things, I asked one of the doctors what percentage of people he’s dealt with have simply started taking them and it becomes part of their routine basically for the rest of their life (which is what I’ve mostly observed) and what percentage take it for a short time and then are done with it because it fixed their life situation for them (which is the scenario he was describing as what might happen to me).
He didn’t really address the question directly, which to me was plenty illuminating as to the answer.