Thorry
@Thorry@feddit.org
- Comment on OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates 3 hours ago:
And their products are so fucking shit. Today I wanted to shit post in a Discord server I’m a part of. I felt like if I put effort into it, it wouldn’t really be a shit post any more. The idea was minimum effort for a few laughs and we move on. So I loaded up ChatGPT and asked it to generate the meme image. I thought even if it messed up the text, I would just generate it without the text and put the text in with gimp or something.
I put in the prompt, it spewed a lot of nonsense about what I meant and how it was going to generate the image. If I would just say “Generate it”, it would generate the image. So I did, it then said I needed to be signed in for image generation. OK fine, I signed in with a Gmail account I only ever use for spam, just for occasions such as this. It was happy to start generating.
It hung on generating for a while, until it said done in the status thing top right, but nothing in the chat. I refreshed the page, which gave me the option to prompt again. I asked where is the generated image? It said here it is and presented a gray box. It said if you see a gray box you uploaded it wrong? Wtf are you talking about? I didn’t upload anything. It said it could try generating again. Same exact result, crashing on generation, refresh yielding a new different gray box.
Like for fucks sake, the one thing I thought it would be good at, low effort shitposting, it failed at. Why the fuck does this company have such a large market cap?
I can’t wait for this whole AI debacle to be over and done with. Nobody is ever going to pay for your buggy ass bullshit generator.
- Comment on Microsoft says Copilot will 'finish your code before you finish your coffee' adding fuel to the Windows 11 AI controversy that's still raging 4 days ago:
Also just because the code works, doesn’t mean it’s good code.
I’ve had to review code the other day which was clearly created by an LLM. Two classes needed to talk to each other in a bit of a complex way. So I would expect one class to create some kind of request data object, submit it to the other class, which then returns some kind of response data object.
What the LLM actually did was pretty shocking, it used reflection to get access from one class to the private properties with the data required inside the other class. It then just straight up stole the data and did the work itself (wrongly as well I might add). I just about fell of my chair when I saw this.
So I asked the dev, he said he didn’t fully understand what the LLM did, he wasn’t familiar with reflection. But since it seemed to work in the few tests he did and the unit tests the LLM generated passed, he thought it would be fine.
Also the unit tests were wrong, I explained to the dev that usually with humans it’s a bad idea to have the person who wrote the code also (exclusively) write the unit tests. Whenever possible have somebody else write the unit tests, so they don’t have the same assumptions and blind spots. With LLMs this is doubly true, it will just straight up lie in the unit tests. If they aren’t complete nonsense to begin with.
I swear to the gods, LLMs don’t save time or money, they just give the illusion they do. Some task of a few hours will take 20 min and everyone claps. But then another task takes twice as long and we just don’t look at that. And the quality suffers a lot, without anyone really noticing.
- Comment on Google is collecting troves of data from downgraded Nest thermostats 1 week ago:
I’m currently using a lot of those mini hygrometer sold under a lot of brands. Mine are branded Brifit, but I’ve seen other brands like Oria and Ankilo and many others.
Here is a listing from Amazon, please don’t buy it there, but to get an idea of the price and the specs:
They use bluetooth and are powered by a little CR2477 coin cell battery, which lasts about a year (varies a bit, I’ve gotten some to last 10 months, others 14 months). I bought a bunch of them at once, which drops the price a lot. I’ve been using them for about 2 years now and they seem to be accurate and report data often (every few seconds).
My Homeassistant server (tiny old Intel Nuc thing) is pretty central in my home and I have a USB bluetooth stick attached to it. It’s on an USB extension cable to have the antenna of the bluetooth stick out of the enclosure it’s in for better reception. The sensors are scattered throughout the house and all seem to have an excellent connection. The USB stick I use is a UGreen one which is very common, with excellent support in Homeassistant.
I think this is the stick I have, at least the picture matches, again please don’t buy from Amazon.
UGreen stuff is pretty good and sold in a lot of places.
Both the bluetooth stick and the sensors are China special, but these days it’s very hard to find anything that isn’t. Quality seems great tho.
- Comment on Google is collecting troves of data from downgraded Nest thermostats 1 week ago:
Yes smart thermostats are great. I live alone and have a somewhat random schedule. Being able to turn on the heat before heading home is a total game changer. If I’m away when I’m usually at home, I can change the schedule in advance, or change it when I already left if I forgot. This helps save money. It can also track usage, so you can double check your energy bill with your actual usage. Although I have a Homeassistant setup with sensors to track usage from the meters, but still a useful tool to have. If you use gas for example for heating and hot water, the thermostat can give the data needed to split up the gas bill between those and see where savings are to be had. It’s also an extra temperature and humidity sensor, keeping track of how comfortable your home is and it’s possible to act not just on temperature, but other factors as well. I have a bunch of temperature sensors scattered in my home and the curves are useful for tweaking heating and ventilation in the home. Giving an optimal balance between cost and comfort. And preventing things like mold, which might save on heating in the short term, but put on costs in the long term with health issues and mold damage.
I have a lot of automation, but I have one rule. Everything must still basically work when the internet is out or the home automation has issues. So I use physical switches with sensors and relays, when everything fails the lights will still turn on and off with the switch. If there is no internet, physically turning the thermostat up or hitting the big override button next to the heater still turns on the heat. Stuff like that is important, it’s a luxery and a convenience, but it must never become a hindrance.
I try to use open source stuff where I can and have contributed to some projects. I’ve made stuff myself like sensors with self made pcbs in 3D printed enclosures. But I also use some proprietary stuff, like for example the Nest thermostat. I bought it about 10 years ago and mostly because I loved the design. This was when they were recently acquired by Google and were still fully autonomous. Back then there weren’t many alternatives and the Nest was by far the best looking one (imho). The software absolutely sucks, the old Nest app didn’t get many updates with Google, but the older models still only work in the Nest app. But with Homeassistant I can work around most of it. It’s a shame because Nest had so much potential and was doing good stuff, now under Google their product are kinda meh.
- Comment on If dark matter doesn't emit, absorb, or reflect light, what happens when light hits it? 1 week ago:
Interesting little detail: Even though the light doesn’t interact directly with the dark matter, so in a sense it just passes through, the light can still be affected by the dark matter indirectly. Because the dark matter does have mass, or at least interacts gravitationally like it has mass, it actually deforms space-time. This deformation can cause light to travel through a longer path than one might expect.
This has been used to create dark matter “maps”, to show where there is more and where there is less dark matter. It also shows up in gravitational lensing.
- Comment on Do you guys know how awesome a printer is that is just working? 1 week ago:
I printed a large complex part once, only to see I overlooked another thing that got in the way of my part. Instead of changing my design and re-printing it (which would take hours), I walked over to the mill and milled off a section of my print so it would fit properly. Plopped it on, fits like a glove, design king status achieved!
- Comment on Subnautica 2 and InZoi publishers announce voluntary layoff program "amid the era of AI transformation" 1 week ago:
Nothing makes me hate a company more than them claiming to be “AI-first”. Like seriously fuck all the way off.
- Comment on Dyslexia 1 week ago:
The brain sees what the brain wants
- Comment on Interesting looking ring. Wonder what it means? 2 weeks ago:
Jaffa! Kree!
- Comment on Interesting looking ring. Wonder what it means? 2 weeks ago:
A Serpent Guard, a Horus Guard and a Setesh Guard meet on a neutral planet. It is a tense moment. The Serpent Guard’s eyes glow, the Horus Guard’s beak glistens, the Setesh Guard’s… nose drips.
- Comment on Maybe there was a cure for human cancer, but it didn't work at all in mice. 3 weeks ago:
Humans only discovered hygiene somewhere in the last couple of thousand of years. Evolutionary pressure for large animals works on time lines of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Before we got cleaner (and also after that) we also lived in unclean conditions, often are still covered in fleas and lice and we are still one of the greatest spreaders of disease. Humans and mice are extremely similar in many ways, just because we have a large brain doesn’t mean we are somehow no longer the animals we always were. We share much of our evolution with mice, our cells are extremely similar and we share 92% of our DNA.
Mice are an excellent point of comparison to humans. And because they are small, live short lives and grow fast, they are excellent to serve as a basis for testing. However it’s also worth remembering the mice aren’t the starting point, nor are they the end point. It’s just one of the steps in between and many other species and techniques are used. In a lot of cases, mice aren’t used at all, but some other test is done.
It’s also like people seem to think that researchers are just doing random crap to mice and seeing what works. Like I said there is a lot of stuff that comes before and a lot of stuff that comes after. Tests with mice are often done to research something very specific, with a carefully considered method of testing and expected outcome. If someone thinks of something so hyper specific to humans, they would simply not do any trials on mice since that wouldn’t yield any results. These days we’ve also gotten extremely good at growing cells and complex clumps of cells at large scales for not much money. And these can be actual human cells with actual human DNA and biological processes. This has made animal testing far less necessary than it was in the past.
Sure at some point if something is very promising but there are doubts about some complex interaction that might be an issue, animal testing can be useful. But if the thing to test is something so specific to humans, an animal closer to humans would be used, for example pigs or some monkeys or apes. And if those doubts aren’t there it isn’t like animal testing is a required step, it is possible to go to human trials without it.
Of course this depends heavily on what it is you are trying to do. For drugs for example animal testing is often done, but often not to figure out if it works or not. But to figure out what sort of dose is needed for enough to be absorbed, but not so much the drug is wasted or the patient would experience a lot of side effects. It’s pretty easy to do a short trial on some pigs and have the first human trial get the dose right straight away. At this point it’s more of a regular way of doing things than something absolutely required. In a lot of places regulation will require some animal testing, especially for drugs, , but these days with better lab tests and simulations it isn’t strictly required.
So it might be a fun shower thought, but it isn’t really how stuff works in real life.
- Comment on Nvidia reveals Vera Rubin Superchip for the first time — incredibly compact board features 88-core Vera CPU, two Rubin GPUs, and 8 SOCAMM modules 3 weeks ago:
And thus Nvidia keeps the money faucet running. Sorry AI companies, we’ve just created the latest and greatest. We know you have invested trillions already, but you need the hot new thing or the competition gets it and you are obsolete. Time to invest some more!
- Comment on NOW! 3 weeks ago:
YSK that this is indeed illegal in many places such as the EU for example.
However those tricky manufacturers have a few tricks to get around this. One of the things they do is to create special “discount” SKUs. Despite their name, these SKUs are often not discounted at all and kept artificially high. Their specs usually aren’t great, so the value for money is poor most of the time. However when something like a holiday sale comes around, these SKUs get discounted massively. That way the shops can still claim the discount is huge and would technically be legal, even though there are plenty of other very similar SKUs in the same series that were available for less.
This isn’t a new thing, so called “retail” SKUs have also been around for a long time. Ever since webshops started out-competing retail stores manufacturers have been creating retail SKUs. These are often very similar or the same as another SKU in the series, but given a unique number and sometimes name. These SKUs are then only sold by distributors to retail outlets. Then when a shopper is in the store and looks up the price of the SKU on the internet, they don’t see a dozen webshops with a lower price, but instead only other retail chains with a very similar price. This is to stop people from going to stores, get advice and look at all the models, only to then buy the selected model online. Of course smarter people can easily figure out which SKU is the corresponding non retail SKU. But if you are smart enough to do that you can probably figure out what model to buy without going to a store.
Still it’s good for the law to exist and it does help a lot. The whole SKU shenanigans are only for some things, such as TVs, notebooks, appliances such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and some other stuff people usually go to stores to buy. For a lot of smaller stuff, such as PC components for example, this usually doesn’t happen.
- Comment on monumentale 3 weeks ago:
// - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
// Note added by employee 871 - S. Sandler - 10-31-2003
// Chapter 1
// Dear reader, let me tell you all about this here function.
// You see it was a dark and rainy night, like the nights often were in the place I once called my home.
// My grandma used to tell stories about those nights, the nights where the cold creeps in and the fog rises up from all around.
// She used to tell us those nights were haunted, evil things happened which could not stand the light of day.
// I never put much stock into those stories, but when the rain beat against the window and the wind would rustle the trees, I figure she might have been onto something.
// So you see it was one of these typical nights where I learned evil does indeed come out. But not from outside as one might expect, no… The evil comes from within
// Chapter 2
// Just like every other Friday, I got stuck with night duty. I wanted to go drinking with friends, but my manager told me I needed the extra shift since quarterly reviews were coming up.
// I was in a faul mood and cursed my manager, but like my grandma used to say curses can be a dangerous thing. They have a tendency to backfire when not used in moderation.
// Frankly I’m not sure my grandma knew what moderation meant, otherwise she would have cut down on the amount of beans she ate.
// Let me tell you; old folk and beans aren’t a great combination. But I digress.
// Getting stuck with night duty wasn’t bad, it didn’t pay much, but you could work from home and usually nothing much happened, especially on a Friday.
// So I sat around watching some old X-Files episodes, keeping half an eye on my mailbox to see if any tickets came in. I do say that Scully chick is one hot mamajama, I kinda forgot about the story.
// It was at this moment I heard loud thunder rolling by and the familiar wee-woo sound of my email client getting a new mail.
// As I read the ticket number: EI-WA-98215-6-66 the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
// Chapter 3
// I wondered who could be submitting tickets at this hour, but it must be important so with one eye on Scully I checked out the ticket.
// For some reason the user name wasn’t in the ticket, just the user number. I had complained about this to IT and they said they would “get to it” whatever that means.
// I swear to the gods if you think developers have their own code to make fun of users, IT guys are way worse. They probably just sit around crimping their cables or whatever they do.
// Anyway this ticket was really weird, the user said when they opened up the admin portal the menu would freak out.
// They said, I kid you not: “The menu is haunted and we need an exorcism”
// Must be some kind of joker who also got stuck with the night shift and doesn’t have anything to do, so let’s mess with the poor devs right?
// Chapter 4
// When I opened up the admin portal I didn’t see anything weird at first, this dude was messing with me for sure.
// I got hungry so I wanted to make myself a quick snack, I found a buldak ramen packet in the kitchen.
// Perhaps I shouldn’t have judged my grandma for eating beans, as I know these spicy ramen will be much worse.
// While waiting for the water to boil, I saw movement from the corner of my eyes, it was like there was someone in the room with me.
// When I walked over to investigate it was suddenly gone, but I saw on my screen the menu was freaking out, opening and closing like crazy.
// I turned to walk back to the kitchen and get my ramen going, but as I did suddenly I hear a loud bang in the apartment.
// Chapter 5
// As I investigated the noise I found a door had slammed shut due to the wind, I was pretty sure I had closed that door earlier…
// With my snack in hand I went in to investigate the code running the menu.
// After thorough investigation, I found no fault in the menu. The code hadn’t been touched in months and nobody had ever complained before.
// But I had seen the menu misbehave myself, surely something must be wrong with it.
// Suddenly it was like my hands had a mind of their own, they started writing code like I had never seen before.
// With horror I saw what they were doing and I gasped. The only brief pause I got was when my hands turned to my ramen.
// I felt sick by the code they had written, but they forced the spicy buldak into my mouth and when I refused to swallow, poured the lukewarm Mt. Dew in my mouth.
// Chapter 6
// Even though I have no explanation for the code that now lays before you, in order to clear my conscience I will briefly try to explain what it does.
// My understanding isn’t complete, but what I’ve been able to glean from beyond the veil is the following:
// Lines 8 - 26 deal with getting the user details, they appear to use the regular API for this but also some calls I’m not familiar with.
// Lines 43 - 78 seem to get the users actual GPS coordinates, I have no idea how?
// Around line 156 the weather.com API is used to get a current report at the users location.
// The rest of the code seems to deal with various time and weather related checks. As far as I can tell it checks if it’s dark and stormy out.
// In the last part of the function there is some simple logic that cancels the menu animation if it triggers too often.
// Chapter 7
// It was with a heavy heart I pushed commit 54D3AD into production with the simple message “Fixes ticket EI-WA-98215-6-66”
// I went to close the ticket, but somehow I couldn’t find it in the ticket system anymore. Probably those IT guys messing up again.
// The mail was gone as well, but with Microsoft Outlook that was pretty much par for the course, so I didn’t think anything of it.
// Wanting to put this horrible experience behind me, I resumed watching X-Files, such a classic show.
// A few minutes later my VLC crashed and kept looping on Mulder saying “Thank you”, but it was slowed down a bunch and distorted.
// In the few seconds I needed to get my hand free from my sweatpants, all my power went out. We really should invest more into infrastructure…
// - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
// Note added by employee 2548 - Martin (intern) - 07-02-2009
// New Weather.com API premium key added, no idea why we need this, but without it the menu breaks.
// Could not find contact info for employee 871 - presumably left the company.
- Comment on PC Master Race 3 weeks ago:
That’s a lot of words to say you are jealous
- Comment on Rise of the Tomb Raider -SteamDeck 4 weeks ago:
I got a message Necesse got it’s 1.0 release. I played it about a year ago and it was rough around the edges. So I’m giving it another go this weekend.
- Comment on Fight me 4 weeks ago:
Sure, but like the other commenter said, everything turns into heat eventually
- Comment on Fight me 4 weeks ago:
Well that’s just objectively wrong. Light is EM radiation, where heat is movement of atoms and molecules. Via incandescence objects can radiate away their heat (following black body radiation), however they are not the same thing.
- Comment on Fight me 4 weeks ago:
In the end we are all infinitely falling into the pit of entropy
- Comment on Fight me 4 weeks ago:
Nah this thing puts out light and probably vibrates as well, so not even 100%.
- Comment on Grab your pitchforks 5 weeks ago:
I’m a huge fan of sweet and savoury in the same dish. Pineapple on pizza is great, but there are a lot of dishes from South-Asia that combine unique flavours. One of my favourites is rice with a yellow curry sauce with raisins and peach slices on the side. There can even be nuts in the rice to mix it up some.
People need to step outside of their food comfort zone and try out different things.
- Comment on How should everything be routed? 1 month ago:
They are trolling, it doesn’t matter at all.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
A table saw is for lengthwise cuts, for cutting long things like these you need a cut-off saw.
Fun fact, you don’t really need to tap soft aluminium like this. You can just drive the bolt straight in with an impact driver. I thought it was sketch at first, having always tapped them beforehand. But my buddy said it’s a waste of time, just drive the bolts in right away. So I tried it and he was right, it works perfectly every time. They form perfect threads so you can easily remove and re-add the bolt just like when it was tapped beforehand.
- Comment on It's a miracle! 1 month ago:
Is that a tail or a penis?
- Comment on It's a miracle! 1 month ago:
Or, you know, FUCKING DEAD
- Comment on Piegoth Ur 1 month ago:
- Comment on Microsoft Is Abandoning Windows 10. Hackers Are Celebrating. 1 month ago:
Which would be the reason the hackers are celebrating
- Comment on Microbes trapped in permafrost awake after thousands of years 1 month ago:
While this is good for some sort of movie or book plot, it isn’t realistic. Remember humans and species we evolved from were around a lot longer than 40,000 years. We’ve encountered these microbes (or their cousins) before and will be able to handle them just fine. Especially because we have an evolutionary advantage over them, they don’t know all the new tricks.
The ones to really be scared of are the ones that have become resistant to all of the antibiotics we have thrown at them. Those super bugs can kick our asses.
- Comment on Exposing Why Farmers Can't Legally Replant Their Own Seeds 1 month ago:
The thing that annoys me about this, is the BS Monsanto is pulling puts GMO in a bad light. Humans have been genetically manipulating crops and animals for thousands of years. But in the past it was a messy, slow and imprecise process. These days we have the tools to quickly and precisely adjust what we need to adjust. This is and has been critical for supporting the number of people alive today. Faster growing crops, with better yields, more resistance to diseases and climate change. GMO is absolutely a tool that we need and should continue to use.
But these days so many people believe that when a crop or animal has been genetically modified, it’s somehow less healthy to eat. There has been a real wave of people who listen to social media about what is healthy and what is not. Blaming things that are perfectly fine, neutral or even good for you, on a precieved poor health. In reality we (especially in rich countries) are healthier than ever. These people look to things like ‘organic’ or weird diets such as Paleolithic (but instead of berries and nuts they eat like a cows worth of meat each day) to improve their lives. Companies that used to use chemicals created by mixing some precursors in a clean reactor, are switching over to organic sources. This might sound like a good thing, but I’ve seen them genetically modify insect that already create the chemical they need in their shells to create lots of that chemical. The insects get bred, boiled and filtered and the chemical is extracted. This leads to a less pure product, with more contaminants, a larger cost, a bigger impact on the environment and more bio-industry. And it’s often a chemical that’s very common and has been in use for over 50 years with zero impact on health.
Well you might say, let people do their own thing, it’s a free country right? Yes, but also no. People having weird diets or listening to Facebook to put olive oil on a dry patch of skin is fine. But it’s a slippery slope. These people are losing their faith in science and truth, but instead rely on whatever people say on social media. A place where more and more scammers are active, saying whatever just to get clicks, get sponsors or actively scam people out of their money. This slope then extends into something like homeopathic medicine and nature healing. Which has convinced people in the past that needed real medicine to instead opt for the “natural” option. People have died because of this.
In the past I was still in the camp of let the people chose, who am I to say what is the truth for other people? I don’t have all the answers, if they want to do something stupid, that’s on them. I also do stupid stuff all the time, just in other ways, should I be disallowed from living my life as I want to? But then the pandemic happened and the people listening to social media instead of science and government started to shout we shouldn’t be in lock down, we shouldn’t use masks, we shouldn’t vaccinate. So my view changed, it’s so easy for people to trust what’s being said on social media. Foreign actors abuse social media to influence the people, destabilize countries and impact elections. Scammers convince people of nonsense, just to get a few bucks. I’m not sure what the solution is, but I have started to believe we actively need a solution.
Seeing a large company like Monsanto abuse GMO in the ways they do pisses me off. We do not need to feed the fire against using tools like this. We desperately need those tools if we want to continue to exist in the numbers we are today. They should be made an example of and their abuse should be stopped.
- Comment on Its all bots, isn't it? 1 month ago:
Can’t we just talk to the humans
Be a little understanding
Could make things better?
Can’t we talk to the humans
That work together now?
