Manjushri
@Manjushri@piefed.social
- Comment on When did it become normalized to start passing credit card processing fees to the customer? 4 days ago:
This is really the best answer, I think. Except the agreement you used to have to sign to take Visa cards used to stipulate that you could not offer a discount for cash.
Visa’s rules have changed in favor of the merchants at last….. Visa has updated their V isa Core Rules and Visa Product and Service Rules, and the rules changed benefit all business owners in all 50 states ! …Now, you can offer a discount when your customer pays with cash in efforts to incentivize your customers and avoid having to pay credit card processing fees. (Therefore if you sell a product or service for $100, you get to finally keep all $100 of the sale….Not $96.00 )
- Comment on Socialist Co-Ops Against Silicon Valley Empires 4 days ago:
I’m in a very rural part of the USA. My electric, telephone(landlines which I don’t have), and internet are all coops. They are all very efficient and inexpensive. I’m very happy with them.
- Comment on New nickel-iron battery charges in seconds, survives 12,000 cycles 6 days ago:
Per the article they are working on that, whichever is good since cattle farming is not exactly eco friendly.
The researchers are currently investigating the use of other metals with this nanocluster fabrication technique. They are also testing natural polymers as more abundant replacements for bovine proteins to facilitate potential manufacturing.
- Comment on Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users 1 week ago:
Security by obscurity is not really a good strategy. Lemmy is small potatoes, sure. But that just means they can devote a small number of assets to effectively monitor it.
- Comment on Recreating uncensored Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments 2 weeks ago:
…it’s safe to say that Pam Bondi’s DoJ did not put its best and brightest on this (admittedly gargantuan) undertaking
Actually they did. It’s just that their best and brightest are fairly dim.
- Comment on xkcd #3202: Groundhog Day Meaning 2 weeks ago:
If we count years from the birth of Christ, shouldn’t his birthday be January first?
- Comment on ‘We’re basically pushers:’ Two California courtrooms hear how companies may have hooked kids on social media 2 weeks ago:
It’s good to see all this come out, but I bet they don’t get more than a slap on the wrist that they’ll write off as a cost of doing business and then just keep doing the same sleazy shit.
- Comment on Players are returning their Dispatch copies due to Switch censorship 3 weeks ago:
Yep. In the words of George R. R. Martin
“You can write the most detailed, vivid description of an ax entering a skull, and nobody will say a word in protest. But if you write a similarly detailed description of a penis entering a vagina, you get letters from people saying they’ll never read you again. What the hell? Penises entering vaginas bring a lot more joy into the world than axes entering skulls.”
- Comment on Is it possible to cool my body enough to not sweat while exercising? 3 weeks ago:
Fans work well for me, but if it is humid in your house you it may not be as effective. Moving dry air can carry off a lot of sweat.
- Comment on Telly has only delivered 35,000 of its free televisions with always-on ads 3 weeks ago:
10 percent of Telly’s shipments through FedEx arrived broken
No big surprise there. Shipments I get through FedEx are always beat to hell.
- Comment on Exploding 🌳🌲🌴🌳🌲🌴🌳🌲🌴🌳 3 weeks ago:
The trees have probably already exploded. It’s how they knew to warn those east of them.
- Comment on UK police blame Microsoft Copilot for intelligence mistake 5 weeks ago:
Everyone wants to run everything like a business these days. They want to save on payroll so rather than paying actual police to do the paperwork, they want to use Copilot or whatever to do the paperwork for them. Of course, because AI models are so crappy and error prone, they need to spend the same amount of money on payroll to verify the accuracy of the AI output. But they don’t do that. They just run with whatever the AI output is and figure it’ll be close enough to accurate. After all, big tech keeps telling everyone that AI is wonderful and can do anything.That is far from the truth though.
A lawyer in California last year got in trouble for using ChatGPT to generate briefs for a trial. He wound up filing those briefs with the court even though they 21 of the 23 quotes from previous trials were complete fabrications. In another incident, a police department in Utah used an AI to generate a report from a traffic stop. That report claimed that an officer shape-shifted into a frog during the incident.
There are endless reports of AI making shit up and demonstrating how error prone those tools are. Yet, people who should know better keep trusting AI to do these important jobs, just to save money on payroll, when AI is clearly far from ready for prime-time.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
You need some heavy curtains. Doing anything like you suggest would just get the cops at your door for creating a driving hazard or something.
- Comment on Gmail's new AI Inbox uses Gemini, but Google says it won’t train AI on user emails 5 weeks ago:
…yet
- Comment on Innocent African-American child George Stinney executed after being falsely accused of murdering two white girls | 1944 5 weeks ago:
This is absolutely horrific and a stain on humanity itself. And there is another aspect that isn’t always brought up is cases of injustice like this. The police, lawyers, judges, and everyone else involved in the murder of this young boy, were quite literally covering up for the real murderer(s) of those girls. Whoever killed those girls went free, perhaps to kill again, because of the racist motivations of those involved in the trial and execution of this poor, scared, kid.
- Comment on What should the next President of the United States do? 1 month ago:
Prosecute the current one for his crimes, but we all know that won’t happen.
- Comment on Can pets tell who's petting them without looking? 1 month ago:
Not always. I was at my sister’s house and her cat was not over-fond of me. That bothered me because cats normally adore me. At one point, the cat was half-snoozing on a stool so I reached over to give him a pet. At first he started to purr and stretched out. Yes! Thought I, finally making friends. Then he looked over his shoulder and saw it was me. He hissed and ran to the other side of the room and started cleaning himself. I’d have been hurt if his expression hadn’t been so funny when he realized that it wasn’t my sister petting him.
- Comment on Hackers threaten to leak massive 'Wired' customer database 1 month ago:
the breach appears to be legitimate and includes email addresses, along with optional fields such as first and last name, phone number, physical address, gender, and date of birth — although many of these fields appear to be empty.
So, this may be the most inconsequential leak in a long time. Grats to Conde Nast for not storing a zillion pieces of data on all their customers.
- Comment on NVIDIA Puts 100-Hour Monthly Limit on All GeForce NOW Subscriptions 1 month ago:
That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.
- Comment on NVIDIA Puts 100-Hour Monthly Limit on All GeForce NOW Subscriptions 1 month ago:
Okay, thanks.
- Comment on NVIDIA Puts 100-Hour Monthly Limit on All GeForce NOW Subscriptions 1 month ago:
Forgive my ignorance, but does this mean that my gforce card performance will be degraded if I don’t pay for this subscription? Why would I want to use this cloud gaming to play games I already own?
- Comment on Celebrating anti-intellectualism is the biggest danger to humanity 2 months ago:
Yes, Isaac Asimov, back in 1980, referred to it as a Cult of Ignorance.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
- Comment on Google is killing off dark web reports 2 months ago:
Google has noted that although its utility offered general information about how many instances your data has been found on the dark web due to breaches and what kind of information about you is available online, the feedback from customers indicated that it did not offer any clean remediation steps to follow next. Indeed, the existing dashboard is just a trove of information with no actionable steps. People can find out how their data was stolen, but they can’t do anything about it.
Welcome to the information age where information is everywhere except in people’s heads.
- Comment on In the US one can graduate *cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude*. There should be another honor added if you survive a school shooting. 2 months ago:
.357 Magnum cum laude.
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 2 months ago:
…additionally using unbelievable amounts of power so the environmental concerns go right out of the window at a time where we should do everything to not do that.
Don’t forget that the enormous energy usage is driving up energy costs for absolutely everyone.
Residential retail electricity prices in September were up 7.4%, to about 18 cents per kilowatt hour, according to the most recent data from the Energy Information Administration.
That’s on a national basis too. If you happen to live in an area with a lot of data centers, your energy costs have probably risen more than that.
- Comment on Alas! 2 months ago:
I think I really need this on a t-shirt.
- Comment on Are all dinosaur fossils 'replicas'? 2 months ago:
Most displays are likely to be replicas, I think. Few people would be interested in seeing a T. Rex hip bone in one display, half a triceratops horn in another, etc. Complete skeletons are a bit of a rarity so it would be tough to find all the parts of some species for all the different museums out there. Also, in order to build a complete display of a T. Rex or triceratops, you would likely use all replica parts because you would need to damage the fossils in order to connect them all together.
Finally, most of the actual fossils are valuable to researchers and putting them on display in museums would make them less available for study.
- Comment on We can play that game too 2 months ago:
Ah, oops. I should pay closer attention. I’ll leave the post and take my beatings.
- Comment on We can play that game too 2 months ago:
That’s a really dumb argument. A person complains about paying for something that they’ll never get, and the IndyStar’s response is to complain about paying for something that they’ve already benefited from, and that was paid for by others. I would further add, paying for schools is a great thing even if you don’t have and will never have kids. Without good schools, everyone else’s kids will probably grow up to be conservatives.
- Comment on Infosec 2 months ago:
To be fair, anyone who uses their birthday for a pin or password is a fool.