ignirtoq

@ignirtoq@feddit.online

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord attempt to put out the fires with a clarification over new age verification⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  How does the age inference model work?

  We leverage an advanced machine learning model developed at Discord to predict whether a user falls into a particular age group based on patterns of user behavior and several other signals associated with their account on Discord. We only use these signals to assign users to an age group when our confidence level is high; when it isn’t, users go through our standard age assurance flow to confirm their age. We do not use your message content in the age estimation model.

  Completely opaque explanation of how they use AI to guess your age with a claim that message content is not used. With no independent way to actually verify that claim, I don’t trust them at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord Alternatives, Ranked⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s his “safety” category in his rankings. He talks about moderation tools and risks like bad actors posting illicit content quite a bit, actually.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is Pixelfed an extra network and not just a Mastodon client?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Bluesky is one, single platform. It stores the complete data for any given user post in its databases and provides that through its data stream and APIs. This means every different client someone writes has access to all the same data as every other client, because they’re all going through Bluesky. This also means if Bluesky doesn’t support some feature, no clients can either.

  The architecture of the Fediverse is different. Forgetting ActivityPub for a moment, Mastodon is one platform and Pixelfed is another. This means each one has its own data model, internal storage architecture, and streams/APIs. Because they were built for different purposes, they support different features. I don’t use either, but I expect there are image-related features in Pixelfed that are just not possible in a Mastodon client, not because someone hasn’t written a client capable of it, but because Mastodon doesn’t have the internal data storage nor API to support it in any client.

  Where ActivityPub comes in is a unified stream language. When a post pops up on a platform, that platform has the complete data and translates as much as it can into an ActivityPub message to send to other platforms. Some platforms haven’t figured out yet how to pack all of their relevant data into an ActivityPub message, so some data may be lost in the sending. And different platforms may not support storing all the data in a given ActivityPub message they receive, especially if it’s from a feature they don’t provide, so some data may be lost in the receiving.

  Ultimately this means even with ActivityPub linking things together, the data flow isn’t perfect/complete. So different data is available to any even theoretical Mastodon client compared to a Pixelfed client because the backend platforms are different. Their APIs expose different data in different, often incompatible ways, so even if someone wrote an image-focused client for Mastodon, it wouldn’t be possible to do everything an image-focused client for Pixelfed could do, because the backend platforms focus on different things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft lost $357 billion in market cap as stock plunged most since 2020⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think she’s saying she could have allocated the GPUs to Azure to game the metrics, but Microsoft chose to allocate them to internal projects, which is a form of self-investment. She’s not saying they made the wrong decision, she’s saying their decision in this longer-term investment makes the short-term metrics worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LG Electronics unveils 2026 Gram Laptop line with aerospace composite - up to 50% lighter than macbooks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally I’m fine with them taking the noise levels from the aerospace industry, too. My primary concern is how’s the battery life?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  U.S. ‌antitrust agencies ⁠had cleared Nvidia’s investment in Intel, according to a notice ‍posted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission earlier in December.

  Are they even giving reasons anymore? Or is the “antitrust agency” just a guy napping in a corner they periodically wake up just to give a thumbs up?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you feel about the removal of tokens from arcades ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Arcades have to charge more than a quarter per play now due to inflation. The price isn’t just you renting the machine for the duration of the play, it’s you paying a small slice of the rent on the arcade location, the income of the workers, the maintenance of the machines, and the electricity for the lights, AC/heating, and so on. No arcades would exist today if they could only charge quarters.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does playing audio at a high volume bluetooth wirelessly use more phone battery power than lower volume or are equidraining?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It doesn’t matter. Even if it were constantly streaming the current volume level, the energy to transmit the value “100” is the same as to transmit “5”, so your phone doesn’t drain any faster to constantly tell the earbuds the volume is high versus low.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We’re about to face a crisis nobody’s talking about. In 10 years, who’s going to mentor the next generation? The developers who’ve been using AI since day one won’t have the architectural understanding to teach. The product managers who’ve always relied on AI for decisions won’t have the judgment to pass on. The leaders who’ve abdicated to algorithms won’t have the wisdom to share.

  Except we are talking about that, and the tech bro response is “in 10 years we’ll have AGI and it will do all these things all the time permanently.” In their roadmap, there won’t be a next generation of software developers, product managers, or mid-level leaders, because AGI will do all those things faster and better than humans. There will just be CEOs, the capital they control, and AI.

  What’s most absurd is that, if that were all true, that would lead to a crisis much larger than just a generational knowledge problem in a specific industry. It would cut regular workers entirely out of the economy, and regular workers form the foundation of the economy, so the entire economy would collapse.

  “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google's Agentic AI wipes user's entire HDD without permission in catastrophic failure⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, average is an ambiguous term. While in statistics it often means “mean,” it can also mean “median” or “mode,” and I would argue the layperson saying “average” intends it to mean “typical,” which is closer to median (or even more). And in that case, those 85 percent would not be smarter than average.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“You heard wrong” - users brutually reject Microsoft's "Copilot for work" in Edge and Windows 11⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  AI is going to destroy a lot of software companies in a way I haven’t seen talked about yet: it will give CEOs exactly what they ask for.

  Before you jump in with “AI produces garbage and isn’t reliable by design,” let me say I agree with you 100%, but for the sake of argument, assume for a moment it could produce a high quality product.

  Once a company gets large enough, very often the CEO gets completely removed from how their company actually works. I know I’ve worked at several companies where the job of my boss was to shield me from corporate nonsense so I could make an actually good product. If I and/or my boss were replaced with AI that actually followed the corporate nonsense, the company would go belly-up quite quickly.

  I think many CEOs are looking to replace huge fleets of workers with AI they can directly prompt. Even if it worked flawlessly, since they don’t know how their products actually bring value to their customers, they will speed-run torpedoing their company’s place in the market by their own ignorance, ego, and overconfidence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When it comes to nukes and AI, people are worried about the wrong thing | It’s more subtle than Skynet.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  TL;DR: While governments are putting out assurances AI won’t make the final decision to launch nuclear weapons, they are tight-lipped about whether they are putting AI in the information gathering and processing components that advise world leaders making the decision to launch nuclear weapons. In risk assessment, there’s little difference between wrong AI making the launch decision and a human informed by wrong AI making the launch decision.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US | SNAP benefits cut off during shutdown, driving long lines at food pantries⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t say benefits were not cut off. I’m challenging the assertion that the mere fact that the government is shutdown is the cause of funding being cut off, like the phrase I quoted implicitly assets. The shutdown alone is not the reason funds for SNAP were cut off, and my proof of my assertion is the fact that funding has never been cut off in previous shutdowns.

  This means someone must have chosen to execute this shutdown differently on purpose. Republicans are in charge of all branches of government, so they are the most likely culprit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US | SNAP benefits cut off during shutdown, driving long lines at food pantries⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  federal food benefits were cut off due to the government shutdown.

  No, they were not cut off due to the shutdown. Payments had not been stopped in any prior shutdown and didn’t have to be stopped in this one. Trump and Republicans specifically chose for this to happen to put more pressure on Democrats. They don’t care if Americans starve to death, while Democrats do. They are starving Americans because Democrats are trying to stop Americans from losing healthcare.