WesternInfidels
@WesternInfidels@feddit.online
- Comment on infinite money 1 week ago:
Whitey On The Moon is from 1970.
- Comment on PC Gamer Recommends RSS Readers in a 37MB Article That Just Keeps Downloading 1 week ago:
Seems like an appropriate companion piece, I have forgotten what pointed me toward this:
I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.
- Comment on Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded across the US 1 week ago:
This is a great story to illuminate the large number of problems that could be addressed by decent public transit, better options for walking and biking, etc.
- Comment on HP realizes that mandatory 15-minute support call wait times isn’t good support 1 week ago:
I spent a couple of years doing phone support (for a Windows program, in the internet-by-modem days), and we had a paper manual that we spent a lot of effort on. I’m not sure it helped too many people. We didn’t have a way of measuring, though. We had no idea how many people were blundering through things up on their own, how many people set things up on their own with the manual’s help, or how many people were chucking the whole product in a closet and forgetting about it.
Sure, some callers definitely felt it was a waste of time to learn how to work things; they just wanted their things to work. They wanted their things to serve them, instead of the other way around, and I can’t even argue with that philosophy.
But most callers just didn’t have the technical experience to make any sense of any documentation we could write. Some of them didn’t know what the desktop computer they used every day even looked like; didn’t know which of the metal-and-plastic boxes around their desk was “the computer.” They didn’t know the difference between a floppy drive and a hard drive, and they’d argue with us about it. “I don’t have a floppy drive, my drive takes those hard disks.” No manual or knowledge base article was going to help these folks, no matter how much effort we made.
- Comment on There's always money in the banana stand 2 weeks ago:
You whiners are losing sight of the big-picture, important stuff, like the unmitigated scandal where Hunter Biden once received a drink on the house.
- Comment on Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers 2 weeks ago:
I participate in the techtakes community on awful.systems…
Jesus, that sounds awful.
Subscribed.
- Comment on Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers 2 weeks ago:
The commentariat at HN was anti-DEI before anyone knew what “DEI” even was.
Garry Tan, tech [Y Combinator] CEO & campaign donor, wishes death upon San Francisco politicians
- Comment on covid.gov redirects to lab leak conspiracy insanity 2 weeks ago:
Wow, it’s so glitzy, so show-biz, so one-sided, so amorphous in structure. They’ve got the Pooper-in-Chief’s picture up there, in case we forgot who was president from November 2020 to January 2021, when the US had a vaccine but no one could get an injection.
You’d think even a serious conspiracy believer would become suspicious, disillusioned. But I guess that doesn’t happen.
A Very Calm Guide to the Lab Leak Theory (slow, archive.org)
- Comment on Why Are We Still Doing This? - Ed Zitron 2 weeks ago:
I am constantly asked to explain my opinions … I am constantly harangued for proof of what I believe, and every time I hand it over there’s some sort of ham-fisted response of “it’s getting better” and “it will get even more better from here!’
For an industry so thoroughly steeped in cold, hard rationality , AI boosters are so quick to jump to flights of fancy — to speak of the mythical “AGI” and the supposed moment when everything gets cheaper and also powerful enough to be reliable or effective.
I don’t know what’s going to happen with “AI,” but I think this highlights an interesting pattern, one where the standards of evidence for critics and boosters are different. Certainly we’ve seen a similar phenomenon in cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
Is it profound, is it one of those penetrating insights that you can’t stop seeing once you’ve seen it? I’m not sure. Of course enthusiasts are biased, of course their arguments are emotional and unfair.
- Comment on Microsoft wants devs to build Electron AI apps on Windows 11, says no need of native code, despite RAM concerns 2 weeks ago:
We could view this as “MS pushes for stupid direction that clued-in tech people are opposed to,” or we could view this as “MS gives up on native apps because everyone else of consequence already has.” I hate it but I have eyes.
If AI enhanced coding is really so great, we might expect to see a Renaissance of small, efficient native apps, even on platforms like Android. I’m not holding my breath, though.
- Comment on Iran war shows how AI speeds up military ‘kill chains’ 2 weeks ago:
The term “kill chain” reduces the slaughter of human beings to an engineering problem. It tacitly admits that modern militaries are murder factories. If we had caught ISIS or a drug cartel speaking and thinking this way, that would be a Fox News headline for months. What a dispiriting bit of jargon. It tells so much more than it says.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
I did this with gemini to so…
I haven’t got any experience with, or any paid access to, these LLM things.
Can you get Gemini to give you the figures (since there are only two for each year) and a URL source for those figures, along with the chart? I’m just thinking this could be really easy to double-check, and that could be an education, however it turns out.
- Comment on The 49MB Web Page 2 weeks ago:
If this trend annoys you, check out A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites.
- Comment on An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea." 3 weeks ago:
What if I have a shirt that says “From the river” and my friend has a shirt that says “To the sea?”
Would we be arrested for standing too close to each other?
What if we stood the wrong way round, and our shirts read “To the sea from the river?” Would that be an offense?
What if the shirt was in the form of a rebus, with pictures and/or wordplay as stand-ins for words like “river” and “sea?”
What if it were a remix that nevertheless put the original slogan in your head: “River. Sea. Some assembly required?”
- Comment on Easy-to-use solar panels are coming, but utilities are trying to delay them 3 weeks ago:
“The utility” has never had a way to prevent you from doing something dangerous with your wiring or with the electricity they send you. The best we’ve managed has been to encourage appliance manufacturers to design their products with safety in mind, through the UL program (which is voluntary). This is why the writer talked to the “vice president of engineering at UL Solutions.”
- Comment on From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT 3 weeks ago:
Putting a dollar figure on your schadenfreude? Do you want a block chain based “prediction market” for schadenfreude? That’s how you get a block chain based “prediction market” for schadenfreude.
- Comment on Russia-backed hackers breach Signal, WhatsApp accounts of officials, journalists, Netherlands warns 3 weeks ago:
The kind of thing only your grandparents would fall for
But evidently not.
Last week I helped someone navigate their bank’s tech support to regain access to an account they’d been locked out of. I believe the bank was having some technical difficulties that they weren’t admitting to (or which the support people weren’t even aware of). Many standard approaches did not work, and we kept getting escalated. The top person we talked to eventually asked for some information that didn’t conform to the usual security question / answer format ("What year what the account opened?” for a ~50 year old account that had been opened many bank mergers ago) and wound up reading us a new password over the phone.
This approach alarmed me, it seemed to violate some security rules of thumb that I thought I understood. But this is what the bank does, sometimes. Given the sort of nonsense that goes on legitimately sometimes, expecting the general public to understand which information flows to be suspicious of – expecting them to think in terms of information flows at all – may be asking too much. We’d all hope journalists would be more savvy, I guess, but “government officials?” Nope. I used to think “Oh, I wouldn’t fall for that” when I read stories like these, but now I’m less sure.
- Comment on Satellite firm pauses imagery after revealing Iran's attacks on US bases 3 weeks ago:
The stated reasoning sounds okay in isolation, but: 1. Why didn’t they start the blackout when the conflict began, as opposed to waiting like this? 2. Why is it just a delay, instead of a real blackout?
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to aboringdystopia@lemmy.world | 2 comments
- Comment on New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice 3 weeks ago:
Your objection does nothing to address the issue you raised. Where is the line drawn between “information” and “legal advice?”
Wikipedia and the lawmakers themselves present us with static information that is not specific to us personally or to any particular situation we may find ourselves in, and which generally does not include specific recommendations. I think most people would agree that’s just information, not advice.
If an LLM can be coaxed into saying things like “you should,” advocating specific courses of action for your circumstances, is that legal advice? I think many of us would agree that would be unlicesenced legal advice.
- Comment on New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice 3 weeks ago:
Is the wikipedia responsible for you reading an article about a law and then taking that as legal advice?
Is the U.S. House of Representatives responsible for you reading the text of a law itself and then taking that as legal advice?
- Comment on WhatsApp officially names Mullvad and Amnezia VPN as go-to tools for bypassing censorship 4 weeks ago:
never heard of Amnezia
You said that before though
- Comment on Prediction market trader 'Magamyman' made $553,000 on death of Iran's supreme leader 4 weeks ago:
Vegas gambling is regulated by the state, but it’s still gambling.
- Comment on Prediction market trader 'Magamyman' made $553,000 on death of Iran's supreme leader 4 weeks ago:
The insiders make money because the “prediction market” odds don’t reflect reality.
- Comment on Prediction market trader 'Magamyman' made $553,000 on death of Iran's supreme leader 4 weeks ago:
How did the general public come to adopt the “prediction market” euphemism? It’s crypto gambling, right? Everyone knows that’s true, everyone understands that terminology. Aren’t we doing the casino’s work for them when we adopt their highfalutin’ marketing-speak? Making crypto gambling sound like a game for rich, educated people, rather than a grubby online casino that caters to insider cheating and tax evasion?
- Comment on Southern California air board rejected pollution rules after AI-generated flood of comments 4 weeks ago:
GPTurfing?
- Comment on Southern California air board rejected pollution rules after AI-generated flood of comments 4 weeks ago:
That annoys me as well. They call it “astroturfing” because it’s fake grassroots. I wonder if we should call this “cyberturfing.”
- Comment on An upcoming California law requires operating system providers to enforce basic mandatory age verification 4 weeks ago:
I’ve only skimmed but:
provide an accessible interface at account setup
They don’t even define “account.” They have a definition of “account holder” that makes no sense.
Are all devices required to have user accounts? There was a time when home computers did not have such things.
- Comment on An AI Thought Experiment on Substack Is Sending The Stock Market Spiraling 4 weeks ago:
Then, agentic commerce, coupled with stablecoins, gets rid of transaction fees and upends the business models of payment processors like Mastercard and card-focused banks like American Express.
Oh, sure. Transaction fees. Going away. That happens in every economic upheaval. Of course it does. I don’t know why you’re laughing.
- Comment on Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more 4 weeks ago:
The steady exodus from Elon Musk’s X has benefited smaller, independent alternatives such as … German-developed Mastodon