sbv
@sbv@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on what replacement to nova launcher would you recommend? 5 days ago:
I like Square Home. It’s like the old Metro windows UI.
And yes, you can change the icons.
- Comment on Japan Just Switched on Asia’s First Osmotic Power Plant, Which Runs 24/7 on Nothing But Fresh Water and Seawater 2 weeks ago:
The plant will generate about 880,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year—enough to help run a nearby desalination facility and supply around 220 homes. That equals the output of two soccer fields of solar panels, but osmotic power keeps running day and night, in any weather.
- Comment on The AI vibe shift is upon us 3 weeks ago:
I’ve heard it likened to the dot-com boom: yeah, we’ve got a tonne of e-commerce today, but the stars hadn’t aligned in early 2k.
- Comment on The AI vibe shift is upon us 3 weeks ago:
Seems a bit early tbh. But I’ll take it.
- Comment on In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses 4 weeks ago:
In total, the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second. The company also provided average estimates for the water consumption and carbon emissions associated with a text prompt to Gemini.
- Comment on Why using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment 5 weeks ago:
It would be fantastic if our other GHG-producing activities were held to the same level of criticism as AI.
You’re gonna get downvotes defending AI on Lemmy - our Overton window is ^tiny^.
A ChatGPT prompt uses 3 Wh. This is enough energy to:
Leave a single incandescent light bulb on for 3 minutes.
Leave a wireless router on for 30 minutes.
Play a gaming console for 1 minute.
Run a vacuum cleaner for 10 seconds.
Run a microwave for 10 seconds
Run a toaster for 8 seconds
Brew coffee for 10 seconds
Use a laptop for 3 minutes. ChatGPT could write this post using less energy than your laptop uses over the time you read it.
- Comment on GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation 5 weeks ago:
Doesn’t Codeberg have private repos? I could’ve sworn I’ve created one.
- Comment on I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C 1 month ago:
Nice!
I enjoyed reading your blog. It’s been a while since I looked at an honest to goodness enthusiast blog. Thanks for writing it!
- Comment on I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C 1 month ago:
Pretty wild that the author didn’t set up app notifications. Getting specific notifications from specific people on my wrist is a big part of the reason I use a smartwatch. But to each their own.
It’d be pretty cool to get a significant use case of my pricey pricey Garmin for ~CAD$40.
- Comment on The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now) 1 month ago:
Recognizing from history the possibilities of where this all might lead, the prospect of any serious economic downturn being met with a widespread push of mass automation—paired with a regime overwhelmingly friendly to the tech and business class, and executing a campaign of oppression and prosecution of precarious manual and skilled laborers—well, it should make us all sit up and pay attention.
- Comment on Woman’s memoirs give fascinating insight into life in 17th-century northern England 1 month ago:
That article needs more excerpts. Four volumes and we get two sentences?
- Comment on go to sleep 1 month ago:
oh shit
- Comment on Christ, Conquest, and the MDGs (Part 2) 1 month ago:
“shall be slaves”
It’s the next line in the song.
- Comment on Why does technology create new problems for each one it solves? 1 month ago:
We don’t notice technologies that quietly solve the problem they were intended to solve. I’ve never seen a rage post about light switches. Or wrenches. Or locks. Or pencils.
AI, and a lot of the technologies we complain about, are business models that prioritize value to the producer over value to the buyer or user. They aren’t technology per se, so much as a shoddy product wrapped in unrealistic promises.
- Comment on JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress) - Jono Alderson 1 month ago:
Developers wanted to build and deploy apps to end user machines. The round trip for page loads was lousy for usability.
Java applets were too shitty. Flash was too janky and hard to work with. So Mozilla started adding JavaScript as a hack. It filled a need.
a barrier-to-entry that makes it difficult to develop new browsers,
It definitely adds a barrier to entry, but JavaScript was really perfected in chromium, which is a different codebase from the folks who proposed and built js to begin with.
I’m not saying JavaScript is good, but it fills a need.
- Comment on Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us? 2 months ago:
In a recent series of experiments, we paid people a few dollars to unfollow the most divisive political accounts on X. After a month, they reported feeling 23% less animosity towards other political groups. In fact, their experience was so positive that nearly half the people declined to refollow those hostile accounts after the study was over. And those who maintain their healthier newsfeed reported less animosity a full 11 months after the study.
Twitter got a lot better when I unfollowed the peeps whose tweets I hated. But it also got boring, so I stopped using it (this was loooong before Trump, Elon, etc).
There’s probably a lesson there.
- Comment on Cloudflare wants Google to change its AI search crawling. Google likely won’t. 2 months ago:
Cloudflare’s customers probably wouldn’t be on board with that. Google’s properties provide a tonne of traffic to businesses. Doing anything to put that in jeopardy would probably have many of Cloudflare’s customers looking for a new provider.
- Comment on What is this new Bitchat scam that crypto-bros think is good? 2 months ago:
It just seems like dude is suffering from Not invented here and wants to reinvent the wheel. The only reason anyone noticed is because a tech b-lister is involved.
- Comment on ‘I blame Facebook’: Aaron Sorkin is writing a Social Network sequel for the post-Zuckerberg era 2 months ago:
Let’s fucking go
The Facebook Files made – and provided evidence for – multiple allegations, including that Facebook was well aware of how toxic Instagram was for many teen girls; that Facebook has a “secret elite” list of people for whom Facebook’s rules don’t apply; that Facebook knew its revised algorithm was fueling rage; and that Facebook didn’t do enough to stop anti-vax propaganda during Covid-19. Most damningly of all, The Facebook Files reported that all of these things were well known to senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s clear which side Sorkin is taking. “I blame Facebook for January 6,” he said last year. “Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible. Because that is what will increase engagement … There’s supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity. There isn’t. It’s just growth.”
- Comment on Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker 2 months ago:
Corps are gonna corp.
- Comment on The Trump Administration is Building a National Citizenship Data System; State and county election officials can now check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists. 2 months ago:
That’s a really weird way of looking at it.
That’s how I roll.
Without the database, there’s no central ledger to consult as to whether or not you’re legally a person.
We’re already seeing them do that without a database. 🤷♂️
Other countries are able to maintain internal databases without using them to screw over their own citizens (except when they do). The problem isn’t the database.
- Comment on The Trump Administration is Building a National Citizenship Data System; State and county election officials can now check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists. 2 months ago:
See the UK Post Office accounting scandal, in which a persistent computer error went unfixed for decades and caused hundreds of post office employees to be fired and dragged through courts for corruption that never happened. A good chunk of them committed suicide.
The database is the least important part of the system: the organizational structure, rules, and procedures are way more important, because they actively help or harm people.
- Comment on The Trump Administration is Building a National Citizenship Data System; State and county election officials can now check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists. 2 months ago:
no no, it’s an input to a Palantir database
- Comment on New Google Search Emoji Answer Feature to Replace All Those Copy and Paste Emoji Websites; You Will be Able to Copy the Code for Emojis With a Click. 2 months ago:
- I haven’t seen a built in picker for multi-character emojis, like the ¯_(ツ)_/¯ (on OSX and Android)
- Sometimes the description I’m thinking of and the picker text doesn’t line up, but I’m not sure if Google’s picker will be that smart.
- Comment on New Google Search Emoji Answer Feature to Replace All Those Copy and Paste Emoji Websites; You Will be Able to Copy the Code for Emojis With a Click. 2 months ago:
🤷♂️
- Comment on AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic 2 months ago:
While the stats vary depending on who’s measuring, the story is consistent: web publishers, who provided the content that trained these AI models, face dramatically diminishing visitors, which means lower advertising and subscription revenues, even amid overall growth in search impressions.
- Comment on What happened to the fediverse stats here? 2 months ago:
Hanlon’s Razor is all well and good as a heuristic, but tends to lead to people discounting malice much too often.
There’s definitely scenarios where that is the case.
Also, I really didn’t say we were “under attack”
I would describe a massive influx of spambots as an attack on a social media platform. It’s my characterization. I didn’t mean to imply that you said it.
- Comment on What happened to the fediverse stats here? 2 months ago:
Agreed.
- Comment on What happened to the fediverse stats here? 2 months ago:
Lemmy is a federated system and these stats are self-reported by user maintained systems. Rather than a sudden influx of users (bots or otherwise), a misconfigured system or hiccup in stats collection seems more likely.
Generally, Hanlon’s Razor, add applied to computing: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
stupidityuser error.There’s a lot of malicious systems out there, but there is little corroborating evidence indicating that we’re under attack.
- Comment on Apple announces iOS 26 with Liquid Glass redesign 3 months ago:
reading text isn’t the easiest with all the colors and blurs everywhere Agreed - I like the look of these things in an abstract sense, but it makes the text really hard to read. I
assumehope there’s a way to disable it in accessibility settings.