rmuk
@rmuk@feddit.uk
- Comment on Apple sues YouTuber who leaked iOS 26’s new “Liquid Glass” software redesign 4 days ago:
Microsoft changing Outlook from gold to yet another blue blob. Google changing every single goddamn app to use the same red/yellow/green/blue pallet. And now this bullshit.
- Comment on Netflix uses AI effects for first time to cut costs 4 days ago:
A boomer coworker recently said something that made a lot of sense to me: Netflix is for 2020s TV what Motown was for 1960s music. They’ve turned the artform into a production line, constantly optimising to shovel out as much content as possible, hunting the minimum viable product, and occasionally, very rarely, producing something good almost by chance. L
- Comment on Orb 4 days ago:
- Ya
Not that exceptional.
- Comment on Do you still remember? 5 days ago:
Like most Brits, a Vauxhall (Opel) Corsa.
- Comment on We really, really do. 5 days ago:
Mirth! Imitate not replicate. 🥄🥄🥄
- Comment on You can drive 74 hours and still be in Germany. The American mind can't comprehend this. 5 days ago:
Or the size of your Mom’s big butt.
Beep boop I’m a bot that translates British English to American English. To opt out, reply ‘ligma’.
- Comment on You can drive 74 hours and still be in Germany. The American mind can't comprehend this. 5 days ago:
Oh, please. There’s way more to NASCAR than that.
- Comment on You can drive 74 hours and still be in Germany. The American mind can't comprehend this. 5 days ago:
Prices tags are normally prepared using computers which are famously good at maths. Here in the UK, England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland have different rules for tax on certain products and yet everything is advertised with the final price.
- Comment on You can drive 74 hours and still be in Germany. The American mind can't comprehend this. 5 days ago:
Parliament.
- Comment on How do people calculate pi to the hundredth+ decimal place? 1 week ago:
It’s true! I just drew a circle and measured it. Turns out π≈5.
- Comment on the universe about to have a little minty b 1 week ago:
I’m currently running Timberborn on a potato. The NPCs don’t perceive their world’s lag: they are part of the world.
- Comment on Realized 99% of all my chargers are USB-C. This can only mean one thing. New USB bout to drop! 1 week ago:
Once you’ve used one you’ll be angry that they’re not standard, at least on desktop/kiosk devices. USB-A also had that as an option.
- Comment on How does AI use so much power? 1 week ago:
Imagine someone said “make a machine that can peel an orange”. You have a thousand shoeboxes full of Meccano. You give them a shake and tip out the contents and check which of the resulting scrap piles can best peel an orange. Odds are none of them can, so you repeat again. And again. And again. Eventually, one of boxes produces a contraption that can kinda, maybe, sorta touch the orange. That’s the best you’ve got so you copy bits of it into the other 999 shoeboxes and give them another shake. It’ll probably produce worse outcomes, but maybe one of them will be slightly better still and that becomes the basis of the next generation. You do this a trillion times and eventually you get a machine that can peel an orange. You don’t know if it can peel an egg, or a banana, or even how it peels an orange because it wasn’t designed but born through inefficient, random, brute-force evolution.
Now imagine that it’s not a thousand shoeboxes, but a billion. And instead of shoeboxes, it’s files containing hundred gigabytes of utterly incomprehensible abstract connections between meaningless data points. And instead of one a few generations a day, it’s a thousand a second. And instead of “peel an orange” it’s “sustain a facsimile of sentience capable of instantly understanding arbitrary, highly abstracted knowledge and generating creative works such to a standard approaching being indistinguishable from humanity such that it can manipulate those that it interacts with to support the views of a billionaire nazi nepo-baby”. When someone asks for an LLM to generate a picture of a fucking cat astronaut or whatever, the unholy mess of scraps that behaves like a mind spits out a result and no-one knows how it does it aside from broad-stroke generalisation. The iteration that gets the most thumbs up from it’s users gets to be the basis of the next generation, the rest die, millions of times a day.
What I just described is NEET algorithms, which are pretty primitive by modern standards, but it’s a flavour of what’s going on.
- Comment on AMD warns of new Meltdown, Spectre-like bugs affecting CPUs 1 week ago:
“PCs run Windows. I have a Mac, which is not a PC.” - Average Tech Journalist.
- Comment on Look out bugs bunny here comes 2 weeks ago:
The basil guy? Yeah, he’s cool, and he helped me get ye flask.
- Comment on That's his name 2 weeks ago:
Let’s go back to a website, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon.
- Comment on Connor Myers: As if graduating weren’t daunting enough, now students like me face a jobs market devastated by AI 2 weeks ago:
Make sure you don’t put “Al” by mistake though. You’ll only get offers to be part of “bodyguard/long-lost pal” collaborations with people called Betty.
- Comment on xkcd #3109: Dehumidifier 3 weeks ago:
Most people tend to stay in the same room (or a neighbouring room) when they’re microwaving something. They could probably save on the cost of having a full-blown computer with wifi inside the microwave by just having the noisy thing from an alarm clock. But, ah, the fuck do I know?
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 6 comments
- Comment on A Polish jalapeño pastry 3 weeks ago:
Can’t say I’d be delighted about this, but they’ll very quickly leave when the food’s disturbed and wasps - like bees - don’t leave behind diseases or eggs. The same cannot be said for flies - if those were flies I wouldn’t touch anything in the shop.
- Comment on "Almost out of shampoo, better add it to my shopping list." 3 weeks ago:
Oh no.
- Comment on Car 3 weeks ago:
Remember when you could mix the cake mix off the spoon as a kid? Yeah, the mechanics won’t let me do that.
- Comment on Car 3 weeks ago:
Subbed. I encourage you, dear reader, to do the same.
- Comment on Blocking real-world ads: is the future here? 3 weeks ago:
Eight hours of labour, eight hours of recovery, eight hours of preparing for labour/recovery.
- Comment on 'Technofascist military fantasy': Spotify faces boycott calls over CEO’s investment in AI military startup 3 weeks ago:
Same story here. I cancelled Spotify after the whole Trump thing and switched to Qobuz; the whole thing was pretty seamless. I’ve got to say, the increased quality is actually noticeable and, as you said, the curated selections actually seem to be, well, curated. Also, if you’ve got a load of playlists on Spotify you want to keep, Qobuz actually provides subscribers with free access to a migartion service that did a superb job.
- Comment on More people buying electric cars and heat pumps than ever before 3 weeks ago:
Some people still complain about slow charging on EVs. Most electric cars have no problem getting 3.5 miles per kWh. A standard UK wall plug can safely provide 13A, and while the voltage is notionally 230V it’s actually more than that for most people, but even if we ignore that, 230V × 13A ≈ 3kW, so an overnight charge of, say, eight hours on a standard wall plug gives you 3kW × 8h × 3.5mi/kWh ≈ 84 miles of range for under £5 if you pay 25p/kWh. I’ve said it before; if you can afford an electric car, you can’t afford not to have an one.
Space is the stinker, of course. A lot of people don’t have a spot on their property they can park their car, but for those that do it’s a no-brainer.
Also, heat pumps are basically magic. Why they’re not mandatory on new-builds, I don’t know.
- Comment on Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok 4 weeks ago:
That’d be esteemed British author Georgie Orrell, author of such whimsical classics as “Now the Animals Are Running The Farm!”, “My Big Day Out At Wigan Pier” and, of course, “Winston’s Zany Eighties Adventure”.
- Comment on THE PERIODIC TABLE OF TAYLOR SWIFT👩🏼🔬🧪🧫🧬🔬 4 weeks ago:
That’s really clever. If you’ve not noticed it yet: if you hold your phone at arms length and blur your vision it looks like a vague blob that doesn’t look like Taylor Swift.
- Comment on I'm down 4 weeks ago:
“The anxiety of an man with the ability to be rendered into glue after death of a horse.”
- Comment on A metaphor for capitalism? 4 weeks ago:
Dyke Delta
Nice try, but I ain’t Googling that.
