AnyOldName3

@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What If There’s No AGI?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You not mentioning LLMs doesn’t mean the post you were replying to wasn’t talking about LLM-based AGI. If someone responds to an article about the obvious improbability of LLM-based AGI with a comment about the obviously make-believe genie, the only obviously make-believe genie they could be referring to is the one from the article. If they’re referring to something outside the article, there’s nothing more to suggest it’s non-LLM-based AGI than there is Robin Williams’ character from Aladdin.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What If There’s No AGI?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  AGI being possible (potentially even inevitable) doesn’t mean that AGI based on LLMs is possible, and it’s LLMs that investors have bet on. It’s been pretty obvious for a while that certain problems that LLMs have aren’t getting better as models get larger, so there are no grounds to expect that just making models larger is the answer to AGI. It’s pretty reasonable to extrapolate that to say LLM-based AGI is impossible, and that’s what the article’s discussing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As I said, I fundamentally disagree. Even if you can make a nearly-teenager-proof website (and so far, your example has been something that most of the people I was at school with could have beaten aged thirteen), teenagers can just go to a different website, so the system is only ever as teenager-resistant as it is difficult to find a website that doesn’t care. Most vaguely competent teenagers know how to find pirate sites with illegally-hosted TV, movies and music (even if they’re not techy, one of their friends just has to tell them a URL and they can visit it). Governments have had minimal success stopping online piracy even when aided by multi-billion-dollar copyright-holding companies, so there’s no realistic reason to think they’ll have any more success stopping porn sites with non-compliant age checks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inspiring. Innovating.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Wooden houses will typically have a waterproof roof and some kind of treatment to prevent them rotting. A log that’s left outside will release all it’s carbon in much less than a century. Human intervention is needed for trees to achieve permanent carbon capture.

  That wasn’t always the case, though. After trees evolved lignin, it took a while for fungi to evolve ligninase to digest it, so trees fell over and just got buried under more trees later without rotting, and that’s where a significant fraction of all coal came from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My point is that you can’t build a completely teenager-proof system. Even if most parents uphold the most unimpeachable password discipline, someone’s going to put a password on a post-it note near their computer, and have their child see the piece of paper, or use their dog’s name despite their child having also met the family dog.

  The original comment I was replying to was framing the issue as teenagers being allowed to watch porn versus no teenager ever seeing porn and maybe some freedom is sacrificed to do that, which doesn’t match the real-world debate. If freedoms are sacrificed just to make it a hassle for teenagers to see porn, that’s much less compelling whether or not you see it as a worthwhile goal.

  As for what a teenager with access to their parents’ bank password would do, if they’re not a moron, they’ll realise that spending their parents’ money will leave lots of evidence (e.g. that they have extra stuff, their parents have less money than expected in their account, and there’s an unexpected purchase from The Lego Group on the bank statement), and so they’re guaranteed to end up in trouble for it. It’s not any different to a child taking banknotes from their parent’s wallet. On the other hand, using it to prove adulthood, if it was truly untraceable like adults would want, wouldn’t leave a paper trail.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
  • Teenagers can find out their parents’ passwords (or their friends’ parents’ passwords) if they really want to, and if things are anonymous enough not to leave a paper trail that would allow spouses to see each other’s porn usage, they’re anonymous enough to let teenagers hide that they’re using their parents’ credentials. 2FA helps, but it’s not like teenagers never see their parents’ phones.
  • There’s not anything that all adults in the UK have that could be used for everyone. There’s no unified national ID or online government identity. There’s no one-size-fits-all bank login system. You’d have to build and secure tens of independent systems to cover nearly all adults.
  • As I said in the post above, if it’s too much hassle for teenagers to access mainstream, legitimate porn sites, then there’s very little anyone can do to stop them accessing obscure ones that don’t care about obeying the law or can’t do so competently. If governments could stop websites from existing and providing content, there wouldn’t be any online piracy.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They consulted with MindGeek, who own Pornhub etc… They’re one of the few companies big enough to comply. It was designed to preserve their monopoly, not Meta’s. The politicians voting on it didn’t necessarily understand that, but the law had been approved by children’s charities and (a single representative of) the industry, so there’d be no reason (if you didn’t understand how technology works) to question it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There is no possible way to actually stop teenagers accessing online porn that doesn’t require such a massive invasion of privacy that it leaves no safe way for adults to access it. To go with your adult video store analogy, it’s like if the store staff would have to accompany you home and watch you watching the porn to check there wasn’t anyone standing behind you also looking at the screen, and while they were there, they were supposed to take notes on everything they saw. Even if they had no interest in doing anything nefarious, a criminal could steal their notebook and blackmail all their customers with the details it contained, and there’d be enough proof that there wouldn’t be any way to plausibly claim the blackmailer had just made everything up.

  If you want to prove someone on the Internet is a real adult and not a determined teenager, you need lots of layers. E.g. if you just ask for a photo of an ID card, that can be defeated by a photo of someone else’s ID card, and a video of a face can be defeated by a video game character (potentially even one made to resemble the person whose ID has been copied). You need to prove there’s an ID card that belongs to a real person and that it’s that person who is using it, and that’s both easier to fake than going to a store with a fake ID (if you look young, they’ll be suspicious of your ID) or Mission Impossible mask, and unlike in a store, the customer can’t see that you’re not making a copy of the ID card for later blackmail or targeted advertisements. No one would go back to a porn shop that asked for a home address and a bank statement to prove it.

  Another big factor is that if there’s a physical shop supplying porn to children, the police will notice and stop it, but online, it’s really easy to make a website and fly under the radar. It’s pretty easy for sites that don’t care about the law to provide an indefinite supply of porn to children, and once that’s happening, there’s no reason to think that it’s only going to be legal porn just being supplied to the wrong people.

  Overall, the risk of showing porn to children doesn’t go down very much, but the risk of showing blackmailable data to criminals and showing particularly extreme and illegal porn to children goes up by a lot. Protecting children from extreme material, e.g. videos of real necrophilia and rape, which are widely accepted to be seriously harmful, should be a higher priority than protecting a larger number from less extreme material that the evidence says is less harmful, if at all. Even if it’s taken as fact that any exposure to porn is always harmful to minors, the policies that are possible to implement in the real world can’t prevent it, just add either extra hassle or opportunities for even worse things to happen. There hasn’t been any proposal by any government with a chance of doing more good than harm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Those photos are of Shah-era Iran, when the West was propping up (including providing weapons, training and funding to) an unpopular authoritarian that had been installed by the UK and US when the previous democratically-elected government dared to attempt to nationalise the oil industry, which was owned by BP. Under the Shah, traditional Islamic dress was outlawed, which is why everyone’s in 1970s clothes. If you disagreed with the Shah, the secret police would take you away and kill you.

  Eventually, a coalition of leftists and religious leaders overthrew the Shah. The religious faction then assassinated all the prominent leftists and switched the secular authoritarian dictatorship for a theocratic authoritarian dictatorship. Under the Ayatollah, traditional Islamic dress was mandatory, which is why women in contemporary photos from Iran always have some kind of headscarf unless it’s in a news report about a protest that someone got executed for. If you disagree with the Ayatollah, the Revolutionary Guard will take you away and kill you.

  So Iran’s had laws forcing women to wear only the clothes approved by a dictator both with and without help from the West.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the most useful things you've printed?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re AAAA cells, not AAA cells, which is why you’re finding they’re too short and narrow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨when ur higher than sagan⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Willow bark contains salicin. Things made from willow bark have been used for a very long time as herbal remedies. In the early 1800s, people figured out how to isolate it and also break it down and oxidise it to make salicylic acid. They tried using what they’d extracted as medicine as they knew it had an effect on the body, and that was the height of the bar back then. It generally did much more harm than good, but eventually some things were discovered that it genuinely helped treat. In the late 1800s, people had figured out that if you tried subjecting known bioactive compounds to chemical reactions, sometimes you ended up with a new bioactive compound - that was how diamorphine (heroin) was first synthesised from morphine, for example. Someone tried an esterification reaction with salicylic acid, and got acetylsalicylic acid, and eventually Bayer managed to purify and manufacture it at scale and start selling it as Aspirin once they’d fed it to people and determined it worked as a painkiller.

  It’s a pretty standard 1800s try extracting compounds from herbal remedies, then kill some people with them, then apply basic chemical reactions to create novel compounds, then get lucky and produce a real medicine story. It doesn’t happen anymore because we’ve run out of things to try and you can’t just create new compounds and feed them to people and see what happens anymore - you’ve got to demonstrate that there’s a plausible mode of action against a specific condition before starting human trials.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨when ur higher than sagan⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Big pharma absolutely can patent drugs extracted from herbs. The reason you don’t see lots of them is that lots of them didn’t work very well and the ones that did were all isolated and turned into medicine decades ago, so the patents have expired, and they’re generally sold under medicine-sounding names rather than the names of the plant them came from. E.g. Aspirin was originally made from modified willow extract, and was discovered because willow was a known natural remedy and so was a good candidate for further investigation. Also, the requirement that a newly discovered drug needs to be proven to be effective to be licensed is a big hurdle lots of natural remedies don’t manage to clear.

  Even despite that, though, big pharma does sell natural remedies. The difference is that they don’t claim they’re medicine. If they only claim they’re a food supplement or something else that’s only medicine-adjacent, there’s no requirement to prove efficacy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Taylor Swift’s new album comes in cassette. Who is buying those?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A cheap record player or a cheap CD player were always better than a high-end cassette player. Cassettes were designed to be small at the expense of quality at a time when technology didn’t allow things to be both small and high quality, and the constraints of the medium are well within the bounds of what most people can easily hear. Once CDs and their players became cheap, tape was entirely obsolete, and didn’t have the I don’t understand Nyquist Sampling Theorem or acknowledge the existence of dust excuse that vinyl had.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Remember to dry your filament kids⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You can weigh it before you start drying it and weigh it again every few hours until it stops getting lighter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK government suggests deleting files to save water⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In the case of AI, even if consumers actively try and avoid products with AI, it’s difficult. There are studies showing customers are generally less likely to buy a product if it’s described as having AI features, so the overall market demand is already for consumer products to have less AI. The demand companies are catering to is from investors, who don’t need to care about whether it’s viable to sell anything until after the bubble pops.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anyone else from Europe feels the same while browsing the "All" feed?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That doesn’t stop Americans signing up with the instance and then dominating all discussion there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DissolvPCB enables fully recyclable 3D-printed circuit boards with liquid metal conductors⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The paper the article is referencing says they made their own PVA glue from pellets so they could get the thickness they wanted, and they did so by dissolving them at 80°C, so it sounds like the glue is soluble, just only in hot water, and all the clothes I ruined as a child could have been saved by using a different setting on the washing machine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My new laptop chip has an 'AI' processor in it, and it's a complete waste of space⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A CUDA core is just a vector processor like every GPUs since the late 90s has been made of, but with a different name so it sounds special. It doesn’t just run CUDA, it runs everything else a GPU has traditionally been for, too, and that was stuff people were doing before CUDA was introduced. There are lots of tasks that require the same sequence of operations to be applied to groups of 32 numbers.

  An NPU is a much more specialised piece of hardware, and it’s only really neural network training and inference that it can help with. There aren’t many tasks that require one operation to be applied over and over to groups of hundreds of numbers. Most people aren’t finding that they’re spending lots of time waiting for neural network inference or draining their batteries doing neural network inference, so making it go faster and use less power isn’t a good use of their money compared to making their computer better at the things they do actually do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DissolvPCB enables fully recyclable 3D-printed circuit boards with liquid metal conductors⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not quite the same stuff as glue. PVA glue is polyvinyl acetate, and PVA filament is polyvinyl alcohol. The glue doesn’t dissolve in cold water like the filament does.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RepRap Pioneer Returns With a DIY 3D Printer That Hits Micro-Level Precision⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re completely neglecting likely doses. If, instead of using it to clean a resin print, you drank the amount of isopropyl alcohol that you’d have used, then wait a day for your liver to clean things up, you’d be in about the same condition as if you’d drunk a whole bottle of wine and waited a day. Obviously, that’s not something that’s healthy to do regularly, but it’s not going to kill you if you do it once, and it’s something that some people choose to do several times a week then go on to live well beyond the average life expectancy.

  However, you don’t drink the isopropyl alcohol. You just inhale some of it. Unless you’re going out of your way to huff it, you won’t inhale a whole millilitre, and then most of what you inhale will be exhaled without being absorbed. If you do that once a week for a year, your liver will be in comparable condition to if at some point in that year, you had a beer once. As we all know, anyone who ever drinks a single beer immediately dies, so your life is over.

  While isopropyl alcohol is metabolised slightly differently to ethanol, going via acetone, the amount that gets into your body from incidental exposure as would happen with resin printing (especially if taking the kind of precautions necessary for the resin itself) would be metabolised into less acetone than is always in a healthy human body due to it being a byproduct of lots of things human cells normally do.

  Again, hand sanitiser and pre-injection swabs, both of which doctors rub on skin, have isopropyl alcohol as their main ingredient, enough for it to give hospitals their distinctive smell, so being able to smell isopropyl alcohol is not a sign that you’re getting a dose that you should worry about.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RepRap Pioneer Returns With a DIY 3D Printer That Hits Micro-Level Precision⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Isopropyl alcohol is significantly less toxic than the vapours from the resin itself, even if it’s water-washable. It’s somewhat more poisonous than regular alcohol, so it’s not a good idea to actively drink it, but it’s safe to inhale in reasonable quantities and get on your skin (as long as you’ve not mixed it with printer resin), hence being the main ingredient in hand sanitiser and pre-injection swaps.

  As for the cost, it’s inexpensive enough to balance with the cost saving from non-water-washable resin of comparable quality generally being a little cheaper. It’s not like you use a whole five-litre jug per print.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RepRap Pioneer Returns With a DIY 3D Printer That Hits Micro-Level Precision⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not unique to water-based resin, though. You can leave the dirty alcohol out in the sun, and if you’re waiting for it to evaporate, that takes less time with alcohol than with water.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RepRap Pioneer Returns With a DIY 3D Printer That Hits Micro-Level Precision⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Water-based resin isn’t any less toxic or safer to dispose of, it’s just more soluble. You can’t put water that’s washed uncured resin down the sink until you’ve exposed it to UV for long enough for the resin to cure and precipitate out, and you still need to ventilate the fumes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cura is making cracks in the z seam?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’ve got a magnifying glass, your phone will be able to autofocus much closer if you put the magnifying glass between the camera and the object.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Duckstation(one of the most popular PS1 Emulators) dev plans on eventually dropping Linux support due to Linux users, especially Arch Linux users.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Most software is like this, but you also don’t get to look at the source code either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Duckstation(one of the most popular PS1 Emulators) dev plans on eventually dropping Linux support due to Linux users, especially Arch Linux users.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It looks like the change happened nearly a year ago, and no one’s kicked up a fuss, so either it was done properly (i.e. past contributors were contacted and consented to the licence change, and any that didn’t had their contributions replaced), or there’s a big problem.

  It doesn’t make it any more legal to fork the project without going back to the last GPL3 commit, though, as any contributions after the license change have to be assumed to be covered by the new licence, so the combined work would be under an invalid licence (as the old and new licences aren’t compatible) rather than being still covered by the old licence.

  Normally, I’d completely dismiss the possibility that a licence change like this could have been done properly, but Stenzek is associated with Dolphin Emulator, which did manage to pull off a switch from GPL2 to GPL3+ by emailing lots of people and replacing a lot of code.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Duckstation(one of the most popular PS1 Emulators) dev plans on eventually dropping Linux support due to Linux users, especially Arch Linux users.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The licence doesn’t permit derivative works, so no forks and no downstream packages.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anker is no longer selling 3D printers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes the ones that are a fifth the price on AliExpress are the ones that failed QA testing for the whitelabeller, or they’re the same board with lower-rated components attached, so they’re not necessarily identical.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ancient filament, salvageable?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A trick is to weigh the filament before you start drying it and then weigh it again every few hours to see if it’s stopped getting lighter. If it’s been hours since it lost a single gram, then it’s probably close enough to as dry as it’s going to get, and if it still doesn’t behave, then there must be a second problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  At the moment, they’re already at risk of being removed by the government, who can make them illegal, and simultaneously at risk of being removed by payment processors, who can prevent the stores from operating. It makes no difference to the government whether they’re also the payment processor. They could remove them anyway. Having two entities with unilateral power to remove something can’t be worse than just having one of them.