merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Bring Back the Burned CD— They’re a love language. And a reminder of the hope we once had. 1 day ago:
It seems to me like the world has had 3 phases:
- Phase 1: People own media on records, tapes, etc. because that’s the only way to listen to what you want whenever you want. The only alternative is radio, where you listen to what the DJ thinks you should hear. If you buy something once, you can listen to it whenever you want forever. (Or at least as long as the medium holds up)
- Phase 2: It was relatively easy to get the media you wanted on demand, but it wasn’t always legal, because the copyright cartels were used to a certain way of doing business and didn’t like disruption. During this phase people still bought read-only media in stores. But, they also sometimes bought blank media and filled it up from their computers at home.
- Phase 3: Everything is now online, and you no longer own media. In this phase you can listen to / watch whatever you want, but you don’t get to own anything, and you have to pay monthly if you don’t want your media viewing / listening to be interrupted by ads. In this phase, media you love can just disappear if someone loses the license to stream it, or the copyright owner decides to pull it or modify it. In this version someone like George Lucas can decide that the version of Star Wars you grew up on should change, and you now have to accept his new version.
Unfortunately, long-term storage hasn’t kept pace with short-term storage and bandwidth. You can make someone a “mix tape” that’s a USB stick, but if someone puts it on a shelf it might not be readable in 5 years. You could save the original version of Star Wars to a NAS. But, if your friend wants to borrow it, it’s not as easy as grabbing a case off the bookshelf and handing it over.
I keep hoping that one of these “crystal storage” mechanisms takes off. Then we can much more easily be data hoarders, keeping everything, and not relying on a continued subscription to a streaming service for our favourite media.
- Comment on Today is the day 1 day ago:
If Jesus was truly the son of god / some aspect of a god and hell exists, that’s where Chuck Norris is.
- Comment on Coffee ☕ 1 day ago:
The Trojan Room coffee pot camera existed before the web existed. Before the web it was a client/server protocol on a local network. They only made it into a webcam after the web was invented and started supporting images.
What I remember is that when the first web browsers capable of displaying images were launched, people found a way to sample a single frame from a camera and load it into an image tag to get an extremely slow frame rate camera. People had been trying to make video calling a thing since the 1960s, and I think the first “webcams” were new attempts to demonstrate that. They basically came out at the same time as XCoffee being available on the Internet, but they had more publicity behind them. IMO, what made the coffee pot special was that it was so clearly useless to everybody except a few people in a lab in Cambridge. It was revolutionary that bandwidth and camera hardware was so cheap that someone could allow anybody on the planet to just check out the level of their coffee machine on demand at any time.
- Comment on Coffee ☕ 1 day ago:
whenever I leave the hoose
Canadian, eh?
- Comment on CEO Asks ChatGPT How to Void $250 Million Contract, Ignores His Lawyers, Loses Terribly in Court 4 days ago:
With many businesses I’m sure that’s true. But, it might be different when you’re making something artistic. Subnautica has a lot of passionate fans, and it’s a unique kind of game. These guys might really want to finish this game that they poured a lot of themselves into. Maybe not, maybe they just want to move on. But, I think a lot of people who work on games really care about what it is they’re doing.
- Comment on CEO Asks ChatGPT How to Void $250 Million Contract, Ignores His Lawyers, Loses Terribly in Court 4 days ago:
The headline is pretty accurate.
- Comment on CEO Asks ChatGPT How to Void $250 Million Contract, Ignores His Lawyers, Loses Terribly in Court 4 days ago:
Yeah. These illegal firings happened around 9 months ago. I doubt these guys had the funds to just sit on the sidelines, doing nothing, hoping that the court would rule in their favour. Even if they’re offered their jobs back, it could be that by now they’ve made other commitments.
- Comment on CEO Asks ChatGPT How to Void $250 Million Contract, Ignores His Lawyers, Loses Terribly in Court 4 days ago:
That’s half of it. The other half is that these execs think that everybody under them is some kind of replaceable cog in the machine with no special skills. They don’t think their job could be replaced by AI. But, they think everyone under them is so unimportant that their job can be done by AI. They’re managers. They don’t know how to do the work of the people they’re managing. They can’t tell the difference between an accurate result given to them by someone with knowledge and expertise vs. one created by a slop machine that generates plausibly realistic text.
If their $1000/hour lawyers tell them one thing, but the bullshit machine tells them something different, they trust whichever one gives them the answer they prefer.
- Comment on Yann LeCun just raised $1bn to prove the AI industry has got it wrong 1 week ago:
LLMs are an obvious dead end when it comes to actual “intelligence” or understanding how the world works.
But, this sounds like a “draw the rest of the owl” situation.
“JEPA learns abstract representations of how the world works, ignoring unpredictable surface detail.”
Oh, it’s that simple is it? Just have it “learn abstract representations of how the world works”. Amazing how nobody thought to do that before!
I think I understand the distinction they’re trying to draw. Current models are trained on billions of pictures of cats and billions of pictures of dogs. You feed it an image of Fido and it finds a point in 2500 dimensional space and knows whether that point is in the “cat space” or “dog space”. It can be very good, but it doesn’t have any “understanding” of what makes something a cat vs. a dog. Humans, OTOH, aren’t trained on billions of images. But, they learn about things like “teeth” and “whiskers” and “snouts” and “eyes”. Within their knowledge of eyes, they spot that vertical slit pupils are unusual and different, and part of what makes something “catlike”. AFAIK, nobody has ever managed to create a system that learns abstract features without intensive human training.
I like that they’re trying something new. But, are they counting on a massive breakthrough on a problem that has existed since people first started theorizing about AI? Or, is it just a matter of refining a known process?
- Comment on Reporting an absence 1 week ago:
I hope whoever this was recorded these snipers for as long as possible.
- Comment on What the fuck is going on with Iran and what will happen next? 1 week ago:
We don’t really know. Maybe they stopped completely and honoured the deal. Maybe they didn’t even slow down and just hid what they were doing.
We know that they allowed international inspectors in while the deal was active though, so at the very least they had to work harder to hide things if they were continuing to work.
- Comment on What the fuck is going on with Iran and what will happen next? 1 week ago:
That would be nice. But, one common theme with religious people is that they always believe that they are going to heaven, but everyone else isn’t.
- Comment on What the fuck is going on with Iran and what will happen next? 1 week ago:
Interesting, I didn’t realize that. I thought all of the groups Iran supported were Shia.
- Comment on What the fuck is going on with Iran and what will happen next? 1 week ago:
It would be funny if they weren’t actually trying to bring about the biblical end-times. Also, they don’t care at all about the future because they don’t believe that the future will exist, since we’re in endtimes.
- Comment on What the fuck is going on with Iran and what will happen next? 1 week ago:
What’s going on:
Israel and Iran:
- Israel has terrible relations with virtually every country in the world, and even worse relations with the countries nearby, one of those countries is Iran
- Iran is the only Shia Muslim country in the world (one where the majority of the population is Shia and the people in power are Shia)
- There are Shia minorities in many countries, and in some countries the Shia are a majority of the population, but don’t have power (Iraq used to be like this, not sure how it is now)
- Iran supports armed Shia groups outside Iran (Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, etc.)
- Sometimes these Iran-backed Shia groups act a bit like governments, sometimes like terrorist groups, often a combination of both.
- Israel shares borders with many countries with Iran-backed militias, so is constantly dealing with low-level conflict with groups linked to (financed by) Iran
- Iran (quite reasonably) thinks that the only way it will be safe from attack is if it has nuclear weapons, so it has been trying to develop them for years
- Israel (quite reasonably) doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons, so has been trying to stop them for years, using spying, sabotage, and more recently, direct airstrikes
- Under Obama, a deal was reached where Iran agreed to stop work on nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief
- Obama violated the terms of this treaty (as he has violated many other treaties) mainly because Obama signed it, and Trump has personal hatred for anything having to do with Obama
- With no deal in place, Iran went back to working (at least more openly) on nuclear weapons
Trump, Racists, and Evangelicals:
- The war against so-called “DEI” has meant any non-white person in an elevated position in the US government and military has been demoted or fired, and incompetent white person have replaced them
- DOGE meant eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse”, but mostly they eliminated anything they didn’t understand, which included soft power, Iran analysts, etc.
- Successfully kidnapping Maduro from Venezuela gave the Trump admin a false sense of confidence
- Israel has a powerful lobby in the US,
- Many evangelicals believe that we’re in the biblical endtimes, and that the rapture will happen soon. They want the jews to go back to Israel so Jesus can come back and kill them, then they get to go to heaven. Jews being in control of biblical places is a key element of their theory, so they support Israel because they want the world to end.
Israel’s latest attacks:
- Israel attacked Iran last year, and the US joined in, and they claimed this “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program
- Despite this, the message is always that Iran is days or weeks away from a nuclear weapon, so both things are true: the Israeli/US strikes against Iran were a massive success and Iran’s program was obliterated, but Iran is still days or weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon
- The Trump admin was trying to negotiate a new treaty with Iran, but wasn’t making much progress because the negotiators were unqualified idiots: a real estate developer (Steve Witkoff) and Trump’s son in law (Jared Kushner)
- Israel saw another opportunity to take out targets in Iran recently, so they attacked, and the US felt the need to join in, despite being in the middle of negotiations
Hormuz
- Many countries in the middle east only have major ports inside the Persian Gulf
- Getting into the gulf means getting past the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran can easily control, it’s only 50km coast-to-coast in some places
- Iran, at best, has non-hostile relationships with the rest of the Persian Gulf countries, so it doesn’t risk much by sinking any ship passing by in the Gulf
What’s Next:
- Who knows
- The US went into the conflict without a goal
- Israel went into it with goals (destroy the ability for Iran to finance militias on Israel’s border, force them to focus on issues back home), but achieving its goals might make things even worse for the US
- Iran is facing an existential threat, so it’s unlikely to back down, and it’s not really like the US can escalate without actually invading
- In any invasion, the US would be badly hurt, Iran has a population of almost 100 million, 660 thousand active military, and 350 thousand reserves
- Any invasion would also serve to have Iranians rally around their country
- Many Iranians (especially urban ones) hate the theocratic regime, but they’ve seen how after US “interventions” nearby countries have collapsed into chaos. Stability under a hated theocratic leader is much preferable to chaos, so they’re unlikely to rise up
- There are groups inside Iran who might fight (the Kurds for example), but they’ve been repeatedly burned by the US, over and over, going back decades, so they’re not going to take promises from the US seriously
- Comment on After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes 1 week ago:
In my experience, LLMs suck at making smart, small changes. To know how to do that they need to “understand” the entire codebase, and that’s expensive.
- Comment on After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes 1 week ago:
Amazon saves the wages of a senior dev by doing that, but then they get outages costing them the wages of that senior dev for decades. I doubt the goal is to blame senior devs. If they wanted them gone they could easily fire them.
- Comment on After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes 1 week ago:
What is AI good at? Creating thousands of lines of code that look plausibly correct in seconds.
What are humans bad at? Reviewing changes containing thousands of lines of plausibly correct code.
This is a great way to force senior devs to take the blame for things. But, if they actually want to avoid outages rather than just assign blame to them, they’ll need to submit small, efficient changes that the submitter understands and can explain clearly. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to say “No AI”?
- Comment on funny number 1 week ago:
Putting young-person slang in a movie has been a bad idea since before Gen Z existed.
- Comment on funny number 1 week ago:
Nature is healing.
- Comment on Valve Sued By The Performing Rights Society Over Music Rights in Games Valve Doesn’t Make or Own 1 week ago:
My hate of the copyright-ownership side of Hollywood / Nashville / Atlanta, etc. has been burning white hot since the days that the RIAA was suing people using P2P networks. But, I had to admit that at least they could probably make a valid claim for copyright infringement. But this?!
It’s interesting how it’s the “Performing Right Society” (which I’ve never heard of). The “performing” part of that suggests that maybe they have an issue with people sharing clips containing music, or live streaming games where they share music. But, again, why Valve? Sure, people can share clips with friends. And, occasionally you see developers streaming their games. But, nobody is really “performing” live streams on Steam. I suspect they just think Valve is rich and so they can strong-arm them and Valve will settle to make them go away. I hope they bit off more than they can chew. Valve is indeed rich, and they have a tendency to be stubborn. I think they might well fight, and fight hard.
I wish a possible outcome was that the PRS ceased to exist. But, I suspect they’re like a flea or something, and even if you knock them off from this attempt to suck someone’s blood, you can’t kill them, and they’ll just find another victim.
- Comment on funny number 1 week ago:
To adults? Or teens? Or 6-year-olds?
- Comment on funny number 1 week ago:
The number 69 has staying power. It was hardly new when it was used in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and that was in 1989, 37 years ago.
How long will 6-7 last? I’m guessing not more than a year. I bet even now it’s being included as part of a script for a kids’ movie, and by the time the movie comes out the kids will all think it’s “cringe” (or whatever term replaces cringe).
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 2 weeks ago:
I still don’t think that would be enough for me to remember it. It would mean I’d have to give it out to people. But, I didn’t do that so often that I’d have memorized the number and remembered it for 30 years.
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 2 weeks ago:
My steam account dates from the release of the Orange Box. That was a few years after launch, because back at the beginning Steam was only for Valve games and those weren’t really my jam. But, the Orange Box was a great deal. So, I bought it (retail version) and then I had to register a Steam account.
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 2 weeks ago:
I can remember mine too, 4170129. I just can’t remember why I remember it. The numbers I tend to remember are the ones that I actually had to use often. For example, I remember some phone numbers because to call someone I actually had to punch in (or dial) their phone number. But, did we have to type in our IDs from memory when logging in or something? That seems like it would be a terrible UI, and surely by the mid 90s nobody was still doing that.
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 2 weeks ago:
I remember my ICQ number, 4170129, but I don’t remember why I know it.
Surely I didn’t have to type it in every time I logged in, did I? That would be a really stupid UI.
- Comment on simpler times 2 weeks ago:
They’re still the stupidest thing I’ve heard of.
- Comment on simpler times 2 weeks ago:
No, they’re stupid.
- Comment on Highguard will permanently shut down on March 12th. 2 weeks ago:
Whenever a game like this flops it gives me hope. Why? Because this kind of game isn’t something that interests me at all. I keep hoping that these companies are going to learn from getting burned, and switch to a style of game that I like more.