orclev

@orclev@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 | Look. All technology comes with a learning curve.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Any police testimony not accompanied by some kind of recording should be inadmissible in court. Likewise any evidence collected while a camera isn’t recording should also be inadmissible. Police have shown again and again that they can’t be trusted and they’re almost always a less reliable witness than some random bystander. It’s about time we actually started tearing them that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not the whole country, it’s the perfect storm of the absolute worst people who spent the last few decades working to seize power combined with the death throws of late stage capitalism. The political and economic elite in America (and most other countries) have merged and corrupted each other beyond redemption, but the ultra capitalist systems of the US means there are few if any effective checks to their power. In a properly functioning country the government checks the power of corporations via regulations and laws and in turn is checked by the will of the public but in the US the incessant corporate propaganda has convinced a depressingly large chunk of the population that government regulations are inherently bad and that everything works better when corporations are free to do whatever they want. That combined with the absolutely blatant bribery and corruption in US politics means that corporations control the US government rather than the other way around.

  The whole thing worked for a little while while the corporations were at least pretending to somewhat care about consumers and things like anti-monopoly regulations, but now that Trump has shown the government is very loudly and publicly for sale to the highest bidder they’ve all gone mask off and are just doing whatever they want. The problem of course is that they’re also run by morons that either don’t see the cliff they’re all collectively racing towards or just don’t care because they’re planning to bail out with all the profits while the greater US economy burns.

  Ultimately this is the sprouting of the seed that was planted back in the 50s from an amalgam of the cold war anti-communism propaganda and the latent racism that was never properly dealt with following the civil war.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure but it’s also a badly done lawsuit for that. It’s a class action of Valves customers when the percentage almost entirely impacts developers and publishers not customers. If this was really about Valves cut it would be a class action by developers. The reasons it isn’t are that that’s a much smaller group, consumer protections don’t apply to them so that would be a much harder case to win, and finally they would struggle to find developers willing to join that lawsuit. There’s also the slight problem that the 30% cut is the industry standard. Both Apple and Google take a similar cut. I’m not sure who originated that as the standard, could go all the way back to brick and mortar stores or it might have originated with one of the games consoles, but Epic is actually the odd one out in this case not Valve.

  As someone else pointed out there are things that Valve could be better about, things like lootboxes in some games or the frankly predatory CS item markets. The issue of course is that none of that is actually illegal even if it is anti-consumer. It would also be nice if Steam had some actual competition, but there isn’t anything Valve can do about that, rather it’s everyone else that needs to get on Valves level.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It doesn’t have anything to do with Epic, it’s because Steam provides a great service with a ton of features nobody else offers, and Valve has demonstrated time and time again that they make policies that benefit consumers.

  It would be great if Steam had some competition, but Epic ain’t it. What people want is another service of equal quality to Steam. Instead the best we have is GOG and that still falls well short of feature parity nevermind the anti-consumer cesspool of Epic.

  Suing Valve isn’t going to do anything to improve the situation. Realistically what could Valve do to be “less of a monopoly”? Lower the percentage they take of sales? Consumers wouldn’t see any benefit from that only developers. Ironically it would also increase Valves monopoly because if they took a smaller cut there would be even less reason for companies to sell on Epic as Epics lower cut is literally the only reason developers (outside of Epic literally paying some of them mounds of cash by way of exclusivity contracts) pick Epic over Steam.

  If Epic really wants to do something about Valves monopoly it’s simple, they just need to offer all the same features that Steam does. Things like family sharing, streaming support, a cross platform store and launcher, and an excellent review system so people can better understand the games they’re thinking about buying. Until that happens yes people will stick with Steam because it’s the objectively superior experience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Keep collecting them. Each one you get costs Epic money and helps counter some of that Fortnite cash that lets Epic keep paying for exclusive contracts. Keep bleeding them and eventually they won’t be able to keep buying exclusive releases.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I still don’t get this. As far as I can find, Steam doesn’t allow steam keys to be sold cheaper elsewhere, but they don’t bother with prices of games in other stores.

  This is tricky. Officially Valve doesn’t have any rules about game prices on other stores. Unofficially evidence has been put forward by way of emails between developers and Valve that seem to show that Valve unofficially requires price parity with other stores and will punish games that offer lower prices elsewhere.

  The charitable interpretation is that their policies are worded confusingly and some of their agents are misinterpreting the rule requiring Steam key prices to be uniform as applying to non-Steam keys. The uncharitable interpretation is that Valve knows such a policy would get them in hot water with anti-monopoly laws and so they’re careful to make sure it stays an unofficial policy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Exposed Moltbook Database Let Anyone Take Control of Any AI Agent on the Site⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The best thing anyone could do with it is get them to rm -rf / their server.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you can bypass it in the middle it is by definition not end to end encryption. The entire point of end to end encryption is that only the endpoints are able to decrypt the messages and everyone in between only has access to the encrypted messages. If that’s not the case that’s just normal encryption not end to end.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anthropic CEO Amodei warns of AI’s fast-coming changes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Translation: please keep pouring money into the bubble

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure it’s a useful skill but not one in significant demand. We have an absolute glut of MBAs and a desperate need for anything but an MBA so why are we paying people to get more MBAs?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The point is we don’t need more MBAs, we need people educated in useful skills. Should every MBA program be closed? No probably not, but we definitely have way more than we need. Cutting funding for things like MBA scholarships and closing down the majority of those programs will go a long way towards moving the majority of potential future MBA students into useful programs. We need less managers and more engineers, fewer CEOs and more chemists, hell fewer analysts and more plumbers.

  There are many problems with modern capitalism and even if we never handed out another MBA degree again that would not even remotely solve everything, but the MBAs are making the problem worse. It’s a minor thing but it’s an easy thing to do and it would make a difference small as it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RAM shortage chaos expands to GPUs, high-capacity SSDs, and even hard drives⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  China is pushing hard to make their domestic brands the new standard world wide so they’re not worried about whether the bubble pops or not. They want to drive prices down even if that means selling at a loss because they know that’s what it’s going to take to dislodge the entrenched players. For better or worse it’s likely a winning strategy because the existing players are more concerned with maximizing their quarterly profits rather than meeting any kind of consumer demand or indeed even selling to consumers at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RAM shortage chaos expands to GPUs, high-capacity SSDs, and even hard drives⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I doubt it will take a couple years. They’re burning through so much cash right now that they’ll be bankrupt in a couple years and despite sunk cost fallacy they won’t let it get that bad. At some point they’ll cut their losses and pivot to some other new fad. The small handful of uses that make sense will stick around and a few companies will be in just the right place to make it turn a profit but the vast majority won’t. Some will go bankrupt (if we’re lucky Meta and/or X will be one of them) and some will just write it off as a failed experiment. Either way just as hard as prices spiked we’ll see them cratering before they rebound back to normal. Six months would be highly optimistic, but a year probably isn’t out of the question.

  Of course all of this might be moot if Shitler manages to start WW3 by attacking Greenland. If that happens RAM prices will be the least of everyone’s worries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Is Scheming, and Stopping It Won’t Be Easy, OpenAI Study Finds⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t even need to turn it off, it literally can’t do anything without somebody telling it to so you could just stop using it. It’s incapable of independent action. The only danger it poses is that it will tell you to do something dangerous and you actually do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jensen Huang says relentless negativity around AI is hurting society and has "done a lot of damage"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The Nvidia PR team. They keep trying to spin more data centers and even more of the US GDP being gobbled up by slop generation as some kind of consumer win but nobody is buying it and their whining is starting to annoy Jensen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your technology mispredictions?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In the late 90s I saw a piece demonstrating an optical 3d storage system that had a capacity about an order of magnitude greater than the at the time brand new HD DVD and Bluray discs. I assumed this clearly superior format that already had a working demo would obviously kill other optical media. Turns out nobody could figure out how to manufacture one at a price anybody was willing to spend.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China's first real gaming GPU is here, and the benchmarks are brutal⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe you should stop assuming things before commenting. And in general. You might also want to reread the article you seem to have skipped some important details.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China's first real gaming GPU is here, and the benchmarks are brutal⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, maybe. The actual performance seems to be unknown. They’re assuming the geekbench score is legitimate, but there’s no way to really know exactly how well it will do when it actually ships. It’s probably safe to assume somewhere between the two, but either way it’s not competing with current gen AMD or Nvidia cards, and might not even be competing with current Intel GPUs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China's first real gaming GPU is here, and the benchmarks are brutal⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I was basing that on the quote saying it rivals a 4060.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China's first real gaming GPU is here, and the benchmarks are brutal⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like it’s about equivalent to Intel’s latest GPU. Both are running about a little over a generation behind AMD and Nvidia. Meanwhile Nvidia is busy trying to kill their consumer GPU division to free up more fab space for data center GPUs chasing that AI bubble. AMD meanwhile has indicated they’re not bothering to even try to compete with Nvidia on the high end but rather are trying to land solidly in the middle of Nvidia’s lineup. More competition is good but it seems like the two big players currently are busy trying to not compete as best they can, with everyone else fighting for their scraps. The next year or two in the PC market are shaping up to be a real shit show.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ublock Origin can get rid of Cookie Banners⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Browsers already have the do not track header, it should just honor that. If you have that set it should be an automatic opt out no banner necessary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ublock Origin can get rid of Cookie Banners⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah yes the classic “You’re making me hit you, I don’t want to, but you’re making me do this”. Maybe instead of blaming the flawed attempt at protecting you from abuse sites you instead blame the ones doing the abusing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ublock Origin can get rid of Cookie Banners⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Website operators don’t want to have to display cookie banners

  This is false. If they didn’t want to display the banners they could literally remove them, there’s absolutely nothing requiring them as long as they don’t track your behavior. They refuse to give up tracking so they add the banners to annoy visitors and hopefully trick some of them into accidentally opting into tracking. It’s an abusive manipulation of a loophole in the GDPR. If they really hated the banners they could just not track you but they rather make it your problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Humans May Be Able to Grow New Teeth Within Just 4 Years⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Gum disease could lead to tooth loss but the primary way people lose them is through infections due to cavities. The infection weakens the tooth and the jawbone it’s rooted in as well as can lead to loss of the root nerve. At a certain point the tooth is too loose or weak and has to be removed to prevent further infection and/or to treat the existing infection.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seven Diabetes Patients Die Due to Undisclosed Bug in Abbott's Continuous Glucose Monitors⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, the pharmaceutical companies have covered themselves via reams of fine print. Using any of the GCMs (or pumps for that matter) means signing away all your legal protections and even if it didn’t the companies have billion dollar lawyers that can easily crush any case brought against them. Unless you’re a multimillionaire you literally can’t afford to sue any of them.

  That’s the real flaw with the current US legal system (the civil one at least), individuals can’t afford to bring cases against large corporations. Class action cases can make it possible, but even then the odds are in the favor of the corporations and even if you win nobody actually makes anything off of those besides the lawyers. Typically the lawyers take 50% of the judgement off the top and by the time you divvy up the remaining 50% among all the participants it’s at most a few hundred bucks each if even that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seven Diabetes Patients Die Due to Undisclosed Bug in Abbott's Continuous Glucose Monitors⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m allergic to many of the barriers as well. There is one I found that I’m not allergic to and it does help a lot but it’s not perfect. Near the end of the 14 day period the area the unit was inserted would often start itching and when removed would show signs of irritation.

  More importantly though I found the Dexcom units to be worse than the Abbott ones in some ways. The Libre 3 has a fall off where it starts reading fairly accurately and then progressively reads lower and lower over time in a linear fashion. The Dexcom G2 on the other hand would start off somewhat inaccurate which could be corrected using a couple of manual glucose readings, but then as time went by it would get progressively more inaccurate in a random direction and no amount of recalibration using manual glucose readings would fix that.

  Dexcom claims the margin of error is 20% and will replace any unit that starts reading outside that range, but at least for me that was literally every unit at some point. Some of them that was right out of the box, some of them that was after 5 days, but it always happened and it was unpredictable. I find the predictable decline of the Abbott units preferable to the random inaccuracy of the Dexcom units. At least with the Libre 3 I can estimate how far off the reading is based on how long I’ve been using it, with the G2 it was a complete crap shoot on whether the reading was accurate or not at any given time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seven Diabetes Patients Die Due to Undisclosed Bug in Abbott's Continuous Glucose Monitors⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It was my experience with the libre 2+ and the libre 3. I’ve never used the libre 1 so I couldn’t say if it applies to that one. That said the 2 and the 1 don’t really qualify as CGMs as you need to poll them for glucose readings and I believe they’re limited on polling frequency (something like once every 5 min) so they’re much closer to a traditional glucose monitor than they are a true CGM.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seven Diabetes Patients Die Due to Undisclosed Bug in Abbott's Continuous Glucose Monitors⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Abbott claims they’re good for 14 days of use but my experience is that they’re worthless after 5 to 10 days. The first 5 days of use they’re about as accurate as the Dexcom units (typically +/- 10%). Beyond that they start to read increasingly low (-50% to -80%) with readings often failing entirely by day 10 or 11. It wouldn’t be a problem if you could replace them after 5 days, but if you do that insurance pitches a fit and refuses to cover more of them because “they’re good for 14 days”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seven Diabetes Patients Die Due to Undisclosed Bug in Abbott's Continuous Glucose Monitors⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately I am severely allergic to the adhesive Dexcom uses that they claim is hypoallergenic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  WINE is basically an adapter. It exposes a Windows API and calls the equivalent Linux APIs when invoked. That’s less overhead than an emulator which models an entire virtual piece of hardware. When you run a Windows program through WINE your computer is actually executing the code of the program just like any Linux one it’s just calling WINE libraries instead of the Windows ones it normally would.