HakFoo
@HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on Share this with 5 people or it gets ya 4 days ago:
I was always more of a fan of the Pennsylvania Railtoad than the competing New Youk Central.
It knows and demands blood.
- Comment on China's smartest students used to chase tech and finance jobs. Now, they're choosing manufacturing. 1 week ago:
Maybe the sheen of tech and finance is limited. You’re, at best, enabling other people’s visions and at worst contributing to enshittification.
It was appealing for a while with the promises of big paydays, but if they stop keeping that up, it won’t stand on its merits.
Making actual things has an emotional charm. I work for a fintech and the best I can do is point at a card terminal and say “maybe my code is one of 932 obscure steps towards your payment happening.”
- Comment on ‘A feedback loop with no brake’: how an AI doomsday report shook US markets 2 weeks ago:
Trying to sell consumers on “scaling solves everything” is going to be a hard sell.
If we look at general purpose computation, which had decades of actual scaling-solves-everything growth, you had two influences that made the message resonate with customers:
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Clear existing applications where more power made the experience straightforward better. Your spreadsheet took an hour to recalculate at 8MHz and 20 minutes at 25MHz. A lot of the “bigger model” stuff is plateauing with marginal or spotty gains. If I feed another 5 Internets of data to ChatGPT, will that summarized email be that much better?
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New applications that could be demoed on specialised low capacity hardware and scaled down to consumers as more power became available. Think of early CGI on hardware costing tens of millions, and now you can run Blender on a $149 laptop. Since most commercial AI plays are hosted services, there’s not much opportunity to tease that way anymore.
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- Comment on ‘A feedback loop with no brake’: how an AI doomsday report shook US markets 3 weeks ago:
The difference was that Amazon knew how to make a profit, but was reinvesting into infrastructure plays and bigger fish.
If they had to, they could have been a modestly profitable bookshop in 2002. AWS and monster logistics might not have developed to put them in the 13-digit club though.
Does any AI-centric play have that fundamental fallback? The services that seem to be most effective at direct monetization, the coding tools, are typically running at huge losses. If they raised costs to cover, precious few firms will pay basically the salary of a senior dev for an emulation of an enthusiastic junior dev with an affinity for footguns.
The less enterprise-focused products-- parasocial toys, image and video gen, will likely try to dip into consumer subs and advertising, but can that generate the cash volumes these platforms demand?
- Comment on If you had any doubts that Know-Your-Customer laws were evil, here is one very good reason: personal data of 1 BILLION people just leaked. 3 weeks ago:
There’s also an execution problem.
Truly knowing your customer might produce very different outcomes than the current compliance checkbox approach.
“I know Fred just sold his old car. The idea he suddenly has $12k in cash is not suspicious” or “Jane’s been talking about going to Montreal for momths. We should not block her card when it lights up there.”. That’s real KYC, but it requires human connection and human judgement, which doesn’t scale and doesn’t provide the right paperwork for demonstrating compliance with arbitrary mandates.
- Comment on The radical woke subliminal message in Bad Bunny's halftime performance 5 weeks ago:
I’m pretty sure it’s actually those shoulder pads.
- Comment on The $20 USD bill is the new 5$ bill 1 month ago:
During thr gold-standard era, 1GBP was around 5USD, but a halfpenny was 1/480 of a pound, so a little more than a cent. The large-format cents issued up to 1857 were similar in size to the halfpennies of the late 1700s.
- Comment on AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow 1 month ago:
Minotaurs have some potential for badass imagery. Reverse Centaur sounds intentionally clunky.
- Comment on Report: Microsoft quietly kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet 2 months ago:
But it does do the force-a-Microsoft-account thing that doesn’t work without a network.
- Comment on My friend is buying a new PC and he is deciding between air cooler and AIO, which should be get? 2 months ago:
I have a 7900X3D and the Peerless Assassin 120 worked well. I swapped for a Zalman CNPS20X because you could get it for next to nothing at the time; it’s not much better (the RGB fans look neat but it’s so big it doesn’t fit well in some cases and the fans are prone to chattering noises at specific speeds)
The benefit I can imagine for an AIO is that it reduces cramping around the CPU, so you can essily release RAM or the GPU slot clip. But I suspect VRM cooling suffers; some vendors made an add-on fan to compensare IIRC.
- Comment on Report: Microsoft quietly kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet 2 months ago:
Even with the internet “available” you can get in chicken-egg scenarios like “the network card is not supported on the OS disc, and it won’t let me complete the OS installer so I can install the driver from external media later.”
Even Windows 10 got pretty testy about that in late releases.
- Comment on Grindr CEO Says App Will Be “AI-First” and “Not in the Business of Politics” 2 months ago:
It smells more like Facebook than Steam to me. they can print money for now because they have established scale and customer base, but it feels a bit slimy to where it might not be that appealing to new users. Dating services in general have a bad vibe-- bot problems, low quality matches, dark patterns, so authenticity is a big selling point, something AI drives a huge stake into.
I’d expect that thr gay community, after decades of being a target for abuse, tends to be a bit more sensitive of red flags and looking for truly safe spaces. The Facebook comparison breaks down there, as it has 700 million Aunt Martha users whose most politically sensitive post is in defence of Miracle Whip on salads.
- Comment on SODIMM-to-DIMM adapters offer a workaround for DDR5 price hikes 2 months ago:
I wonder if the next generation of memory will only have a SO-DIMM pinout so they don’t have to split limited supply. Maybe larger “desktop or highend laptop” modules will be physically longer like 2230/2280/22110 SSDs
- Comment on Microsoft Edge Pushes an "All in One Browser" Message on Chrome’s Download Page 2 months ago:
Microsoft was probably the only firm with the resources to keep a Chromium fork current while uneinding Google’s enshittifications. But their incentives are too similar for that.
- Comment on posting an actual shitpost each day till I stop seeing regular news posts here #1 3 months ago:
Giant isopods. Thry’re the big, ocean dwelling version of the little segmented crustaceans you find under rotten wood who ball up for defence.
- Comment on Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL— Tentative ruling signals a potential win for SFC’s copyleft enforcement push 3 months ago:
I’ll say one word: WRT54G.
You put the hackers in control and otherwise mediocre hardware can become iconic and shape the future of your brand. (It’s funny that you now see the second-gen “looks like a low-poly WRT54G” routers in thrift shops due to wi-fi churn)
OTOH will it be harder with video, if every third party integration is demanding DRM blobs, than with RF which is justjust a federal offense if misused?
- Comment on Remain Klingon! 3 months ago:
What’s interesting is that we sort of have a counterpoint already with The Orville’s Moclans, who have interpreted their warrior culture fixation as mandating force-transition to suppress females. This results in an interesting cameo by Dolly Parton playing her own hologram. The Klingons are at least more progressive there.
- Comment on They're watching you. 3 months ago:
He’s so cute! He can monitor me any day!
- Comment on Major Bitcoin mining firm pivoting to AI, plans to fully abandon crypto mining by 2027 as miners convert to AI en masse — Bitfarm to leverage 341 megawatt capacity for AI following $46 million Q3 loss 3 months ago:
Aren’t most miners running ASICs that are pretty much only useful for mining specific coins? I was hoping we were past the last “people are buying off-the-shelves GPUs for crypto” bubble.
- Comment on What’s something society normalizes that you quietly disagree with? 4 months ago:
Let’s require far less training to put a 16-year-old at the helm of three tonnes of Detroit Death Machine than you need to cut hair commercially.
- Comment on The bourgeoisie could technically unintentionally end capitalism... 4 months ago:
The Orville has a great take on it too.
There’s an episode where they bring in someone from a scarcity-era planet and she’s freaking out about how they have replicators and future medical tech, and the crew explains to her that if the technology were airdropped on her world, thry wouldn’t be socially ready for it and it would just become a means of further stratification.
- Comment on Gran Turismo 2 Beige Edition: Teaser Trailer 4 months ago:
I see a Roadmaster wagon. To the used-games store!
- Comment on You mean there's a better way‽ 4 months ago:
It can’t be a real “as seen on TV” product because they didn’t use the phrase “in the palm of your hand”.
One day they’ll need to sell a larger product and be forced to hire actors with freakishly gigantic hands.
- Comment on m2 to sata adaptor board suggestions? 5 months ago:
Some mainboards have very few PCI-e slots.
I ended up with a similar adapter because the onboard SATA on my board was flaky with optical drives and I rip CDs.
- Comment on How Many Phones Sport a 5 and 1/4 Diskette Drive? This One. 5 months ago:
A Greaseweazle mihht be another angle; you could image discs at lest.
- Comment on AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Crime In America 6 months ago:
I want to see the camera that will stop white-collar crime.
- Comment on Age Verification Is A Windfall for Big Tech—And A Death Sentence For Smaller Platforms 6 months ago:
I’m surprised there isn’t more of a crowdsourced solution-- community maintained block/allow lists and pluggable tools.
Part of the reason filters suck right now is that they’re sold to turboprudes and people pushing compliance solutions that will placate litigious turboprudes. So you get blocking all of Wikipedia and .edu/.gov because three pages have an anatomical diagram of a breast. The kids are frustrated, normal parents have to keep unblocking legit stuff, and nobody wins.
If you could pick from easily managed lists sponsored by groups you personally trusted, with responsive appeals systems, people might be more willing to use them.
The ad-blocker ecosystem has a lot of precedent for how to work this stuff.
- Comment on Age Verification Is A Windfall for Big Tech—And A Death Sentence For Smaller Platforms 6 months ago:
We need to reframe the discussion from “it’s for the children” to “it’s for lazy parents”.
People are keen to scapegoat parents, and here it’s the truth. They don’t want to use existing opt-in controls, or put the damn computer where they can keep an eye on Little Timmy while he uses it. Make the entirery of the legal system do it for you!
- Comment on HDMI 6 months ago:
It’s clearly DisplayPort.
- Comment on Taco Bell Says 'No Más' to AI Drive-Thru Experiment 6 months ago:
It’s a remarkable entitlement.
Let’s say I’ve never dealt with your restaurant before. Why would I start my relationship with you by installing your lowest-bid spyware on my personal device? You have yet to even convince me I’ll ever want a Quesachalupa Wrap Crunch Bellgrande (the same as “taco, add tomatoes”, but $3.72 more) again.
