riskable
@riskable@programming.dev
- Comment on What's inside the London Tower Bridge? 4 weeks ago:
The tower on the left is home to the Tea Wizard who uses parts of the lower floors for the nation’s biscuit reserves. The one on the right is host to a princess that’s been waiting for rescue by a prince for a very long time now.
- Comment on Jesus, help me! - No! 1 month ago:
The Warhammer lore where people worship an AI as literal God suddenly seems so realistic!
- Comment on Homeowner baffled after washing machine uses 3.6GB of internet data a day 1 month ago:
If you’re putting in a dishwasher just drill the holes. Your landlord will thank you for saving them the trouble of having to do that themselves some day.
I don’t think any normal landlord would give two shits about some dishwasher-hose-sized holes drilled under a sink, between internal cabinet walls, that no one will ever see. Such holes are so far back and out of the way… No one would ever notice unless they’re missing.
- Comment on Homeowner baffled after washing machine uses 3.6GB of internet data a day 1 month ago:
Wait: Do the times listed on the screen of your washer/dryer actually reflect reality‽
My dryer will say it’s got 20 minutes remaining for like an hour and a half. And yes, I clean the lint screen and vent regularly (all the way up to the roof!).
- Comment on Responding to ShotSpotter, Police Shoot at Child Lighting Fireworks 1 month ago:
The correct term for this is Xjournalist. Probably. Maybe.
- Comment on Responding to ShotSpotter, Police Shoot at Child Lighting Fireworks 1 month ago:
Kids these days… Pfft!
You don’t need Bluetooth to play sounds out of speakers, LOL! They have a limited range anyway.
Use token ring over RG-6U coaxial 👍
- Comment on Study: Dark matter does not exist and the universe is 27 billion years old 1 month ago:
It’s probably not that the light is losing energy it’s just that the distance it travels over time (the time we “know” is supposed to take for a given distance) appears compressed because of unknown/unseen gravitational forces.
Think of it like this: If there were only one star in the universe and it emits a particle of light we could calculate the distance it would travel over time. Yet we know that star will still have a gravitational effect on that light… No matter how far away it gets.
That’s what they mean by light “losing energy”. Is the energy actually “lost”? Not really. Is this slowing (aka appearance of lost energy) caused by dark energy/dark matter or something more fundamental like spacetime itself being stretched or compressed due to the gravity of astronomical objects we can see or “dark matter”/“dark energy” or… ? We don’t really know for certain yet!
- Comment on Weird shower leak. Advise needed. 1 month ago:
Redo the caulk at the edge of the glass frame. I’m 75% certain that’s where your problem lies… Had something similar 👍
Basically what’s happening is that water is getting out somewhere under that glass frame, going through the grout on the either side, then flowing out the side. The water could be entering all the way at the opposite end of where you see it coming out.
In fact, I’d re-caulk everything that has caulk. Don’t re-do the grout; that won’t fix anything. If re-caulking doesn’t fix it then you really do need to take the whole shower out and redo it (I know, “fuuuuuuck”). Been in that situation before too 😞
- Comment on Pixelfed introduces Loops, a Short-Form Video App 2 months ago:
This might not necessarily be the case for much longer with storage costs finally reaching certain thresholds.
2TB SSDs only cost ~$100 and you can cram a lot of SSDs into a tiny space with only a minimal amount of cooling (still need a fan but just a fan).
The next bottleneck to overcome is upload bandwidth. Too many providers offer asynchronous service with weirdly low/slow upload limitations. However, that too might be changing over the next few years as DOCSIS 4.0 supports 10Gbit down/6Gbit up (DOCSIS 3.1 only supported ~1Gbit up). An important note about DOCSIS 4.0 is that in order to take advantage of it’s improved features (on the ISP end) you need to provide more upload bandwidth to the client (well, you can still cap it at the router but at that point the ISP is just being an asshole instead of actually “managing bandwidth”).
- Comment on What's the deal with Docker? 2 months ago:
Docker containers aren’t running in a virtual machine. They’re running what amounts to a fancy chroot jail… It’s just an isolated environment that takes advantage of several kernel security features to make software running inside the environment think everything is normal despite being locked down.
This is a very important distinction because it means that docker containers are very light weight compared to a VM. They use but a fraction of the resources a VM would and can be brought up and down in milliseconds since there’s no hardware to emulate.
- Comment on Driver deliberately crashed into cars he thought were being badly driven 2 months ago:
Did he use his turn signal to indicate his intent beforehand? If not he’s just as bad!
Use your turn signals, people!
- Comment on In a First, a Prosthetic Limb Can Sense Temperature Like a Living Hand 2 months ago:
Nooo! The whole point of having a cybernetic arm/hand is that you can just stick your hand in a great big beaker full of liquid nitrogen-cooled eyeballs and not have to worry about getting frostbite!
You can also just grab the hot pan from the oven and not have to worry about getting burned.
You want temperature sending? Put a thermistor in one of the fingers and a little OLED display on the arm (or even better: in a HUD that can only been seen in the user’s eye). A nice, high temp one 👍
- Comment on Poignant post on the state of things 3 months ago:
I think the left’s problem isn’t inclusiveness (in things like this) it’s the inability to give power to “strong” leadership. The same mental firewalls that prevent those on the left from falling victim to mountebanks keeps them from letting others speak on their behalf.
It also creates mental roadblocks for anyone on the left who tries to lead. “How can I speak for these people? I am not one of them.” That’s not a limitation of inclusiveness it’s just empathy. So when anyone on the left challenges a left wing leader with anything, really that leader–if they are truly left leaning–will not fight back without near certainty about their position.
This makes it easy for a left wing leader to denounce the illogical and/or racist positions from those on the right but extremely difficult to take a stand on issues where everything sucks like Israeli/Palestinian conflict or immigration. This leaves them open for charlatans to point to them and say, “See? They’re weak!” Which is the exact thing the right hates and fears from left wing leaders.
- Comment on Poignant post on the state of things 3 months ago:
SS seems powerful, sure but the godlike powers of SSS class generations could put black holes to shame with their inescapable might.
- Comment on ‘There is no such thing as a real picture,’ says Samsung exec. 3 months ago:
In the 90s someone proved–mathematically–that invisible watermarks (e.g. hidden in metadata or in the pixel data itself) in photos would always be removable. I searched for it but I couldn’t find it but it should be obvious: Merely changing the format of an image is normally enough to destroy such invisible watermarks.
Basically, the paper I remember proved that in order for a watermark to survive a change in format/encoding it would need to be visible because the very nature of digital photo formats requires that they discard unnecessary information.
Also, I’d like to point out that it’s already illegal to remove watermarks (without permission) while simultaneously being trivial (usually) for AI tools like img2img to remove watermarks.
- Comment on You people will never be able to replace me! 3 months ago:
True story: This is the setup monitor manufacturers use to come up with the names for their products.
- Comment on Google News is indexing and promoting websites that immediately rip off others with AI clones of their articles. These websites are absolutely littered with Google ads. 3 months ago:
The AI clone wars have begun.
- Comment on This tool for finding bad USB-C cables 3 months ago:
It’s not the cable that goes bad it’s the connectors on the ends: They wear out.
- Comment on Unity bans VLC from Unity Store. 4 months ago:
Oh come on! They’re software developers! The code they wrote three years ago is total shit and you (we) know it, haha.
Take the time to learn something new, today. It’s practically what makes a software developer a software developer. If you’re not learning a new language, engine, or technique pretty regularly you’re going to have a hard time (eventually).
The reason why software developer reinvent the wheel so often is because we know that the old wheel is garbage. It at least, the way we used it was. After being a software dev for a few decades, looking at your old code should always give you a feeling of, “I could’ve done that better.”
- Comment on Unity bans VLC from Unity Store. 4 months ago:
Yeah! Everyone stop using Microsoft products today! I’m serious.
I took this same advice in 1999. Been using Linux on my desktop ever since 👍
Just like with unity: You have to learn some new skills if you switch to something else but the benefits outweigh the costs. It’s so much easier today than it was back then and this seems to be a universal truth: The sooner you switch off of any abusive platform the more quickly you’ll reap the rewards.
Even better: Later, after everyone who didn’t switch is bitching about the latest nonsense from their abusive vendor of choice you can rub it in their faces and be like, “I switched to Godot ages ago and I am so glad I don’t have to deal with this kind of shit anymore.” Just like how Linux users say similar things about the latest bullshit from Microsoft whenever it comes up in the news (which is often, which is why it’s become a trope).
- Comment on Well, it looks like verification photos might be useless now. 4 months ago:
Example: When famous people do an AMA. E.g. Obama did an AMA on Reddit and he was verified with a photo that would be very easy to fake today using AI.
- Comment on What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices? 4 months ago:
I work for a huge bank that’s investing a non-trivial amount of money (billions) in single family homes. They don’t plan to rent them out. They just want to own them.
Now why would a huge, rich bank invest in something like that? Because they’re pretty sure they’re going beat inflation when they resell those properties later. It’s a very safe (if spread across the entire US and Canada) place to park money.
It’s not a big deal if one or two banks do this or even a handful of private equity firms. However, when all of them do it at once (like they are now) it can have a major impact on the prices of single family homes. It also creates something called a, “systemic risk” but that’s a very large topic that I’m not going to cover here.
The point is that yes: The big banks and big private equity firms (and 401ks!) all own way too much non-commercial real estate in general right now and their expansion into single family homes is a great big societal problem.
…but why now‽ Why haven’t they been investing in huge swaths of single family homes since forever? I mean, they’ve been appreciating faster than inflation since forever with only a few minor hiccups (e.g. 2008). The answer is: It used to be much more expensive to maintain homes that don’t have anyone living in them.
Back in the day most homes were unique. In any given neighborhood some homes might have gas heat while others had electric and some others used oil or coal! There were also more fire and flood hazards with more flammable furnishings/building materials and things like washing machine hoses would often just break after a certain amount of time (the seals were only good for like ten years).
These days you have endless amounts of cookie cutter homes in enormous neighborhoods all over the damned place. They’re also built to vastly superior building standards and come with appliances and AC that are orders of magnitude more efficient than in decades past.
This means a big bank or private equity firm can buy hundreds of houses in a region and (cheaply) hire a 3rd party to look after them. They just don’t need as much maintenance as they used to. They’re so much cheaper to maintain en mass.
So how do we fix this problem? There’s all sorts of things you can do but some quick and perhaps unexpected things are:
- Raise minimum wage and crack down on businesses hiring illegal workers doing house maintenance work (let them do construction 👍).
- Raise property taxes in general. You could try to raise them for homes without people living in them but then you just end up creating other unintended consequences/problems (which I won’t get into to stay brief)
- Force upgrades on unoccupied homes. Air conditioning system is 10 years old? You have to get a new one with improved efficiency. House has gas stoves? You have to replace those.
- Force inspections of unoccupied homes and come down hard in regards to code enforcement (every unoccupied home poses a nonzero fire risk to every neighborhood).
Basically, you have to turn unoccupied homes into expenses again. When that happens the banks and private equity will get the hell out.
There’s lots of private equity that will just convert to being slumlords but the big banks do not want to be renting out anything. It’s a huge risk for them and looks real bad on their balance sheets from a banking perspective. Also, if a bank is big enough they’re straight up forbidden (by law) from renting out properties (though there’s various loopholes which I won’t get into).
- Comment on AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans 4 months ago:
It’ll be a good while before an AI generates an Oscar-winning script or a whole movie but most movies and TV shows are very formulaic. Would it really be that surprising if AIs were generating the entertainment equivalent of Hannah Montana in a few years? Or the latest Hallmark Christmas special (LOL)?
My guess is five years: That’s how long it’ll be before we start getting a flood of half-decent AI-generated shows/movies. Where the script is good but the animation/video are “a little off”.
I mean, come on: There’s so many successful TV shows and movies that are total shit! You think AI can’t do better with just the tiniest bit of evolutionary improvements (and better hardware)?
- Comment on AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans 4 months ago:
AI will follow a similar curve as computers in general: At first they required giant rooms full of expensive hardware and a team of experts to perform the most basic of functions. Over time they got smaller and cheaper and more efficient. So much so that we all carry around the equivalent of a 2000-era supercomputer in our pockets (see note below).
2-3 years ago you really did need a whole bunch of very expensive GPUs with a lot of VRAM to train a basic diffusion (image) model (aka a LoRA). Today you can do it with a desktop GPU (Nvidia 3090 or 4090 with 24GB of VRAM… Or a 4060 Ti with 16GB and some patience). You can use pretrained diffusion models at reasonable speeds (~5-10 seconds an image) with any GPU with at least 6GB of VRAM (seriously, try it! It’s fun and only takes like 5-10 minutes to install automatic1111 and will provide endless uncensored entertainment).
Large Language Model (LLM) training is still out of reach for desktop GPUs. ChatGPT 3.0 was trained using 10,000 Nvidia A100 chips and if you wanted to run it locally (assuming it was available for download) you’d need the equivalent of 5 A100s (and each one costs about $6700 plus you’d need an expensive server capable of hosting them all simultaneously).
Having said that you can host a smaller LLM such as Llama2 on a desktop GPU and it’ll actually perform really well (as in, just a second or two between when you give it a prompt and when it gives you a response). You can also train LoRAs on a desktop GPU just like with diffusion models (e.g. train it with a data set containing your thousands of Lemmy posts so it can mimic your writing style; yes that actually works!).
Not only that but the speed/efficiency of AI tools like LLMs and diffusion models improves by leaps and bounds every few weeks. Seriously: It’s hard to keep up! This is how much of a difference a week can make in the world of AI: I bought myself a 4060 Ti as an early Christmas present to myself and was generating 4 (high quality) 768x768 images in about 20 seconds. Then Latent Consistency Models (LCM) came out and suddenly they only took 8s. Then a week later “TurboXL” models became a thing and now I can generate 4 really great 768x768 images in 4 seconds!
At the same time there’s been improvements in training efficiency and less VRAM is required in general thanks to those advancements. We’re still in the “early days” of AI algorithms (seriously: AI stuff is extremely inefficient right now) so I wouldn’t be surprised to see efficiency gains of 1,000-100,000x in the next five years for all kinds of AI tools (language models, image models, weather models, etc).
If you combine just a 100x efficiency gain with five years of merely evolutionary hardware improvements and I wouldn’t be surprised to see something even better than ChatGPT 4.0 running locally on people’s smartphones with custom training/learning happening in real time (to better match the user’s preferences/style).
Note: The latest Google smartphone as of the date of this post is the Pixel 8 which is capable of ~2.4 TeraFLOPS. Even 2yo smartphones were nearing ~2 TeraFLOPS which is about what you’d get out of a supercomputer in the early 2000s: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS (see the SVG chart in the middle of the page).
- Comment on AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans 4 months ago:
Whoah there: Who says AI influencers aren’t the result of individual’s honest work? You don’t need an entire data center of computers to make your own AI influencer!
Don’t assume there’s a corporation behind every AI persona. It could just be one guy with a lot of VRAM getting creative with prompts in his parent’s basement.
- Comment on AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans 4 months ago:
I chuckled at this but I would like to point out that we shouldn’t dehumanize influencers. They’re are just as human as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
Wait…
- Comment on AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans 4 months ago:
AI is stealing the job of immigrants, being blamed for stealing jobs!
- Comment on If you know, you know. 4 months ago:
It’s an older meme, sir but it still checks out.
- Comment on Plummeting interest rate 4 months ago:
This is sage advice: Sex misallocations often lead to extensive long term losses.
- Comment on Republicans slam broadband discounts for poor people, threaten to kill program 4 months ago:
As someone who has worked in government and private industries of all sizes let me tell you the takeaway from my experience: Only organization size matters. The only exception is in the “small stuff”:
- Small government entities (municipal stuff) are often extremely efficient and frankly, surprisingly competent.
- Small businesses are much more likely to be wildly inefficient and incompetent. They’re also much harder to police and can often exist solely to extract as much money as possible from a government contact while providing as little benefit/output as possible (the bare minimum). Safety is never a priority and anything that can be made someone else’s problem will be (externalities).
Big business and big government are both extremely slow and wasteful but in different ways. Big government wastes time and money on simple things that should be cheap but because of various laws and regulations must adhere to regulations of all sorts they end up being expensive (and these regulations often don’t keep up with the times). This also slows everything down because you have to wait for the stuff to pass muster before you can use it most of the time (no matter what that thing is… From simple paper products to chairs to industrial equipment to desks to rocket engines etc you name it). This often results in people having to wait (sitting on their asses while still getting paid).
Big business wastes money on 3rd party tools and services that are often completely unnecessary. Usually because the powers that be “have always done things that way.” They also waste money by being really, really bad at project management. This is the big one: At any big company something like 9 out of 10 IT projects are considered failures because they just keep going forward (with the project) no matter what. So they often end up with something that needs to be maintained/replaced and ends up becoming a regular, long term expense.
Big business isn’t usually corrupt but they will spend loads and loads of money lobbying to make it easier for them to extract profit from whatever it is that they do. Safety, ethics, and things like the general well-being of society be damned. They have no morals except those codified in law whereas the people in huge government organizations are very visible to the people in general and know they have to act ethically or they could get in big trouble (and there’s whole entities who’s job it is to watch them for bad behavior and inefficiencies).
Related: There’s never “too much” or “too little” regulation. There’s just good regulations and bad regulations. Anyone who says regulations are bad or insinuates that they’re “job killing” is looking to mislead you.