masterspace
@masterspace@lemmy.ca
- Comment on 3.5" floppy disks were peak tactile feedback in storage: easy to stick in, drives had a button to immediately eject them, big enough to get labels, thin enough that stacks didn't take too much space 1 week ago:
- Comment on 3.5" floppy disks were peak tactile feedback in storage: easy to stick in, drives had a button to immediately eject them, big enough to get labels, thin enough that stacks didn't take too much space 1 week ago:
They’re talking about the tactility of the format, not the actual data limits on it.
You could build SSDs today in floppy form with terabytes of storage.
- Comment on Turing speculated that acting human would be the best indication of humanlike thought, but a better indication would be the inability to act otherwise. 1 week ago:
While the tester is blind as to which is which, the experimenter knows the construction of the machine and can presumably tell if it’s artificially constraining itself.
In the case of intelligences and neural networks that is not so straight forward. The humans and machines that are behind the curtain have to be motivated to try and replicate a human, or the test would fail, whether that’s because a human control is unhelpful or because the machine isn’t bothering trying to replicate a human.
- Comment on Turing speculated that acting human would be the best indication of humanlike thought, but a better indication would be the inability to act otherwise. 1 week ago:
I see what you’re saying but I think the problem is that you would need to test an AI while it’s unaware of being tested, or use a novel trick that it’s unaware of, to try and catch it producing non-human output.
If it’s aware that it’s being tested, then presumably it will try to pass the test and try to limit itself to human cognition to do so.
i.e. It’s possible that an AI’s intelligence includes enough human-like intelligence to completely mimic a human and pass a Turing test, but not enough to know to keep to those boundaries; but it’s also possible that it both know enough to mimic us and enough to keep to our bounds.
- Comment on I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter. 1 week ago:
Maybe reconsider throwing around words like “naiive” when your source is a Europol briefing document covering various threats at a high level with no stats or numbers.
Especially since if you actually dig into it, you’d find that Europe’s illegal gun trade comes partially from old military and police weapons from the Balkans / collapse of the Soviet Union, partially from theft of legal firearms, partially from weapons that are imported (legally and illegally) from the US and Turkey, and minorly from weapons smuggled in from other war zones / 3d printed guns.
The fact is that gun control works. Dislike that all you want but it doesn’t change the stats or reality you the world.
- Comment on I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter. 1 week ago:
Maybe so, but we live in a world where guns exist.
No, you live in a country that chooses to manufacture guns in response to people buying them, and you choose to actively perpetuate that by buying and the purchase of guns, funding gun companies, and then by going online to try and spread that justification so that you can feel slightly less guilty about choices you know are wrong.
- Comment on I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter. 1 week ago:
Lol no. This is absolute horseshit, and if you were actually a lawyer, I would expect you to know that.
Gun control does work. Literally all stats and research bears that out, in addition to this thing called travelling to countries with gun control.
If youre an actual human lawyer, travel more. But I suspect you’re not.
- Comment on I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter. 1 week ago:
No, I misread your comment and thought it was from someone who had been in a situation where a gun would have made it better, rather than one where it had.
- Comment on I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter. 1 week ago:
And some of you may be gun nuts who upvote any plausible argument for gun ownership, even in the face of overwhelming objective evidence that it makes societies vastly unsafe.
Here’s the thing about guns and victimhood, access to guns causes far more victims then access to guns prevents and it always inherently will. In that environment, a predator intent on committing a crime will always have one, and a victim only ever might have one.
- Comment on I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter. 1 week ago:
In this thread: Americans who literally cannot comprehend that they are not the only country on earth.
- Comment on I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter. 1 week ago:
How did the home invasion attempt resolve?
- Comment on LG Electronics unveils 2026 Gram Laptop line with aerospace composite - up to 50% lighter than macbooks 2 weeks ago:
I have both a gram and a MacBook that my work forces on me.
Lmao, if you want a heavy brick that can survive a fall then buy a Think Book.
If you want a light laptop that’s easy to carry around then buy a Gram.
MacBooks heavy feel is literally just them overcharging you for something brittle. It’s like being charged more for furniture because it’s heavy only to find outs it’s made with MDF.
- Comment on Is there a "buy nothing" community on Lemmy? Or an anti-consumerism comm? 2 weeks ago:
I feel like there’s three types of buy nothing:
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buy it for life - people looking to reduce consumerism by purchasing high quality, long lasting items that aren’t engineered to have limited lifespans. See lemmy.world/c/buyitforlife@sh.itjust.works
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second hand trading groups - people who want to reduce consumerism by creating vibrant second hand marketplaces and encouraging selling, trading, and donating of old goods. Lemmy is the wrong format for this, these groups tend to exist in geographically focused platforms like Facebook and Kijiji.
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true die-hard anti consumerists - want to never buy anything, including any items that are remotely consumable. Hard to find these communities as these people tend to head off grid, and / or self implode.
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- Comment on Is there a point we can track down when we stopped caring about doctors, nurses, teacher, etc? And thought it was a great idea to pay atheletes millions and screw everyone else? 3 weeks ago:
Is there a point you can find in history where we paid doctors, teachers, and nurses close to what they’re worth and more than professional athletes?
It sounds like you’re nostalgic for a time that never existed.
- Comment on Why do personal knowledge base applications like Obsidian have all these bells and whistles for querying and parsing metadata/frontmatter but nothing similar for the actual content of notes? 3 weeks ago:
Because indexing a structured field with limited values is different from indexing a “structured” document with fields that can be anything.
- Comment on Is it a bad idea to learn Russian because of the war? 4 weeks ago:
Fair enough, I am just being overly angry and hateful.
- Comment on Jimmy Carr on Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI 4 weeks ago:
It’s not entirely clear what he’s referring to, he just uses the term AI broadly in the context of people being worried about job losses, then talks about the reduction in secret police costs that enables, then discusses applying AI to physics.
- Comment on Is it a bad idea to learn Russian because of the war? 4 weeks ago:
It’s not the same idea, as I didn’t advocated studying them when they were authoritarian shitholes who were actively slaughtering their neighbours.
- Comment on Jimmy Carr on Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI 4 weeks ago:
Tl;dw: he has two points:
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That between cameras and now AI monitoring, it has just drastically reduce the cost of running an authoritarian regime. He claims that running the Stahsi used to cost like 20% of the government budget, but can now be done for next to nothing and if will be harder for governments to resist that temptation.
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That there hasn’t been much progress in the world of physics since the 70s, so what happens if you point AI and it’s compute power at the field of physics? It could seen wondrous progress and a world of plenty.
Personally I think point 1 is genuinely interesting and valid, and that point 2 is kind of incredible nonsense. Yes, all other fields are just simplified forms of physics, and physics fundamentally underlies all of them. That doesn’t mean that no new knowledge has come from those fields, and that doesn’t mean that new knowledge in physics automatically improves them. Physics has in many ways, done its job. Obviously there’s still more to learn, but between quantum mechanics and general relativity, we can actually model most human scale processes in our universe, with incredible precision. The problem is that that the closer we get to understanding the true underlying math of the universe, the harder it is to compute that math for a practical system… at a certain point, it requires a computer on the scale of the universe to compute.
Most of our practical improvements in the past decade have and will come from chemistry, and biology, and engineering in general, because there is far more room to improve human scale processes by finding shortcuts, and patterns, and designing systems to behave the way we want. AI’s computer scale pattern matching ability will undoubtedly help with that, but I think it’s less likely that it can make any true physics breakthroughs, nor that those breakthroughs would impact daily life that much.
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- Comment on Is it a bad idea to learn Russian because of the war? 4 weeks ago:
I don’t have to, I just have to name one better than Russia.
- Comment on Is it a bad idea to learn Russian because of the war? 4 weeks ago:
German culture and heritage was destroyed by the world wars. What remains is not what was there pre-WWII.
And I’m not cancelling or destroying anything. I’m just prioritizing cultures worth preserving over those that have been poisoned by a century of dictatorship and death.
- Comment on Is it a bad idea to learn Russian because of the war? 4 weeks ago:
Fuck Russia. Learn literally any other language. Let them and their brains dead culture rot.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Decentralized identity management / verification is still the biggest unsolved problem of the fediverse, and inherently pressures things towards centralization.
- Comment on Seems legit 1 month ago:
You can fit text-only wikipedia on a normal Blu Ray as it’s only about 24GB. You can also easily fit Llama 3.1 or any of the other open, offline capable ai models as they’re only about 4GB.
- Comment on Why do some Americans "feel ashamed" for being American even when it's not their fault? 1 month ago:
False equivalency.
- Comment on The Turing test has been inverted. 1 month ago:
The Turing test is most specifically highlighted in movies like Blade Runner or Ex Machina where it’s a noire with a lone robot in a room being tested. In reality the future is more like Westworld where there are so many robots that can pass a basic Turing test that people are constantly engaged in Turing tests at all times.
- Comment on spongebob big guy pants okay 1 month ago:
Do they regrow their body or a new body made from the same parts?
- Comment on German court: ChatGPT violated copyright law by ‘learning’ from song lyrics 2 months ago:
But the court rulings / precedence wouldn’t care about that distinction, it just covers learning from copyrighted material in general.
- Comment on German court: ChatGPT violated copyright law by ‘learning’ from song lyrics 2 months ago:
What if you read a copyrighted engineering textbook, and then build something for profit with that knowledge?
- Comment on When we eat the billionaires, we should spare Gabe Newell? No? 2 months ago:
Valve innovated a package manager, a store, strict DRM, and gambling / third party cosmetic markets.
Very recently they built the Proton compatibility layer.