• 0 Posts
  • 1.18K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle
  • The Internet that you’re posting on was built on top of a military network intended to provide redundant communication in the event of a global thermonuclear war.

    Responding to this part alone: that’s not actually true.
    The intent of arpanet, the direct predecessor to the Internet, was to make it easier for universities to use high powered computer resources located at national laboratories, as well as making it easier to distribute software updates. The person who initially pushed for it’s creation wanted “an electronic commons open to all, 'the main and essential medium of informational interaction for governments, institutions, corporations, and individuals '”. They secured funding for the initial computer science labratories, os research that underpin everything, and the foundation for the “INTERgalactic NETwork”.

    Arpa was, at the time, the advanced research project agency. They were under the DoD, but they filled a role closer to the NSF today.

    In designing the system they referenced work done by people who were studying robust communication networks. At the time that meant the phone system and nuclear weapons. The research, however, was applicable to any unstable network, and so had particular interest to them because computers had terrible reliability and they wanted to not have to call people if they discovered they had turned off a computer halfway between New York and LA.

    The closest thing it has to a cold war military objective is to help us win the research race and spite the Soviets. It can withstand a nuclear attack, but that’s just because that’s the easiest way to make it survive a farmer with a backhoe accidentally hitting a wire.


  • The thing is they’re currently trying to sell as a business oriented tool. They’re not going to make money off of individuals.
    Google is positioned to come closest because they’re already an advertising company.

    If you think their focus isn’t businesses then you’re not paying attention to their strategy. The pressure to drive profitability is increasing as their business customers are reporting that investment in AI capabilities isn’t converting into measurable financial returns. That’s the type of news that makes investors wary.

    If you operate at a loss, you need to be providing a value to your customers that you can leverage. You need more than high interest, you also need demonstrable utility.

    There have also been plenty of times that a new technology just … Didn’t pan out. This specifically happens with AI technology, and we even have a term for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter The tech won’t go away, it’ll just be market infeasible for a while until it’s no longer called AI and is just a feature in some other product.

    Take your comment and apply it to someone marketing “spell check as a service”.


  • This is capitalism working exactly as intended. People with capital are using it to guide businesses to make them more money.

    The mistake is thinking that capitalism is motivated by a healthy economy, when the theory is that if everyone is aggressively selfish then the economy will naturally become healthy and efficient.

    The people making money are counting on making their money as investors keep pumping more in. The investors are all aiming to be the last one to sell before the crash. Russian roulette venture capitalism. (In some cases they think the economy will tolerate 1-2 companies and they’re aiming to buy a controlling interest in a company worth 2% current value after the correction, and in others they just have so much money that a few billion is a minor bet - BlackRock comes to mind, with more than $10 trillion to invest)

    If you look at 2008, we had a similar-ish situation with a major portion of the economy being invested in mortgage based investments.



  • When two people love each other very much, they can decide they want to go to a series of various doctors appointments where the mommy gets given new and exciting risk factors and complications and the other desperately tries to keep track of the paperwork.
    Then they have one final expensive doctors appointment and take home their brand new legal liability and tax exception, get ready for all of their new doctors appointments where everyone tries to sort the paperwork, skip sleeping for the next 6-36 months.
    Thanks to evolutionary trickery they will ultimately rate this experience quite highly, on average.


  • ricecake@sh.itjust.workstoGaming@lemmy.worldAtmosphere
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    3 days ago

    The secret is that it was filmed on film and the originals were still around. So they were able to just reprocess the original film with higher resolution and such.
    Other shows were either digital, or filmed on film but the only thing saved was the broadcast transfer.





  • You’re literally quoting a part of a sentence to seemingly disagree with. Specifically a sentence that’s saying that you don’t need to believe it’s nefarious for it to be reasonable to want privacy and assurances of privacy.

    They seemed on the fence about if they were being paranoid or if they were justified in feeling concerned and it was as bad as it seemed.
    I’m saying it doesn’t matter what you believe their intentions are, it’s not paranoid to have concerns about the camera in your face. You can short circuit questions about the technology or their reputation and go directly to resolving that discomfort however is most suitable to you.


  • Yeah, I can see the safety benefits but I’m honestly not sure how I would feel about it. My current car has a variant but the camera is mounted on the outside, and it notices lane drift and changes in responsiveness to curves. It’s basically an extension of the collision/lane centering/automatic windshield wiper (weirdly) systems.

    I’m okay with that because it’s not looking at me, but at the road, which I expect the car to do. Even if it was verified to not be sending anything anywhere I can honestly say I’m still very unsure about just being passively on camera like that.


  • Fatigue detection is a real thing that doesn’t use the type of AI that people think of when they hear that word today most often. It’s not language based but instead it’s able to recognize faces and posture, tell where your attention is focused, and recognize signs of fatigue like head drop, eyes closing, and attention drifting from the road.
    It, along with other attention based driver safety features, are real and effective and can be done on device with a computer with less power than a modern cellphone.

    It is, however, at least a little creepy. It’s made a lot more so by it not being disclosed upfront with disclosures and full user awareness. It should be explained by both the website, the car manual, the salesperson and the car itself exactly what it’s doing and where any video data is being sent. It’s probably processing the video locally and at most sending telemetry about which driver just sat down and such, but 1) you might not want that 2) unless they actually tell you that you don’t know.

    It’s not paranoia to want an explanation and appropriate assurances, or for it to be in your control. You don’t need to assume it’s the worst case for that to be true. It’s probably a real safety feature with a couple of quality of life features taped on so people can see it do something, since you don’t really see a passive safety feature. But without actual communication you don’t actually know that.


  • I don’t think they’re arguing they need the large cut to develop features, I believe they’re arguing the large cut is reflective of the added value.

    In a capitalist system there’s no transaction that can’t be traced back to some form of exploitation. Profit is someone making more money than they put in.

    There’s no game marketplace that isn’t looking to exploit someone.
    The question isn’t “is someone being exploited”, it’s “how severe is the exploitation” and “is the exploiter using unfair means to reduce choice”.

    Because we don’t have a magic wand that lets us see the objective value of the services being offered we can only compare preferences and tolerable prices.

    I believe their argument to be that the high margin taken by valve isn’t reflective of monopolistic market practices, but a reflection of the value added by their service, and that if you were to offer a lower rate that didn’t have the listed perks you would see developers showing a preference for the higher rate.


  • No, they don’t. You’re acting like all those benefits you listed are payment or compensation for the work they did. If those serve as compensation, they don’t create a forward obligation. The paycheck you get at work doesn’t entitle your employer to your continued labor.
    The community isn’t owed shit for the guy giving them something useful that may have looked good on his resume. It’s entitled as fuck to think you’re owed something because someone built something you found valuable enough that someone else wanted to hire them.

    To answer your questions:

    • because it’s their project and they thought it was the right tool for the job. What answer were you expecting?
    • because the community isn’t working on the project.
    • probably not.

    Seriously. Demanding someone give up control of their personal project because it’s too important for them to run as they see fit, but not important enough to support or help maintain.
    Fork it and maintain it yourself. Literally nothing is stopping you. You’re just as equipped as he is, other than not being the inventor of the underlying technology.


  • It’s essentially highlighting the ambiguity the colors can convey. Because our eyes don’t see in isolation from our brains, we don’t see based on the actual reflected color, but based on the contrast between those colors and context clues. We essentially have white balance and color correction baked into our vision,which is part of why photos without that look weird. Lacking context you process the colors differently.

    In this case people saw a blue and black dress and lacking visual context they either compensated for sunlight or the compensated for shade. The contrasts involved (black/white, blue/yellow) are because opposite compensations maintain contrast while changing brightness.

    This image has someone wearing the dress photographed with the white balance specifically off so that you can maybe see what other people were implicitly correcting for.




  • No, you’re not understanding that there are other types of datacenters.

    A datacenter is a building with a lot of computers. Not all of them are AI related, and in fact most aren’t.
    Easily more than 90% of everything on the Internet and all telecommunications runs out of a datacenter.

    The thing people are currently, rightly, being opposed to are hyper scale data centers. Those tend to be filled with things like AI training or massive web services where all the pieces need to be close to each other to work efficiently.

    Most data centers are similar in size and environmental impact to a shipping warehouse, but with power consumption a fair bit higher.
    Any midsize city will have at least a few, if for no other reason than to handle telecommunications, and many businesses will have their own small one near their offices.

    Everything in a capitalist society serves profit to its owners. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t serve a good we want to have around. It’d certainly be better and more efficient if my local telecom hub or hospital were publicly owned and managed with a service motive above a profit motive, but they’re not and I’d rather have both than not.

    What I don’t need is open AI building a datacenter 32 times larger than the hospital and 128 times larger the the telecom hub to train AI models, fuck up the water and double my power bill.



  • ricecake@sh.itjust.workstohmmm@lemmy.worldhmmm
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    14 days ago

    Older Chinese men are like, a half foot shorter. It stands out more.

    But you’re right, I probably should have written that second paragraph saying that older Chinese men are on average shorter due to rampant food issues in china ~60 years ago.