mobyduck648

hotter and more humid than Satan’s asshole

Genuinely the UK at the moment, which is not a sentence I thought I’d say but well into our fifth heatwave I’m praying for rain in Wales of all places.

Fuck climate change.

There’s hating technology in general and then there’s hating the US West Coast tech scene specifically in my opinion.

I have a neurological vision disorder which I suspect augmented reality glasses would help a lot, but sod letting Meta see my life from a first-person perspective 24/7, or the lives of anyone around me for that matter. Also I suspect a genuine medical device would have to be made very obvious, you don’t want accessibility tech being mistaken for pervert tech. I wouldn’t take the risk frankly! It’s like if I’m talking to someone and they have a hearing aid in that’s fine, but if they’ve got headphones in I’m going to feel a little cheesed off on the face of it.

Also not American but I work for a trans-Atlantic company, those things sound like a PHI nightmare in a medical setting given Meta’s habit of indiscriminately hoovering up data like as many labradors in a pantry.

It certainly calls into question his judgement, what kind of person hires a skipper who apparently either does not keep the required watch on channel 16, or ignores calls for aid?

If that superyacht’s radio doesn’t have a dual watch function then I’m the king of the Britons.

Yeah it was literally drilled into me as a child that you aid a vessel in distress until the point you would be in distress yourself, provided you are in position to do so. It’s the law certainly, but without highly extenuating circumstances there’s also the matter of serious personal disgrace in my view.

My favourite claudism is when it deletes tens of gigabytes sized models as if redownloading them is trivial for me. It might be for the boys at Anthropic with their sewer pipe sized fibre optics, but for me where my last mile is copper bullshit Openreach probably hasn’t maintained since the 2008 crash it’s a massive pain in the arse.

To expand on this, things like reddit and discord are literally modern-day attempts to enclose the commons in my view. They took all the ground from open protocols that nobody in particular owned and replaced them with an aristocrat’s private property.

It can be done, I just bought an e-ink phone and it’s caused my use of commercial social media to plummet. Admittedly I’m saying this on Lemmy, but I think Lemmy has more in common with the forums of yore than ‘social media’ as it’s generally understood.

The new Moore’s Law: the amount of RAM you can afford halves every six months.

You might have a point in utilitarian matters where functionality is all that matters, but how can you possibly say that when it comes to art? If I write some software for my boss using an LLM and it works just as well as hand-written software that’s one thing, but if I commissioned some art and got back some prompt-bro’s artefact I’d have a right to be miffed about it.

The intent behind the work matters so much in any work of art, I don’t want to hear AI music in particular because I’m a musician myself and I want to know what a fellow musician thinks, I specifically want to know a small part of the inside of their mind by listening to their works. Even if AI music is indistinguishable from actual music, I don’t care for it because the expressive bandwidth of prompting is tiny compared to an instrument, it tells me nothing of the person who created it. In my opinion nobody can make art of any sort without exposing themselves in some sense, but what is exposed about a person by prompting an AI music bot? People saying ‘well if you can’t tell the difference between real art and AI art you have no business commenting’ are missing the whole point of why people undertake an artistic project in my opinion.

I don’t think any human artists have made an album about the Isstvan massacre.

How on Earth are there warhammer fans who haven’t heard of Bolt Thrower?

Medical AI is usually more along the lines of ‘we’ve created a proprietary model for computer aided diagnostics specific to x disease being scanned with y modality and we’ve taken this through the regulatory process in z jurisdiction’ than ‘put your symptoms into an LLM lol’.

I’ve faced this situation at work, we deployed a dedicated windows VM that all the devs shared for the one tedious task. Eventually got replaced with a saner system and we had no Windows dependencies at all.

Windows-free since 2014 in my case! Hated Windows 8’s user experience enough that I decided KDE was a better windows than windows and never looked back.

In 2026 Plasma 6 is genuinely in the conversation for the best graphical environment for the desktop platform in general, partly because it’s very good and partly because Apple and Microsoft have let standards slip a lot in my view.

What worries me is people using it for safety-critical things without appreciating the danger, for a test some of my friends who sail for a living asked various chatbots some questions like ‘how would you approach a berth under sail when the wind is against the tide?’ and every single one but Claude got it dangerously wrong, and Claude wasn’t 100% either it just refrained from suggesting a sail plan that would lead to you crashing into the pontoon.

Will give a shout out to Mistral which got the sailing element of the question very wrong but did sensibly suggest ‘turn your engine on and perform the manoeuvre under power’ which of course is what you should do if you can.

Very well said! Privacy protects the innocent far more than it protects the guilty, and no false positive rate other than zero is acceptable when ‘van bursts in to take your career away over an AI detecting wrongdoing’ in my view.

If a false positive rate of zero is not possible then not building it is the only ethical option.

Why is stirring up conflict here beneficial though? I’m intensely critical of the current US government but me and the average American still have more in common with each-other than either of us have with our respective ruling elites in terms of material interest and daily life.

Yes their crowing about being the most democratic country on Earth is a bit silly but that doesn’t mean they deserve to become an outright plutocracy, nobody deserves that. You can object to Washington’s lofty perch in the global pecking order and to Americentrism in general without wishing ill on a whole nationality the vast majority of whom have done nothing to wrong you personally. The only thing I wish for the Americans is for them to fix their backsliding democratic institutions and to adopt a more realistic view of their country’s place in the geopolitical landscape; I don’t doubt these are goals many Americans support at this point.

I was really looking forward to my luxury German nuclear-powered car as well >:(

Not played those games but to be fair in a nuclear wasteland you would expect fresh meat and vegetables to be more radioactive than the general environment. Animals and plants can accumulate radioactive fallout, if it’s diffuse in the soil it can be more concentrated in whatever lives off that soil. Radioactive contamination often consists of caesium-137 which behaves like potassium, and strontium-90 which behaves like calcium, so you’re getting screwed by conventional biochemistry as much as nuclear physics.

This is a concern in the Chernobyl exclusion zone even now, there’s mushrooms and other forage that must be avoided for this reason.

Dylan has more good advice here, when it comes to bubbles you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows!