13·
10 days ago
Arthur Besse
cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
- 80 Posts
- 229 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: January 17th, 2022
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50·14 days ago
6·19 days ago
The rest of me is all, “It’s still 2025!! If we have the Bell Riots now we’re still on-pace for a Star Trek future!!”
The Bell Riots were in September 2024.
Our universe’s lack of Eugenics Wars in the 90s was already pretty strong evidence that we’re not living in the prime timeline.
211·27 days agoThis article buries the lede so much that many readers probably miss it completely: the important takeaway here, which is clearer in The Register’s version of the story, is that ChatGPT cannot actually play chess:
“Despite being given a baseline board layout to identify pieces, ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks, and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were."
To actually use an LLM as a chess engine without the kind of manual intervention that this person did, you would need to combine it with some other software to automate continuing to ask it for a different next move every time it suggests an invalid one. And, if you did that, it would still mostly lose, even to much older chess engines than Atari’s Video Chess.
edit: i see now that numerous people have done this; you can find many websites where you can “play chess against chatgpt” (which actually means: with chatgpt and also some other mechanism to enforce the rules). and if you know how to play chess you should easily win :)
incredible self-own from ArduPilot co-creator Jason Short:
Not in a million years would I have predicted this outcome. I just wanted to make flying robots.
🤡
(of course, in reality, many people were discussing weaponization even on the day diydrones was announced…)
30·1 month agoThe industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams ... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what ... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source – we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC ... These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake. - Steve Heckler, senior vice president of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc, August 2000
quote from https://web.archive.org/web/20010201204600/http://www.nyfairuse.org/sony.xhtml
via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
7·2 months agothis is a good meme
9·2 months agoThe network never went down.
You say that but, everything I ever posted on identica (and also on Evan’s later OStatus site
Status.Net, which i was a paying customer of) went 404 just a few years later. 😢When StatusNet shut down I was offered a MySQL dump, which is better than nothing for personal archival but not actually useful for setting up a new instance due to OStatus having DNS-based identity and lacking any concept for migrating to a new domain.
https://identi.ca/evan/note/6EZ4Jzp5RQaUsx5QzJtL4A notes that Evan’s own first post is “still visible on Identi.ca today, although the URL format changed a few years ago, and the redirect plugin stopped working a few years after that.” … but for whatever reason he decided that most accounts (those inactive over a year, iiuc, which I was because I had moved to using StatusNet instead of identica) weren’t worthy of migrating to his new pump.io architecture at all.
Here is some reporting about it from 2013: https://lwn.net/Articles/544347/
As an added bonus, to the extent that I can find some of my posts on archive.org, links in them were all automatically replaced (it was the style at the time) with redirects via Evan’s URL shortening service
ur1.cawhich is also now long-dead.
imo the deletion of most of the content in the proto-fediverse (PubSubHubbubiverse? 😂) was an enormous loss; I and many other people had years of great discussions on these sites which I wish we could revisit today.
🪦
The fact that ActivityPub now is still a thing where people must (be a sysadmin or) pick someone else’s domain to marry their online identity to is even more sad. ActivityPub desperately needs to become content addressable and decouple identity from other responsibilities. This experiment (which i learned of via this post) from six years ago seemed like a huge step in the right direction, but I don’t know if anyone is really working on solving these problems currently. 😢
1·2 months agoLmao that my pedanticism could be perceived as BSD advocacy - fwiw, I primarily use GNU/Linux, I develop GPL-licensed software, and I think GPLv3 or AGPLv3 are good choices for many new projects starting today.
My opinions about the history and future of copyleft are somewhat complicated but I didn’t mention any opinions in the comment you’re replying to - I was just correcting your factual misunderstandings about the accepted definitions of these terms.
Is this a spam campaign?
Five of the eleven comments so far (including one from OP) are all recommending the same service; all five are from accounts less than 2 months old with a one or two digit number of comments 🤔
thanks i hate it
Do tech journalists at the New York Times have any idea what they’re talking about? (spoiler)
'We’re going to talk about these stories.'
The author of this latest advertorial, Kevin Roose, has a podcast called “Hard Fork”.
Here he and his co-host attempt to answer the question “What’s a Hard Fork?”:
kevin roose: Casey, we should probably explain why our podcast is called “Hard Fork.”
casey newton: Oh, yeah. So our other names didn’t get approved by “The New York Times” lawyers.
kevin roose: True.
casey newton: And B, it’s actually a good name for what we’re going to be talking about. A “hard fork” is a programming term for when you’re building something, but it gets really screwed up. So you take the entire thing, break it, and start over.
kevin roose: Right.
casey newton: And that’s a little bit what it feels like right now in the tech industry. These companies that you and I have been writing about for the past decade, like Facebook, and Google, and Amazon, they’re all kind of struggling to stay relevant.
kevin roose: Yeah. We’ve noticed a lot of the energy and money in Silicon Valley is shifting to totally new ideas — crypto, the metaverse, AI. It feels like a real turning point when the old things are going away and interesting new ones are coming in to replace them.
casey newton: And all this is happening so fast, and some of it’s so strange. I just feel like I’m texting you constantly, “What is happening? What is this story? Explain this to me. Talk with me about this, because I feel like I’m going insane.”
kevin roose: And so we’re going to try to help each other feel a little bit less insane. We’re going to talk about these stories. We’re going to bring in other journalists, newsmakers, whoever else is involved in building this future, to explain to us what’s changing and why it all matters.
casey newton: So listen to Hard Fork. It comes out every Friday starting October 7.
kevin roose: Wherever you get your podcasts.
This is simply not accurate.
Today the term “hard fork” is probably most often used to refer to blockchain forks, which I assume is where these guys (almost) learned it, but the blockchain people borrowed the term from forks in software development.
In both cases it means to diverge in such a way that re-converging is not expected. In neither case does it mean anything is screwed up, nor does it mean anything about starting over.
These people who’s job it is to cover technology at one of the most respected newspapers in the United States are actually so clueless that they have an entirely wrong definition for the phrase which they chose to be the title of their podcast.
“Talk with me about this, because I feel like I’m going insane.”
But, who cares, right? “Hard fork” sounds cool and the times is ON IT.
1·2 months ago
By “solar power in operation” (in GW) i think they mean maximum output capacity rather than actual production, since these numbers add up to 923 GW while wikipedia says in 2024 there was 2.13 petawatt-hours (243 GW on average) actually produced by solar.
These articles were stolen, by the paywall operators. Elbakyan rescued them from the thieves. 🎉
As I wrote in the thread about this last month on !linux@lemmy.ml:
I wonder how much work is entailed in transforming Fedora in to a distro that meets some definition of the word “Sovereign” 🤔
Personally I wouldn’t want to make a project like this be dependent on the whims of a US defense contractor like RedHat/IBM, especially after what happened with CentOS.
and, re: “what do you mean ‘redhat is a defense contractor’?!”: here are some links.
(source)
poe’s law exemplar 😬
