TheGrandNagus @ TheGrandNagus @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Really frustrating that children are 3x likely to be in poverty as pensioners, yet a disproportionate amount of money is redirected towards pensioners, the richest demographic by a long shot.

And as has been made clear, any attempts to address that will not be tolerated by media or by the electorate. Labour couldn't even get the original WFA cuts through, despite the poorest still being entitled to them!

Labour restarting SureStart in all but name will surely be a big help for young children and new parents, as will things like the sizable minimum wage increases, and the expansion of free school meals. But it won't be enough to fix this problem entirely.

Same. I have to tinker with it a lot to make it less frustrating to use. I like how customisable it is but man I don't really want to customise everything anymore.

I want a UX that is great out of the box in terms of theming, functionality, and ease of use. I want sane defaults.

Having artificially generated news anchors seems so bizarre to me.

It's one person that in a country like china will be seen by tens or hundreds of millions of people. Is it really worth it to axe that job and put some uncanny valley CGI figure in their place? The per viewer cost saving must be fractions of a penny, and it risks putting off a not insignificant amount of people.

Now, if initiatives like this can be used for things like generating a figure that can do sign language in the corner of a screen that would be an amazing development, but this? I just don't see it.

I even get it for broadcasting to a very small audience, such as languages with almost no speakers. E.g. having an always-available Welsh language presenter. But this? Nah.

LLMs are an interesting tool to fuck around with, but I see things that are hilariously wrong often enough to know that they should not be used for anything serious. Shit, they probably shouldn't be used for most things that are not serious either.

It's a shame that by applying the same "AI" naming to a whole host of different technologies, LLMs being limited in usability - yet hyped to the moon - is hurting other more impressive advancements.

For example, speech synthesis is improving so much right now, which has been great for my sister who relies on screen reader software.

Being able to recognise speech in loud environments, or removing background noice from recordings is improving loads too.

My friend is involved in making a mod for a Fallout 4, and there was an outreach for people recording voice lines - she says that there are some recordings of dubious quality that would've been unusable before that can now be used without issue thanks to AI denoising algorithms. That is genuinely useful!

As is things like pattern/image analysis which appears very promising in medical analysis.

All of these get branded as "AI". A layperson might not realise that they are completely different branches of technology, and then therefore reject useful applications of "AI" tech, because they've learned not to trust anything branded as AI, due to being let down by LLMs.

Women are underrepresented in CEO positions, although perhaps not for the reasons people think.

The average age of a CEO is 55. Many are far older. You get to that point by being in management positions within an industry for decades. Outside of fringe cases, it takes a long time to become a CEO.

Obviously, that filters out some women due to them choosing family life over chasing job position above all else, as well as things such as in the past there being an even greater disparity in the difference between maternity and paternity leave than there is today (and it's still not great today either!), as well as past sexist attitudes in having women in managerial roles.

IMO, there being fewer women in CEO positions is an indicator of sexism in the past, not sexism in the present.

Nowadays there are far more women in managerial positions, it's not seen as weird anymore in the slightest, and that will naturally translate to more CEOs. It will just take time for that influx of managerial-position women to reach the CEO-level.

Will it be 50/50? Eh, probably not. The fact that women give birth means there will always be a not insignificant amount of women that take a significant amount of time out of work and prioritise family life to a greater extent than men.

I miss the internet being a wild west.

It certainly had its downsides, but it felt a lot better than the nonsense that's been happening over the past decade+.

Absolutely grotesque and evil. It boggles my mind how some people can be this hateful.

They said they'd probably have to if Fedora removed support for 32-bit packages, which was a proposal to the Fedora Community (who rejected the proposal).

Long-term, I imagine Valve will have to bundle a 32-to-64-bit abstraction layer, like they already do with a win-to-linux abstraction layer (Proton), and are preparing to do with an x86-to-ARM abstraction layer.

Distros do not want to each duplicate the work of maintaining 32-bit support for all eternity.

Why compare it to nuclear rather than what's currently being used in that area? Coal and gas.

Nuclear is good for providing a stable base load, but having the entire grid be nuclear would be very expensive. And if everyone were to do the same, the market cost of fissile fuel materials would skyrocket.

Lots of solar and wind in the energy mix is a no-brainer.

This is such a depressing read. So fucked up. How can people be this evil?

I'm glad this has become illegal, but I'm sad it even had to be in the first place.

One way to interpret this is "ha, people consider AI worthless!"

However another way to interpret this is the same way users view everything on the web, from social media to journalism and media streaming: this should be free and they should use my data and advertise to me instead, consequences/enshittification be damned.

I don't know why there is such a focus on levies/taxes in this article. For energy, the VAT rate is only 5% - even if we scrapped it entirely, it'd barely make a dent. I truly do not understand where the "getting rid of levies will cut energy bills by over £500" thing comes from.

The only way to bring bills down is to bring the cost of energy down by increasing supply and bringing down our average cost per MWh for production of energy.

The good news is that the government, to their credit, have been doing that.

The bad news is that this isn't a "press the 'fix everything' button in No. 10, then everything will be hunky dory" situation, it's a "take action now so that we can benefit from it in 5-10 years" situation.

E: Reading E3G's own Energy Bills Charter, the only levy they want to remove is 'legacy costs', which they claim would save roughly £80 per household per year. They want it instead to be paid from income tax on workers. Legacy costs, btw, is things like insulation schemes and solar feed in tariffs. Of course, if it is paid via income tax, that'd be an additional £3bn the government will have to find from somewhere, likely meaning more cuts.

I don't know where this alleged £500+ has come from. It seems other-worldly optimistic to me.

Break the law and pay 0.014% of your market cap, or 0.31% of their 2024 profit.

Tech firms will suggest any invasive nonsense that will make them money.

Those present included representatives of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Palantir, which works closely with the US military

A completely unsurprising list of companies lol

There is no backdoor. We do not have the export variant of the F35 with US-controlled software. The software on our F35s (and Trident missiles) is British. This came as the result of concerns New Labour had about the very thing you mention - US backdoors.

And I agree that the US cannot be trusted. Thankfully our sixth gen fighters have no US ties, and most of our other recent military developments aren't either. For the time being, though, we can't really abruptly scrap trident or F35s, despite maintenance not being 100% done here (particularly for Trident). Our missiles only need maintenance every 10 years - I'd hope we have facilities to do that domestically by then.

Ok so you think that the old 4" screen phones should actually have been sub 2". That seems excessively small to me.

There's a disproportionately high amount of old people in that area - a demographic probably less likely to care about a gaming preservation petition.

First I've even heard of it, damn, I'd have totally signed.

MP pay is such a red herring.

Yes, their pay is a lot compared to, say, minimum wage, but a low MP pay even further encourages only wealthy people to become MPs.

I'd much rather see MP salary significantly increased, but expenses capped and put under a much greater level of scrutiny.

Easy thing to say when you're not the one donating your time for free.

I love what Valve is doing for Linux, but longer term, the onus is on them to solve the 32-bit compatibility layer issue (a-la Proton for win-to-linux, as well as their upcoming x86-to-ARM layer).

Expecting all distros (who again, are staffed mostly by volunteers) to do this work separately (i.e. duplicating all that work), for all time, is a big ask.