abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

The internet made photos of trump and putin kissing shirtless.

And is that OK? I mean I get it, free speech, but just because congress can't stop you from expressing something doesn't mean you actually should do it. It's basically bullying.

Imagine you meet someone you really like at a party, they like you too and look you up on a social network... and find galleries of hardcore porn with you as the star. Only you're not a porn star, those galleries were created by someone who specifically wanted to hurt you.

AI porn without consent is clearly illegal in almost every country in the world, and the ones where it's not illegal yet it will be illegal soon. The 1st amendment will be a stumbling block, but it's not an impenetrable wall - congress can pass laws that limit speech in certain edge cases, and this will be one of them.

have there been any improvements in this area?

Um... what rock have you been living under?

For simple code generation, I use GitHub CoPilot.

In both cases, I'm essentially writing the code "from scratch" myself every time, but now I can type "write a person class" then "add a name property", etc. Best of both words - the control of hand written code, and the efficiency of not having to type all that code out.

When your code is really repetitive, you don't even need to give it any prompts at all. You can usually just start a new empty line and it will guess what line goes there. For example if you have a firstName property, it will predict you're about to add lastName.

When it's more complex, for example if I haven't figured out how to structure the code yet, I use ChatGPT+. That's more of a conversation approach, similar to bouncing ideas off a colleague... "how would you do this; what about that edge case; etc".

When I make coffee at home, it works out to 65 cents per cup. And I make it exactly how I like it — so it tastes better than most cafes.

I'm prepared to pay more when someone else makes it, but not ten times that price. Sorry.

RSS sucks. Activity Streams are a better in every way (other than compatibility established software, obviously).

If you're building anything new that uses RSS today, I encourage you to do both RSS and Activity Streams. Or just do what I do, and only do AS.

This. The lack of vetting sucks and it goes both ways. Sometimes the algorithm incorrectly flags perfectly legitimate content as fraudulent with no way to recover from that.

Also - post it on GitHub. Preferably now while you've got people paying attention. :-)

When I'm going through job candidates, nothing gets my attention better than a public GitHub project where a lot of other people have stared/forked/written issues/submitted pull requests/etc. Which means you shouldn't just post it, you should spend a bit of time maintaining it. Fix bugs, add features, add content (search for treasure?)

But most useful programs we deal with do more than merely verify an input [...] We may sum a list of numbers [...]

Computers are binary. 1 or 0. Pass through the electrical gate; or do not pass through the gate. That's the only tool we've got to work with and therefore, "sum a list of numbers" is literally implemented as a series of "accept or reject" steps.

Everything above that is a convenient layer of abstraction. Abstraction is there to reduce your mental load while working but it doesn't always achieve that goal — especially if you don't know what's going on underneath.

Click the link and watch? It's very good. Looks like Veritasium spent a huge amount of time researching for this video and you're not just trusting his research - he interviews experts on historical (failed) air ships as well as modern engineers working on multi-billion dollar projects trying to fix the mistakes that were made in the past as well as discussing new problems that weren't encountered last time but would have if they hadn't given up almost immediately.

Still - it finishes on a positive note, those engineers do think the problems can be solved. We could have cheap cargo transport to anywhere in the world instead of exclusively to coastal cities with a sheltered bay and a harbour that takes hundreds of years to build. An air ship could deliver a shipping container, cheaply, to anywhere a helicopter can land. That's a problem worth trying to solve.

It will likely start with niche use cases, such as delivering massive wind turbine blades to the top of a mountain ridge... without having to first build a mountain road up to the construction site - and a road suitable for trucks that can carry an 800 foot long turbine blade:

Once air ships are solved for those use cases, it will inevitably be used for other things too.

Any chance work will issue you with a Mac? This would be so much easier if they would. You'd be able to use the iPad as an external display for the Mac, and could run Mac note taking apps (which save all their data on the Mac) on the iPad screen, with full touchscreen and pencil support for drawing/etc. The iPad basically becomes a Cintiq.

I think the only way Windows can connect to an iPad over USB is with "iTunes File Sharing" which requires installing iTunes on Windows - then it will be able to access some data on the iPad. It used to be pretty widespread for note taking apps to support that, but I'm not sure how common it is these days. Almost everyone uses cloud sync these days.

I don’t want profitable software

What? You want all the software companies you depend on to go bankrupt?

I want fairly priced software

Canva is free for basic features and reasonably priced if you want features that cost them money such as 24/7 phone support, access to their stock artwork library, storing up to a terabyte of documents on their servers, etc.

I get the hesitation - we don't know what they're going to do with the affinity suite, but I wouldn't immediately assume it will be ruined.

Lets have a look at the memory speed on your 2012 Mac:

• RAM: 25 GB/s
• HDD: 0.1GB/s
• SSD: if it's a really good one, 0.7GB/s. If it's a cheap one, might be closer to the HDD

Now compare that to the latest MacBook Air:

• RAM: 100GB/s
• SSD: 5GB/s

And aside from bandwidth, there are also latency improvements that are even more impressive.

These are the numbers that you are actually going to notice in every day life - they are far more important than CPU speed. They are also far more important than wether or not the software you're using is native or emulated - because modern emulation usually works quite well (I run intel software all day every day on my M1 MacBook Air, which is a lot slower than the computers you're considering).

The SSD being an order of magnitude faster than on your old 2012 model also means a lot of things that historically needed to be stored in RAM, no-longer need to be in RAM. That's particularly true for Photoshop and iMovie which both will use all of the memory you have, and use swap if they need more than that. In practice, you won't notice when they use swap - because what used to be a three second beachball in Photoshop is now zero seconds.

Another thing to consider is modern versions of MacOS will compress some of your RAM which is incredibly effective. Windows and Linux do that too — it's an industry standard now and not just to save memory. If you can store 2GB of data in 1GB of RAM, that effectively doubles your memory bandwidth (because compressing and decompressing takes zero time with a good memory controller). Software memory, it turns out, is usually extremely compressible.

Like you, I had 16GB on my 2012 MacBook Pro, and I still have 16GB today on my Apple Silicon Mac. It was all I could afford in 2012 and I wished I could have more. These days I can afford more, but I just don't see the point in paying. 16GB is enough now*.

(* although if you want to play with generative AI, then you'll want more RAM)

The primary difference between the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro is the GPU, but it doesn't sound like that will be an issue for you. I recommend the MacBook Air - not just because it's cheaper, it's also smaller, lighter, bigger screen, etc.

Regarding the Mac Mini, no I don't think 8GB isn't enough. Keep in mind the core operating system itself uses about 4GB of your RAM... so an 8GB Mac will have 4GB for the software you run, and a 16GB Mac will have 12GB available for your software. Personally I've configured Docker on my Mac to use 8GB on it's own... but it obviously depends what containers (and how many) you are running.

8GB probably would be just enough, your docker containers sound smaller than mine, but my feeling is it's a little too close for comfort and you would likely regret it in a couple years time, when you run something that needs 16GB.

He was one of the largest shareholders. One third of the company in fact... but he sold most of those way back when they were worth almost nothing (as in hundreds of dollars). And as far as we know virtually all the rest of his shares since then have been gifted to charities. Mostly schools.

"I do not invest. I don't do that stuff. I didn't want to be near money because it could corrupt your values." -- Steve Wozniak, five years ago

He makes a good living doing speeches at universities/etc - that's his primary wealth, not his shares in Apple. If he had kept even a tenth of the shares he once owned, he'd be richer than Elon Musk. As it is, the house he lives in is likely more than half of his total worth (it's a nice house, with six bedrooms, in a nice location... more than most people can afford but hardly extravagant, 6 bedrooms is enough to host a large family holiday party, which I think is quite reasonable).

The title of the video is pretty clear "TikTok is a Cyberweapon".

Reasonable people can disagree over wether or not that's actually true... but it's worth noting China has banned TikTok within their own country. Clearly they think it's harmful.

It's also worth noting that congress was acting on an intelligence report which has not been published. I've heard there are rumours they might declassify the report and release it. Personally I'm inclined to reserve judgement until we actually know what evidence they have but the fact China has banned it themselves is a huge red flag.

those projects shouldn’t really exist

You think web browsers should not exist? How do you write Google Chrome, and all of it's dependencies, in one page of code?

I think you're miss-understanding the article. Joel didn't say you should never rewrite an individual component in your code, he was saying you should never throw out an entire project (all of the components) and start from scratch.

He also wasn't talking about "multiple people and man-years of work". He was talking much larger projects. How many people have contributed Chrome? Not just direct contributions writing lines of code, but indirect contributions such as reporting bugs or writing documentation on how it works?

If Google were to start over, all of that would be thrown out. It just can't be done.

All you can really do is what Microsoft did with IE / Edge. Edge was a fork of Chromium which was a fork of WebKit which was a fork of KTHML which was a fork of the KDE HTML Widget. Which dates back to 1996. Internet Explorer started in 1995. Microsoft didn't start Edge from scratch, they basically shifted their team of developers over to another project that was the same age.

The smaller the project, the easier it is to do a full rewrite but realistically it's almost never a good idea unless your product is very young.

Replacing code is fine. Replacing an entire product is the mistake.

The last one isn't warning you that your trial is running out. It's warning you that if you don't start your 90 day trial soon, you will "miss out" and only be able to sign up for a shorter free trial period.

And yes, I'm aware you can disable them. My point though was that Apple definitely does do ads. Oh and by the way if a third party developer were to use notifications like those three? They'd risk having their developer account banned. It's a blatant violation of Apple's developer agreement.

That doesn't disable ads, it just means the ads won't be "personalized".

For example you'll see general interest news ads, instead of ads targeted at the things you are interested in.

What technical limitations?

I'd guess it was the small battery in the watch. A lot of features on Apple's smartwatch cause serious battery life problems unless they can be offloaded to your phone at least most of the day.

For example if you have the weather conditions on your watch face... the watch can lookup the weather but it generally will ask your phone to do that. Stuff like that is a lot easier if you control the phone operating system and aren't just running an app.

... for example if you never launch the weather app on your phone, both Android and iOS will reduce it's ability to drain the phone's battery by running in the background. Apple makes an exception to that rule for weather apps where the user has a widget an Apple Watch face. How could the Android battery management systems know what widgets are on your Apple Watch?

Um, good luck trying to get that law passed.