Prophet @ dtjones @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I agree, in the context of the tweet, that purchase history is enough to build a working product that roughly meets user requirements (at least in terms of predicting consumed items). This assumes you can find enough purchase history for a given user. Even then, I have doubts about how robust such a strategy is. The sparsity in your dataset for certain items means you will either a.) be forced to remove those items from your prediction service or b.) frustrate your users with heavy prediction bias. Some items also simply won't work in this system - maybe the user only eats hotdogs in the summer. Maybe they only buy eggs with brownie mix. There will be many dependencies you are required to model to get a system like this working, and I don't believe there is any single model powerful enough to do this by itself. Directly quantifying the user's pantry via vision seems easy in comparison.

Also quite difficult from a vision perspective. Tons of potential object classes, objects with no class (e.g., leftovers, homemade things), potential obfuscation if you are monitoring the refrigerator/cabinets. If the object is in a container, how do you measure the volume remaining of that substance? This is just scratching the surface I imagine. These problems individually are maybe not crazy challenging but they are quite hard all together.

Funny that you don't even try to deny that Trump may have been involved in inciting/leading an insurrection. It's only that he hasn't been found guilty of it by the courts. How will the goalposts shift if he is found guilty?

Thanks for the catch, I edited the comment.

A lot of people in the comments are saying how this won't hold up or how unconstitutional it is but 35 fucking states have already passed anti-bds (boycotts, divestment*, and sanctions) laws that do the same thing as this bill but Israel. If the politicians are sufficiently bribed enough, they won't care what the laws actually are.

I also really like these things. I read the article, and I got the sense that their rationalization for picking BG3 as GOTY was based exclusively on the actual game design, and before I say anything else, I agree that the design is fantastic. But, I would love to see Larian get more credit for the transparency during development, their commitment to delivering an experience of the highest quality, and the fairness and respect they give to their player base.

Whether or not a person likes games like BG3 or thinks it deserves GOTY, this stuff alone should be the bar for all games, not the scummy greedy practices we've become so used to seeing. Thank you Larian Studios!

Obama's presidency was the first presidency with a truly contrarian congress. Dems should have done more when they controlled both houses, because once they lost the senate, Republicans blocked Obama's agenda in every conceivable way, and that has been their modus operandi ever since.

Just for reference, Obamacare was supposed to be fairly close to single-payer insurance, with both public and private options (which would force private insurance to compete with the government). What we got in the end was a neutered, emaciated shell of what the original bill was supposed to be, but at least insurance companies couldn't deny you based on preexisting conditions anymore. This was considered a huge win at the time. It's laughable though, because this was when everyone was pointing at Canada and claiming they had death panels because universal healthcare couldn't handle all the patients (complete bullshit/propaganda), as if our own insurance companies weren't doing exactly this.

I left out a crockpot of mostly eaten mac and cheese on the counter. I was on the couch half-asleep when I heard my keys (which were next to this crockpot) jingle. I didn't say anything, I just turned my head and saw my cat running for cover as if it had just tripped the alarms during a heist gone wrong. How do I interpret this in any way other than my cat knowing what it was doing was naughty?

It's also a state where your primary residence is shielded if you need to declare bankruptcy...

I think you have the right idea but came to the wrong conclusion. Why would anyone buy office space if there is no value in employees coming to the office? Hint: they wouldn't.

Edited to add: these properties may become a liability on their books which would impact their ability to apply for or pay for loans, as well as other negatives for the company.

Microsoft didn't "absorb" open ai, they have a partnership where Microsoft pays assloads of money to sustain openai so that Google doesn't get it. Ironically, this might be considered "long term thinking" but I wonder how long shareholders will tolerate such a hit to the books. There is supposed to be a profit sharing model here eventually (up to a certain point) but Microsoft isn't getting chatgpt, otherwise bing would have replaced chatgpt. I have to wonder if, by the time chatgpt is profitable, if there will already be better models produced by other groups (maybe even open source), especially given the pace of AI innovation. I would not be surprised if this was a net loss for MS. GPT is amazing but it has numerous drawbacks at the moment. I admit that, if they figure things out quickly, this could be a huge win for them. I would go so far as to say that this is not anti consumer at all and is exactly how the free market is supposed to work.

As for Facebook, the only data you need is that the younger generations think it's for boomers and don't use it. I'm a little older and (to your credit) I check in about once a month. I know that meta has a very powerful user data harvesting business (arguably more valuable than Facebook), but Facebook's user engagement will continue to slide if they can't capture younger users and keep millennials and gen x users on the platform. This devalues their ability to make money from ads directly, and again, they did this to themselves by destroying their reputation for short term gains. They will eventually become like Yahoo! or AOL, both of which have almost zero brand value.

I'm not sure it's entirely accurate to say these companies aren't destroying themselves though. Are they just going to explode and die all at once? Probably not, but they will likely fade to obscurity like IBM or HP (two powerhouses of the last century). I agree that exploiting customers is how they make money hand over foot (and we just roll over for it) but the point is to make the largest possible short term gains, not to maximize profit. It's important to maximize short term gains because it makes big shareholders happy, and the shareholders (e.g., the CEO and the board) want to enrich themselves. The issue with optimizing for short term gains is that you miss out on the dividends of long term effort, which is usually significantly greater.

Something I think about occasionally is how it is that a no-name startup beat the likes of Google, MS, Facebook, etc to chatgpt. Chatgpt is the single greatest innovation in search in almost 3 decades. Google's whole business relies on users needing Google's search platform to find information. Google gets to place ads here, and that makes up the largest part of their revenue, but chatgpt threatens to upend that whole business. There is the potential for a whole new generation of advertisement technology to be baked into chatgpt that delivers an unprecedented level of ad targeting. In case you need a translation, that is massive $$$$$$$$, because advertisers want their ads to be placed in front of people who will actually buy the product (and they will pay a premium for this!), not the spray and pray strategy you see today.

So yes, in a way, Google and other companies that rely on simply extracting wealth rather than innovating/building wealth risk losing billions of dollars and eventually fading to irrelevance. I really think Facebook has passed the point of no return already in this regard, and has allowed numerous social media sites to steal market share very easily.

Seems like anything you buy is somewhat of a gamble. Internal combustion engines/gasoline could be gone or (more likely) far less desirable in 10 years. As manufacturers begin switching to primarily electric cars, finding parts/labor for these vehicles may become challenging. With a hybrid, I wonder if you carry all the same risks (as far as the long term value of the vehicle) as a normal gasoline-powered car.

But maybe the timeline for this is more like 20 years.

You can see how those two things are a little different though, right?

No, not really. Contrary to your point, Bethesda has worked quite closely with Xbox a number of times (especially back in the oblivion days) and Sony has never been interested in Bethesda's ideas about games (support for Skyrim was abysmal on PlayStation and mods on PS3/4 were a joke).

Is MS a huge jerk for yanking starfield out of the hands of the majority of console gamers? Yeah totally, but Sony is also a huge jerk (and has been) for a long time when it comes to negotiating exclusivity deals, which they have been able to do because they are the number 1 console. It's really not hard to extrapolate how much leverage Sony has over the industry when you see that they have sold 75% more consoles than xbox (35 vs 20 million units sold PS5/XS). I believe the previous gen was even worse. The outcry over this would have been much smaller if the roles were reversed, because it would have just been business as usual for every gamer.

Since the starfield exclusivity thing started, this point has always stuck with me: PlayStation owners buy PlayStation because of the expectation that they will get the best exclusives (and even most other games first). It was so bizarre to see them so brazenly attack Xbox over making starfield exclusive. They couldn't see that they were beneficiaries of these same tactics for so long that they just accepted it as "the way it is." Logically, why would you ever buy an Xbox if PlayStation gets better exclusives and the other great games first? No one should be surprised when TES6 is Xbox/PC exclusive.

But doctors are required to report anything that they identify as an immediate physical threat (e.g., to the patient or because of the patient). I found out recently that this is entirely subjective - different doctors have different ideas about what constitutes a threat. So, in a lot of ways, no, medical secrecy may not protect you if you tell the wrong doctor.

We already have DNA tests for that which don't require a whole database? A comprehensive DNA database could be used for extreme evil, such as mass systemic genocide or eugenics.

It's because we like the challenge. Also how salty people get when they lose to my f-tier character.

I feel like I need to step in and personally rebuke this shit. Voting absolutely does work. Showing up to vote once isn't going to magically fix everything - it's going to take many election cycles to reverse course. US policy doesn't reflect the will of the people because we've been apathetic for so long. Saying "voting doesn't help" implies there's no point in voting, and not voting guarantees that we will lose our democracy. I'm sympathetic to those who have been hurt by the conservative and capitalist agenda in this country who are losing hope, but making claims like this essentially makes you an ally to the corpofascist machine.

Please vote.