tinkeringidiot @ tinkeringidiot @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

An overreaction by members of the board that wanted to keep AI development slow and “safe”. Sudden news that there was a major advancement toward AGI (which they believe will destroy humanity, there’s a seriously a whole cult around this in AI research circles right now) that they hadn’t been told about sent them off the deep end. Those board members thought they could fire Altman and throw the brakes on, not anticipating that 700 employees would side against them and potentially migrate to Microsoft where the “AI ethics” would have no influence at all.

They shot their shot and lost massively, for themselves and their fellow believers. That attitude toward AI is now being labeled a business liability in the minds of every decision maker in the whole AI world.

It’s nice to celebrate the wins this year, but I think there were just as many warning bells.

UAW, WGA, and SAG got thrown their bones, sure, but we also watched those huge multinational companies gleefully ignore them for huge spans of time. These massive companies can just fall back on their international components, knowing the company can go on indefinitely without them, and wait for the union to run out of money. Then when the union members are desperate, the company finally comes to the table with a fraction of what the union wanted at the start.

This years events showed pretty clearly that strikes are not (always) the existential threat to the business that made organized labor so powerful in the past. I hope the movement is hearing that warning bell.

Same, I view the whole internet through uBlock and a pihole, so my value as an “impression” is virtually zero.

I’m not against for-profit websites making some money (and I run my own website, which generates a whopping $0), but Google has jumped the shark with their sketchy malware bullshit, and I’m starting to root for that organization to die.

These shenanigans have me rapidly transitioning from “I don’t want to see your annoying ads” to “I don’t want you to make any money at all”.

Well that puts the “Ethical Altruism” board members’ willingness to risk it all on such a wild dice roll in more context.

It’s probably lost their entire movement any influence on the future of AI research, but them’s the breaks.

Lots and lots (thousands) of government security requirements covering every aspect of the enclave and everyone who’s allowed to touch it.

GovCloud isn’t just some marketing label Microsoft made up to cash in. It’s a US federal system that operates in commercial clouds (AWS and Azure, thus far). And the federal government doesn’t trust cloud at all, so they’ve made earning the GovCloud designation about as painful as they possibly can.

Amazon has a good description of the standards they have to meet here, and it’s the same for Microsoft:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/latest/UserGuide/govcloud-compliance.html

Quite a bit more to it than that, but yes definitely upcharging like crazy.

There are no big tech companies that have ever not been a part of it.

So many classrooms depend on cloud-hosted teaching aids that I doubt this would be feasible. They’re far past the old days of passing around printouts, everything is online now.

This problem isn’t limited to schools. State IT infrastructure is a shambles pretty much everywhere, and there’s no relief in sight. Awful salaries, impossibly low budgets, and a total lack of planning or strategy for decades now, and they’re getting exactly what they’ve paid for.

It’s been awhile and I haven’t tried to latest hardware, but I’m sure it’s still doable. The process wasn’t terrible, just a few extra steps to add compatibility for some of the devices.

I mostly just used the guidance here:

https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

I put Ubuntu on a handful of Surface Pros a couple years ago for work, and while the process wasn’t horrible, I was wishing for something with more native support the whole time. Nice to see I wasn’t the only one.

This is how you say “wait, shit, we fucked up” in Board of Directors.

Be interesting to see how many of them still have seats by Christmas.

Someone needs to read up on hydrostatic shock.

I love guns and oppose all bans, but let’s not pretend that rifle rounds are less deadly because they’re smaller caliber. 9mm Luger wasn’t designed to drop a deer at 100 yards.

Yeah, that happens when you’ve got JP-8 running through the tap water lines.

You can be absolutely sure they’re selling it to every company and national government that will pay for it.

If you’re part of a marginalized group that some government would like to commit a human rights violation against in the last decade, chances are Google was a gleeful enabler on the government side.

Wow, that’s a shock. RIP.

I’ll most miss the musicians spreading random delight. Those were always fun to watch.

iMessage does end-to-end encryption by default, but only between iMessage clients (blue bubbles). I believe (someone correct if I’m wrong) that android’s basic messaging app does SMS by default, which does not support encryption. So iMessage can communicate with android phones, but only by falling back to basic unencrypted messaging, which it displays in a green bubble.

There are other proprietary iMessage features too, like animated messages, that don’t work for android at all. And I suppose to be fair to Apple users, it is kind of annoying having an android in a group chat because tagging a message (thumbs up or whatever) doesn’t actually tag it, it just sends a message that says says “so-and-so liked a message”. Not worth bullying someone over, but I get the irritation.

Maybe in a few hundred years when automated manufacturing is churning out low cost goods using the infinite resources found around the solar system (also gathered and processed by automated processes). But there’s no “age of jobless abundance” until the raw materials are so abundant that they’re effectively value-less. Which they are very much not, and won’t be in the lifetime of anyone currently living.

The worlds richest man needs to learn a lot of things, chief among them a little basic economics.

Blue bubble in iMessage means the message is encrypted and fully functional. Green bubble means it’s not encrypted and some features (like sharing videos) wont work properly.

Apple has gained a lot of market share in recent years, and apparently it’s a thing to make fun of that one person in a group text who’s using an android and forcing all the bubbles to be green. Kinda silly, and I’m sure Google’s ultimate goal here is getting access to more user data (over any concerns about “openness” or bullying), but there you go.

Very much this. Lithium batteries are the best battery we’ve got (at manufacturing scale) so far in terms of energy storage density, but the best we’ve got isn’t very good.

Gasoline has an energy storage density of around 13 MJ/kg. That’s a ton of energy, so much so that a vehicle can waste most of it generating so much heat that we have to bolt on a cooling system (with the associated weight) and still have enough to go highway speeds for hundreds of miles on a quantity of fuel weighing less than one of the passengers.

Toyota loves hydrogen because it’s got a storage density slightly higher than gasoline. Hydrogen has some serious volume and storage issues, but the density is there.

Contrast that with lithium ion batteries at ~0.7 MJ/kg (for the really good ones, which usually aren’t used in cars). Less waste heat, to be sure, but the bulk of the vehicles weight, the main factor in speed and travel distance, is the insane amount of material necessary to store the “fuel”.

Electric motors are far more efficient than ICE, but we need orders-of-magnitude improvements in battery storage density before EV can really take advantage of the greater efficiency. Until then manufacturers don’t have a choice, EV will be heavy and thus expensive.