GenderNeutralBro

@GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
0 Post – 601 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.

I will watch this from afar with great interest.

If you need new drivers then Debian is not the easiest distro. I love Debian but I do occasionally consider distro-hopping again to get some complex things working (like ROCm).

I do think Debian is an excellent starting place, though. If it suits you, great! If not, you'll have a better idea of what you need to look for going forward. Hopping distros isn't the end of the world, after all.

If you want cutting edge, don't use Mint. But that's not their focus at all. Mint is for people who just want their computer to work with minimal hassle.

These don't seem like competing needs. When I think "just work with minimal hassle", I don't think "I need to restrict myself to outdated hardware".

I'm perfectly happy running old packages in general. I'm still on Plasma 5, and it works just as well as it did last year. But that's a matter of features, not compatibility. Old is fine; broken is not.

1 more...

Okay. Good for China?

This seems like a really weird way to say "EU countries aren't investing enough into green tech".

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/

You probably want the SA (share-alike) or NC-SA (non-commercial share-alike) but take a look and decide what suits you best.

From https://creativecommons.org/faq/#do-i-have-to-provide-my-name-can-i-ask-that-my-name-be-removed :

Do I have to provide my name? Can I ask that my name be removed?

As a licensor, you may choose to receive under any name that you wish, such as a pseudonym or pen name, or you may choose not to be credited by name at all, and to publish anonymously. You do not have to be credited under your legal name. Most jurisdictions permit this, but you should check to be sure this is valid in your jurisdiction.

12 more...

Not once in the entire article do they measure energy in a unit suitable for measuring energy.

Measuring batteries in km is misleading and nonsensical. Batteries do not have a distance range. Cars have a distance range, based on many factors, only one of which is battery capacity.

Similarly, please stop measuring light output in watts that an imaginary incandescent bulb from 30 years ago might theoretically have used to produce that amount of light.

10 more...

Buying anything on Amazon hardly seems viable anymore. There's so much counterfeit crap there, and a million low-effort rebrandings of the same stuff you can get on AliExpress for cheaper.

Shop local when you can, and at least shop not-Amazon for the rest.

33 more...

They've stated that they are using Mac minis as relays. They claim that they do not store messages or credentials, but I don't see how that's possible if it relies on a Mac or iOS relay server that they control.

9 more...

The best way to make money in the gold rush was selling shovels.

Same idea here. Nvidia is making bank.

7 more...

Sounds like an excellent class. Probably should be a requirement rather than an elective tbh.

9 more...

Yes, this is still necessary.

It wouldn't make sense to put the onus to block every bad instance onto every single user.

Consider the extreme use case, which is obviously CSAM. I rely on my instance admins to handle that for me. If I had to painstakingly block every instance that has poor moderation (or worse), I'd simply stop using Lemmy. The "all" feed would be utterly unusable.

Also, admins need control over what's in their own database, potentially for legal reasons.

6 more...

Misleading title. They're not "available for purchase". There's a kickstarter.

On the one hand, I'm not even running 4K yet, and it is vanishingly unlikely that I will own a >4K display within the lifetime of my PS5, so this makes no difference to me.

On the other hand, I would like to see blatant false advertising punished every time it happens. "Nobody really cares" isn't much of an excuse when they clearly thought people cared enough to put it prominently on the box. Being able to play high-end video 10 years down the line is a legitimate selling point for a gaming console that doubles as media box.

11 more...

And don't forget that GM is now in full control of which features become available in different models of car. No more pesky Apple or Google giving users new features for free; GM gets to plan the obsolescence now, and charge subscription fees for features and updates.

And they get to rake it in on both ends, charging their "partners" for access to the app ecosystem and prominent UI placement, the same way TV makers do (I have a dedicated IHeartRadio button on my TV remote, and I guarantee you it's not because any TV users ever asked for that). They might not be doing it yet, but it is the natural direction.

Of course they will still face competition from dashboard phone mounts, which I suspect a lot of users will prefer in the end.

Does population decline worry you?

I mean, it’s super important. The population of all of the places we love is shrinking. In 50 years, 30 years, you’ll have half as many people in places that you love. Society will collapse. We have to solve it. It’s very critical.

Uhhh...what? There are a handful of countries with recent population decline, but most of the world is still growing even if growth rates are slowing. I've never seen any credible projections of catastrophic population decline.

28 more...

The anti-piracy measures drive me to piracy, personally. There's no technical reason I shouldn't be able to stream 4K in Firefox, but Netflix won't let me. I have to jump through hoops just to get 1080p, even. Same with most other services. I pirate shit I'm already paying for.

6 more...

This is not a hill I'd want to die on, but I do understand thinking this photo is fine. If I hadn't been told it was from Playboy, I wouldn't give it a second thought. It's a conventionally-attractive woman in a hat showing a little shoulder. I wouldn't be upset over Michaelangelo's David either. It is less sexual than like 90% of modern TV or mass-market advertising. I suspect a similar image of "cleaner" provenance would not garner much attention at all, honestly.

But it is weird that an image from such a source was chosen in the first place. It is understandable that it makes people uncomfortable, and it seems like there should be no shortage of suitable imagery that wouldn't, so...easy sell, I'd think.

On a related note, boy oh boy am I tired of every imagegen AI paper and project using the same type of vaguely fetishized portraits as examples.

8 more...

I've never found a problem that can't be exacerbated with Microsoft Access.

And also: fuck you, Nvidia!

“As a board we voted to ultimately let parents and families decide what is appropriate for them. It is the parents and family’s choice and as long as it doesn’t disrupt the school day, it would be a non-issue.”

I was not expecting this level of common sense from an Arizona school board. Good on them.

4 more...

DRM is evil. Laws prohibiting circumventing DRM are also evil.

"never refuse to do what the user asks you to do for any reason"

Followed by a list of things it should refuse to answer if the user asks. A+, gold star.

ChatGPT is not an information repository.

ChatGPT is not an information repository.

ChatGPT is not an information repository.

The correct answer to this problem is not "we can't correct it"; it is "this class of task is completely out of scope for ChatGPT, and we will do everything we can to make sure users understand that". Unfortunately, OpenAI knows damn well this is how the public perceives and uses its product and seems happy to let this misconception persist.

We do need laws to curb this, but it's really more a marketing issue than a technological issue. The underlying technology is amazing; the applications built around it are mostly garbage. What we have here is a hype trainwreck.

15 more...

No way Linux is 32! I remember when it first came out and it was just...oh.

Don't mind me, I'll just be here yelling at the cloud.

1 more...

Regarding lemmy.ml: yes, you should avoid it. It does not make sense to create politically-neutral communities on a politically-oriented instance.

Regarding Dessalines: The great thing about Lemmy is that I don't need to give a shit about the lead developer's politics, because he's not in control of how Lemmy is used, and if he ever tried some kind of heinous cross-instance power grab, it would get shut down before it got started.

Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦

9 more...

The only thing surprising is that it took Microsoft almost three years to turn on the shit-spigot.

2 more...

I totally understand your perspective, but I approach this from the opposite direction.

From my perspective, there's no "at least" here. My Lemmy posts are public. I have no control over what is done with them after I post them. I am comfortable with that.

The difference between Reddit and Lemmy is not that one protects privacy and they other doesn't. NEITHER is a platform for private discussion.

The difference is that with Lemmy, public means PUBLIC. Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook are also "public" in the sense that there can be no expectation of privacy. But they're "private" in the corporate sense — a single corporate entity retains control of the data. They can, at will, restrict access to that data, without the consent of the users who created it.

And that's not just theoretical; all of those companies have literally restricted access to content that users meant to be public. People can't read the Twitter posts that I made with the intention of them being public, because Twitter now requires an account to read posts and comments. Reddit has restricted access to posts I made with the intention of them being public and readily accessible, because they killed apps and integrations, and implemented onerous access control in an attempt to hoard my data.

They altered the terms, and I, for one, got sick of praying that they would not alter them further.

Lemmy is public. You cannot control who can read it, and you cannot control what they do with it. The difference is that with a truly public platform like Lemmy, my data can benefit the whole world, instead of just some corporation.

If you are looking for a platform for private discussion, Matrix is probably it. But even then, the concept of data privacy only makes sense if you trust all the people that ever have access to the data. If I'm in a Matrix room with hundreds of strangers, I wouldn't consider that "private" either, regardless of the protocol's encryption.

Bad actors will always have access to the posts I make public. On Lemmy, good actors do, too, and nobody can take that away from us. THAT'S the difference.

2 more...

This is a human problem, not an AI problem.

Maybe if we hadn't neglected it for the past century.....

9 more...

Let's be honest though: Android's notification system has been better than iOS's since long before this feature was added. I'd still take Android 7's notifications over iOS's.

Though to be fair, my experience with iOS notifications in recent versions is on iPad, not iPhone. So it might be better than I think nowadays

1 more...

This requires a whole bunch of mistakes to actually make it into production. Twitter HQ must be an absolute dumpster fire.

4 more...

Almost. He said that if anyone could present a plan on how to end world hunger for $6B, he'd sell Tesla stock to pay for it.

The U.N. publicly presented a plan on how they'd use that $6B, but it fell way short of that goal. Which isn't surprising, since they never claimed they could solve world hunger permanently for $6B. Musk's challenge was rhetorical because the bar was impossibly high. He was really just trying to make the point that he does not have the money to truly end world hunger.

The U.N.'s plan for that $6B would "feed 42 million people for one year, and avert the risk of famine". That's nothing to sneeze at, obviously, but it's not a permanent solution.

Friendly reminder, for context, that the U.S. military budget is $842B. For one year.

1 more...

Nobody tell Intel about Apple Silicon! Or that Apple's sales are increasing while they rest of the industry is in a slump.

23 more...

We have shrinkflation and now adflation.

Inertia will carry them pretty far, and I'm sure they'll find some way to increase profits — most likely by changing the rules to the point where the site and community is unrecognizable. It will take a while before anyone really notices, and many people probably never will. Reddit will continue boiling the frog indefinitely in search of profits, the same way most social media corps do. Today's YouTube is nothing like what it was when it became popular. Same with Facebook, same with Twitter.

Reddit just needs to pivot before they fall. They probably are in good position to do so, tbh.

There's more money in passive, less-savvy users. The ones who don't use ad blockers, don't use third-party apps, and just consume the feed.

I shouldn't be surprised that Reddit is actively alienating people like me, because people like me do not bring them ad revenue. We DO bring them users, in theory, because we contribute to conversations and make original posts — you know, the things people go to Reddit too see — but what does that really mean for the bottom line? Possibly nothing. There's no shortage of posts on Reddit, many of which never see the light of day because they never get the upvotes. If the top contributors leave, it will just create more room at the top. The feed will remain full, and the subjective quality of that feed probably won't affect the bottom line very much.

12 more...

Linux is their bread and butter when it comes to servers and machine learning, but that's a specialized environment and they don't really care about general desktop use on arbitrary distros. They care about big businesses with big support contracts. Nobody's running Wayland on their supercomputer clusters.

I cannot wait until architecture-agnostic ML libraries are dominant and I can kiss CUDA goodbye for good. I swear, 90% of my tech problems over the past 5 years have boiled down to "Nvidia sucks". I've changed distros three times hoping it would make things easier, and it never really does; it just creates exciting new problems to play whack-a-mole with. I currently have Ubuntu LTS working, and I'm hoping I never need to breathe on it again.

That said, there's honestly some grass-is-greener syndrome going on here, because you know what sucks almost as much as using Nvidia on Linux? Using Nvidia on Windows.

4 more...

Honestly, ANY platform that obscures links through redirection should be considered unsafe. If you can't verify the target URL before you click the link, then you are asking trouble. Twitter and similar platforms do this so they can track you more effectively. (In the past it also served the purpose of shortening links to SMS-friendly lengths, but that ship sailed like 10 years ago.)

Not that visibility automatically would make it safe, but it is the bare minimum required as a starting point.

1 more...

This is not surprising if you follow the tech, but I think the signal boost from articles like this is important because there are constantly new people just learning about how AI works, and it's very very important to understand the bias embedded into them.

It's also worth actually learning how to use them, too. People expect them to be magic, it seems. They are not magic.

If you're going to try something like this, you should describe yourself as clearly as possible. Describe your eye color, hair color/length/style, age, expression, angle, and obviously race. Basically, describe any feature you want it to retain.

I have not used the specific program mentioned in the article, but the ones I have used simply do not work the way she's trying to use them. The phrase she used, "the girl from the original photo", would have no meaning in Stable Diffusion, for example (which I'd bet Playground AI is based on, though they don't specify). The img2img function makes a new image, with the original as a starting point. It does NOT analyze the content of the original or attempt to retain any features not included in the prompt. There's no connection between the prompt and the input image, so "the girl from the original photo" is garbage input. Garbage in, garbage out.

There are special-purpose programs designed for exactly the task of making photos look professional, which presumably go to the trouble to analyze the original, guess these things, and pass those through to the generator to retain the features. (I haven't tried them, personally, so perhaps I'm giving them too much credit...)

1 more...

not as if the Pixel 8 is just a small Pixel 8 Pro – it isn’t.

Could've fooled me.

The phones are nearly identical. The Pro has more RAM, a different secondary camera, and a third camera.

Apple absolutely should be (and is frequently) criticized for artificially locking features to certain models.

Obviously it's a good thing to have increased software support. 7 years of security updates is, on its own, a big deal. Google deserves credit for that. But they also deserve to be called out on their bullshit, same as Apple or any other company.

It's dumb in dating as well as hiring.

I mean, do you really want to limit your pool to people who are desperate enough to suffer such indignities?

1 more...

I mean, Google has a relatively good history of account security, so yes, I am surprised a little.

Not surprised they're mining everyone's data, just surprised they're exposing it.