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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • If it makes you feel any better, modern climate and economic studies have shown that even a full scale nuclear war involving every nuclear power at the height of the Cold War and when nuclear stockpiles were far larger than today we still wouldn’t have come very close to actually killing off all the humans on earth, with the vast majority of the casualties being owed to famine in regions that were/are heavily dependent on western fertilizer. Indeed entire nations in the southern hemisphere tend to get through such senecios without much of an direct effect from world war three.

    Mostly this change from earlier predictions came from being able rule out the theory of a nuclear winter as climate modeling became more accurate and we could be sure that the secondary fires from such a war could not carry ash into the upper atmosphere in significant quantities, which was practically shown when a climate change fueled wildfire in Australia got so large that it should have been able to carry the ash into the upper atmosphere under nuclear winter theory but none was observed, validating modern climate models.

    Also, dispite what some less scrupulous journalists trying to drum up clicks have posted on the Ukraine War, the Russian government itself hasn’t really made any major signaling moves with regards to bringing nukes into the conflict, and indeed has maintained and repeatedly reiterated Putin’s 2010s no first use policy when asked.

    Don’t get me wrong, this is not the result of some greater Russian morals or whatever, but just a consequence of the inherent risk that such posturing could lead to nuclear escalation and breaking the nuclear taboo or even just other nations actually believing they plan to, and such scenarios end very badly for Russia in general and Putin in particular.


  • I mean, the government has mandated that all cars built since the 90s have to have a lot of computers and sensors for engine monitoring and emissions logging so that ship has long since sailed. Automatic braking is also credited with eliminating something like 1 in 5 fatalities in car accidents, so as long as we have any motorized vehicles around at all I don’t really have a problem with the government requiring manufacturers to spend the extra 20 dollars or so per vehicle it costs them to add a few ultrasonic sensors and a microcontroller it takes to slow the vehicle to the point where a driving into a pedestrian might just be survivable.


  • I’m not the specific target of the question since my family always turns out to vote, but I’d imagine some of the big ones are people not knowing that they have a legal right in many states to take paid time off work to vote, general apathy, voter suppression making it very difficult to vote in some areas, and given the swing in turnout between presidential and non presidential elections, a lot of people who only pay attention to the presidential elections because they get nationwide coverage dispite your local and district votes bro by a whole lot more important when it comes to effects on your life and keeping extremists from implementing their policies.





  • Sonori@beehaw.orgtoTechnology@lemmy.mlToday's AI is unreasonable
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    4 months ago

    OpenAI’s algorithm like all LLM’s is designed to give you the next most likely word in a sentence based on what most frequently came next in its training data. Their main strategy has actually been to use a older and simpler transformer algorithm, and to just vastly increase the scrapped text content and recently bias with each new release.

    I would argue that any system that works by stringing sudorandom words together based on how often they appear in its input sources is not going to be able to do anything but generate bullshit, albeit bullshit that may happen to be correct by pure accident when it’s near directly quoting said input sources.


  • Most of the recent change in AI has been owed to Openai’s approach of combining a more primitive transformer with going from all the books they could pirate with GPT3 to the entire text interment with GPT4. Smaller subject specific models have made relatively little progress in the last ten to fifteen years, so I don’t think a chatbot like GPT4 that regurgitates more specific information with high accuracy is likely to be on the table anytime soon.

    A better search engine seems far more suited to such a task than a generitive system anyway.


  • Having worked with schools that use chromebooks before, generally the entire point of using them is that Google is your IT department. You don’t need any on site servers beyond a router from your isp, and can just return anything that breaks to Google for a replacement, all very cheaply. The records can all be administered by whatever teacher is least scared of computers and can use the nice gui. Especially for smaller schools with say a dozen or so total staff, not needing to pay a employee or MSP to fix the computers is a big deal.

    Nextcloud however, as much as I like using it, requires a server. It requires the ability to understand hardware requirements enogh to get a good nas, an ok understanding of dns, and when the gui updater breaks, an ability to ssh in and run the updater manually. You need ssl certs, and if your using letsencrypt port forwarding, and public dns entery, and keeping on top of updates. Jan, fourth grade teacher who plays Stardew Valley and so isn’t too terrified when asked to go into the brightly colored menu, is not going even know it exists, much less install it.

    Also, the problem with Fedora is that it also requires an domain, which means installing and configuring dedicated domain controllers, which is not an simple task. You need a deficated IT person, or you go with an MSP, and the MSP will just set up a windows environment in a few hours and be done with it.


  • Yes, you could technically use email like SMS, while the standard allows for up to five days for the message to go through that’s pretty rare, in practice it’s primarily used to send long messages from one computer to another, not a single sentence or two between phones.

    In practice, it is about as secure as SMS, as both require similar levels of dedicated effort to interpret. Most of the actors with the hardware used to intercept and decrypt SMS are the same actors who can compromise a server, or outright have acess to the backdoor they paid 10 million to put in RSA. Not that they need it, as the largest email providers by far do often work with law enforcement anyway. Both SMS and email attacks are seen at about the same rate and scales, which is to say rarely outside of government agencies where both are unfortunately routine.

    Signal is primarily designed and marketed to fufill the same basic role as SMS, as evident from just how much of an afterthought anything but the mobile app is, how said app copies the same format as SMS for messages, how it required an phone number to use and sync phone contacts, and how it did support SMS for quite some time. It is emently reasonable for Signal to have continued to have featured the messaging format most of the people it could talk with used.



  • SMS is also the common standard for talking to people.

    For the vast, vast majority of people, the technical security of, ‘hey, you want to catch a movie next saturday’, is far less important then the message actually getting through.

    Qute simply, it is far more important for a communication method to be easy and universal then to be secure against attacks the vast majority of people do not think they will ever encounter. When most people want to tell their neighbor two houses down that the dog has gotten out again being able use the app they already use to communicate is far more important to them then then a bunch of technical jargon about end to end encryption.


  • Worth noting that with the current US electrical grid an EV produces about half to too thirds of the pollution per mile, and is expected to be down to one third by the time a new electric vehicle bought today reaches the end of its life. Given that cars represent a significant portion of the transportation sectors carbon emissions, which in turn represent theory percent of the US entire emissions, I wouldn’t call halving that inside ten years insignificant, especially as there is no practical alternative that could be implemented on a similar time scale that would be prevented by said EV adoption.

    It’s also practically possible to decarbonise electricity, indeed renewables are now cheaper than fossil for new electrical generation even accounting for their intermittence, while it’s not really feasible to do so with oil. While carbon capture is a thing, it hasn’t been able to scale well dispite having been thrown money at for nearly fifty years now and there industries like aviation that can pay a lot more to get first dibs on said fuel.

    Lithium is hardly particularly damaging to the environment to mine when compared to most other mining operations, like in the case of the worlds largest lithium producer’s(Australia) the coal mines next door. Cobalt actually isn’t that relevant in mass adoption scenarios as it’s cost means it tends to be completely absent in most adorable mass market EVs which currently tend to use LFP as compared to lithium ion or nickel cadmium.

    As for recycling batteries, you just toss them in a industrial scale dielectric bath crusher and treat the output as absurdly high grade lithium-cobalt ore. The reason it has been slow to scale is not technical difficulty but rather a lack of demand, as even the first model S(one of the first properly mass produced EVs) will still have over two hundred of its two hundred and sixty mile range today. Given that one can cross the entire US with only a hundred mile range, there is still a lot more demand for reusing such cars then you get from the batteries scrap value even before considering the demand for cheap large scale batteries for things where that loss of power density doesn’t matter.

    After the used and crashed market reaches maturity and we go from being able to just reuse them, recycling will actually become a significant strength of EVs, as a majority of the emissions are in battery mining, and thusly only happen once. We have a 97% capture rate on lead acid car batteries today, and thouse are only worth dozens of dollars in material, not thousands, so I hardly expect any to make their way into landfills in sufficient quantities to compete with the byproducts of even just refining oil on water and soil conditions.




  • Sonori@beehaw.orgtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlNames
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    7 months ago

    You know, it would be really nice if some of them actually knew what that book was talking about sometimes. From my understanding the Bible describes and condemns witchcraft as making deals with evil for power, and basically uses it as condemnation of thinking that the ends can ever justify the means by taking things to the logical extreme.

    In most modern settings at least, magic is either an inerhant trait, lots of carful study, or a bargain with a benign spirit of some variety.

    There’s is admittedly a long history of people missing the point of this, most of which stated by an utter loon trying to get back at is ex. The people at the time utterly ignored medieval Karen, but this drove him to rant a lot in writings which then got used as a source by latter assholes to justify gojng after the people they wanted to get back at.

    All of which ignores the obvious of course, which is to say the Bible doesn’t say you can’t experience story’s about sin in the first place.