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Same thing whenever you see articles about Bitcoin’s energy use. Or the energy usage of any tech service/product:
- For some reason blames the product or service people are using, not politicians for failing for decades to invest in renewable energy.
- No contextual information (how much does the remittance industry use? How much energy does SWIFT, IBAN, or printing paper money use)? How efficiently do these systems actually use energy?
- No mention of the many useful things it does with that energy or why it uses energy in the way it does. (Send money across the globe in under a second for under a penny in fees to anybody with a cellphone and halfway reliable internet) (low fees available on Bitcoin lightning)
- No mention that most of that energy comes from renewables or how being a “buyer of last resort” for energy actually helps build out renewable grids since grid operators can guarantee whatever energy capacity they provision will be bought. Doesn’t even look at energy mix and demand curves.
Just ragebait tailored to their readers who already have strong negative opinions about this asset class but not about bonds or stocks or other asset classes for some reason. Even though Bitcoin has kept all its promises for 15 years in a row, never been hacked, never experienced an hour of downtime, or bank holiday, and never had its value printed away by an ever increasing supply (supply is capped at 21 million coins).
Yes, I too would love the US president to decide which social media platforms I am allowed to legally use and who I can legally communicate with. I’m so scared China is going to, checks notes, influence my opinion that I’m willing to sacrifice my free speech rights in the process. Regulate me harder, daddy! 😍
On the other hand, Snapchat absolutely should be liable for its recommendation algorithms’ actions.
Should they though? The algorithm can be as simple as “show me the user with the most liked posts”. Even the best design algorithm is going to make suggestions that users connect with sex offenders because the algorithm has no idea who is a sex offender. Unless snapchat has received an abuse report of some kind of actively monitors all accounts all the time, they have no way to know this user is dangerous. Even if they did monitor the accounts, they won’t know the user is dangerous until they do something dangerous. Even if they are doing something dangerous, it may not be obvious from their messages and photos that they are doing something dangerous. An online predator asking a 12 year old to meet them somewhere looks an awful lot like a family member asking the same thing assuming there’s not something sexually suggestive in the message. And requiring that level of monitoring is extremely expensive and invasive. It means only big companies with teams of lawyers can run online social media services. You can say goodbye to fediverse in that case, along with any expectation of privacy you or anybody else can have online. And then, well, hello turnkey fascism to the next politician who gets in power and wants to stifle dissent.
Kids being hurt is bad. We should work to build a society where it happens less often. We shouldn’t sacrifice free, private speech in exchange or relegate speech only to the biggest, most corporate, most surveilled platforms. Because kids will still get hurt, and we’ll just be here with that many fewer liberties. Let’s not forget that the US federal government has a list of known child sex offenders in the form of Epstein’s client list and yet none of them are in prison. I don’t believe that giving the government more control and surveillance over online speech is going to somehow solve this problem. In fact, it will make it harder to hold those rich, well-connected, child rapist fucks accountable because it will make dissent more dangerous to engage in.
It could be “bolted on” to the side, some people are working on that, but there are some very basic premises where they differ which make it difficult (such as an AP account being tied to an instance whereas a nostr account is not). It’s like asking “can email be intergrated with discord”. Well, yes, kinda, but it’s not going to be as smooth as if they used the same underlying protocol in the first place.
Nostr is the way. I think it’s going to end up with way more adoption than mastodon or bluesky. I wrote a post comparing nostr vs mastodon if anyone is curious. https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081
Heart disease is a major killer, this is excellent news! If you are effected by heart disease or know somebody who has been (or if you’re just enthusiastic about medicine), consider donating some of your computer’s idle time to DENIS@Home. You can set it to only run when your computer is idle, and it helps researchers who are working to refine electrical models of the heart. Fair warning: They don’t always have workunits available, I encourage you to check out the many other [email protected] projects if you are interested. World Community Grid is another great health one, as is SiDock.
No that’s not how it works. It stores learned information like “word x is more likely to follow word y than word a” or “people from country x are more likely to consume food a than b”. That is what is distributed when the AI model is shared. To learn that, it just reads books zillions of times and updates its table of likelihoods. Just like an artist might listen to a Lil Wayne album hundreds of times and each time they learn a little bit more about his rhyme style or how beats work or whatever. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s a layperson’s explanation of how it works. The book isn’t stored in there somewhere. The book’s contents aren’t transferred to other parties.
Amazing how every new generation of technology has a generation of users of the previous technology who do whatever they can do stop its advancement. This technology takes human creativity and output to a whole new level, it will advance medicine and science in ways that are difficult to even imagine, it will provide personalized educational tutoring to every student regardless of income, and these people are worried about the technicality of what the AI is trained on and often don’t even understand enough about AI to even make an argument about it. If people like this win, whatever country’s legal system they win in will not see the benefits that AI can bring. That society is shooting themselves in the foot.
Your favorite musician listened to music that inspired them when they made their songs. Listening to other people’s music taught them how to make music. They paid for the music (or somebody did via licensing fees or it was freely available for some other reason) when they listened to it in the first place. When they sold records, they didn’t have to pay the artist of every song they ever listened to. That would be ludicrous. An AI shouldn’t have to pay you because it read your book and millions like it to learn how to read and write.
The solution to this is decentralized and federated platforms. Federated platforms can’t monopolize a userbase like centralized ones can. Decentralized platforms enable the users themselves to control their own data and enable things like revenue sharing models where user’s can vote on if the platform should have ads and how money from those ads should be spent (perhaps on users who create content or on medical research or whatever they want).
Funny to see the argument being made here that this idea is crazy because people “don’t have the attention span” to monitor the robot driving the car. Like yes, that’s exactly the point, people suck at driving and maintaining constant attention, and they are worse than they were 10-20 years ago thanks to cell phones and screens. One in every hundred people you know will literally die due to this problem. For most people that means several people you knew in high school are dead because of people’s inability to drive perfectly all the time. That’s just deaths, many more will get injured or maimed. It doesn’t have to be this way. The only way out of it aside from somehow designing better humans is self-driving cars. They are already orders of magnitude safer than humans and have been so for years. Do they have bugs? Yes. But if we replaced every car on the road with a self-driving car right now we’d see the death and maiming rate plummet.
For context: we shut down the global economy for a virus with an estimated 1% mortality rate. It was necessary to avoid hospital overwhelm and give us time to develop countermeasures. That’s the same mortality rate as driving. Obviously drivers are not overwhelming hospitals because the deaths are spread out over a longer time period. But nonetheless I think it’s an interesting comparison.
So ban it on government devices. China spying on me personally has no national security implications. That goes the same for pretty much every other American citizen. Add to that, most other apps are spying in the same way and then re-selling that data globally to the highest bidder. It’s not about national security. Pushes to infringe on our rights never have been, that’s just the excuse they use.
They do actually care about getting re-elected. The more they hear from constituents about issue A, the more likely they are to vote some way on issue A. Do they ignore many of their constituents concerns? Of course. But if we never make them heard, they will certainly be ignored. It’s an imperfect system but apathy is an even worse one.
We’re getting spied on via all our apps. If the concern was really privacy, congress should enact some GDPR-like privacy legislation that applied equally to all companies and levies fines against them for non-compliance. But they aren’t doing that. This is just a bunch of hot air that is used to reduce our liberties. Same as when they say laws are “for the children” but all they really do is restrict online speech, take away your right to privacy, etc.
I couldn’t find the full list of state attorney generals who did this, but here’s a partial one. Write your reps if you think the government has no business telling you how and with what apps you are free to speak. Georgia, Alaska, Utah, Indiana, Nebraska, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and South Dakota
It’s wild to me how many people with seemingly liberal values are cheering on the US government telling them what apps they can and can’t use to get and share information. Banning it on government devices is fine, banning it outright seems like a huge 1st amendment violation and assault on democratic values. The government has no business telling you what you can listen to or say, many people have died for us to have that right and we shouldn’t give it away just because we’re scared of election interference or spying or whatever it is.
Unfortunately this is just ONE of MANY bad internet bills currently up for consideration and with bipartisan support. Help fight all of them at https://badinternetbills.com
Worth noting that BOINC (the distributed computing platform behind SETI@Home) is alive and well with over a dozen projects. You can help scientists cure diseases, map the galaxy, and more. The Large Hadron Collider even has a BOINC project you can crunch for. See the Lemmy for BOINC https://sopuli.xyz/c/boinc
The CPU will automatically scale down in most devices to keep the temp in a safe range. Batteries will swell for a while before they become an issue. As long as you aren’t browsing the open internet with it and are behind a NAT, patching probably isn’t a huge issue. But of course, always be mindful of how you use your devices particularly when it comes to security. A factory reset will remove all sensitive data from the device and give it a computational power boost as well.
Re: heat management. Putting the device on a rack (like one used for cooling cookies) and removing the case and/or cover can make a surprising difference. Heatsinks can also be applied to the case itself or to the processors themselves. I have several devices running at 100% with no issues thanks to some small heatsinks repurposed from a raspberry pi. You can get like 100 of them for $10 on amazon/ebay/etc.
How to contact your MEP. We beat this bill last time, we can beat it again https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home