brucethemoose

I’m just really tired of the parroted and reactionary “blockchain/AI bad” comments because they often have no nuance. It’s not the implementation that’s “bad”, it’s seemingly that they used the tech at all.

Agreed on that, too.

There was this one instance of a remastered” TV show, partially processed with GANs, a long time ago. I pointed this out (as apparently this little detail was forgotten with time), and I got chewed out. Reddit commenters either claimed I was lying (when I helped work on it), or declared it was now awful and intolerable just because it’s “AI”… something they had loved for years, way before the LLM bubble.

Of course it can be discussed… I’m really into (open weights) genAI myself, have been for years, *but at the same time* I’m under no illusion the space is clean. The vast majority of services are scams, many open source AI projects are autogenerated slop from someone with AI psychosis (if not outright Tech Bro scams), and that’s not even touching on what Big Tech is pushing. What I’m asserting is that a fat slab of skepticism is healthy in this kind of space. Be an enthusiast, *not a believer*. I know much less about blockchain, so perhaps I was a little zealous in judgement, but something about this project just raised a lot of red flags in my head like scam-adjacent AI projects do. *** Another thing is that the blockchain scams *haven’t gone away*, and in ten years they probably will still stubbornly persist. GenAI is going to be the same.

To illustrate what I mean more clearly, look at the top comments/replies for the NASA Artemis posts, as an example. ...It's basically all conspiracy theorists, and government skeptics. Twitter's focusing the Artemis posts on them because *it's what they want to see*, and most engaging for them. In the EFF's case, I'm not just talking about Musk's influence. The algorithm will only show the EFF to users who *would be highly engaged by it*. E.g., angry skeptics who wouldn't be swayed by the EFF anyway, or fans who already agree with the EFF. It's literally not going to show the EFF to people who need to see it, as Twitter's metrics would show it as unengaging. *** This is the "false image" I keep trying to dispel. Twitter is less and less an "even spread" of exposure like people think it is, like it *sort of* used to be, more-and-more a hyper focused bubble of what you want to hear, and *only* what you want to hear. All the changes Musk is making are amplifying that. Maybe that's fine for some orgs, but there's no point in the EFF staying in that kind of environment, regardless of ethics.

I feel like the EFF's messaging is just not going to get through to anyone *still* on Twitter. Remember, it's not a fair forum; it's an algorithm. And it's not going to show the EFF to users who need to see it.

*To be fair*, it's a consistent red flag. Blockchain is theoretically interesting. Very interesting, in certain niches. But 9 times out of 10, "blockchain-based" is code for "enshittified" or "a pyramid scheme scam from the start." And in the cases where its implementation is altruistic, it's still questionably sustainable or creates considerable overhead.

What would happen if a tanker was destroyed and spilled out there?

Imagine if you showed this to someone in ~2009.

Presumably because one needs a phone app or physical hardware (like a Yubikey) to use them. I dunno. *Shrug*

They’re selectively asking for verification to do it. That’s mixed, because:

• They’ll only ask to verify “suspicious” accounts. So all the bots that “behave” are going to stay, which is what the bots will now optimize for.

• Verification will become another form of selective enforcement. Say the wrong then, and you get either verify or get banned.

• As for the methods, see for yourself:

When confirming that there is a human behind an account, we prefer third-party tools that keep a distance between verification and Reddit itself. Any system we use will not expose your real-world identity to Reddit nor your Reddit username or activity to any third party. There are a handful of ways to do this, and I’m sure there will be more. Each have their tradeoffs:

• Passkeys (which are well supported by Apple, Google, YubiKey, and various password managers) - These are lightweight, require a human to do something, and don’t require your ID. The tradeoff is that there is no proof of individuality or anything other than “a human probably did something.” Nevertheless, it’s a great starting point.

• Third-party biometric services - For example, World ID (yes, the Orb company, though they have non-Orb solutions as well). This technology unlocks proof-of-individual without requiring your name, government ID, or a centralized database. I think the internet needs verification solutions like this, where your account information, usage data, and identity never mix.

• Third-party government ID services - In some countries, such as the UK and Australia, governments require us to use these. These are the least secure, least private, and least preferred. When we are forced to do this, we design the integrations so that we never actually see your ID information, so your Reddit data cannot be tied to you.

Draw your own conclusion.

But my take? It’s the worst of everything: Only the most primitive, obvious bots get banned. “Transparent,” sycophantic bots will all stay on Reddit, and get even stealthier. Rebellious human users will get hit with verification, at the whim of whatever opaque algorithm determines they’re “bot-like,” which is a fantastic recipe for censorship without the appearance of doing so.

And this is all if you take Spez at his word. There’s a lot of history suggesting you should not.

That's the neat part. The Fediverse doesn't eat itself; more activity on Piefed is more activity on Lemmy.

Your country going to war, as the belligerent, is more than just “news.” I get it, I can see how it’s missed, but I think that shows just how screwed up the system is here.

“Dismissing Wikipedia” is my political litmus test. To be clear, it’s never been a reliable source; we learned that in middle school. You take everything written on it with a grain of salt. …But it’s still an oasis in a desert. When some of my family started questioning its utility because of its “liberal bias,” like post-grad-educated family saying this as Fox News blares in the background, I knew things had gotten bad. I haven’t seen any extreme left question it IRL, but I feel like that’s coming too, with how tankies are skeptical of it.

So it’s not technically Chromium anymore? It’s a fork of Chromium?

Mmm, its versioning keeps up with Chromium, and the source just looks like a bunch of patches to me: github.com/imputnet/helium/tree/main/…/core Not a fork, I’d say.

My distro (CachyOS) has it packaged, so maybe you can request for yours to do it as well?

Helium is a fork, so they can keep compatibility as long as they want, theoretically.

It specifically supports (and ships with) full UBO.

Been using it for months, and I adore it. +1 Only think I wish it had is JXL support hacked in like Thorium.

Yeah, we’re gonna need more details, like your DE, GPU, maybe the monitor? But I would start by test booting images and just… see what OBS package works out of the box. Try Cachy or Nobara with KDE, plus whatever their respective wikis say about OBS usage.

That’s interesting, but what’s the point? If it’s like 2 DGX boxes in each satellite, spaced out, the interconnect between them is going to be very slow, and the individual computational power of each satellite will not be that impressive. And if you connect them all in one constructed mesh and wire them together, well, you’ve made a 200MW datacenter! The economies remain the same. If hardware gets more power efficient, well… Then why do you need to go to space anymore?

100kW? Nvidia BGX 200 servers are 14kW each, not counting the interconnect, or anything else. According to nuggets I’ve read online, we’re talking 200 megawatts for an Earth-based AI datacenter these days, without something exotic like underclocked Cerebras WSEs Plugging 200 megawatts into this: www.calctool.org/…/stefan-boltzmann-law I get about 0.46 square kilometers, depending on the coolant temperature and ultimate efficiency of the system. I have no clue what the construction of such a monstrosity would look like, but if it was a simple 0.5 inch aluminum sheet, it would weigh like 15,000 metric tons.

Well, that’s just it. Facebook makes so much money it doesn’t even matter, they can just write it off and Zuckerberg faces zero consequences. This is the same. These guys could burn many billions on space data centers, get zero returns yet face zero consequences, essentially leaving the rest of the world with the bill/wasted work.

Fair. I’m pretty sure that’s a plot point in some cyberpunk-ish sci fi.

Plugging it into this formula: projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/heatrad.php I get a circular radiator at least a kilometer wide, assuming the radiator is quite efficient, a rather modest datacenter, and very hot coolant (70C). …Realistically, the coolant temperature would need to be much lower, and dissipate much more, so the area gets very large real quick. I cannot emphasize how expensive a functional 2km+ radiator would be in space. It’s mind bogglingly expensive.

Eh, the context I was thinking of is that they are constantly playing “safety theatre” where it absolutely doesn’t matter. They’ve tried to kill open models and basically capture regulators by misleading or outright lying, for their benefit. In other words, this is a case of “a broken clock is right sometimes,” and I think they knew Trump will back down.

Yeah… Microsoft and Google have a list of employees to fire now. Trump will back off to some extent, to avoid inflaming stock markets (and his Big Tech friends heavily invested in Anthropic). And Anthropic will fire a few people and make money somehow. That’s about it.

That’s basically always been the case anyway, except for Gemini for long context, perhaps. And, of couse, prioritize open models over API. It’s: Open training models > open weights models > restrictively licensed open models > open weights models over API > Claude/Gemini > don’t bother with OpenAI/Grok

Anthropic is self righteous and self serving. Like, I like local LLMs more than most and Anthropic models are great at the moment, but don’t mistake Anhropic for having a spine.

Talk in other comment sections is this means Nvidia (or AMD, or Cerebras, or Intel or anyone) can’t legally supply Anthropic with hardware. So it effectively kills the company? And at the other extreme, a lot of Big Tech (like Palantir) is heavily reliant on Anthropic, which would unsettle the oligarchs and likely force Trump to walk back.

This is exactly my point; it’s easy to jump in and defend Valve for their good points when, at the end of the day, they take a third of all profits for themselves and have a pseudo monopoly with their platform. One can make similar points about Amazon, about how much they can save retailers, especially before they enshittified so significantly.

I think they’re talking about Steam key resellers, which I wasn’t referencing. That’s a whole other thing (and can indeed be priced lower than the main storefront, I believe).

Yeah. At some point mounting them statically becomes the more cost-effective than the sun-tracking mount, I guess.

Just like modded Minecraft.

It would make sense. Thermal concentrator cost is basically fixed: mirrors of a specific quality, tracking mounts, an eye of sauron cooling loop. That tech doesn’t change. But the bulk of photovoltaic installation cost is the panels. And those get exponentially cheaper.

Joke’s on you. They don’t actually make any money. Not unless their a monopoly that’s captured regulators anyway.

All the billionares watched a few too many Cyberpunk 20777 YouTube videos. Why do you think they’re so specifically interested in space datacenters? And AR glasses?

And scrambled eggs?

I mean, some of both curve up to Spain. They usually peter out before then, but this is placed before they fizzle out.

since it’s needed to store training data. Again, I don’t buy this. The training data isn’t actually that big, nor is training done on such a huge scale so frequently.

Aside: WTF are they using SSDs for? LLM inference in the cloud is basically only done in VRAM. Rarely stale K/V cache is cached in RAM, but new attention architectures should minimize that. Large scale training, contrary to popular belief, is a pretty rare event most data centers and businesses are incapable of. …So what do they do with so much flash storage!? Is it literally just FOMO server buying?

HDDs should be fine. No?

Well. I just FOMO ordered a SATA SSD. Thanks, OP. Mostly because I got 2x64Gb sticks, 2 months before they shot up to nearly 4X the price!

Ehhhh, except that hurricanes sometimes curl up that way.

Irony is LG has their own open weights AI: Exaone 32B. huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE It’s… not terrible. But they gave it a license from the depths of hell, that even forbids reverse engineering and basically claims all its outputs, so no one uses it. huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE/…/LICENSE Anyway, I find it darkly hilarious that they choose to snub their own research and shove copilot in instead.

AFAIK there are also problems that Chinese companies have their own tool chain, and are releasing high level truly open source solutions for AI. One interesting thing about the Chinese “AI Tigers” is the lack of Tech Bro evangelism. They see their models as tools. Not black box magic oracles, not human replacements. And they structure/productize them and such. But with AI you can use whatever tool is best value, and switch to the competition whenever you want. Big Tech is making this really hard, though. For one thing, there’s a lot of paranoia about using Chinese LLM weights. Which is totally bogus, but also understandably hard to explain. And OpenAI and such are working overtime to lock customers in. See: iOS being ChatGPT-only; no “pick your own API.” Or Disney using Sora when they should really be rolling their own finetune.

Yeah. People harp on Onlyfans, but how sexualized and “softcore teasing” Insta and even TikTok are kinda creeps me out. I have a parent who’s blissfully off of social media, and it was interesting to see their reaction to what they’re like now.

And functional! You’re looking at Dakar rally champions, and hatchbacks that were literally so fast on dirt, their league was banned.

I propose we trick our fellow Americans by making smol cars offroady enough to embarrass an F150: Look at them! Who would want a rolling brick over that? And the Ford Focus is already mostly there.

It’s literally style. Those pickup lifts often ruin durability and off-road capability.