I wish Europe would just embrace the fediverse. The techno oligarchs are not your friends and most of them are invested in the US.
If you have the lid closed, you’re looking at 3 to 15 watts to have a laptop running in the background doing some basic server shit.
Not all laptops make effective use of power with the lid closed, sadly. Not saying this as a correction, but for others to know that they need to make sure these settings are available in the bios of the system they are buying.
The term "unalive" is so cringey yet dystopian that I don't know whether to feel embarrassed or concerned when I hear it.
So you're telling me that I should just add the word trans to my code a shit ton to opt my code out of AI training?
It's very strange that you've made a post about bugs but chose not to list any of the bugs.
Like, how can we make a recommendation if we don't know what types of issues you're running into? What type of hardware you have? What expectations you have?
It just kind of screams of disgruntled user syndrome. These are community lead projects so, yes, they'll have bugs. But if people never say what they are or what issues they had with what they used, the best the rest of us can do is just guess!
Caption: What it's like to have dyslexia.
I was expecting something juicy but the dossier is basically... Anything we all already know about JD Vance?
And he's still blocking it? Hmmm... Ok, well whatever. This is why you don't use ex dot com.
I didn't believe the hype about wireless headphones until I bought some with noise cancelling and all that for around $130.
Pros:
1 - You don't realize how "tethered" you feel on older headphones until you really try to use wireless headphones. There's a certain freedom you feel when you realize you can place your phone on a hotel table but lie down in bed.
2 - Noise cancelling and noise passthrough is a transformative experience when travelling or find yourself abroad. Airports are much easier to feel relaxed in when 80% of the noise or so can be filtered out as you wait for your flight to board. Additionally, the flight experience is less annoying (no engine drone gets through, even passengers can mostly be ignored) but you still have the option for pass through if someone absolutely needs to talk to you.
3 - Many of these headphones come with some kind of EQ feature, which can occasionally mean that you get speakers with more tunability and thus slightly better bang-for-buck that works globally across apps.
4 - Audio quality. Since these are expensive drivers, you're often going to get better sound quality than those cheap 30 dollar throw aways were ever going to give.
Cons:
1 - Latency. These things could never be used in professional audio situations other than listening to a pre-rendered song for quality judgements. I don't thing gaming would be nice with these either, even if I've tried (and failed) to play counter strike on these on occasion to keep noise levels down.
2 - Mic quality of the built in is lacking on my particular headphones (Sennheiser CX Plus). They're really only intended to capture the outdoor for noise cancellation IMO, not the greatest for calls or recordings. They're servicable, but it's the area I'd like the most upgrade (and it would probably improve noise cancellation features as well.)
3 - Environmental / Sustainability Concerns: Other than people just "losing" these devices with built in batteries that are bad for the environment being a problem in and of itself, there are other long-standing concerns I have about these devices. They often require proprietary non-open software to configure, meaning if the software gets delisted, you will no longer be able to configure them until someone comes up with some kind of alternative using reverse engineering (good luck). Batteries are likely to degrade over time, meaning you'll eventually end up with a worthless ear bud on the left or right and the only solution will be to throw them out. These things are often pretty bad scoring on repairability metrics, and I can't even blame the companies producing them here because they're so small.
4 - Despite passthrough being a feature, it's hard to convey to people that you can actually hear them through the device. There should be some kind of blinking light on the outside that indicates that passthrough is enabled or something.
So I actually do love these devices, but #3 of the cons is really the biggest real issue I have with them. If they're going to cost over 100 dollars, I would like to know that these things won't just become ewaste in the same way that cheap crappy wired headphones end up being as well (which sea life often chokes on or gets tangled up in.) If they costs a premium, I would really like to know that they aren't a figurative dead end when they eventually fail.
As someone who has been going to 7-11 more now than ever in the past, I actually kind of hope they succeed in this.
The Japanese ownership has made the chain much better than it was prior in the 90s, for instance.
Yeah, I actually think this policy is 100% correct and, if more services did this instead of eating the costs, we could have a real discussion about the harm caused by arbitrary fees.
It will likely result in Apple seeking a special deal with Patreon to avoid this mess though. It's really not a good look for Apple especially as they cater themselves to the creatives market.
I don't even get how this would work. If you paywalled, say, /r/gaming, could you just make a new community called /r/freegaming? And do the moderators get paid for the communities they created?
It all feels really half-baked and a desperate plea for money from investors when the money well is drying up.
If you think about AI systems as effectively complex DSP problems and equations, then logically any system that takes inputs that are potentially the outputs can cause system feedback or recursive (destructive) loops. What scares AI companies is that, while most recursive loops are easy to detect immediately, "content loops" will be much harder to detect as the delay time between inputs is much larger compared to, say, audio or programming loops where feedback is obvious immediately.
This is effectively the theory behind the practice of data poising, and it's hard to say there's no validity to it as most AI companies are terrified of data poisoning. If it didn't work, companies wouldn't be so adamantly vocal about their distaste for model poisoning conceptually. Also, a lot of time and money is spent trying to "detect" AI content for a reason -- that reason is actually to help aid the detection of AI output which must be "valuable" to the companies to spend the resources on it.
Conversely, AI makers have learned of ways to avoid this by simply having human semantic "grading" of the content done by third parties. This is why there are so many deals going on in Africa / SE Asia where these AI companies are hiring English speakers to effectively "wash" the input by giving it contextual "extra information" and rough validation scoring. This is an expensive solution, though, so they're very much dependent on AI being the bees-knees of lucrative investment for this process to continue. I'd also argue, with the rate at which AI development has slowed down, the semantic grading of content being fed into the system also has diminishing returns. However, this is effectively a "survival of the fittest" style evolutionary simulation, where the AI is only interested in training off information it happens to find is "right" or "close enough" or whatever metric the grader finds. The feedback is less of a problem if the validity of the input can be assured or "cleaned up" to prevent unintended loops, basically.
Now, "are the programs that claim to poison the datasets effective?" Hmm, that's a difficult one to answer. Personally, I have some skepticism around these models as their origins are vague and most are not adopting an "open data" approach or even an open binary approach (freeware) for distribution. I understand that the concern from the makers is that publicly talking about how the sausage is made makes the software less effective, but it's hard to validate that the people behind these models are providing the service as intended and that they aren't doing anything with the data being sent to them for "protection." There's no assurances that they aren't training models off the data artists send in themselves, for example, or any guarantees to how that data will be used for training. So it's kind of a "miss" for me, unless there's a project someone is aware of that is both open-source and open-data (I find that 'open-source' in the AI field is a hugely misleading moniker, as AI follows a "data is king" philosophy and the program that trains the models is inherently less important as a result.)