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plenipotentprotogod

@ plenipotentprotogod @lemmy.world

Posts
3
Comments
84
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • What search engine do you guys use?

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  • Qwant and Ecosia are especially notable for their efforts to build an independent search index.

    For those who don't know, most "independent" search engines, including DDG, still rely on Bing or Google results behind the scenes. They basically just act as a middleman by taking your query, forwarding it to one of those providers, and then returning the results to you. Some of them will attempt to reshuffle the order of those results to push the ones they think are best towards the top, but they're still fundamentally limited to what Google and Bing choose to give them.

    Presently a lot of Qwant and Ecosia searches go through Bing, but they're collaborating to build an independent index which will allow them to become fully independent. I believe they're already serving a mix of results from Bing and their own index, with plans to bias more and more towards their index as it matures.

  • Fat labrador topology

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  • Topologically a dog is a sphere (assuming it keeps its mouth shut...

    Next time I want someone to stop talking, they're going to be very confused when I tell them to "become topilogically spherical."

  • Del Monte collapse leaves California peach growers stranded. ‘No place else to go’ Read more at: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article314486736.html

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  • If im reading the article right, it looks like the other major processor in the region (now the last one standing) is already organized as a growers cooperative. They have their own facility, and had the opportunity to buy the Del Monte one but decided against it. The bigger problem seems to be that national demand for canned peaches is declining while simultaneously imported peaches are out competing domestic ones for what market remains. To add insult to injury, the tarrifs on foreign steel have caused can prices to jump.

  • Laffy Taffy

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  • Isoamyl acetate, the chemical which is traditionally used for artificial banana flavor, was first synthesized in the UK where it was marketed as Jargonelle pear flavor. Companies importing it to the US believed that the American public wouldn't be interested in pear candy, so they decided to call it banana flavor instead.

    Also, as an aside, Lecroy now sells "sunshine" flavored sparkling water which I'm 90% sure is flavored with isoamyl acetate. I think they just decided to lean into the fact that it tastes distinctly fruity, but not like any one fruit in particular.

  • My phone, iPad, and laptop finally all use the same USB-C charger. The galaxy is at peace.

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  • Now do yourself a favor and buy a good quality cable thats at least 10ft long and rated for 240W. The feeling of having one cable that can charge any of your devices from any seat on your couch is incredible.

  • Microsoft 365's buggy Copilot 'Chat' has been summarizing confidential emails for a month — yet another AI privacy nightmare

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  • Even in the wide world of dubiously useful AI chatbots, Copilot really stands out for just how incompetent it is. The other day I was working on a PowerPoint presentation, and one of the slides included a photo with a kind of cluttered looking background. Now, I can probably count the number of things that AI is genuinely good at on one hand, and context aware image editing trends to be one of them, so I decided to click the Copilot button that Microsoft now has built directly into PowerPoint and see what happens. A chat window popped up and I concisely explained what I wanted it to do: "please remove the background from the photo on slide 5." It responded on that infuriating obseqious tone that they all have and assured me that it would be happy to help with my request just as soon as I uploaded my presentation.

    What?

    The chatbot running inside an instance of PowerPoint with my presentation open is asking me to "upload" my presentation? I explained this to it, and it came back with some BS about being unable to access the presentation because a "token expired" before requesting again that I upload my presentation. I tried a little longer to convince it otherwise, but it just kept very politely insisting that it was unable to do what I was asking for until I uploaded my presentation.

    Eventually I gave up. The photo wasn't that bad anyway.

  • This MF is quadrupling down and dropping Alien files before dropping the full, unredacted Epstein Files. GODDAMN.

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  • Oh yeah, this has happened multiple times, and the story is always the same:

    1. The government says they're going to release info on UFOs. This caused a brief flury of interest from the general public which is reinforced by the conspiracy theorists who swear that this will finally be proof of little green men at area 51, or whatever.
    2. The government takes a while to follow through, during which time the general public slowly loses interest. The conspiracy theorists start getting impatient and publicly worrying that there must be a faction within the government that's deliberately slow walking the release or even modifying the documents because they don't want The Truth to get out.
    3. The documents are finally released. They consist of 99% dry, beauracratic paperwork and 0% admissions that aliens have every visited earth, but the conspiracy theorists dig through and pull out a few scraps that can be spun to make a good headline.
    4. The nation spends at most a week talking about "video taken out the window of a fighter jet of a mysterious floating orb thats porobably just a balloon" #27, or "eye witness account from a sleep deprived 18 year old soldier who swears he saw an alien space ship while on guard duty at 2am" #382.
    5. The national news cycle moves on, and most people promptly forget about the whole thing. Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists take whatever scraps they were able to find and add these to their rotating library of bullshit to talk about. The initial promise that this was going to be irrefutable proof that aliens have visited earth is quietly forgotten. If it ever does come up, they blame that shadowy faction of the government which must have succeeded in watering down the release before publishing it.

    Rinse and repeat.

  • OpenStreetMap community @lemmy.ml
    plenipotentprotogod @lemmy.world

    The Third Place Index - a project which combines OSM and US Census data to score the availability of "third places" nationwide.

    thirdplaceindex.org

  • What's yours?

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  • I'm not sure who would be considered the "main character" of strange new worlds, but I'd be happy to have any of their jobs.

  • Everything's fine. Nothing to see here.

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  • Very well put. This is a dimension to the ongoing AI nonsense that I haven't seen brought up before, but it certainly rings true. May I say also that "They already operate at the minimum level of reflection that they're willing to tolerate." Is a hell of a sentence and I'm a little jealous that I didn't come up with it.

  • ‘It’s sick’: Trump administration uses mascot called ‘Coalie’ to push dirtiest fossil fuel

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  • There's a recent video from Hank Green outlining the very compelling argument for abandoning coal power in strictly economic terms. It turns out that even if you ignore the big picture environmental impacts like global warming and acid rain, and you also ignore the localized impacts like air pollution and chemical waste, and you ignore the other negative externalities like long term health effects on the workers, then coal is still hard to justify because natural gas plants are simply more profitable.

    Not to say that we should be ignoring any of those things, but just to make a point about how impossible it is to make a good faith argument for coal in today's world.

    https://youtu.be/IfvBx4D0Cms

  • ELI5: Why won't android just straight up run like Linux distros that almost run on any computers?

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  • Out of curiosity, is this something that RISC-V does better, or are they going down the same path as ARM?

  • Removed

    If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED.

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  • "Gunpowder caliber guano" is an absolutely amazing way to call something batshit insane and I will be taking every available opportunity to use it in conversation from now on.

  • Macron urges EU to deploy trade ‘bazooka’ against US as Trump ramps up tensions

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  • You don't even need to ban it. You just need to open up the marketplace to alternatives. Cory Doctrow has been pushing the idea that the best retaliation is to simply repeal anti-circumvention laws and allow companies to begin chipping away at the walled gardens of the tech giants. For example, John Deere famously puts software locks on its tractors so that even simple repairs require the owner to pay for a technician to come out and "authorize" the newly installed part or else the machine will refuse to start. This system could almost certainly be bypassed, but right now the law not only allows manufacturers to lock their tractors, it also forbids anyone else from unlocking them. If the EU simply repealed the law that bans circumvention then some clever EU citizen could legally reverse engineer the software running on those tractors and start a business selling unlocking software. They could make it a one-time purchase at 10x the cost of an official tech visit and make money hand over fist while still saving their customers time and money in the long term.And of course it's not just tractors. Make a third party app store for the iphone that charges half the commission of Apple. Make a tool that allows seamless account migration from Google to the independent cloud provider of your choice. A huge amount of corporate rent seeking is enabled by anti-circumvention laws.

  • cat scroll

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  • Lovecraftian Physics

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  • For what its worth, Slotin in particular knew the consequences. If i recall correctly, he had a reputation for being a bit of a "cowboy" when it came to experimental protocol. I believe the lab even had specially made tools for handling the core, but Slotin insisted on using a screwdriver because it was easier.

  • Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods

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  • European banks plan to cut 200,000 jobs as AI takes hold

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  • The bloodletting will hit hardest in back-office operations, risk management, and compliance

    Compliance? Really? They're going to put the non-deterministic halucination engines in charge of compliance?

    I can only hope that the first time this goes south the regulators understand how important it is to make an example to everyone else that a company can not escape liability for their actions just because the AI system that took those actions wasn't explicitly instructed to do so.

  • Betty Boop and 'Blondie' enter the public domain in 2026, accompanied by a trio of detectives

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  • Time to once again pitch my idea for a Super Smash Bros style fighting game with all public domain characters and a new DLC released every January 1st.

  • Zuckerberg Already Blowing Up Relationship With New Head of AI He Paid Ten Zillion Dollars to Hire

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  • The cynic in me wants to say that Facebook's foray into VR was a resounding success in that it propped up their stock price until the next fad/grift could come along and take it's place.

  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    plenipotentprotogod @lemmy.world

    Has anyone here built a Beowulf Cluster?

    spinoff.nasa.gov /Spinoff2020/it_1.html
  • Selfhosted @lemmy.world
    plenipotentprotogod @lemmy.world

    Pi-Hole or something else for network ad blocking?