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r00ty

@ r00ty @kbin.life

Posts
2
Comments
933
Joined
3 yr. ago

I'm the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

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  • I'm going to argue that it's a little of both. While I doubt Ofcom have much chance being able to actually recover money through legal channels because of US constitutional amendments, they must have thought about this and the next step is likely to be an even more draconian "great firewall of britain" moment. Which of course will likely be equally as trivial to bypass as the age verification so..

  • This CEO laid off nearly 80% of his staff because they refused to adopt AI fast enough. 2 years later, he says he’d do it again

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  • I think it's a real shame because all three of those things you mention are useful. The problem is that once they become a buzzword, then everything needs to be done using that buzzword.

    Cloud has been misused to hell and back, and I have no doubt AI will too.

  • This CEO laid off nearly 80% of his staff because they refused to adopt AI fast enough. 2 years later, he says he’d do it again

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  • I usually ignore these kind of trends. Just meet any required deadlines etc but don't engage too much. The vast majority will just disappear.

    Specifically as a software developer I cannot see a good outcome from engaging with this trend either. It's going to go one of two ways.

    1: It pans out sooner rather than later that AI wasn't the panacea they thought it was, and it either is forgotten about, or becomes a set of realized tools we use, but don't rely on.

    2: They believe it can replace us all, and so they replace us all with freshly graduated vibe "programmers" and I don't have a job anyway.

    I don't really see an upside to engaging with this in any kind of long term plan.

  • This CEO laid off nearly 80% of his staff because they refused to adopt AI fast enough. 2 years later, he says he’d do it again

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  • A lot of the large(ish) corporates are moving in this direction, including where I work. It's not unusual, I always liken large organizations to insects, just following where the others are going, and what they are doing. They don't really ever put much thought into their actions.

  • The lottery is a scam

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  • Well it's not a scam. It works exactly as advertised. But, just like in casinos, the house is always the winner.

    I made a multi-threaded UK lottery simulator that draws 68 million lotteries per second on my machine. It shows the ROI on average is around 30% meaning the "house" (lottery company/government/charities) gets 70%. Here's the last line after 5.1billion draws:

    Draws: 5,130,046,351. 3: 56,022,165, 4: 2,521,545, 5: 38,525 5+b 5,918 Jackpots: 113. Losses: 2,491,081,393. Cost £10,260,092,702, Winnings £3,058,100,000 ROI: 29.810%. 68,548,225.400 draws/s

    Yes that means you will wait on average 45.4 million draws before you hit the jackpot.

    In any case. You could implement the meme like the lottery and make money and I assure you, if you made the full info public people WOULD send you money and you'd keep the 70%..

  • Microsoft's Windows lead says the next version of Windows will be "more ambient, pervasive, and multi-modal" as AI redefines the desktop interface

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  • Ahh, keyboard. How quaint!

  • UK government suggests deleting files to save water

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  • Sure, but since per capita they can do pretty much a billion times more than me. Then, I think it should be "after them"

  • UK government suggests deleting files to save water

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  • This is analogous to the "I'm using paper straws while the billionaires take a private jet each to Venice" situation.

    So I should delete old mails so that maybe (and actually no, it won't) there will be less drives to cool in the datacentre while the techbros have entire datacentres using hundreds of terawatts of power[1] and is predicted to be using billions of cubic metres of water per year by 2027[2].

    As usual, they're looking toward the people they can influence to make changes to their lifestyle, and ignoring the people actually doing the damage because they know they will not change.

    [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024: IEA annual report showing that AI and crypto is estimated to have consumed 465tw/h of energy in 2024. [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cindygordon/2024/02/25/ai-is-accelerating-the-loss-of-our-scarcest-natural-resource-water: Forbes report stating that AI datacentres are estimated to use around 6.6 billion cubic metres of water by the year 2027.

  • Wikipedia loses challenge against UK Online Safety Act rules

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  • I think neither of us should be throwing stones in either direction right now. But yeah, this isn't great for us at all.

  • Begun the kernel wars have

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  • I can tell you why they do it. Which is to get installed at launch time (like a driver required to boot for example), so they can watch absolutely everything that loads into the system.

    But yes, I wouldn't play any game that needs a kernel anti-cheat.

  • What is stopping someone from creating a keylogger disguised as a typing game and uploading on Steam?

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  • I would argue most don't need it. But my point was that steam don't (maybe cannot?) stop it. They run the .exe. If the exe asks for admin and the user grants it, they have admin. So a malicious "game" could definitely do this.

  • Lemmy be like

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  • Now see, I like the idea of AI.

    What I don't like are the implications, and the current reality of AI.

    I see businesses embracing AI without fully understanding the limits. Stopping the hiring juniors developers, often firing large numbers of seniors because they think AI, a group of cheap post grad vibe programmers and a handful of seasoned seniors will equal the workforce they got rid of when AI, while very good is not ready to sustain this. It is destroying the career progression for the industry and even if/when they realise it was a mistake, it might already have devastated the industry by then.

    I see the large tech companies tearing through the web illegally sucking up anything they can access to pull into their ever more costly models with zero regard to the effects on the economy, the cost to the servers they are hitting, or the environment from the huge power draw creating these models requires.

    It's a nice idea, but private business cannot be trusted to do this right, we're seeing how to do it wrong, live before our eyes.

  • What is stopping someone from creating a keylogger disguised as a typing game and uploading on Steam?

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  • Aha OK. That's better than I expected then! Thanks for that. Running KDE Plasma here and I know CTRL works because I use it as PTT in several apps over XWayland. I just assumed they allowed them all.

  • What is stopping someone from creating a keylogger disguised as a typing game and uploading on Steam?

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  • In general steam is going to run a .exe for a game, and as such that's really going to be able to do anything a user process can do under windows (or linux if it has a dedicated linux binary). Steam doesn't run games inside a sandbox. That includes prompting the user to elevate the process to admin, and if the user clicks yes, being able to do anything an admin level process can.

    There may well be some pass/fail testing before they will list a game, and for sure if there were reports showing a game was doing something malware/illegal they would certainly investigate/remove games that breach this.

    But, steam is not a protection in and of itself.

  • What is stopping someone from creating a keylogger disguised as a typing game and uploading on Steam?

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  • Won't protect you from a steam game, that runs in XWayland, which allows global hotkeys (and effectively I guess key monitoring). But yes, overall it's a nice security feature.

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  • It is a weird one. I mean they're making this timeline happen.

    They have a choice. Keep trying to get "all the money" at the expense of people's lives, and need the bunker for the inevitable result of such behaviour. Or, move (back) to a more relaxed version of capitalism, still have a lot of money but not need the bunkers.

    Their choice is clear.

  • AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after it's debut — AOL Shield Browser and AOL Dialer software will be shuttered on the same day

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  • This was pretty much the very first thing I did when I got a job. Fit a second line for modem use!

  • AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after it's debut — AOL Shield Browser and AOL Dialer software will be shuttered on the same day

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  • Ahh, I had the older "stylophone" style sportster. 28.8k. I think I have 2 really old miracom couriers somewhere, inherited from when my old office closed down. Actually I might even have an IBM RS6000/220 from the same shutdown at my parent's house.

    Well that went off on a tangent.

  • Charging to tour rental properties...

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  • This is exactly it. It's always been a risk of being an estate agent/real estate agent. You take on the up-front cost on the basis you will make it back overall in commission in the long term.

    12 or so years ago, we were looking at rental properties. And not only was there none of this nonsense. They were finding extra properties to look at, in addition to the one(s) we asked for. They wanted to sell and understood they need to put in the time up-front to get that.

    But, if you can get the seller AND the buyer to pay you for your services? Damn, is that a win for them?

  • Charging to tour rental properties...

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  • So, I think a decade or so ago (maybe more), the bigger corpos went full mask off, and stopped even pretending they cared about anything but making more money. Screw the employees, screw the customer, screw the regulatory departments. Money only.

    It seems this is filtering down to more and more businesses.

    I am not sure how it is over there. Here in the UK the number of rental properties has dropped drastically. I suspect, it's because of a few changes legally here that make it not quite so lucrative to buy-to-let any more. In any case, rather than bring house prices down, it just made the rentals still on the market go up in price. As an example today for my postcode there are over 80 properties for sale (excluding retirement/shared properties) and only around 10 for rent with the same filters. It used to be closer to half the number of rental properties up until around 5 or so years ago.

    If there's a seller's (well landlord's/renter's I guess) market, they could for sure make people pay to get an edge on gaining an increasingly rare rental. It's downright scummy. But, I expect nothing less any more.