theatlantic.com

Audacious , to Technology in The Toilet Theory of the Internet: Google is serving an audience that wants quick and easy results. That may lead to disaster.

I don't mind looking through several pages of results, but the problem is that many results are the same web domains, which causes glazed-over eyes seeing the same results. So, I think it's the search engine's fault for this behavior, at least for me.

retrospectology , (edited ) to World News in The Gaza Death Toll Is Confusing And Unreliable
@retrospectology@lemmy.world avatar

They killed all the people in Gaza who would be keeping track of this kind of thing, there simply isn't any infrastructure left. Gazans are eating hand to mouth because that's all they can do right now (if they're the lucky ones).

aberrate_junior_beatnik , to World News in The Israeli Defense Establishment Revolts Against Netanyahu

This has placed the prime minister in a political vise. If he commits to postwar Palestinian rule in Gaza and begins acting seriously to establish it, he loses the far right. But if he commits to resettling Gaza, he loses the Israeli majority and the international community. And so, as he has often done in the past, Netanyahu has chosen not to choose

Oh, he's chosen.

over_clox , to Not The Onion in Trump Suggests Planes Can’t Fly When It’s Not Sunny

And Elon is selling vehicles that'll break down in a carwash. Next thing you know, they'll outlaw rain...

jaschen , to Technology in EVs Could Last Nearly Forever—If Car Companies Let Them

My family bought an electric forklift for their factory in the early 90s. I think it is a Yale.

My sister has since taken over the forklift for her company and she has only replaced the batteries and the controller once.

These things are cheap to replace and not as much of a mystery as ICE engines.

I am seeing people replace old Prius hybrid batteries themselves with basic tools now.

I think the only thing I would be concern about is the crash safety for cars. Newer cars are safer. I think that would be the only draw to buy a newer vehicle.

TehWorld ,

I replaced the main battery in a Gen1 Prius. Fiddly. Had to get a strong buddy to help lift it in and out of the car, but we did it in a long weekend. A full set of 'used but tested' cells cost something like $750 but that was probably 8 years ago.

jaschen ,

Exactly. Plus the newer cells are more efficient and longer-lasting. You pretty much upgraded your vehicle.

chakan2 ,
@chakan2@lemmy.world avatar

I was going to scoff at the Prius...the battery is only 1500$.

I need a Prius frame in an El Camino body.

jaschen ,

I'm sure someone has a kit for that.

umbrella , to Technology in EVs Could Last Nearly Forever—If Car Companies Let Them
@umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

so do most electronics.

but you know, line must go up.

teawrecks , to Technology in 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement

So this could go one of two ways, I think:

  1. the "no AI" seal is self-ascribed using the honor system and over time enough studios just lie about it or walk the line closely enough that it loses all meaning and people disregard it entirely. Or,
  2. getting such a seal requires 3rd party auditing, further increasing the cost to run a studio relative to their competition, on top of not leveraging AI, resulting in those studios going out of business.
lvxferre , (edited )
@lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

3. If you lie about it and get caught people will correctly call you a liar, ridicule you, and you lose trust. Trust is essential for content creators, so you're spelling your doom. And if you find a way to lie without getting caught, you aren't part of the problem anyway.

CanadaPlus ,

And if you find a way to lie without getting caught, you aren’t part of the problem anyway.

I was about to disagree, but that's actually really interesting. Could you expand on that?

lvxferre , (edited )
@lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

Do you mind if I address this comment alongside your other reply? Both are directly connected.

I was about to disagree, but that’s actually really interesting. Could you expand on that?

If you want to lie without getting caught, your public submission should have neither the hallucinations nor stylistic issues associated with "made by AI". To do so, you need to consistently review the output of the generator (LLM, diffusion model, etc.) and manually fix it.

In other words, to lie without getting caught you're getting rid of what makes the output problematic on first place. The problem was never people using AI to do the "heavy lifting" to increase their productivity by 50%; it was instead people increasing the output by 900%, and submitting ten really shitty pics or paragraphs, that look a lot like someone else's, instead of a decent and original one. Those are the ones who'd get caught, because they're doing what you called "dumb" (and I agree) - not proof-reading their output.

Regarding code, from your other comment: note that some Linux and *BSD distributions banned AI submissions, like Gentoo and NetBSD. I believe it to be the same deal as news or art.

CanadaPlus , (edited )

Yes, sorry, I didn't realise I was replying to the same user twice.

The problem was never people using AI to do the “heavy lifting” to increase their productivity by 50%; it was instead people increasing the output by 900%, and submitting ten really shitty pics or paragraphs, that look a lot like someone else’s, instead of a decent and original one.

Exactly. I guess I'm conditioned to expect "AI is smoke and mirrors" type comments, and that's not true. They're genuinely quite impressive and can make intuitive leaps they weren't directly trained for. What they're not is aligned; they just want to create human-like output, regardless of truth, greater context or morality, because that's the only way we know how to train them.

I definitely hate searching something, and finding a website that almost reads as human with fake "authors", but provides no useful information. And I really worry for people who are less experienced spotting AI errors and filler. That's a moral issue, though, as opposed to a practical one; it seems to make ad money perfectly well for the "creators".

Regarding code, from your other comment: note that some Linux and *BSD distributions banned AI submissions, like Gentoo and NetBSD. I believe it to be the same deal as news or art.

TIL. They're going to have trouble identifying rulebreakers if contributors use the tool correctly the way we've discussed, though.

teawrecks ,

I think the first half of yours is the same as my first, and I think a lot of artists aren't against AI that produces worse art than them, they're againt AI art that was generated using stolen art. They wouldn't be part of the problem if they could honestly say they trained using only ethically licensed/their own content.

Melody ,
the_doktor , to Technology in EVs Could Last Nearly Forever—If Car Companies Let Them

Like the new LED lightbulbs. Buy one now and they last a year or so. I bought one of them WAY back when they were brand new and horribly expensive and the damn thing still works just fine.

Companies can't stand new technologies that just work. They have to build in planned obsolescence. See also: smartphones, especially iTrash that make you buy a new one every year or two because updates slow them down.

frezik ,

The problem with LEDs isn't the bit that emits lights. It's the power supply, specifically the electrolytic capacitors. Good designs either use higher quality caps, or use designs that avoid electrolytic caps altogether. Either one takes a bit more money, but the market is always in a race to the bottom.

Long term, I think we should be avoiding traditional light fixtures entirely. It's better to have a lot of little lights spread over an area rather than a few point sources in the room. That gives us the opportunity to separate the power supply from the lights entirely, like LED strips do.

cmnybo ,

The LEDs will also fail from overheating. LED bulbs don't last long in fully enclosed fixtures that were designed for incandescent bulbs.

If the bulb starts flickering, that's usually a bond wire failure in an LED. When the LED heats up the bond wire loses connection and it will reconnect when it cools down again. The LEDs are in series, so if one fails, the entire bulb goes out. Flickering can also be caused by a capacitor failure in a switch mode supply, but most LED bulbs use linear regulators with a high voltage series string of LEDs now, which also increases the chance of a bond wire failure.

The early LED bulbs that cost a fortune had huge aluminum heat sinks to keep them cool. The few that I had all lasted until the LEDs got dim.

barsoap ,

Good ones still last a long time. What fails is generally not the LED itself but the cheap-ass rectifier in a cheap-ass case that is optimised for production price instead of heat dissipation. The fixture can also be an issue as nobody designed for heat dissipation in the days of incandescent bulbs, you might be baking those poor capacitors.

And those kinds of bulbs will stay available because there's plenty of commercial users doing their due diligence on life-time costs. Washing machines, fridges? Yes, those too, though commercial ones aren't necessarily cheap. Want a solid pair of pants? Ask a construction crew what they're wearing.

BearOfaTime ,

I bought about 20 Cree bulbs 5 years ago, 15 are on about 15 hours a day. I've had 2 fail in that time.

Not a bad record in my book.

Even the off brands, IKEA, Amazon, etc, seem to last as long. They're all in open fixtures, so no cooling issues.

BobaFuttbucker ,

Please elaborate on the iTrash slowdown thing. I have an idea of what you’re referring to but want to make sure I’m right.

the_doktor ,

iPhones and iPads famously get slower, laggier, and less useful as time goes on. This is not just because of its use because even resetting one will make it just as slow as before. Sure, as we move forward we get more demanding applications and such, but it seriously doesn't seem like that scales properly with the ability of the hardware, almost like Apple intentionally builds in incremental slowdowns in each patch that isn't installed on current hardware. It's apocryphal, I know, but there have been so many people complaining about their perfectly good iDevices suddenly not performing like they used to even after a refresh that makes me feel like there's at least something to it.

And don't get me wrong, Android phones seem to do the same to a certain degree. iDevices are just more famous for doing it.

keyez ,

It's not even almost, in 2019 there was a settlement where they were found to literally be making older devices artificially slower once a newer model or two was out. Settlement sign ups ended in 2020, search Apple slowdown lawsuit.

BobaFuttbucker ,

Yeah you’re talking about batterygate. That was blown way out of proportion by the media. I know this because I worked for Apple from as far back as 2012 and most iPhone repairs were from old batteries shutting off around 30% charge remaining because the battery was so consumed, it couldn’t keep up with the voltage the hardware was pulling. This led to frequent shutoffs, data corruption and a whole lot of angry customers.

In an iOS 10 update they tweaked iOS to throttle to a speed the battery could handle. So yeah, your old phone might run a little slower, but it wouldn’t shut off in the middle of use and corrupt your shit.

The problem was they didn’t elaborate in the release notes and didn’t give customers heads up as to why they did that. Then their press release was written by engineers. Tech blogs spun the story as “OMG APPLE IS SLOWING YOUR PHONE SO YOU BUY A NEW ONE”.

No.

Apple is telling your phone to dumb itself down to what your old-ass battery can handle. As a result, they also dramatically lowered the price of battery swaps for several years after this whole experience to like $29, and just this last week they officially affirmed their unwritten commitment of supporting devices with software updates for at least 5 years.

Be mad at Apple for shit they deserve please. They’re not a great company and do a lot of shitty things that deserve this kind of hatred. But I lived this. You just have a surface level understanding of what happened.

The only way to circumvent this problem is to invent a battery that doesn’t age. The person who does that is going to be a _very _ rich dude.

qprimed ,

The only way to circumvent this problem is to invent a battery that doesn’t age. The person who does that is going to be a _very _ rich dude.

or how about easily replacable batteries. yes, they can be designed in a sleek, apple-y ergonomic way. but its much easier and more profitable to make battery replacements a phone killing endeavour. this applies to other manufacturers as well.

BobaFuttbucker ,

That’s a valid criticism too. But that’s also not exclusively an apple criticism, as you pointed out.

I’m not trying to defend Apple from people who hate them, I just want to make sure we’re not being solely reactionary here.

Again, they dropped the price of out of warranty battery replacements from $99+ to $29 for (don’t quote me on this) something like 2 years as a result of the bad PR they got from this change, which was inherently done to prolong the life of a phone with a consumed battery. That’s anything but a planned obsolescence move. They fucked up the messaging to users sure, but it wasn’t just done to slow your iPhone.

qprimed ,

agreed on the batterygate thing. ars did a pretty decent writeup on the reasons behind the CPU throttling.

my issue with Apple has always been their... "its magic!" bullshit. that marketing leads to more and more e-waste as other manufacturers follow the sucessful Apple marketing trend, because, you know... its NOT actually magic and batteries are consumable items.

"Ford, how am I supposed to operate my [insanely expensive] digital watch now [that the battery is broken]?" guess i'll just get another one!

BobaFuttbucker ,

I mean, people don’t have to buy new phones every year. Especially recently YoY improvements have stagnated enough and prices have jumped enough that there’s never been less reason to.

I don’t really fault Apple for iterating their devices every year and advertising them any more than I fault literally every other manufacturer for doing the exact same thing. I just don’t understand why people like to pick out Apple specifically? It’s an industry problem, not just an Apple problem.

keyez ,

I appreciate the look behind the curtain but since apple was found in a court to have deceived customers and was proven of wrong doing it certainly is a bit more than just the media blowing it out of proportion or Apple actually doing people a favor that was misinterpreted. For example 3 days a week I use a phone from 2018 that was my daily driver for 3 years and needed to use it as a backup MFA device that I also sometimes stream and watch media on for a few hours a day. Updated it to the latest LineageOS and haven't had to worry about freezing or being slow or shutting off and corrupting my shit.

BobaFuttbucker , (edited )

I already stated as much my guy, they screwed up letting users know what was going on. First in the release notes, second in the press release they put out about it. That’s why Apple was found to have deceived customers and rightfully so.

I’m not arguing that. I’m just stating the intentions behind it have been completely dominated by the media and reader’s reactionary responses to hearing “Apple slowed down your phone”. All I ever said here was that there was a very good reason for doing so, and it wasn’t planned obsolescence.

As for lineageos, it also slows down the CPU as needed when a consumed battery cannot output the necessary power or when the operating temperature exceeds safe limits. Most OSes do that. The ones that don’t cause data corruption.

You seem to misunderstand the issue still. It’s not an OS issue. It’s an issue with a consumable part becoming consumed. Until the update, iPhones just shut off when the OS tried to pull too much power. All Apple did was trade shutoffs (compromising user data) for dynamic CPU throttling (sometimes slower performance but your data is fine). Where they screwed up was in telling the users what they were doing and why.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about iOS, Android, a fork, or something else. An OS has battery management capabilities or it doesn’t.

That doesn’t change the fact that Apple should’ve been more transparent, but you’re not avoiding this very common method of resource management because of the type of device you have, unless lineageos can defy the laws of physics and consumable batteries.

BobaFuttbucker ,

Yeah that’s not my experience. Maybe it’s yours and I apologize for that, but my 11 is still running like it was brand new.

Got any proof that “Apple intentionally builds in incremental slowdowns in each patch”? There was batterygate but that was a messaging problem.

the_doktor ,

Like I said, it's apocryphal and probably has other reasons (like the one you mention), but it's something you hear all the time about them to the point where it becomes major news and there has been some evidence presented, but as I said, it could just be newer versions of software requiring better hardware, which is still a bit iffy when you have an older phone and they want you to update to software that won't run as optimally on it. In some ways, Android actually benefits from this by just creating security patches for the life of the phone for the older version, and not updating to newer versions of Android like iOS does for old phones.

BobaFuttbucker ,

I think people just like to pick on Apple. They support old phones for at least 5 years with software and security updates, and sometimes even longer. They’ve even been known to push out the occasional security update for devices nearing a decade old.

That’s not to say they’re a perfectly innocent company. I just think there’s an Apple hate bandwagon people like to jump on. Rather than doing that, I’d like to see people focusing on the specific shitty things they do, and giving them credit for the things they get right.

Bronzie ,

Hey man, I'm an Android dude for phones. Won't even consider an iPhone as I dislike locked ecosystems for phones, but this is just not true.

Apple supports their devices way longer than any of the major Android producers do. I can't remember the last time my phone was supported more than 3-4 years, but my iPad was just rock solid and updated for 6 years. Replaced it because I wanted more RAM for scrolling endlessly on Reddit, but it was brilliant for everything else. My daughter still uses it with no issues today, two tears later.

The missus' Samsung tablet on the other hand...
What a piece of crap, and it was top of the line just three years ago.

the_doktor ,

Yep. Apple supports their stuff a lot longer, but it does seem like it slows down more and more every single update.

I'm really soured on the whole portable device thing completely because I don't like the interfaces, I don't like touchscreen (imprecise garbage), I don't like how locked down it is by default (Android over iOS here plus some Android devices are very hackable to the point of getting root, but still), and I hate the intense data collection and tracking these devices do to you. Even phones rooted with custom OSes still track you by its mobile radio triangulating your position.

The planned obsolescence is just another frustrating aspect to the damn things.

Bronzie ,

We agree on every point except Apple products slowing down significantly faster than Android. My personal experience has been the polar oposite.

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

auzas_1337 , (edited )
@auzas_1337@lemmy.zip avatar

Gonna downvote you here bröder and chip in with the people defending Apple’s products while recognizing that Apple did go through a lawsuit and that they did indeed participate in this shady-ass practice. Whether they still do - who knows, we live in a funny age.

From personal experience, not only is the build quality superior but they do last pretty long. I’ve got 3 devices personally and have had experience with many more.

My SE that’s old as hell now, for example, I’m not gonna say it runs every app just fine, but the OS functions just fine. I use it as a music player now tho and iPhone 14 as my phone.

SE2 was shit, I’ll admit.

I bought M1 Air when they just came out - it has barely slowed down.

I also just recently used a friend’s pretty ancient iPad for Procreate and that worked just fine as well.

If someone’s looking for great UI/UX out of the box and great industrial design, what other alternatives are there besides Apple? At least for smartphones there are none. If someone did put a really nice feeling (physically) smartphone in front of me and said: “hey, you can switch everything off with hardware switches and all the apps you’re used to are supported plus the UI and the camera is competent”, I might jump, maybe. Depending on how I could manage my workflow with Linux bc I’m not going to Windows and in this hypothetical scenario if I’m jumping Apple, I’m jumping everything not just the phone.

All that said, I have been giving a thought to all of this for some time and as soon as the time is right for me, I will switch, out of principle. I would love to be able to run some other OS on Apple phone hardware tho.

exanime , to Technology in EVs Could Last Nearly Forever—If Car Companies Let Them

I've been taught that capitalism is all about innovation... So I'm sure the perfect long life car is just around the corner, they wouldn't actually just build crappy cars just to force us in a never ending cycle of consumerism, right?... Right?

/S ... in case it wasn't on the nose enough

Cryophilia ,

Planned obsolescence should be illegal and strongly punished

exanime ,

Absolutely!... It would be hard to write a law against it, but definitely we should try

Planned obsolesce is like steroid for an infection in our consumerist societies

rottingleaf ,

This will make starting a business (any kind) in this area another little bit more expensive, while much less affecting the existing ones. And when everybody big is sabotaging a rule, you'll see it becoming just a symbolic fine.

EDIT: I wrote a lot of stuff elaborating it further, don't read it if you are not interested in my political views.

It's counterintuitive, but regulations won't work. Those supposedly in our favor still have such side effects, being the more bothersome the smaller you are. Those openly not in our favor work more efficiently, cause the state enforcing them is an organism much more similar to corporations than to us. They understand each other better and work in symbiosis.

All these things are the consequence of patent and trademark laws. Very basic and short-term versions of these are better than none, but what we have now is killing our civilization. Not slowing it down, not making it worse, just killing it.

Competition does work when it's not fucking prohibited! And that's what we now have, competition being discouraged.

With idealized unimpeded competition everybody really gets their needs, because the demand of poor people for housing, for example, is still something that can well be provided with the value they can give back.

I don't understand people who look at our current world and think it's not regulated enough, thus it's capitalism's fault. It's regulated to sea hell. And the more regulated a country is, the more likely it is to be an oligopoly. Say, Sweden which many people like a lot. Most of its economy is owned by a few families. They are just kinda magnanimous.

Which leads us to the question why the legal and social and economic systems become what they are, that's because they are affected by power manifested in various ways. You can't vote for the world becoming better and expect it to become better.

Openness, transparency, voluntarism, right to cut off voices you don't want to hear and right to raise your voice anywhere on any matter are things that make power more distributed and competitive.

And any regulation gives additional power to people who already have enough.

Cryophilia , (edited )

EDIT: I wrote a lot of stuff elaborating it further, don’t read it if you are not interested in my political views.

Well, I don't know that your political views are, so--

It’s counterintuitive, but regulations won’t work.

Ah, you're one of those. Say no more.

I mean literally, stop talking.

rottingleaf ,

Yes, I am literate in economics and world history, unlike you, if that's what you mean. Understandably you don't want to read further.

___ , (edited )

My uncle bought a used car built in communist east Germany. He always emphasized how it was built like a tank to last. Capitalism is great and all, but it promotes waste. Companies have an incentive to make products that fail and need to be repurchased. Planned obsolescence is fine if it was only about people craving something better. As it stands, it’s more of a forced switch with breakable parts.

AnalogyAddict ,

Communist West Germany? You mean East Germany?

Because I lived there when the Wall came down, and I can tell you based on the huge influx of Eastern Germans who had floorboards you could see through that quality was not a priority.

KillingTimeItself ,

they don't mean quality as in nice. They mean quality as in it still exists.

Those wooden floor boards are probably still there, to this day. Still shitty, but there.

turmacar ,

It's not a mystery which of the car might've been available in East Germany.

Trabants aren't exactly known for being long lasting.

Ullallulloo ,
@Ullallulloo@civilloquy.com avatar

More it still exists because they were literally incapable of replacing it. They weren't good quality; people just didn't have any other options. I'm sure we can make our cars last just as long if we clamp the screws tighter and ensure no one can afford to buy a new car.

KillingTimeItself ,

I’m sure we can make our cars last just as long if we clamp the screws tighter and ensure no one can afford to buy a new car.

doubtful, if you look at the differences between a lot of soviet engineering and a lot of western engineering, the western engineering is often much nicer, but also rather temperamental in terms of long term maintenance. It's certainly possible, but it's just a different design meta. Especially if we're talking modern western equipment, which is designed to be "service life only"

Chadus_Maximus ,

Sometimes you stuck gold. Got one of those amazing Philips electric kettles 20 years ago. Works like new still. Of course they don't make them anymore.

suction , to Technology in OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game

It’s still just LLM and therefore just autocomplete

todd_bonzalez ,

This article is about their voice synthesis product, which works in tandem with their GPT LLMs, but isn't itself an LLM.

suction ,

Moot point

MojoMcJojo ,

Some days I'm just an autocomplete

itsathursday , to Technology in The Toilet Theory of the Internet: Google is serving an audience that wants quick and easy results. That may lead to disaster.

No shit

sukhmel ,

Constipation? Gives some of the much needed focus for reading articles on-line

reddig33 , to Biodiversity in Enough With Saving the Honeybees/The Truth About the Bees

This is one of those “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” situations. The article is full of statements about how all pollinators are in trouble. The headline is clickbait. If honeybees serve as a poster child for pollinator awareness, that’s a good thing.

Ephera ,

Yeah, I despise the honey industry profiteering off of this, when they're even partially responsible for killing off proper pollinators, but if we stop using certain pesticides to protect the honey bees, that will likely benefit non-honey bees and other pollinators, too.

schwim , to Biodiversity in Enough With Saving the Honeybees/The Truth About the Bees
@schwim@lemm.ee avatar

Laypeople don't make the distinction between bees. They want to "Save the bees", not save the honey bees. Of course the sentiment will be exploited by an industry.

andrewth09 , to Not The Onion in Trump Suggests Planes Can’t Fly When It’s Not Sunny

It's like he takes fragments of memories and tries to make it a policy suggestion.

Bombing hurricanes was a theory in the atomic age and became an urban legend.

During a COVID briefing, he read a poster about how to disinfect surfaces and thought they would make suitable treatments.

With the electric aircraft thing he probably saw a tweet about NASA's Pathfinder and made a ton of assumptions about electric aircraft.

It's an incredibly stupid way to operate as someone who wants to lead the creation of policy.

intensely_human ,

And you just believe this headline, no critical thought on that front?

Snapz ,

He's an incredibly stupid man, so that makes sense.

uebquauntbez , to Not The Onion in Trump Suggests Planes Can’t Fly When It’s Not Sunny

Trump's very interesting for all astrophysicists. His brains seems like a black hole. Some say there's a whole new universe in it. Some say it's terrible, no good place to live in, in there. So who's right?

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