there would be nothing to prevent the 99% from rightfully rising up against the 1%
Except for the other 1% who are trained and equipped to violently suppress the 98%. And if for whatever reason they fail to do the job, the killer robots will do it instead.
the barrier for getting Linux to work is too high right now for a very large part of the population
My elderly (late 80s) parents have Windows on their laptops and it would be impossible for them to use it without my regular intervention. I might as well take the plunge and set them up with Linux.
The world's top two AI startups are ignoring requests by media publishers to stop scraping their web content for free model training data, Business Insider has learned....
I'm a school bus driver, and one of my weirder experiences is listening to a middle-school boy ripping on some middle-school girl for having "only" ten thousand followers.
Take WWII for instance, being neutral kind of says yeah we are cool with both sides.
Being literally surrounded by the Third Reich meant their choices were neutrality or actually joining up with Hitler, so they really can't be criticized for choosing neutrality. They can be criticized for their actions during and after the war in helping the Nazi leaders squirrel away the wealth they stole from the Jews, something that was not necessary for a neutral nation to do.
I'd rather rip on Sweden which at least had some possibility of joining the Allies but instead supplied Germany with the high-quality iron ore they absolutely needed to keep their war machine running - the exact same thing they did in WWI. They also supplied Germany with much-needed ball bearings, but at least they sold them to the Allies as well.
Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells.
As a programmer who has studied neuroanatomy and the structure/function of neurons themselves, I remain astonished at how not like real biological nervous systems computer neural networks still are. It's like the whole field is based on one person's poor understanding of the state of biological knowledge in the late 1970s. That doesn't mean it's not effective in some ways as it is, but you'd think there'd be more experimentation in neural networks based on current biological knowledge.
The one thing that stands out to me the most is that programmatic "neurons" are basically passive units that weigh inputs and decide to fire or not. The whole net is exposed to the input, the firing decisions are worked through the net, and then whatever output is triggered. In biological neural nets, most neurons are always firing at some rate and the inputs from pre-synaptic neurons affect that rate, so in a sense the passed information is coded as a change in rate rather than as an all-or-nothing decision to fire or not fire as is the case with (most) programmatic neurons. Implementing something like this in code would be more complicated, but it could produce something much more like a living organism which is always doing something rather than passively waiting for an input to produce some output.
And TBF there probably are a lot of people doing this kind of thing, but if so they don't get much press.
I'm a school bus driver and I work with a few Trump-supporting lesbians. It's no mystery why: they really, really hate black people and that hatred blinds them to any possible conception of their own self-interest. For good measure they're also staunchly pro-union.
I (white boy) visited India in the early '90s and brought back a bunch of rolls of half-Rupee coins as souvenirs. Turns out they were the exact same weight and diameter as US quarters (even down to the number of ridges, which makes me suspect India bought a bunch of used US minting machines to make them), so I started using them at laundromats. The exchange rate at the time was 35 Rs to the dollar, so a load in the US that normally cost $1 was costing me less than 6 cents. I do feel bad for the harassment that actual Indian customers probably ended up receiving, although possibly the owners never noticed or cared.
British coins really seem absurdly overly-beefy for the monetary value they represent. I think it's a way of saving up metal for the next time the Germans need sorting out.
There were monoplanes in WWI, most notably the Fokker Eindeckers which kicked the snot out of the Allies for most of 1915 and on into 1916, though largely because of their synchronized machine guns rather than any superiority in their design.
So many shells fired it turn the soil into quick sand.
An interesting stat is that the major combatants fired approximately 300 artillery shells for every soldier that was killed - and 75mm shells (the most common caliber) are not trivial industrial products to produce. It's hard to even conceive of an industrial society devoting that much productive capacity to the task of killing somebody.
WWII wasn't even really a sequel - it's more of a classic reboot. It's almost exactly the same story as the first one, just with a few twists like Japan and the atomic bomb ending thrown in.
The UN general assembly has voted overwhelmingly to back the Palestinian bid for full UN membership, in a move that signalled Israel’s growing isolation on the world stage amid global alarm over the war in Gaza and the extent of the humanitarian crisis in the strip. The move drew an immediate rebuke from Israel. Its envoy to...
I made the mistake of giving Churu lickable cat treats to my cat. She used to come to me all the time for affection and scritches - now she just wants Churu and expresses her supreme dissatisfaction with my existence at every point in time when I am not giving her Churu.
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My small tech company (which I really liked working for) had < 100 employees. We struggled through a few near-death experiences because of slow sales and panic from our original investors, then we got saved for a few years after being purchased by a larger company (with around 1000 employees). Then that larger company (a small player in the networking equipment genre) got bought by probably the largest player in that space, and within six months everybody from the 1000-person company (excepting a few c-suite types) were laid off - the company had only been acquired in order to eliminate a very minor competitor. There is no safety in small.
When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...
I saw my first cybertruck in person the other day. It looks incredibly dumb in promotional photos, but it's astonishing how much stupider it looks in traffic surrounded by normal vehicles.
Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why::The share of workers being called back to the office has flatlined, suggesting remote work is an entrenched feature of the U.S. labor market.
I had a coworker who did exactly this back in the '90s. He was an expert in a really obscure programming/database platform/language from the 1970s (called "Cyborg") that only had a few people left that knew anything about it. It took literally hours to compile even the tiniest code changes so his job mostly involved sitting around doing nothing waiting for the compiler to finish. He managed to eventually get a WFH situation (with dialup lol) that paid him $300 an hour, then went out and got two other similar WFH jobs that paid the same since his actual work load was just a few minutes per day for each. $900 an hour in the 1990s.
I used to work for a cable company whose name rhymes with "bombast". They offer a wifi service whose name is a derivation of the word "infinity". Most of the hotspots for this wifi service are provided by the Bombast wireless routers that cable customers have in their homes. So if you're a Bombast customer, you're helping to pay the electrical bill and giving up bandwidth in order to provide Infinity wifi.
Another fun Bombast story: the founder, a man who always wore a bowtie, died a few years ago. At a memorial service in his honor, a number of vice presidents and other executives (including my boss at the time) wore bowties. Everyone who wore a bowtie to the service was fired within a week.
"Working with Gen AI" by Dandytoon
Cross posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/35627632
Microsoft really wants Local accounts gone after it erases its guide on how to create them ( www.xda-developers.com )
Microsoft removes guide on converting Microsoft accounts to Local, pushing for Microsoft sign-ins....
Louisiana's new "Ten Commandments" law actually contains eleven commandments ( boingboing.net )
OpenAI and Anthropic are ignoring an established rule that prevents bots scraping online content ( archive.ph )
The world's top two AI startups are ignoring requests by media publishers to stop scraping their web content for free model training data, Business Insider has learned....
I'll have you know, my fork of a github repo has 3 stars 😎
Members of Britain’s richest family get jail terms for exploiting Indian staff at Swiss mansion | The Straits Times ( www.straitstimes.com )
Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined ( variety.com )
What a time to be alive
Gay Republican candidate melts down when he figured out that his party is homophobic ( www.lgbtqnation.com )
Two students find security bug that could let millions do laundry for free ( www.theverge.com )
Don't like the sound of that ( lemmy.world )
Mein Cat ( lemmy.today )
UN votes to back Palestinian membership, prompting Israeli envoy to shred charter ( www.theguardian.com )
The UN general assembly has voted overwhelmingly to back the Palestinian bid for full UN membership, in a move that signalled Israel’s growing isolation on the world stage amid global alarm over the war in Gaza and the extent of the humanitarian crisis in the strip. The move drew an immediate rebuke from Israel. Its envoy to...
A difference of opinion as to the dispensation of certain canned goods ( lemmy.world )
An older pic but one of my favorites
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After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year ( www.billboard.com )
When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...
A YouTuber let the Cybertruck close on his finger to test the new sensor update. It didn't go well. ( www.businessinsider.com )
Not like that ( sh.itjust.works )
Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why ( www.cnbc.com )
Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why::The share of workers being called back to the office has flatlined, suggesting remote work is an entrenched feature of the U.S. labor market.
What's a company secret you can share now that you no longer work there?