Diff's recent activity

  1. Comment on Spotify won’t open-source to-be-bricked Car Thing, but starts refund process amid lawsuit in ~tech

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    I believe I read somewhere that they do also act as CarPlay/Android Auto receivers, although I don't know whether this will continue on unmodified devices after Spotify shutters them.

    I believe I read somewhere that they do also act as CarPlay/Android Auto receivers, although I don't know whether this will continue on unmodified devices after Spotify shutters them.

    3 votes

  2. Comment on Rabbit gaslit me, so I dug deeper in ~tech

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    The Rabbit being a physical device means it has more access than that, it can look up your location using a Wifi and Bluetooth beacon map for example. It just doesn't. That's actually quite a...

    The Rabbit being a physical device means it has more access than that, it can look up your location using a Wifi and Bluetooth beacon map for example. It just doesn't. That's actually quite a problem for a device that's supposed to be able to call an Uber for you.

    His diagnosis about the problem is incorrect but there's still a problem, and there's still no indication of where any claimed LAM might be lurking. People with actual tech skills have been running practically unimpeded through Rabbit's front and back ends and there's no sign of its existence yet. Just hardcoded actions being called by other people's LLMs.

    22 votes

  3. Comment on The lonely work of moderating Hacker News in ~tech

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    Several bloggers I follow have tried to implement technical measures to block HN users from viewing their content, that typically just makes HN more antagonistic about it. Not just the users,...

    Several bloggers I follow have tried to implement technical measures to block HN users from viewing their content, that typically just makes HN more antagonistic about it. Not just the users, either, HN itself has implemented countermeasures against the blocks.

    4 votes

  4. Comment on Does anyone play Vintage Story? in ~games

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    I've been enjoying VS quite a bit! I started out playing with a friend group that's since fallen off, but I still have fun playing on small public servers and playing solo. VS is like Minecraft...

    I've been enjoying VS quite a bit! I started out playing with a friend group that's since fallen off, but I still have fun playing on small public servers and playing solo. VS is like Minecraft mixed with Primitive Technology.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on Megathread: April Fools’ Day 2024 on the internet in ~talk

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    The staff and I on a forum for a dead game got up to some Innovative April Fools Shenanigans this year. We reversed post order so that newest posts show up first, and shuffled around the entire...

    The staff and I on a forum for a dead game got up to some Innovative April Fools Shenanigans this year. We reversed post order so that newest posts show up first, and shuffled around the entire forum UI from what it used to be. Post controls are at the top of the post, almost everything from BBCode buttons to navigation links are swapped left to right. Collectively we've probably accidentally logged out a dozen times while working on this.

    17 votes

  6. Comment on This super-Earth is the first planet confirmed to have a permanent dark side in ~space

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    From what I can find, Mercury's days are longer than its years, and are harmonic with its years, but not 1:1 tidally locked.

    From what I can find, Mercury's days are longer than its years, and are harmonic with its years, but not 1:1 tidally locked.

    6 votes

  7. Comment on Playtron: the startup hoping to Steam Deck-ify the world in ~games

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    Someone who worked on CyanogenMod should know enough to have not made that immutable OS mistake. Even the author of the article knew enough to raise eyebrows at that statement.

    Someone who worked on CyanogenMod should know enough to have not made that immutable OS mistake. Even the author of the article knew enough to raise eyebrows at that statement.

    16 votes

  8. Comment on Learning new programming languages with limited time: Rust, golang, or otherwise? in ~comp

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    I've played with both Rust and Go, and while I bounced off Rust after giving it maybe a month or two (I just could not figure out how to represent certain structures in a way that would appease...

    I've played with both Rust and Go, and while I bounced off Rust after giving it maybe a month or two (I just could not figure out how to represent certain structures in a way that would appease the borrow checker), I was almost immediately able to be productive in Go and was able to port a CHIP-8 emulator I wrote while I was learning it.

    Go is definitely very boilerplate-heavy in the form of its error handling, lots of

    if err != nil {
   return err
}

    peppering the code, but I don't personally mind it much. It's opinionated, and its opinions often align with mine. Go also heavily encourages organizing your code, without prescribing a strict way to do it. I often hear people say to split out code into functions and modules as they develop organically, there's no default template/framework for it. You're encouraged to create a place for everything, but what that place is is up to you to decide.

    10 votes

  9. Comment on Bitcoin tops $57,000 price level for first time since late 2021 in ~finance

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    That wasn't the goalpost. The goalpost was over here: And the difference between Bitcoin and other monetary assets is efficiency. Bitcoin is not efficient or capable of being a global monetary...

    Which monetary assets in history have survived on only excess energy?

    That wasn't the goalpost. The goalpost was over here:

    Bitcoin mining is often using stranded energy

    And the difference between Bitcoin and other monetary assets is efficiency. Bitcoin is not efficient or capable of being a global monetary asset, it just does not scale, either in time (as mentioned by @streblo elsewhere) or in usage, as it has a hard cap in transactions that Lightning cannot overcome.

    Speaking of efficiency, that study you linked about Bitcoin's efficiency has some awful math in it. I didn't dive fully into it, I was turned off the interesting abstract pretty quickly by the bad math, but for energy usage of printing banknotes, they cited a source that says a 96 page magazine produces X amount of energy to produce. Ignoring that this cannot be compared to the process of minting banknotes, to get the amount of energy per banknote, all they do (and they don't mention it, I had to reverse engineer their numbers), is divide the whole-magazine number by 96, getting something approximately (but higher than) a per-whole-page energy value, then multiply that by the number of banknotes.

    Even if you could equate these two different types of printing (and you can't. One is a flexible CMYK process that can print, cut, and bind anything, the other fabricates only a single design unwaveringly), that equates every single banknote to 1/96th of a magazine.

    16 votes

  10. Comment on ETF approval for bitcoin – the naked emperor’s new clothes [European Central Bank criticises US securities regulator for approving a Bitcoin ETF] in ~finance

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    There is an enormous gulf between the amount of power bitcoin uses and the amount of power almost any other monetary asset uses per unit. Just because no power is ideal doesn't mean less power...

    There is an enormous gulf between the amount of power bitcoin uses and the amount of power almost any other monetary asset uses per unit. Just because no power is ideal doesn't mean less power isn't something to strive for.

    10 votes

  11. Comment on OpenAI releases Sora: Creating video from text in ~tech

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    The red panda video is in the third row above the glitch reel, although there's a similar video in the glitch reel depicting wolf puppies spawning and collapsing in a very similar way.

    The red panda video is in the third row above the glitch reel, although there's a similar video in the glitch reel depicting wolf puppies spawning and collapsing in a very similar way.

    2 votes

  12. Comment on A peer reviewed journal with nonsense AI images was just published in ~science

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    Like with other arenas, fakery has always existed, and (in almost all cases) better than any AI could manage. The difference AI makes is the barrier to entry and the mass-produce-ability. You...

    Like with other arenas, fakery has always existed, and (in almost all cases) better than any AI could manage. The difference AI makes is the barrier to entry and the mass-produce-ability. You don't need a PhD to make a convincing photoshop, but you need substantial skill and experience and time investment. And that time investment is constant regardless of the form the fakery takes. But this? This can be automated, and can be set in motion by any one of billions of human beings with access to the open internet.

    The topic of peer review failure in this journal is here regardless of whether it's human or computer generated nonsense. The novel part is the growing question of how we discern and moderate content on the increasingly massive scales it can be generated on.

    4 votes

  13. Comment on Using work OSX machine while travelling in ~comp

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    Sometimes knowing the nature of the boundaries lets you craft much better solutions, even ones that might appear to straddle or overshoot the line with only a 30,000 foot view of the border. Maybe...

    Sometimes knowing the nature of the boundaries lets you craft much better solutions, even ones that might appear to straddle or overshoot the line with only a 30,000 foot view of the border. Maybe it's presumptuous, but it's something that comes up very often when giving advice, at least in my experience. Assuming the boundaries aren't personal or secret, more information only means better problem solving.

    5 votes

  14. Comment on Flipped bit could mark the end of Voyager 1‘s interstellar mission in ~space

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    Maybe memory.corruption? That seems more likely to be typed in for a variety of purposes, from rowhammer-type attacks to cosmic rays to software bugs.

    Maybe memory.corruption? That seems more likely to be typed in for a variety of purposes, from rowhammer-type attacks to cosmic rays to software bugs.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on I got a spam call and the automated voice that requests their reasoning for calling was my voice AI generated in ~tech

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    I checked and there's a Share button next to screened calls that exports a WAV of the call audio. The original filename started with "dobby_audio_", I wonder if that's the name of this call...

    I checked and there's a Share button next to screened calls that exports a WAV of the call audio. The original filename started with "dobby_audio_", I wonder if that's the name of this call screening system.

    4 votes

  16. Comment on I got a spam call and the automated voice that requests their reasoning for calling was my voice AI generated in ~tech

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    Seconding this. I have the Pixel with call screening and it's switched to a much more human voice, but one that sounds nothing like me. I think it's just coincidence that it happens to sound like...

    Seconding this. I have the Pixel with call screening and it's switched to a much more human voice, but one that sounds nothing like me. I think it's just coincidence that it happens to sound like OP, and there's a comment at the bottom of that thread that has listened to two pixel screening voices from two phones and reported that they also do not sound like their owners.

    10 votes

  17. Comment on How social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit in ~tech

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    Some subreddits did, some of the largest of those subreddits were the first to have their mod teams nuked from orbit.

    Some subreddits did, some of the largest of those subreddits were the first to have their mod teams nuked from orbit.

    17 votes

  18. Comment on Velocipedia: Renderings of strangers' drawings of bikes in ~arts

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    No AI here, these are all images made by the artist based on the sketches by the human participants. At the bottom of the artist's site that @cfabbro linked above there's a video showing the...

    No AI here, these are all images made by the artist based on the sketches by the human participants. At the bottom of the artist's site that @cfabbro linked above there's a video showing the creation process.

    16 votes

  19. Comment on Simple Mobile Tools bought by ZipoApps (company offering apps with ads and tracking) in ~tech

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    I was using Simple Gallery on my old phone, I recently moved to a new device though and I suppose I'll be just using the stock Google Photos for now.

    I was using Simple Gallery on my old phone, I recently moved to a new device though and I suppose I'll be just using the stock Google Photos for now.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on Tildeverse.org in ~tech

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    I highly recommend the crew at tilde.town, they're very welcoming and I've that found the wide array of projects being actively worked on makes for a great creative environment and is very inspiring.

    I highly recommend the crew at tilde.town, they're very welcoming and I've that found the wide array of projects being actively worked on makes for a great creative environment and is very inspiring.

    6 votes