Grzmot's recent activity

  1. Comment on Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys in ~society

    Grzmot
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    The answer is yes.

    The answer is yes.

    22 votes

  3. Comment on Framework reveals 13 Pro laptop with 20-hour battery in ~tech

    Grzmot
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    It's still a presentation by an investor and the CEO of Framework. It might be cool, and I personally think that Framework is very cool, but it's just not an objective review. It's a showcase....

    It's still a presentation by an investor and the CEO of Framework. It might be cool, and I personally think that Framework is very cool, but it's just not an objective review. It's a showcase. It's an ad. That's okay. But you're not going to get a honest review.

    2 votes

  4. Comment on Replacing Lenovo’s WWAN unlock blob with a 100-line Bash script in ~comp

    Grzmot
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    Posts like these are a fantastic read, and genuinely show that propriatary code doesn't necessarily need to be special. It's often just done to save time, and thus money of the corporation. I...

    Posts like these are a fantastic read, and genuinely show that propriatary code doesn't necessarily need to be special. It's often just done to save time, and thus money of the corporation. I doubt the original unlock does anything malicious, but it was likely just easier to push through from Lenovo's side.

    But the fact that it can be accomplished by such a simple plaintext script also shows that the efficient, lazy way can also be wrong. There's no reason that I know of, that the script couldn't be the official way provided by Lenovo. Throw the dev of the script a couple bucks and adopt it into the official repo. Everyone's better off.

    6 votes

  5. Comment on Sam Altman may control our future—can he be trusted? in ~tech

    Grzmot
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    Journalists are allowed to form conclusions based on their reporting. To be frank, I think both ways work, and I understand why they chose to "stay neutral" in tone, even though they're obviously...

    Journalists are allowed to form conclusions based on their reporting. To be frank, I think both ways work, and I understand why they chose to "stay neutral" in tone, even though they're obviously writing one disparaging remark after another, but I found the conclusion at the end lack-luster considering the overwhelming amount of anecdotes depicting Altman in a negative light that the article contains.

    It's strange to write over 10 000 words, and then at the end go "Welp, it's hard to say where his hope for humanity ends and his ambition begins!", that's not the impression the rest of the article gave me.

    1 vote

  6. Comment on Donald Trump posted on Truth Social this morning that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" as his threatened attacks on Iranian infrastructure loom ahead of deadline in ~society

    Grzmot
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    There was a time when Russian propaganda did talk about nukes publically, but as far as I remember, that happened like once and even China stepped in and was like "cool it" behind the scenes.

    There was a time when Russian propaganda did talk about nukes publically, but as far as I remember, that happened like once and even China stepped in and was like "cool it" behind the scenes.

    12 votes

  7. Comment on Sam Altman may control our future—can he be trusted? in ~tech

    Grzmot
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    That happened a few times, and is mentioned in the article.

    That happened a few times, and is mentioned in the article.

    11 votes

  8. Comment on Sam Altman may control our future—can he be trusted? in ~tech

    Grzmot
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    A very long article that details the shifting goals of Sam Altman. Personally I'd call it "lying", but for some reason the authors went to an outrageous degree to avoid using that word. Maybe they...

    Even people close to Altman find it difficult to know where his “hope for humanity” ends and his ambition begins. His greatest strength has always been his ability to convince disparate groups that what he wants and what they need are one and the same. He made use of a unique historical juncture, when the public was wary of tech-industry hype and most of the researchers capable of building A.G.I. were terrified of bringing it into existence. Altman responded with a move that no other pitchman had perfected: he used apocalyptic rhetoric to explain how A.G.I. could destroy us all—and why, therefore, he should be the one to build it. Maybe this was a premeditated masterstroke. Maybe he was fumbling for an advantage. Either way, it worked.

    A very long article that details the shifting goals of Sam Altman. Personally I'd call it "lying", but for some reason the authors went to an outrageous degree to avoid using that word. Maybe they went with a neutral tone to let all the conflicting statements speak for themselves.

    35 votes

  10. Comment on Why the US Navy won't open Hormuz in ~society

    Grzmot
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    The Hormuz strait isn't an area you can invest lives and materiel to take and then occupy. Being there exposes you to rockets and drones launched from Iran, from which you have to always defend...

    The Hormuz strait isn't an area you can invest lives and materiel to take and then occupy. Being there exposes you to rockets and drones launched from Iran, from which you have to always defend yourself from. Even worse, you're very close to where the drones are getting manufactured. Iran would likely keep up the production and overwhelm enemy ships in the strait.

    Given how invested China is in supporting Russia in Ukraine, I think they would absolutely dedicate resource production to help Iran keep up its drone and rocket production. The US would have to secure enough of the country that drones can't make it to the strait, which seems unfeasible to me.

    Additionally, the strait is probably already mined and the US mothballed mine clearing ships a while back.

    Of course if the US declared total war and dedicated its entire economy it's likely they would beat Iran. But that's not the option that's on the table, and it's very realistic that even with manpower and American deaths involved, you still would not secure the strait.

    11 votes

  11. Comment on Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security in ~tech

    Grzmot
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    I think that happened because it made hosting a website approachable to non-technical users. That's what a lot of the web has been about, after all. I think for a good while, maybe even now,...

    I think that happened because it made hosting a website approachable to non-technical users. That's what a lot of the web has been about, after all. I think for a good while, maybe even now, wordpress permitted free hosting, which of course broke down the barrier towards aquiring new users to being non-existent.

    5 votes

  12. Comment on Backrooms | Official trailer in ~movies

    Grzmot
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    After the teaser some time back, we get a glimpse at the plot and it looks interesting. I'll definitely check this out in theaters.

    After the teaser some time back, we get a glimpse at the plot and it looks interesting. I'll definitely check this out in theaters.

    5 votes

  14. Comment on Israel passes death penalty [as default] law for Palestinians convincted [in military court] of lethal attacks in ~society

    Grzmot
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    Thank you for adding context to the title, I think that was very reasonable. However, I'm having trouble understanding the "default" wording. By default, does that mean that the court has no...

    Thank you for adding context to the title, I think that was very reasonable.

    However, I'm having trouble understanding the "default" wording. By default, does that mean that the court has no flexibility to change the sentence even if it wanted to?

    11 votes

  15. Comment on Nvim 0.12 released in ~comp

    Grzmot
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    Based off the 3 version numbers 0.12.0 it seems they use semantic versioning, which divides the 3 version numbers into MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. Major versions are supposed to be breaking changes, minor...

    Based off the 3 version numbers 0.12.0 it seems they use semantic versioning, which divides the 3 version numbers into MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. Major versions are supposed to be breaking changes, minor upgrades that are backwards compatible and patches for bugfixes only.

    This versioning scheme makes the most sense for libraries, i.e. code that is meant to be used by other code, because you can tell at a glance if you as the user of such libraries need to change something. Minor and patch versions are drop in replacements, major require some changes on your end to get your code to work again.

    This is really just the idea, and nothing says that you have to adhere to these rules. Sometimes software increments the major version if some new big feature is getting released.

    2 votes

  16. Comment on I think Tildes moderators and admins may need to make a decision regarding how to handle Harry Potter related posts in ~tildes

    Grzmot
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    idk if you're aware but they casted a black man as Snape in the new HBO show and it was received predictably well by certain parts of the HP fandom. By predictably well I mean people were racist.

    idk if you're aware but they casted a black man as Snape in the new HBO show and it was received predictably well by certain parts of the HP fandom.

    By predictably well I mean people were racist.

    8 votes

  17. Comment on Welcome to a multidimensional economic disaster - the AI boom wasn’t built for the polycrisis in ~tech

    Grzmot
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    The global economy has become dependent on the AI industry. Trillions of dollars are being invested into the technology and the infrastructure it relies on; in the final months of 2025, functionally all economic growth in the United States came from AI investments.

    Perhaps the clearest examples are advanced memory and training chips, which are among the most important—and are by far the most expensive—components of training any AI model. Currently, most of them are produced by two companies in South Korea and one in Taiwan. These countries, in turn, get a large majority of their crude oil and much of their liquefied natural gas—which help fuel semiconductor manufacturing—from the Persian Gulf.

    Meanwhile, Iran and Israel have begun bombing much of the fossil-fuel infrastructure in the region, which could take many years to replace.

    The situation has grown so ungainly and untenable that, if Silicon Valley is merely forced to slow down, the viability of all this spending will likely be called into question in ways that could be devastating for many.

    The [Hormuz] strait is “critical to basically every aspect of the global economy,” Sam Winter-Levy, a technology and national-security researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told us. “The AI supply chain is not insulated.”

    “There’s a reason to think we’re seeing some of the same 2008 dynamics now,” Brad Lipton, a former senior adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and now the director of corporate power and financial regulation at the Roosevelt Institute, told us. “Everyone’s getting tied up together. Banks are lending money to private credit, which in turn lends it elsewhere. That amps up the risk.”

    OpenAI, Anthropic, and others charge users for using “tokens,” the components of words processed by their bots. This means that tokens are an industrial commodity akin to, say, crude oil or steel. But unlike other commodities, the cost of each token is rapidly decreasing owing to advancements in AI’s capabilities. Kedrosky called this “a death spiral to zero.”

    At every step of the way, AI firms have appeared to prioritize speed above the physical security of data centers, supply-chain redundancy, energy efficiency and independence, political stability, even financial returns. And in that quest for unbridled growth, the AI industry has wrested ungodly amounts of capital from investors all looking for the next big thing, ensnaring the entire economy.

    14 votes

  19. Comment on Kill chain - on the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children in ~society

    Grzmot
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    Of course the most difficulty in interacting with a database lie with the edge cases. Any system is tested by those. But 90% of the actual interactions with a system are not the edge cases. Those...

    Of course the most difficulty in interacting with a database lie with the edge cases. Any system is tested by those. But 90% of the actual interactions with a system are not the edge cases. Those are called that for a reason.

    The thing about going to the local office to get something done is that it's essentially still self-service. You're just talking to another human who than actually executes the self-service task in your name. What I mean that there is rarely a particular skill or knowledge involved that you do not have. In most of these tasks, there is little inherent knowledge required other than clicking the buttons that are labeled accordingly and filling out forms in some UI. It's not like going to the mechanic, or a doctor, where you are interacting with a human who has skills you do not posess.

    Unless the processes are oblique and cumbersome by design, or because they've grown organically over the decades and are often redundant and overly complex, the clerk at the county office doesn't really do much else. Of course if you live in a system where you need to do something, but that requires filling out 15 different forms, then yeah, of course the assistance of someone who knows their shit is appreciated. But that's not what most people need. And even complex processes can be simplified. My country recently launched a pilot project where individuals can found companies through a simple web UI, which generates valid contracts and handles a lot of complicated nuances. There are limitations, it's meant for self-employed people, but it's still a welcome simplification that covers the needs of a lot of people.

    Our arguments aren't at odds with each other, though. I think what you describe is real, and especially for folks who live in the US in the aftermath of DOGE, talking about efficiency gains is going to carry with it a foul taste.

    I don't think that there's anything wrong with having a self-service app, UI, webpage whatever, that offers you list of actions that cover the needs of most people interacting with the system, and then a way to contact some help office that has people who are actually skilled and knowledgeable and can help you solve your case. But like you say, that requires that effiency gains aren't used to fire people, they're used to train them so they are at the citizen's disposal should they need to cover an edge case.

  20. Comment on The Treasury just declared the US insolvent. The media missed it. in ~society

    Grzmot
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    Probably whenever the rest of the world decides to stop using the USD as the reserve currency, and additionally, it stops being the currency that's used for trading oil. This topic is not a new...

    One really does wonder if and when it all comes crashing down, US dollar and rest of the world included.

    Probably whenever the rest of the world decides to stop using the USD as the reserve currency, and additionally, it stops being the currency that's used for trading oil.

    This topic is not a new one. The French used the term exorbitant privilege to refer to the USA's unique ability to finance its deficit through the rest of the world. The simple fact of the matter is that for a very long time, everyone wanted American dollars. Conversely, American dollars are laughingly cheap to produce. A 100 dollar bill costs probably less than one dollar to make. But the US can sell it for 100 dollars to other nations, that want 100 dollars. And a lot of nations, certainly every nation that wants to purchase oil, wants dollars.

    That's a damn good margin for the US.

    It's a lot more complicated than that, but it's the gist of it. The US is also an economic powerhouse, but when it comes to debt management, it's really just that simple. Everyone wants dollars. So the American position is pretty unique internationally, and the reason the country's debt can be so damn high.

    21 votes