- 2 Posts
- 181 Comments
FYI (and I expect to be downvoted because y’all don’t want to hear this), but when an article talks about the “global 1%” it’s probably talking about YOU.
Yes, you. And me. And probably most of the people reading this, who live in the US or another Western country and consider themselves “middle class.” WE are the global 1%.
From https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/9/15/23874111/charity-philanthropy-americans-global-rich :
If you earn $60,000 a year after tax and you don’t have kids, you’re in the richest 1 percent of the world’s population.
Also, if you prefer to measure by wealth instead of income, that’s lower than you think, too. I’m having trouble finding a more recent figure, but as of 2018, the threshold to be considered global 1% in terms of net worth was only $871,320. No, didn’t typo: it really is only hundreds of thousands, not millions or billions.
(The billionaires are more like the 0.01%.)
The project creator doesn’t mince words:
wordfreq was built by collecting a whole lot of text in a lot of languages. That used to be a pretty reasonable thing to do, and not the kind of thing someone would be likely to object to. Now, the text-slurping tools are mostly used for training generative AI, and people are quite rightly on the defensive. If someone is collecting all the text from your books, articles, Web site, or public posts, it’s very likely because they are creating a plagiarism machine that will claim your words as its own.
So I don’t want to work on anything that could be confused with generative AI, or that could benefit generative AI.
OpenAI and Google can collect their own damn data. I hope they have to pay a very high price for it, and I hope they’re constantly cursing the mess that they made themselves.
I learned Python after I already knew C, and I will forever be grateful for that.
I took an Operating Systems class in undergrad whose first assignment was to implement a simple web server in C, and it was fine. Later, I took the same prof’s grad-level class and had to do basically the same assignment again, and all I could think was “wow, this is incredibly tedious: this whole thing would be literally two lines of Python.” Python absolutely ruined my patience for writing C (or at least, for writing C socket code that has to manually juggle IPv4 and v6 struct addrinfos and whatnot).
- @grue@lemmy.world to
- •
- www.theguardian.com
- •
- 1M
- •
Every proprietary software will be enshittified eventually; it’s only a matter of time.
The only way to not be subject to the enshittification, in the long run, is to adopt a militant zero-tolerance policy against all proprietary software and insist on using only 100% Free Software instead.
I think perfect competition is impossible.
It is an ideal to be approached asymptotically, and a correct goal for consumer-protection regulation. Consider for example antitrust law, truth-in-advertising laws, product safety standards, etc. and how they directly match up with and promote those conditions.
It’s just not a system that is sustainable. The incentives are simply wrong and the society built around those incentives can’t maintain a system of perfect conditions even if one were to exist.
It’s not a system that is sustainable in a liassez-faire libertarian Hellscape, because of course capitalism left unchecked devolves into cartels. But it is a system that can be maintained with appropriate regulation.
Yes, I know. You’re a sweet summer child if you think these algorithms will be used to consistently make wealthier people pay more, as opposed to (for example) charging poor people without cars more because they can’t as easily go to a different store.
They will exploit every customer to the maximum extent that they can. Rich customers may have more ability to pay, but they also have more resiliency and options to resist the exploitation. It does not seem likely that the price discrimination would really end up as progressive in the taxation sense as you hope.
When people talk about the benefits of capitalism, what they’re generally really talking about are the benefits of perfect competition.
The capitalists themselves, of course, absolutely hate perfect competition with the burning wrath of a thousand suns.
I have personally bought several $5 Pi Zeros. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve also bought at least a half-dozen Pi Zero Ws for $5 from Microcenter (pre-pandemic), even though their MSRP was $10 at the time. I distinctly remember them being super cheap, but also limited to one per customer (per trip) at that price, so I’d just pop in and grab one any time I was near the Microcenter.
Well you definitely don’t want to put the power cables in the same conduit with the data cables (PoE being the exception). Run two conduits (one for power, one for data) separated by the distance specified by your local electrical code (probably at least a foot or so, and wider is better). If the conduit is metallic, then the spacing can be less.
In those conduits, run:
- The wires you actually know you need right now, and
- A pull string.
The truth is that the internet kinda needs at least some ads to be viable.
It really does not.
- Wikipedia does not need ads (it’s supported by donations).
- Bittorrent does not need ads (the load is distributed to the users themselves).
- Labor-of-love amateur websites from the '90s (that had more actual useful information than the SEO-optimized lazily-copywritten (or increasingly, AI-generated) bullshit we have today does) did not need ads.
- Fediverse services do not need ads (being a combination of donation-supported nodes and, in the case of PeerTube, Bittorrent-style load distribution).
Frankly, if all the corporate content that exists only to make a buck off advertising were deleted tomorrow, the Internet not only would remain viable, it would be better off!
That’s an interesting point there, but have you considered that even with a mechanical link and current safety features, it can still override you? I unfortunately almost drove into someone at very low speeds in a dark rainy parking lot, but the cars safety systems overrode me thankfully. I don’t think they would have been injured it was so slow, but just to show that nowadays with cars you don’t always have full control. In that case it was the brakes not steering, but modern cars can and will prevent you from changing lanes into someone in your blind spot for example.
I’ll be honest with you: all but one of the half-dozen (which is too many, BTW) cars I own have manual transmissions, and half of them don’t even have ABS, let alone any other fancy electronic nannies. I mention that to help explain the extent to which I am fundamentally Not On Board with anything that interferes with my manual control of the car. (I’m also a Linux user and a DIYer, which are some more clues to how much of a control freak I am: I expect my property to be exactly the way I want it to be and do exactly what I want it to do, and nothing else.)
Putting torque on the wheel while in these semi self driving modes disables the self driving features, but that’s software that disables it when you take over. What if that software failed and you were now fighting the self driving car also trying to steer and as you tried to steer it put equal power against you thinking the steering was rough?
Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t mind having radar cruise with lane-keeping for long trips on the freeway, but only if such a system were fail-safe enough that even if it were stuck on, yanking on the wheel hard enough would get the car to turn. I would absolutely insist on the maximum torque the self-driving system could apply being much less than the strength of the human driver. I don’t know if that’s the case in late-model vehicles or not, but if it isn’t, I would consider those vehicles to have an unsafe design.
The L2 driving system decides to go left or right and will send the same signal you would by steering left or right.
Exactly: the same signal. If the electronics controlling it receive one input from the steering wheel and a different input from the self-driving computer, are you sure it will prioritize the steering wheel input in every single possible circumstance? 'Cause I’m not!
I guess it’s just it’s own thing just like power steering is it’s own thing.
The difference between this and regular power steering perfectly illustrates my concern: the way power steering works is that it assists the driver’s movements by amplifying the force that you’ve applied to the wheel. If it fails, you can still steer the car; it’s just harder. (I know this from personal experience BTW: the power steering in my old pickup truck is out right now. I haven’t fixed it yet mostly because I’m still deciding whether I want to keep it or downgrade/simplify to a non-power steering rack.)
In contrast, if something goes wrong with this system, it is very unclear to me that the driver could override what the car wants to do, no matter how much force you apply to the steering wheel. Or, for that matter, if turning the wheel would be effective at all: you might end up just sawing the wheel left and right with no effect whatsoever on the way the tires are pointing.
I don’t like those failure modes! At least in a mechanical steering system, for it to fail completely like that would require something like a tie rod breaking or the splines in the steering column shearing off – in other words, metal ripping apart that (a) shows warning signs you can easily inspect for (e.g. deep rust or cracks on the tie rods), (b) you probably notice happening because it makes noise, and (b) probably happens kinda gradually rather than instantaneously because steel is ductile.
I’m not fully opposed to self-driving, by the way: it’s just that (a) I want the system to be Free Software so I can inspect and trust the code, and (b) I want it to be coupled to the steering column with a belt or a clutch or something that can slip and allow me to mechanically override it if I yank hard enough on the steering wheel.
Obviously this is first gen tech in cars, but it’s been around for quite awhile in aviation with no backup mechanical link, we haven’t all died yet.
First of all, aviation has vastly more stringent oversight than cars do, in terms of manufacturing regulations, maintenance regulations, and pilot regulations.
Second, fly-by-wire passenger jets are also just categorically different not because it’s flying vs. ground transport, but also because it’s public transport vs. an owner-operated private vehicle. If I’m already entrusting my safety to a pilot or bus driver anyway and they decide fly-by-wire or drive-by-wire is acceptable, that’s one thing. But when I’m the one operating the thing myself, it’s entirely another.
subsidy queens
I read that as… "suberb queens.”
To be fair, the suburbs are a Ponzi scheme and suburban homeowners are, indeed, welfare queens. In fact, they are being subsidized by the very urban apartment dwellers they try to attach that label to!
Humanity literally physically came together because it was necessary to rebuild.
I’m pretty sure that didn’t really happen until after the Vulcans showed up, TBH.
From Memory Alpha:
During the 2060s, Cochrane and his team of engineers began developing the warp drive. (Star Trek: First Contact) The challenge of inventing warp theory took Cochrane an extremely long time. (ENT: “Anomaly (ENT)”) In 2061, he was responsible for Earth’s first successful demonstration of light speed propulsion, though his work was far from complete. (VOY: “Friendship One”; ENT: “In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II” library computer file) His primary motivation for commencing warp technology was financial gain in the devastated, poverty-stricken America that existed in the wake of the Third World War.
He finally built Earth’s first warp ship, the Phoenix, in the hope its success would prove profitable and allow him to retire to a tropical island filled with naked women. A historical irony was that, contrary to the fact he went on to use the Phoenix to inaugurate an era of peace, Cochrane incorporated a weapon of mass destruction into its design; he constructed the Phoenix in a silo on a missile complex and used a Titan II missile as his launch vehicle.
(WWIII ended in 2053; First Contact was on 5 April 2063)
I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie
“Wow, rude!” – Carl Sagan, probably
- @grue@lemmy.world to
English - •
- 10M
- •
This is just yet another “fuck you” to the Chagossians, for whom it could have been the next best thing to reparations if they were given control of it.