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BertramDitore

@ BertramDitore @lemm.ee

Posts
1
Comments
270
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Unanimous Vote: Mississippi Becomes Third US State to Pass Bill to Ban Cultivated Meat

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  • I think the main difference is that it’s incredibly expensive to get a cultivated meat facility going at any kind of meaningful scale. It takes a long time to grow the first batch, but then you basically just need to keep it “alive” in huge vats where it can propagate, under very precise and specific conditions. But it’s much much more expensive than maintaining a herd of live animals, at least to start.

    If they get the all the ratios right, I doubt there’d be much of a difference in taste. But you’re right that opposition is mostly from meat lobbyists and anti-science bullshit.

  • Uncle Sam mulls policing social media of all would-be citizens

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  • While this is clearly Orwellian and incompatible with a free society, I've never quite understood how this kind of thing is implemented. Lemmy is the only 'social media' I use, and I don't use it under my real name. They wouldn't find anything on any social media platform for me, no matter how hard they looked, because it doesn't exist. So, would they believe me that I don't use social media? Law enforcement don't typically just believe what people say, so I'm genuinely curious how they would go about 'inspecting' someone's social media presence.

  • Amy Coney Barrett reaction to Donald Trump walking by goes viral

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  • What's your favorite sound?

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  • The soft crinkling sound of a down comforter.

  • Jamie Dimon calls U.S. government 'inefficient' and says Elon Musk's DOGE effort 'needs to be done'

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  • The Coup Has Failed

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  • That article was all over the place, largely underestimates the moment, and completely misunderstands the purpose of the laughably weak Republican pushback, but the last paragraph at least tries to clean it up.

    This is also not a call to stand down, to relax, to be less vigilant. It’s merely an observation: Public outcry has succeeded. It’s made it impossible for Trump to sustain his coup. If the people keep this up, they will succeed even more.

    I’d also moderate his language significantly. Public outcry has absolutely not succeeded, but it has helped give some ammunition to elected officials and confidence to civil servants, so it’s true that we will absolutely fail without sustained public outcry. But we are still light years away from succeeding.

  • New York Times caught passing off GOP flack as average Black voter.

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  • To add some context, one nice thing about the independent model 404 Media has gone with is that they tell us exactly what their motivations are, in their own voices (it’s only four people). On their podcast they’ve been very open about what they want, and maximizing profit is not it. They’ve talked honestly about what it costs to operate, and they’ve said the infinite growth model is not what they want to emulate. They just want to keep doing good journalism, they are not in it to get rich. Since I believe and trust their journalism, I’ll choose to believe them on the business side too, and that’s up to everyone to decide.

    I think they’re in touch with their readership enough to know that they’d lose a ton of subscribers if they sold out or started making terrible profit-driven decisions.

    But who knows, I don’t know them personally so they could just be really really good liars.

  • New York Times caught passing off GOP flack as average Black voter.

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  • These stealth edits are unacceptable. They are tantamount to the NYTimes shouting about their cowardice from the rooftops. Do they really think people won’t notice? Clearly they underestimate how satisfying it is to catch them in a lie, which is ironic for a newspaper whose reputation has been bolstered by exposing (some) lies.

    I thought correction notices were standard practice. It’s not like they can correct the hard copy, so fuck all their online readers I guess? Infuriating, but we shouldn’t expect anything better from them at this point in their downfall.

  • Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian

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  • Ah got it, thanks for the clarification.

  • Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian

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  • Yup! I should have been more specific, Mobius Sync uses syncthing on iOS.

  • Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian

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  • It’s always been free for me using Mobius Sync…

  • "Did I leave the stove on again?"

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  • Damnit Shiro, how many times do I have to shut it off for you??

  • what could human-AI collaboration look like? we try to find out with an Edgar Allan Poe story

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  • Human and AGI collaboration might be interesting, if ever real AI actually develops. But I wouldn’t call augmenting or probing of existing works of fiction with rehashed LLM sludge collaboration, I’d call it glorified and advanced plagiarism at worst, and low quality cliff notes at best.

    I would much rather read a work of creative fiction from a human being than to encounter autocorrect word predictions written into paragraphs. The idea that the text itself can be queried to gain additional meaning divorced from the author’s intention strikes me as unrealistic and not faithful to the person who originally crafted the words.

    Though I’m obviously biased against LLMs being used for this kind of thing, from lots of experience seeing how crappy they are.

  • Microsoft announces Muse AI, a Generative AI model that can generate a game environment based on visuals, players' controller actions, or both.

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  • Ugh.

  • Social Security chief steps down over DOGE access to recipient data: Reports

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  • I get what you’re saying, but in reality this isn’t always possible. If you are directed to do something by your superior and you choose not to comply, disciplinary procedures will start, and will ultimately lead to your termination. Throughout that process, the principled protest that lead to your termination would be muddied and probably forgotten. Resigning on idealistic or principled grounds sends a stronger message than allowing yourself to be fired, and least for those in the administrative state that don’t have highly visible jobs. The result is still the same either way: the action you were protesting was probably carried out anyway by someone less principled than you, but you’re out of a job and few people will ever know why.

    If you loudly resign, your message will be received by more people and will be backed and strengthened by your sacrifice. It’s fucked up that it has to go down this way, but when there are two bad choices I’m glad enough people are making the harder one that might benefit more people even at personal expense. For heads of agencies and high level staff it might be more impactful to let yourself get fired, but I think those cases will be the exception (the FBI director, for example, should have let himself get fired).

  • DeepSeek sends shock waves across Silicon Valley.

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  • Ed Zitron has the best takes on this imo. One of his pieces is linked in the posted article, but here it is again. His podcast also has some of the most grounded and hilarious insight into the absurdity of the AI bubble. If you want to hear from him in a more mainstream setting, I highly recommend the interview he did with Brooke Gladstone on On The Media. That was the first time I heard anyone really talk about the AI industry with genuine frankness and honestly.

    Basically, OpenAI, Sam Altman, and all of the big tech players have defrauded us and investors by raising laughably high amounts of money and wasting precious resources to build inferior and closed products, when any reasonable person would have known there were better ways. This whole thing also proves how essential competition is to a healthy market and producing things people actually want to use.

    In essence, DeepSeek — and I'll get into its background and the concerns people might have about its Chinese origins — released two models that perform competitively (and even beat) models from both OpenAI and Anthropic, undercut them in price, and made them open, undermining not just the economics of the biggest generative AI companies, but laying bare exactly how they work. That last point is particularly important when it comes to OpenAI's reasoning model, which specifically hid its chain of thought for fear of "unsafe thoughts" that might "manipulate the customer," then muttered under their breath that the actual reason was that it was a "competitive advantage." -Zitron

  • Red America Would Suffer Under RFK Jr.

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  • Pam Bondi Sues NY Dems For 'Prioritizing' Undocumented Migrants

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  • “Sanctuary Cities,” or policies that local law enforcement won’t actively assist ICE agents, are fully in line with Federal law. And for what it’s worth, Supreme Court precedent has made it perfectly clear that Federal agents do not have the right to commandeer state or local resources to carry out a Federal action.

    Officials in sanctuary cities obviously can’t obstruct a federal investigation or action, but they are under no obligation to help. This has long been accepted by legal experts on the right and the left.

    The country’s Attorney General flat out lying about the spirit and letter of the law shouldn’t be surprising to anyone at this point, but it’s still worth noting how far we’ve fallen.

  • Did UCLA Just Cure Baldness?

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  • 100%

    I’ve had dreams where my long locks were dramatically blowing in the wind, only to wake up and run my hands through my…well shit, that’s just my scalp.