Skip Navigation

RegalPotoo

@ RegalPotoo @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
92
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • What is in Area 51?

    Jump

  • Plus a bunch of old equipment and documents that are definitely secret and too valuable to just destroy, but no-one is entirely clear exactly how secret and valuable so it's safer to leave it guarded in place than to try and move it

  • Absent US congresswoman has been dealing with ‘dementia issues’, family says

    Jump

  • If I didn't show up to work for 6 months, they'd stop paying me - surely there would be a case to force her to return the salary she drew while not actually performing any of her duties?

  • TBH i am more excited about unlimited or atleast million context AI than AGI so that i can take code of my favorite game and make more levels, for eg: alt history BF1 mod

    Jump

  • What's stopping you from learning to mod BF1 today? Why do you need some magic AI to make this happen?

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • shrug if you think you can run 100 ft faster than concrete can fall 30 during an earthquake so strong you can't stand then more power to you I guess

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • Having lived through a major earthquake - if it's a brick or concrete tilt-slab building, you are way better off inside the building. The risk isn't so much some random piece of something falling off, it's the entire facade of the building coming down on your head.

  • Removed

    Brand new ChatGPT Pro o1 reasoning model asked: "What are the most impactful yet achievable actions humanity can take in the next decade to ensure global stability and sustainable development?"

    Jump

  • LLMs are a muse, not a fucking oracle you absolute strawberry plant

  • Totally happened

    Jump

  • The major supermarket chain where I live has a "shop and go" system. You get a battery powered barcode scanner that you take round and scan items before you put them in your trolley, then hand it over to an operator at the end. They can download the list of items to the till, then you pay and leave.

    They have a "random spot check" system where sometimes they pick a few random items out of your trolley and check that they are on the list. I'm imagining that some people get away with theft, but it's probably not a lot more than people who are going to steal normally anyway

  • Deleted

    Have you ever been experienced a natural disaster? If so, which one?

    Jump

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_earthquake_(disambiguation)

    One in 2010 that did a bunch of damage but only killed 2 people, but then triggered a significant aftershock in February 2011 that was much more destructive - partly because it was shallower and closer to the city, but also because lots of buildings had been damaged but not fully repaired.

  • Love the annual tradition

    Jump

  • Can't speak to others' motivations, but my wife had to "keep the peace" with her grandparents by seeing them on Christmas, even though they were awful people who took pleasure in bullying and belittling her mum. If we didn't show up on Christmas for an hour or two and put up with some snide comments and a few "I'm only joking don't be so serious", then her mum would have to put up with months of full on abuse.

    We didn't need substances to cope with it, but I can totally see how people might feel like a drink or a toke with some family they do enjoy socialising with could make it easier to be with family they don't enjoy spending time with, but feel obligated to to avoid hurt feelings.

    For whatever reason my mother in law didn't just cut contact and leave them to die alone in their crappy little house surrounded by their hate and resentment and friends who also couldn't stand them. Thankfully they are dead now, so we don't have to put up with them.

  • Deleted

    Have you ever been experienced a natural disaster? If so, which one?

    Jump

  • I was in Christchurch for the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes that killed 185 people and critically damaged essentially every building within the city centre.

    The whole thing was pretty surreal. My family were pretty lucky, our house was lightly damaged (old timber frame, moved ~2cm off its piles but was livable while that was fixed) and we had a few things break (including a 60L fishtank that nearly landed on me as I tried to get to a doorway), I know a few people who were without electricity and clean water for a week, or whose houses were damaged beyond repair then had to spend years fighting insurance companies to get what they were due.

    I still live in the city, and it's pretty much unrecognisable as to how it was before. Basically every major building in the central city had to either be torn down or significantly renovated to repair it. Basically every brick building built before the 1950s was damaged beyond repair. Huge chunks of residential land in the east of the city was so badly damaged that there is no way it could be safely built on again - the government brought all the houses, tore them down and fenced the area off.

  • Global warming is a worldwide hot topic

    Jump

  • so far

  • We're never going to have better internet in the USA, are we?

    Jump

  • Internet in NZ used to work a bit like the US does now with one large ISP that is also the network operator and gave exactly zero shits about quality of connections or internationally competitive pricing, except they got greedy and charged their retail arm half what they charged their competitors. Anti-monopoly folks got very pissy about this and managed to get the largest fine permitted by law, forced them to split their wholesale arm off into a separate company, banned them from tendering on the government-funded fibre network (which cost them literally billions of dollars) and then changed the law so that if they did it again there wouldn't be a cap on the penalty they could impose.

    In 20 years we went from ~35th of the 38 OECD countries in internet speed and accessibility to 9th. Markets only work long-term if you actually regulate them

  • We're never going to have better internet in the USA, are we?

    Jump

  • Yeah, pretty much. The way the rest of the world deals with it is by splitting the infrastructure maintenance and retail sides to eliminate the profit incentive to not do maintenance.

    You have a company who owns a/the fibre network in an area and is obligated by anti-monopoly rules to sell access to the network at the same rate and terms to anyone who wants it. They have a profit incentive to maintain the network to a reasonable standard because having a functioning network is how they make money. In a lot of places this wholesale provider will be at least part government owned given that the government usually pays a good chunk of the cost to build out large national infrastructure projects like fibre networks.

    Separately, you have retail ISPs who buy access to the fibre network (or 4g, satellite, ...) and sell it to the public along with value adds like tech support, IP addresses, peering agreement etc.

    It's never work in the US because holding private companies accountable for how they spend public money and maintaining well regulated competitive markets is communism or something.

  • Brick Layers: Stronger 3D Prints TODAY - instead of 2040 (bad patent holding back progress)

    Jump

  • That's probably an impossible task - getting enough people who are experts in every possible field enough to judge novelty and innovativeness wouldn't be feasible.

    An alternative is the way the Dutch assess patents - they don't, and grant them automatically on filing, but that means you remove the assumption that they are valid on their face if they get challenged

  • Brick Layers: Stronger 3D Prints TODAY - instead of 2040 (bad patent holding back progress)

    Jump

  • Unfortunately, the way patent suits work it could be enormously expensive to defend something like this, even when the patent is clearly bad.

    You'd be arguing that the patent is invalid to start with, but the court would probably start from the position that you are actually infringing a valid patent (it was granted after all), and grant an injunction to prevent further harm ("stop giving people the software until we can work out if there is any merit to your claim that you aren't infringing"). You then need to put together a case to show the prior art, and you can bet that they'd contest every single point. This whole process could take years, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that you won't get back even if you win - there isn't really a provision to recover costs in patent cases because there is the assumption that every claim is made in good faith

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • If you follow it, you quickly end up with the Infinite Improbability Drive from The Hitchhikers Guide - if you have an infinite number of typewriters, an infinite number of them will be loaded with paper that already has the complete works of Shakespeare written on it

  • Airplane seatbelts

    Jump

  • Planes rarely reverse into mountains.

    And the survival statistics have a lot to do with the amount of work that has been put into making the worst case "controlled descent into terrain" scenario exceptionally rare.

  • The littlest air biscuits

    Jump

  • Illegally smol

  • CNC Kitchen – What is the best way to dry your desiccant? (microwave)

    Jump

  • Some (usually cheaper) indicating desiccants use cobalt-based dies which are fairly toxic, but unless you are using them to keep food dry it's not a huge issue. Having them break into powder in the microwave probably isn't great though, I'd avoid breathing any of it in

  • Trump says Harris should be ‘forced off’ campaign, wants Biden back

    Jump

  • If your country is in a place where you don't think banning felons from holding elected office is good because you are worried that the legislative branch will weaponize the judicial branch to stop their opposition from running, then I'd suggest that the problem isn't one that laws can fix