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merc

@ merc @sh.itjust.works

Posts
4
Comments
1674
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Men with higher IQs are less conservative, study finds

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  • Actual conservatism is just as "logical" as libralism / leftism, or whatever you want to call the other side. Old fashioned conservatism is just the idea that traditional ways of doing things are good, so we should be slow in adopting changes.

    Modern American conservatism isn't conservatism. It's an incoherent philosophy that resists some changes while making a lot of other very radical changes. There's no plan behind it. Even their "gameplan", project 2025, is a mess of contradictory ideas. The execution depends on the whims of an idiotic, incurious, and possibly altzheimer-addled man.

  • Shoe company Allbirds pivots to AI compute in sign of a totally normal and healthy economy

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  • Shoe company Allbirds pivots to AI compute in sign of a totally normal and healthy economy

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  • We don't know if this bubble is going to be more like the dot-com bubble where the bubble burst but left useful things behind, or if it's going to be like the NFT bubble that left nothing useful behind.

    As for whether the companies see this or not, of course they do. But, what are they going to do, go out of business intentionally before the bubble pops? It's really the investors who don't seem to see it. Why do they keep pumping money into the companies that are obviously ridiculously overvalued?

  • California ghost-gun bill wants 3D printers to play cop, EFF says

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  • Right. I think photocopiers are somewhat aggressive in their money detecting algorithms. I remember someone having a problem photocopying something that was obviously (to a human) not real currency. It wasn't even prop currency which is supposed to look real on camera. This was something for a game or a party or something.

    I think the algorithms have to be a bit loose for the currency detection because there are new bills that are released, and many photocopiers aren't constantly connected to the Internet, and may not have the newest firmware.

    But, for a gun, that's going to be a much harder matching problem, especially because it's a 3d object and after the print the user could snip things off or glue things together. Plus there's the constant remixing of 3d printed things where someone improves on a design and posts it and people adopt then adapt the new design. The only realistic way for it to work is for the printer to do some complex finite element analysis or something on everything anybody tried to print to see if maybe it could perform the function of a certain part of a gun. And that's absurd because that's something you need a workstation class PC to even consider doing, while 3d printers use chips that are... let's just say they can't run Doom.

  • Trump supporters burn MAGA hats after president's AI Jesus post and pope attack

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  • The mom's worked what?

  • California ghost-gun bill wants 3D printers to play cop, EFF says

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  • Most people don't have photocopiers in their homes. Plus, I think most people realize that producing fake money is much harder than just photocopying it.

    IMO it's dumb that photocopiers do that, but it doesn't really inconvenience people. Plus, it doesn't add much complexity or cost to photocopiers since they're already built to scan and analyze images.

  • California ghost-gun bill wants 3D printers to play cop, EFF says

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  • If it's about stopping a random idiot, then the existing laws should be fine.

    The problem is that it's a minor inconvenience to determined criminals. At the same time, it's a industry-destroying law for 3d printer companies.

    I also really don't think it's about ensuring the profits of weapons companies. Weapons companies are big and already fairly regulated. As a result, it's easy to keep an eye on them and ensure that if there are laws about what's legal and illegal to build and sell in the USA that those companies are following them. I think lawmakers are scared that with 3d printers in the hands of hundreds of thousands of people, it's much more difficult to ensure that the laws are being followed. It's about control, not profits.

  • California ghost-gun bill wants 3D printers to play cop, EFF says

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  • 3d printers don't have particularly powerful computers. The 3d modeling and slicing (creating a plan to generate the model using the printer) is done on a PC. The printer just knows how to move the axes, heat the filament, etc.

    If the 3d printer has to be able to recognize gun shapes and refuse to print them, it will need a much more powerful processor. And even then, what's the point? It's unworkable.

    The person is going to be sitting at home with their own 3d printer. If it refuses to print something because it sees it as a gun part, the user can go over to their computer and modify the shape until the 3d printer no longer recognizes it. If the algorithm to detect a gun part is very strict, it will end up also blocking things that aren't gun parts, especially gun-like props.

    If someone doesn't feel like fiddling with the shapes they're trying to print until the printer obeys, they can probably just install their own software. Some commercial printers will make that harder, but Amazon is a multi-billion dollar company and can't keep people from installing their own firmware on Kindles. There's no way that a smaller printer company will be able to lock down their printers. In addition, there are the open source printers, that are explicitly designed so that you can install your own firmware. I assume California is going to make that illegal -- a move that the closed-source printer companies will love.

    If the law were passed, it might stop a hobbyist who wanted to try out printing a gun part just to see if they could. (Even though that's already illegal.) But, it won't stop anybody doing it as a business who can invest the time to get around the ban. So, all you'd do is hurt regular users while only mildly inconveniencing the main people you're trying to stop.

  • Trump supporters burn MAGA hats after president's AI Jesus post and pope attack

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  • Like their mother's what?

  • Trump supporters burn MAGA hats after president's AI Jesus post and pope attack

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  • That's a really weird metaphor. It doesn't really make any sense.

    There's a well known metaphor about burning your own boats so that you're unable to retreat. But, those aren't lifeboats.

    If you're talking about not letting people get rescued, why not "sink the lifeboats"? Setting them on fire would be annoying, but a fire would be easy to put out if the boats are out at sea. There's water all around. The article seems to be more about not allowing people who have abandoned the sinking ship to come on board. So, why not just "ignore the lifeboats". You don't have to approach them and set them on fire. You can just refuse to rescue the people in those lifeboats and leave them floating out at sea.

  • Trump supporters burn MAGA hats after president's AI Jesus post and pope attack

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  • And if it is trump cultists who write the history books, they'll openly admit to a lot of stuff that only their cult thinks is OK. (And the writing in crayon will be a dead giveaway.)

  • Trump supporters burn MAGA hats after president's AI Jesus post and pope attack

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  • What we need to do is convince them never to vote again.

    If you were fooled by mango mussolini, you don't have the brains to make good decisions when you vote. Surely you have family or friends who have been warning you about Trump for a decade now. They were right, you were wrong. Take your hands off of the steering wheel and let those more informed people drive.

  • Trump supporters burn MAGA hats after president's AI Jesus post and pope attack

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  • Which church would you go to?

    Even if you believe that the only way that Trump could possibly die within the next 24 hours is the act of a god, which god was it? Maybe you're supposed to go to a Hindu temple, maybe it's a Jewish one, maybe it's Ra or Thor.

  • Evil

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  • "Oh wow, you're really bad at your job!"

  • Dad stuck in support nightmare after teen lied about age on Discord- Ars Technica

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  • It must be a lot of friends who don't all know each-other too.

    If it's a bunch of friends on one discord server, surely it's not too hard to get back on to that same server and say "my account was hacked". But, if you have dozens of friends spread across many servers, you might not even remember the servers.

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  • One mistake? Most people are involved in at most one airplane accident in their lives. Ford has been involved in 4 where he was the pilot and a fifth as a passenger. All 3 incidents since 2015 were his mistake. The helicopter autorotation incident may not have been.

  • Gay hookup app Grindr to host its first 'White House Dinner Correspondents party'

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  • Apparently Unilad couldn't even copy The Hill's homework correctly.

    Somehow they reworded “White House Correspondents’ dinner Weekend Party” as "White House Dinner Correspondents Party".

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  • I guess cross stitching is a new hobby after he got tired of crashing planes?

  • EFF is Leaving X | Electronic Frontier Foundation

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  • Did it though? EFF says that the number of impressions their content received is why they left:

    Those [2018] tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month.

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    Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.

    But, I wonder what the real numbers actually are. Do we think Elon is honestly reporting real numbers to people? And, of the "impressions" that are real, how many of those are actually from bots rather than actual human users?

    IMO, one of the biggest tricks Elon has managed to pull with Twitter is to convince celebrities and brands that it's still a thriving site full of other people, leading to them sticking around because supposedly no other site gets as much traffic.