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Riskable

@ riskable @programming.dev

Posts
3
Comments
545
Joined
3 yr. ago

Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

  • Someone Cut Down Every Single Flock Camera in This Town in a Single Night

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  • Someone cut above the rest‽

  • Is this a good first homeserver?

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  • Massive overkill!

    That's a great Home Theater PC. Hook it up to your TV and install KDE Plasma (distro of your choice 👍) then just crank up the global desktop zoom to like 225% and get:

    • A real wireless mouse that has a long range (e.g. $10 TEKNET cheapo deal with 10% off coupon today, LOL! https://a.co/d/02qG1oHO )
    • A wireless keyboard/trackpad combo that's made for that kind of thing (they're all terrible keyboards—it's only purpose is to get you through the boot menu/rescue process if something horrible goes wrong). Use SSH for doing any real work on the thing.

    Now install Docker and all the containers/servers you want!

    I have a ~14yo HTPC with a mostly modern GPU (8GB) that only has 8GB of RAM and four cores on some old AMD CPU. It's running four separate servers for my self-host purposes and it doesn't break a sweat.

  • Linux's market share in North America has breached 10% for the first time, says StatCounter

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  • I did the math and these are the approximate real numbers:

    • US: ~30 million
    • World: ~105 million

    That's active Linux desktops. That is, they're being used to browse the Internet regularly enough to make it into StatCounter.

  • The Masculinity Scam | The manosphere’s campaign strategy

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  • Yes. Women have the biological means to perform just about any activity a man can do (two arms, two legs, a sapient brain, etc) , but there's something only women can do.

    Following this to its logical conclusion: If a woman can do it, it's not masculine.

    Hence my statement: Feminine things do exist (not because they're a particular color, LOL). There's a whole aisle of literal feminine products in every grocery store but there's no "masculine products" section.

  • The Masculinity Scam | The manosphere’s campaign strategy

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  • Unpopular opinion: Masculinity doesn't exist. There's feminine things and then there's everything else.

    Is a hammer masculine? What about a monster truck? What if you paint them pink?

    See what I mean? The modern concept of masculinity—and certainly conservatives stance on it—is an invented thing that only serves to make feeble men feel special.

    If you accept that nothing is masculine, then a whole lot of advertising, conservative takes, and weird, supposedly "manly" activities start to appear absurd. Because they are.

  • Just nod and smile

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  • They're just like any other data center, except bigger because that's more efficient than building a bunch of smaller ones.

    AI data centers have a lot of GPUs and specialty hardware that use a lot of power, but they're still just big buildings with lots of computers in them. They just sort of sit there, with air conditioners running 24/7.

    If they're not the huge "hyper scale" type, you end up with a situation like in the article: Where they had to cram too many cooling units in too tight a tight space (to make up for the fact that the data center wasn't built for its current workload).

  • AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

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  • Haha: What you state is logical and reasonable. That position would be easy to defend, if the legal system around copyright made sense.

    Unfortunately, it isn't a logical system. You're trying to apply copyright law—which has now been ruled on in court, officially making training AI with copyrighted material Fair Use.

    The problem is that the issue with ebooks is all about contract law. Not copyright.

    When you "purchase" an ebook (which is a misnomer), you're actually signing a legally binding contract. A license, in effect, to use that copyrighted work for the sole purpose outlined in the contract. That outlined purpose expressly forbids using the work for anything other than you—the purchaser—reading it (usually on the platform they specify).

    Having said that, many, many court rulings have found numerous license clauses like that to be unenforceable. That is, just because it's written in the contract, doesn't mean it's legal.

    The courts have ruled—thanks to everyone's efforts fighting the MPAA, RIAA, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo in the 1990s and early 2000s—that everyone does have the legal right to "platform shift" whatever copyrighted works they own.

    To get around that, those very same entities tried to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's rules about circumventing "copyright protection mechanisms" to try to make it illegal for people to platform shift their stuff anyway. That is, they added trivial encryption to all their platforms.

    But it's even more complicated than that! Because Congress gave the Librarian of Congress the power to say when it's legal to circumvent such "copyright protections." For example, technologies that aid the blind (I.e. gotta decrypt that file for the program to read it out loud).

    There's other exceptions and everyone fights to get more added whenever it comes up.

    The key takeaway, though is that none of this complicated mess applies to physical books! So there ya go 😁👍

  • AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

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  • If you own a book, you can legally make as many copies of it as you want. As long as you're not distributing them, the courts treat that as a single effective copy.

  • AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

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  • Legal reasons: When you "purchase" an ebook you're actually just licensing it and nearly all ebook licenses exclude the ability to do anything with the ebook other than read it yourself.

    They could get a commercial license to get big ebook libraries like Anthropic did, but they can't, really, because Anthropic paid for an exclusive license. Which means that if other AI companies want to compete, they sort of have to buy books in bulk and tear them apart to scan them.

  • AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

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  • If you think any more than 0.1% of these physical books would ever have ended up in antique bookstores, you're dreaming.

    Think about how many books out there are things like Donald Trump's biography, or pointless drivel from non-experts, self-help books that tell people to down "essential oils", old editions of programming books, or just plain shitty fiction that never sold much in the first place.

    It's ok to throw trash away! Really!

  • AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

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  • That's like saying, "they had some failure modes from the synthetic data, so they should just obviously stop trying forever."

    They'll just fix the edge cases and move on. Like any programming task.

  • AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

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  • Yes. That does make sense.

    If you bought a book, scanned it—destroying it in the process—then read it on your computer, that would be completely acceptable.

    Why is it wrong when a corporation does the same thing?

    They're not claiming ownership of the copyrights, just ownership of a copy. Which is how copyright works.

  • AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

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  • Big AI mostly switched to synthetic training data anyway. The books they're digitizing are being used to gather knowledge, not writing styles or logic (mostly).

    As in, when you ask ChatGPT how long some book is, it can just go check (if it's in the database). It's also useful if you ask about that book or about knowledge contained in that book. It'll even reference books now (if you demand that in your prompt).

    It's not the same as earlier LLM tech which relied on scanned text to figure out how to respond to any given prompt (from a language standpoint). The "language" part of LLMs is a solved problem now (thanks to the synthetic training). At least for English 🤷

  • AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

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  • Is it really destroying though? They're digitizing them, and publishers still have the digital copies ready to print more at any time. So it's not like they're destroying the texts, they're just shifting them.

    Nobody complained when Google did this over a decade ago 🤷

    When you say they're "destroying the books" you make it sound like they're erasing one of the last known copy of some important work when in reality, most of these books were purchased in bulk from bookstores and libraries that were planning on discarding them anyway.

    Almost all these books were either headed to the dump or the recycling center. They're just being digitized on the way.

  • 'We're a humiliation': Trump voters admit America is now 'objectively worse'

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  • Only one of the focus group members, a 24-year-old engineer from New York named Alvin, gave Trump a 5 out of 5, praising him for "trying to bring back manufacturing jobs" even though manufacturing growth has slowed.

    So basically, only the delusional think he's doing a good job. I'd say this is like, "just my opinion, man" but no: That's literally what the focus group discovered! It's a fact.

  • Border czar warns there will be more ‘bloodshed’ unless Democrats ‘shut their mouths’

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  • So he's literally saying the beatings will continue until morale improves‽

  • IT administrators are "fed up" with Microsoft's "useless" apps and Windows 11

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  • At this rate, Windows will never be ready for the desktop.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • It's not the only animal like this! The Iberian Ribbed Newt (Pleurodeles waltl) will push its own ribcage out of its chest (turning them into spikes) and secretes toxic venom through those bones...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_ribbed_newt

  • Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang says electricians and plumbers will be needed by the hundreds of thousands in the new working world

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  • While I sort of agree with you that that is his angle, service jobs that aren't easily automatable will continue to climb in the "job stability and pay rate" category until the world figures out how to deal with Baumol's Cost Disease:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

  • Ask Experienced Devs @programming.dev
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    Do you think the DRAM shortages will result in more of a focus on software optimization?

  • Programmer Humor @programming.dev
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    Incident Postmortem

  • Technology @lemmy.world
    Riskable @programming.dev

    NTFS turns 30 years old today! I hear it's still in use by some crufty old legacy operating systems 😁

    en.wikipedia.org /wiki/NTFS