Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.
Those who believe we’ve been in an incrementally escalating software crisis since at least 2007.
Web development is now especially notorious for completely disregarding accessibility, user device capabilities, and regulations. Most of the ideas of user-centred design are alien to modern developers.
goes to archive.org's copy of Yahoo from the golden era of 2006
https://web.archive.org/web/20061212011659/http://www.yahoo.com/
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I use Vanilla Music.
https://f-droid.org/packages/ch.blinkenlights.android.vanilla/
It's fine for my purposes. I don't know what functionality you're missing with these other programs, though, so hard to say if it meets your needs.
I don't think that that's really a platform issue per se. I mean, you can spin up an instance here on the Threadiverse and set whatever instance policies you want. Someone else could have an instance with very different policies.
On the negatives:
- Online abuse: AI is fueling the spread of sexual abuse material and sexually explicit deepfakes, with women and children most at risk.
Eh. I don't see this as that fundamental. I mean, Photoshop lowered the bar too to making synthetic pornography, to slapping a head on someone else's body. The ability to do image warping allows resizing body parts in a convincing-at-first-glance look, and I remember when that was a fad. It just doesn't seem to have changed society all that much in the past. It may be that people just stop caring much about pornographic images of a particular person. I'm not saying that it won't have an impact, but I have a hard time seeing a scenario where it really deeply alters society.
- Disinformation: AI can generate false information that is as convincing as the truth, undermining trust in public debate and democracy.
Yeah, that's a bigger issue.
It is not one that is impossible to deal with. It was a situation that we had to deal with prior to recording technology. And there were problems --- like accusing politicians of going to one place and saying one thing in their speeches, and then to another and saying something else was a real thing in the US back when the only record we have was from newspapers printing summaries of what they said. We had solutions for that era, like people who would put their reputation on the line to attest to various facts. We could do it again. But we've benefited from having easy technology that made it pretty easy to make a credible record cheaply and easily of all sorts of things, audio recording, photographs, and video recording, and the bar for that might rise.
It was always going to happen one day, whether-or-not neural networks were involved. Computer graphics and audio synthesis have only gotten more-accessible and convincing over the years.
I think that one new issue is the ability to synthesize propaganda using the bandwagon effect on social media. That is, it used to be just financially impractical to have a zillion people online trying to influence people. But...if chatbots drastically lower the cost to that, that could be a real issue, and one that we haven't had to deal with before, ever.
Crime: Criminals are using AI to carry out cyberattacks, fraud and social engineering scams.
Yup. Some of this we can fix, and is because we have outdated authentication mechanisms (like recognizing someone's voice on a phone because the phone network has basically no authentication mechanism). Some of it is going to be harder. I think that this is largely not fundamental problems, but some things are going to have to change.
- Mental health: Some AI systems can reinforce harmful beliefs or behaviours, leading to mental health crises, including suicide.
Ehhh. I mean, yes, but so can all sorts of other things. Sitting alone watching TV all the time. I remember distress when the Internet became more widely-available about how people could enter into harmful forums. And we've always had crackpots with weird ideas out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
Ray didn't need AI to develop his theories.
Honestly, I'm kinda more concerned about stuff like cults and scams, cases where someone is actively attempting to maliciously manipulate people than "random person goes and spends time talking to a chatbot and feels that it reinforces his crackpot views".
- Loss of control: As AI becomes more autonomous, experts warn it could become harder to monitor and govern without stronger safeguards.
Yeah, this is a big one. The Friendly AI problem is a hard one. I don't know if there are practical solutions, not for self-improving advanced intelligences, which we are certainly going to try to build.
- Environmental impact: The energy-hungry data centres which power AI are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions which leads to global warming.
Eh, yeah, but this is basically the same as our existing energy problems. Like, we were already emitting an unsustainable level of carbon dioxide emissions. The answer has to be shifting to different generation methods. The answer was never going to be "we keep burning coal and whatnot and everyone just reduces energy usage enough on a per capita basis to keep human-driven carbon dioxide emissions at a sustainable level".
But you’re not selling that as a service.
No, but...is your concern the ability to run a commercial service involving AI compute? I mean, there are certainly a ton of startup companies doing that. Heck, there are people selling access to their GPUs for parallel compute on vast.ai.
I'm just saying that I don't believe that the ability to run neural nets on parallel compute hardware is something that is going to be terribly exclusive over time, and certainly isn't today something limited to someone with a net worth of a billion dollars.
As I've commented before, we'd need a lot more RAM than exists in the world today if everyone's going to do it. Like, AI companies are buying more 2026 RAM production than the rest of the world combined, on the order of two-thirds of global production. If they get something like 100% capacity utilization of their hardware, and a typical user doing local AI compute would get something like 1% capacity utilization of their hardware, then we'd need about a hundred times that much memory to let everyone run comparable stuff locally. That's a pretty stupendously large amount of memory. But if, over time, there's demand for it, I expect that it'll happen. We've scaled up parts of the computer industry by orders of magnitude in the past.
At this juncture, I would point out that !floridaman@lemmy.world also accepts "Florida Woman" submissions.
EDIT: Unfortunately, it appears to be fake.
The United Nations is supporting a new international architecture to help countries make informed decisions about AI.
In 2025, the UN General Assembly established the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, made up of 40 experts from every region of the world serving in their personal capacity.
The panel's role is scientific rather than regulatory. It assesses, on a regular basis, the latest evidence on AI's opportunities, risks and impacts and produces independent reports that governments can use when developing policy.
This is approximately what I recommended some time back on Reddit. Can't have Sam Altman or advocacy groups driving it --- need reasonably objective, unexcitable observers. Also, not just to governments but to the public.
There are a lot of unknowns, but at least we can start building consensus on some points and identifying the known unknowns.
It's also not just computer, technical unknowns. Like, one of the big questions is how much existing stuff done by humans can we realistically automate (Sam Altman has an incentive to say "everything, tomorrow"), and what. Economists can't predict the impact without technical data on capabilities, and right now, we just don't know a lot of that, and we don't know where we'll be in a decade. But they can firm up a set of questions to ask and to watch for. "If we can achieve capability X, then this is what the likely global impact is."
Those predictions will probably be bad at first. But...that's science. You start with a model and start refining and revising.
I'm also interested in coming to some kind of firmer consensus as to superintelligence risks. Right now, we have a lot of ideas flying around that run the gamut from If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies to "it's impractically hard to build and is thus a non-issue" and little consensus as to what lines we might cross that would expose us to superintelligence risk. Needless to say, this is is basically useless if you're trying to do anything from a policy standpoint.
I don't think that we should kick the can down the road on that. The problem is that our major advantage, as humanity, in dealing with superintelligence, is time. We get to make the first move, structure the environment. So we don't want to throw that away. If we need to figure out how to contain, how to control superintelligent systems, we likely need to do so before we have people actually building them. And there's a lot of potential economic and military and so forth benefit in building a superintelligent system, so people are probably going to try to build such systems. But there aren't similar incentives associated with safety surrounding superintelligent systems. People may not just go out and do that on their lonesome. So if we need to fund them or whatever, we should be doing so without waiting for those systems to exist.
You mean to say, the thing that only billionaires can own
I own a dedicated AI compute machine, and I'm certainly not a billionaire.
I don't know if I'd get one now, with RAM prices where they are, but down the line, I expect that they'll have better hardware and bang for the buck, as hardware designed from scratch for running neural net compute instead of being repurposed from doing 3D rendering spreads.
The pixz compressor provides parallized compression/decompression (desirable on modern CPUs), uses LZMA (like 7zip or
xz), and provides indexed access when used astar'scompressor. The last of these is what you want.$ tar cvf foo.tar.pixz -Ipixz foo/pixzis packaged in Debian-family distros.Much less important than some of these, but there was a British history teacher, Jonathan Pagel, who made some "history raps" for his class back around 1995 and 1996. His website went down many years ago, but the URL was still embedded in a comment in one of the files that I had, and I dug them up with archive.org's Wayback Machine.
They were released under the GNU FDL, so I can repost them:
I wonder how to tell if an instance supports it apart from just blindly trying.
They don't have to stick it at the same prefix, so there's no reliable way to check by just guessing the name.
It looks like p.lemmy.world is running the Photon frontend. On lemmy.today, we have it at photon.lemmy.today.
Lemmy.today lists the alternate frontends in the instance sidebar, but there's no requirement for an instance to do that.
The breaking point? A price jump of 16%.
When shoppers do make the switch, groceries are the first to go with 76% dropping a brand they were previously loyal to
I guess that's why shrinkflation is such a thing specifically with food.
I think that the Australian and New Zealand ones are okay from a technical standpoint.
We have a lot of really bad state flags in the US. A lot of them originally involved slapping the state seal (not optimized for flag use, usually more-detailed) on usually some shade of blue.
That being said, a bunch of them have been revised. Utah ("The Beehive State") did a 2024 revision, which I think is a pretty strong improvement (and follows the "originally just the state-seal-on-blue" pattern):
to
And honestly, I think that most of those warrant a change more than most national flags.
However, if I were going to make changes to national flags...hmm. Well, there are a whole bunch of countries that have extremely similar flags. Nobody wants to back down on their flag, but honestly, the present state of affairs just kind of sucks from a functional standpoint, seeing as the purpose of flags is to let one easily identify something as being associated with a country. It'd be nice if they'd flip a coin or something and have one of the countries pick something more-distinctive.
One of the most-egregious is the flag of Chad:
And the flag of Romania:
There are a bunch more that look very similar at a distance or at small sizes or if one is being flown upside-down. I won't list them all here, but it'd be awesome if those would get sorted out.
Also, while the tricolor, as with the above flags, is associated with republicanism, and thus a lot of countries use it, and technically, it's nice (simple, easy to identify, no text), there are similar alternatives that would help make flags a lot more distinguishable. Take the flag of Czechia, for example:
Still three colors, but looks pretty different from most other national flags. You don't get into the "tricolor with very similar colors" problem.
The world's first webpage is still up.
https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
Looks a lot like a typical gopher node) (or, today, gemini node). Hierarchical tree, link, brief description attached to each link.
I realize that a flamethrower is impractical...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R0gDq-3vhA
Archive.org has archived an awful lot of websites and other data, including Wikipedia. If I had to take just one website, I'd take that one.
It's a little like being an ocelot. Less fur, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LRC_(file_format)
For time-synchronized lyrics.
It looks like my Scandroid audio files from Bandcamp have embedded non-synchronized lyrics.
$ metaflac --list *08*.flac[snip]
comment[12]: UNSYNCEDLYRICS=Beware the shadows of the drones Destruction wrapped in pretty silicone They’ve taken everyone I’ve known And now I walk these empty streets alone In my memory the past is fading The future has been redesigned It’s hard to focus on it when I’m running out of time Surrounded by streetlights at midnight My destination is unknown I walk these empty streets alone Digital dreams thrive in the moonlight I’m only flesh, circuit and bone I walk these empty streets alone Beware the faces of the clones Deception sent from Neo-Tokyo They’ve erased everyone I’ve known And still I walk these empty streets aloneI don't know how widespread that is.
Note that lyrics are themselves copyrighted works, regarding simply sharing them. That is, if you want to create, say, "Lyricsnet, the new Fediverse service" or something like that, you may attract attention from IP owners.