hendrik

Yes, that’s likely a longer argument. I think I’m not completely considering it a bad thing… I think the old time forums had some charm to them, where you’d just contribute something to a discussion, no matter what and who you are… It’d be just about a certain topic. But that’s not really what we do here. So it’s a bit out of scope. I feel we could do that, though. The technology and set up of the platform itself should allow for those kinds of conversations… Bus yeah, it’s complicated. And this might be more social media than internet forum.

Sure. And since Lemmy is part of the Fediverse, it is embedded into some context… I mean we also connect to services like Mastodon with a very different approach. And we have things like Mbin with a hybrid approach. And as mesa said, Piefed tries to do some additional things as well. But the way Piefed currently handles missing avatars is to just not show any, it’ll just be the username as text aligned to the left.

(And I think the stream of faceless opinions is part of the idea behind Lemmy… Whether that’s a good or bad thing, or could be improved.)

I think this platform is less about people and more about commenting. That’s also why we can’t even subscribe to people on Lemmy, just communities. So naturally, your profile ends up being less important. And I have close to no incentive to care about avatars. This place is more or less just about the text content and the links. And I don’t even want my real face to show up next to my stupid comments.

I mean developers add avatar to all kinds of things, whether that’s useful or not. I myself don’t need one in Spotify or the fitness tracker app or my computer user account. They’re there nonetheless, and once you implement them, you have to deal with the UX representation. I think some users like to customize stuff so it get’s implemented. But it might be meaningless to most of us.

I agree. We already moved the goalposts a few comment further up the thread… (And I meant plugged-in chargers that have nothing attached with my bad phrasing with “unplugged”) I just wanted to tell that some of the ways to mitigate for the risk aren’t very straightforward. What seems to do a lot is get smoke detectors, and a fire extingusher, so you don’t spend the deciding 2 minutes in the bathroom, filling up a bucket. And some risk is always there, we almost all own quite an amount of electronic devices and batteries. (And then what people said here, don’t use dubious products with less failsafes in their design, and entirely unplugged things (without a battery) are safe and will not cause a fire.)

Not sure. Most time I read in the newspaper when some apartment burnt down, or this happens somewhere in my vicinity, it is something that was plugged in. It’s super rare that this happens with unplugged chargers. So I’m pretty sure there is some chance this happens, but it’s more complicated than that. For example during sleep, the human nose seems to be on standby as well, so you might not notice if your e-bike battery or your hoverboard which you’re charging during the night will catch on fire. Until it might be too late. You won’t be noticing the unplugged charger either, but it’s less likely to fail catastrophically. But you should be worried about both. Especially the hoverboard. And not being present has the downside the fire is going to spread. But as an upside you can’t die from the fire if you’re not there. But yeah, if you’re sitting next to it and act quickly, you can stop a situation from escalating.

And firemen always tell, people are surprised how quickly a fire turns from small to all the furniture and plastics stuff burns and it’s not something a regular person can extinguish or contain any longer. So you really have to be right here. One room apart might not be enough.

Yes, that’s why I say it doesn’t generalize. They mention this in the article. These old power bricks from the 90s with a heavy copper transformer inside waste a lot of power on standby compared to the modern switch-mode power supplies. But times have changed. On the flipside we have a lot more electronic gadgets these days and things in fact add up. So if you have modern things like 5 smart lightbulbs in the house, then a network switch, an internet router and a wifi extender, plus a few USB chargers at the bedside, the livingroom, a TV set with a PS4 and a soundbar plus subwoofer. A few LED strips in the gaming den… Then you might own a dishwasher and washing machine with wifi, the oven has a display, the microwave above yet another one, the cable TV has some booster in the basement… You’re likely paying more than a few cents for that. And the things which run unattended 24/7 for decades, buried somewhere, tend to not get replaced every few years, so you might still own a power brick from the 90s. So I’d say it’s worth looking into… I mean not super important, you can as well skip it and just pay the amount… But it’s a thing. And I mean if you’re unalike me and buy a new stereo every 10 years or so, that’s also not necessarity helping the environment, and they cost money. So it’s a bit complicated and a balance. At least I can somehow relate to the article, because the multi-outlet power strips behind the TV and my desk with the computer kind of look like the pictures there…

It doesn’t completely generalize that way. I have an old stereo which uses like 7W on standby. And an old pair or computer speakers which don’t really care if I press the button to turn them off. I mean that’s not the power brick, but the device after that, so a bit out of scope for this article. But if I weren’t unplugging them… 10W standby is 26€ a year and not just a few cents.

Tl;dr: Consider unplugging them, they all consume some small amount of standby power and that adds up. Also they wear out.

Though: I’ve never noticed any of the 24/7 devices I own wear out, I think that might be a myth?

I don’t really know why that is. If you want to bypass the issue and just solve it, try sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata on the command line.

(Edit: Mind that sudo on the command line generally doesn’t show any stars or such things. After being prompted for it, you type in your password blind and hit enter.)

I suppose it’s like with the boiling frog syndrome. Temperature increases gradually. But there is no such point when we all jump out.

Maybe the internet already was tainted before generative AI, with all the tracking, selling of userdata, big soulless services, the attention economy… Maybe that was it and we’re way past it already?

Oh well, some people in the USA have a really “interesting” relationship with their own constitution these days… I sometimes feel like explaining it to them. Or what a constitutional republic is.

Yeah, keeping things “off record” is the usual strategy to get away with whatever you wanted.

So they’re open-sourcing some minor glue to connect to an API of a big proprietary online service, or what’s this about?

Thanks, nice video and seems he has some numbers. Very inhuman that they figured out exact numbers how it has an allowance to take out 15/20 bystanders as well. Or an entire elementary school if it’s an high ranking “target”. I mean war is a bit of a different thing than policing. But a minimum 10% false positives plus collateral murder is quite a lot. And then I’m not sure if there is any substance to those numbers. I suppose they conveniently eliminate all the evidence with the same bomb that kills the people. And they don’t do research, so I wonder how they even figured out a ratio.

I’m looking more for large-scale quantitative numbers. I mean one destroyed life is really bad. But they could argue they’d have saved 30 lives in turn, and then we’d need to discuss how to do the maths on that…

Would be nice to get some numbers on the accuracy and performance of such a dystopian sci-fi technology (Minority Report?). There should be some, since it’s already in operation for 13 years…

And what exactly are AI textbooks? Does AI generate a quiz? Or generate the facts? I feel there is quite some bandwidth there and the article doesn’t say a lot.