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.

  • 33 Posts
  • 1.81K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoComic Strips@lemmy.world•Watch your step, partner.English
    2·
    18 hours ago

    I’m okay with the comic, though I’m not a fan of The New Yorker’s articles.

    But the spacing on the typeface in the caption around those right-hand quote marks, both the single and double, is killing me.

    looks more

    I guess maybe when they made the italic font, they had to move the quote marks to avoid colliding with slanted letters, like the capital T—the left-hand quote marks next to it look fine to me. But then, maybe they didn’t add kerning information so that if an adjacent character didn’t require shifting, the right-hand quotes didn’t shift all the way over, so they’re always left hanging out there to make space for potentially-problematic characters.

    You’d think that an entity like The New Yorker, with a long history of printed output, would have selected solid typefaces.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•“This is the AI men actually use”: Meta ads pushed apps nudifying real teensEnglish
    7·
    1 day ago

    Yeah, honestly, you could go way further back.

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

    A Venus figurine is any Upper Palaeolithic statue portraying a woman, usually carved in the round.[1] Most have been unearthed in Europe, but others have been found as far away as Siberia and distributed across much of Eurasia.

    Most date from the Gravettian period (26,000–21,000 years ago).[1] However, findings are not limited to this period; for example, the Venus of Hohle Fels dates back at least 35,000 years…

    For context, we figured out agriculture and started to move away from hunter-gatherer life about 12,000 years ago.

    These figurines are recognised as some of the earliest works of prehistoric art.

    Most have wide hips and legs that taper to a point. Arms and feet are often absent, and the head is usually small and faceless. Various figurines exaggerate the abdomen, hips, breasts, thighs, or vulva, although many found examples do not reflect these typical characteristics. Depictions of hairstyles can be detailed, and clothing or tattoos may be indicated.[5]

    The original cultural meaning and purpose of these artefacts is not known. It has frequently been suggested that they may have served a ritual or symbolic function.

    I have a guess.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoCalifornia@lemmy.world•Spatula-Wielding Student Jumps Through In-N-Out Window to Protect Workers from Customer Who Was Allegedly Attacking ThemEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    The 20-year-old — who is a college student and former gymnast, rugby player and parkour teacher who now does freestyle trampolining — opted to jump through the drive-through window and grabbed a spatula, the first thing he saw on a nearby counter.

    “Thinking about it now, I probably would have been better off with a fryer basket, but it happened so fast,” he told the Times.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_London_Bridge_stabbings

    At 13:58 on 29 November, the police were called to Fishmongers’ Hall[10] after Khan, wearing a fake suicide vest, threatened to blow up the hall.[11] Holding two kitchen knives taped to his wrists, he began stabbing people inside the building.[12] Several fought back, including a Polish kitchen porter, Łukasz Koczocik, who fought Khan off with an ornamental spear,[13] a South African, Darryn Frost, who grabbed a 1.5-metre-long (4.9 ft) narwhal tusk from the wall to use as a weapon,[14] former prisoner John Crilly, and Steven Gallant, a convicted murderer attending the conference on day release from prison, after participating in the Learning Together programme.

    One of the people who stepped in to fight the attacker drove him back by spraying a fire extinguisher.[20][15]

    Humans might be soft and squishy and lack venom and armor. They might not have much by way of teeth or claws. But they didn’t become the planet’s superpredator without developing an impressive ability to, with very little notice, turn just about anything in their vicinity into a weapon.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•People Are Telling Their Darkest Thoughts to AI Without Realizing They Can Easily Become Public: a full third of all AI users admit to having told their chatbots a secret.English
    3·
    4 days ago

    Use a local model

    I also think that local models are generally preferable, but everyone having a local model requires more hardware, since much of the time the local hardware to run the local model is probably going to be idle, whereas hardware in the cloud can be servicing User B when it’s not servicing User A.

    In 2026 and 2027, absent some very unexpected development, memory prices are going to be elevated.

    And while some people could get local hardware, we couldn’t build a comparable-to-what-someone-could-get-in-the-cloud AI compute box for everyone if everyone wanted to go local, not for years, as we don’t have the memory production capacity today. If everyone tried to get a local box for AI compute at the same time, it’d just do what happened when the cloud companies did it, but at greater scale, because it’d require even more memory. There’d be a new memory shortage. Prices on memory would keep rising, pricing would-be buyers out, until the number of buyers still willing to buy was equal to what supply was present.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoGames@lemmy.world•Sony Implements New Customer Harassment Policy Following Backlash Toward Its Plans to Stop Making Physical Game DiscsEnglish
    3·
    7 days ago

    searches

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

    The finger pinching conspiracy theory[b] is an antifeminist conspiracy theory that originated in South Korea. It claims that there is a deliberate plot to spread and promote misandry through symbolic hand gestures, and that radical feminist groups have propagated these hidden messages to humiliate men with small penises.

    The conspiracy theory first gained prominence in May 2021 when convenience store chain GS25 published an advertisement with a hand gesture, which faced accusations of allegedly disparaging penises and aggrandizing the defunct fringe group Megalia. The company retracted it and issued an apology. Since then, numerous organizations were met with similar protests from theorists and announced apologies.

    Despite contradictory claims and a general lack of evidence, the theory persists; notably in the video game industry, where Nexon led a public allegation against its collaborators. It is viewed as an online harassment tactic employed by antifeminist backlash movements. The theory has been a source of misinformation circulated by internet-based communities and news media.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoProgrammer Humor@programming.dev•New compression techniqueEnglish
    7·
    7 days ago

    It actually is. I mean, it’s building a dictionary off of a variety of content ahead-of-time, rather than training it on the specific item in question, but that’s not uncommon for non-general-purpose compressors.

    I mean, doing so to a (probably short) prompt is (a) lossy (and I gave a lossless example) and (b) lossy to an extreme degree, to where it’s probably not incredibly useful option for the kinds of systems that exist today.

    But…existing diffusion models aren’t actually intended for this, either. I’d bet that you could train a model to do image compression along these lines, with a large dictionary, that could do usable compression along the lines of what is (jokingly) described in the article. Probably have a larger compressed form than what they’re thinking of.

    EDIT: At one point in time, about over a quarter-century ago now, I went out and banged on a neural net post-processor for JPEG artifacts. The idea here is that JPEG very probably isn’t optimally representing the final image, as a human, using their knowledge of what the world looks like, can manually (if time-consumingly) clean these up. I didn’t meet with a lot of success; I only wanted to put a small amount of time into it, and I was working with much weaker hardware than people are running neural nets on today. But that generated a pre-existing dictionary, a pre-trained neural net, off a training corpus of uncompressed images. It didn’t try to reconstruct the image from scratch, the way something like this would, just clean up artifacts, but it has that same pre-generated neural net approach.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•.name TerminationEnglish
    11·
    7 days ago

    Despite the fact that it’s registered and paid for until 2040.

    I can believe that Verisign might have some route to terminate service (even in cases where there is some contractual obligation to provide a service for a given period of time, someone can typically break the contract, just having to pay some sort of penalty for doing so), but I also suspect that they are legally required to issue you some sort of refund.

    You generally cannot just sell someone a service and then refuse to provide it; that’ll violate consumer protection laws.

    That probably won’t make the author happy—he probably wants the domain, not the money. But at the minimum, I will say that he probably doesn’t have to pay for service that he doesn’t get.

    It might be that they are doing that; he doesn’t specify.

    But it gets much worse. Once the 3rd-level domains are terminated, it is assumed that the now vacant 2nd-level domains will become available for registration. Should someone (other than me) scoop up fraser.name they would be able to recreate and control neil.fraser.name. They’d be able to hijack hundreds of accounts that are linked to that address. They could commit code with my authentication. They could seize control of IoT devices. There is no way to enumerate all accounts (online and offline) which have been opened using this email address over the past quarter century.

    Yeah, personally I’d rather have some kind of key-based mechanism, at least as an alternative to the X.509-based system. Think of what PGP or SSH do. Like, the key is your identifier, not the endorsement of some centralized registrar.

    Hyphanet does something like this, can do key-based addresses.

    That has some drawbacks too—I mean, you are the ultimate authority here, and thus responsible for keeping that key safe, and that’s a big responsibility. If you think of all the attacks on cryptocoin wallets and stuff, I think that personal computers are not incredibly-well-suited for that—if we’re going to do that, we probably want something more like hardware-based keystores, like YubiKeys or similar, where a key cannot be exfiltrated if a PC is compromised, as PCs have a big attack surface. And it’s harder for humans to remember a key as an identifier, which means that they probably have to have a computer somewhere store a list of known and trusted keys (though doing so solves a lot of existing attacks, like phishing emails with look-alike URLs that attack the limited human ability to remember names, so there are pros and cons). And it avoids the risk that someone with access to a certificate authority’s key can compromise your security.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoProgrammer Humor@programming.dev•New compression techniqueEnglish
    15·
    7 days ago

    It’s humorous, but last I checked, the best general-purpose compressors with the highest levels of compression—even lossless, which is probably not what most people think of when they think of neural nets—are neural net based.

    Neural net-based compressors are computationally expensive, which is why we don’t normally use them for most day-to-day tasks, but they really can produce really small outputs.

    I’m going to take the text of the US Constitution and stick it in a text file.

    $ wget https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5/pg5.txt
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt 
48326

    Okay, so 48326 bytes.

    Let’s do lzo. You’d expect a limited amount of compression — LZO is “fast” compression, usually only used where compression speed is really important, like where you want to be compressing stuff that’s going to be decompressed once and your bottleneck is throughput to disk:

    $ lzop <pg5.txt >pg5.txt.lzo 
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt.lzo
24843

    Okay, how about gzip? That’s Deflate, an older, but pretty-widely-used general-purpose compression algorithm.

    $ gzip <pg5.txt >pg5.txt.gz
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt.gz
16660

    Okay, what about LZMA? That’s a newer, more-CPU-intensive thing that’s probably a good general-purpose choice that’ll generally give better compression ratios. It’s the kind of thing that I’d probably use in a lot of cases. (Personally, these days, I tend to use pixz, which provides both indexed access for tarballs and parallel compression and decompression, which is important for modern processors.)

    $ xz <pg5.txt >pg5.txt.xz
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt.xz 
15488

    Okay, now PAQ, a neural-net-based compressor:

    $ zpaq a pg5.txt.zpaq a pg5.txt -method 5
$ stat -c %s pg5.txt.zpaq 
13063