irotsoma

@irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon, Google, Microsoft reportedly warn H-1B employees to stay in the US⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They don’t want change. That’s never been the goal. The goal is to create enemies, but make them people who are not able to fight back. Fascism requires an enemy to “fight” in order to get people to ignore the bad stuff and focus on the fight. Fascism can’t survive in a peaceful, happy society.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon, Google, Microsoft reportedly warn H-1B employees to stay in the US⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah they’ll be able to get out, likely for free if they don’t mind a bit of detainment first. What they should be doing is finding a new place to work or seeing if their current employers will move them to an office in another country. And big companies should be expanding their offices in other countries to make up for the loss of workers, or moving their offices back to places where American tech workers are willing to live rather than moving to conservative states and then pretending there aren’t educated workers for them to hire in the US.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google will use hashes to find and remove nonconsensual intimate imagery from Search⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The system that scours search results doesn’t store the images, but they are stored. Maybe or maybe not by Google, but someone is collecting them and keeping them in order to feed whatever “AI” or hashing algorithm comes next.

  And it’s actually not the “whole point” in a technical sense. It’s mentioned because they want to make it sound less harmful. You’d never compare actual images directly. That would take a ton of storage space and time to compare a large set of files byte for byte. You always use hashes. If it was easier or cheaper to use the images directly, they would, just like the “AI” agents that do this in other systems need the actual images not hashes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google will use hashes to find and remove nonconsensual intimate imagery from Search⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Problem is that this means the images have to be kept around in order to compare them. So, often these caches of child porn and other non-consensual images which often are poorly secured are targets of hacking and thus end up allowing the images to spread more rather than less. And the people sharing these things don’t usually use the services that do this kind of scanning. So in general, it has more negative than positive effect. Instead, education to prevent abuse and support for the abused would be a better use of the money spent ln these things. But more difficult to profit from that and it doesn’t support a surveillance state.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After Ukrainian testing, drone detection radar doubles range with simple software patch⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No surprise. Most software from large public companies is poorly optimized because they value current profits over future sales and in near monopoly markets there’s no real fear of losing future sales over poor reputation. So build it good enough to demo and sell as cheaply as possible while sales people are taught to hide the flaws and that’s all it takes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean the whole calculation was ridiculous anyway on how they determined the “net”, so it was never true. It’s just now it’s much more difficult to fudge the numbers since they are using so much dirty power for LLM training.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Not Required to Sell Chrome in Court Antitrust Ruling⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No surprise. The US issued any real action in antitrust cases in many decades. I think the AT&T split is really the only major one I can even remember having any real impact on improving competition. Since then lobbying and campaign contributions have skyrocketed and corporations own most of the government anyway, so there’s almost no chance of a court being able to issue a real punishment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An activist has started using AI to identify ICE agents beneath their masks⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  ICE agents just like all law enforcement agencies, are public servants employed by taxpayers. Good luck finding any other legitimate job you can hide your identity from your employer. If you choose to serve the public, you choose to be in the public eye a d should be identifiable. I could care less if they wear a mask or not, but they should be required to have some other identifiable marking if not like a badge number, or hell, even something to identify that they are agents and not just random kidnappers would be an improvement. As for being harassed for doing their job, if they’re doing the job in a reasonable way, they wouldn’t be harassed. Sure they wouldn’t be able to hit the quotas they’re given, but having quotas for finding criminals is a backwards concept in general and means they have to create criminals when there aren’t enough that are easy to catch. It shouldn’t be easy. It should be thorough, especially if no life is I’m danger from the “criminals”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A little over half have them. But several other states do have anti-union laws that are similar to that part of the right to work laws. So that’s not all that different across states anymore even though that’s what the laws were originally supposed to be for.

  The other smaller part of the laws that’s actually usually more impactful these days especially for bigger cities, is that local governments can’t make laws to limit firings and without unions to make agreements around what kind of things people can be fired for, it effectively allows businesses to fire people “with cause” (i.e. they can’t get unemployment) for things that wouldn’t be fireable offenses in many other places. This causes large cities to end up with having to support a lot more unemployed people when big companies use these kinds of tactics to fire a lot of people.

  For example, often “insubordination” doesn’t require that the thing you were told to do and didn’t do was in your employment contract. Like a salaried employee who’s contractually obligated to work a minimum of 35-40 hours refusing to work an 18hr day when they’ve already worked 18hr days all week is generally easier to fire someone for “insubordination” for than in some other states that treat employment contracts as actual contracts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Right to Work” refers to the concept that companies don’t need a valid reason to fire someone without notice or severance benefits.

  It’s marketed as employees not needing a reason to quit or change jobs, but that’s not really true anyway considering most of the states allow binding non-compete agreements and your health insurance is tied to your employment and usually impossible to get at similar cost outside of the employer group market due to “stop loss” policies and other risk sharing plans.

  And there aren’t many laws anyway that prevent employees from leaving a job without a reason in non-binary"right to work" states, so the only real advantage is to companies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A hacker used AI to automate an 'unprecedented' cybercrime spree, Anthropic says⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe it will encourage companies to start taking security seriously…nah who am I kidding…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Lol, I switched to a keyboard on my phone with an ñ for writing in Spanish as well as English and the s key is just a little further to the right than on the standard QWERTY, so I keep hitting s instead of a. And for some reason the spell check and auto-correct seem not to be catching it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nope, Texas had no problem denying my unemployment and appeal when the company had a major change in leadership and I wasn’t interested in playing politics. They came up with some made up excuse that I was not coming to the office daily per the policy. And my boss had already been pushed out of his role as COO and Executive VP and moved to a marketing director job with no real power, so he couldn’t help.

  When I was fired the date they gave that I hadn’t come in I was able to present evidence to the unemployment when I came in the office and left because traffic was bad that day and I took the toll road and had the receipt. So, they came back with another day. That one I hadn’t used the toll road and since I wasn’t allowed to get other employees to say they saw me there, so I had no evidence that wasn’t fully under the control of the company. That was enough for them to rule I was insubordinate by not coming into the office for 8 hrs/day when it was policy to do so. Forget that I was paid salary and worked way more than 40hrs a week. And that I was doing way more than I was supposed to be based on my job title and I was barely being paid anything for what I was doing. They weren’t saying I wasn’t working enough. Just that I violated that one rule even one time was enough for unemployment to be denied. That’s all it takes. I could have appealed higher, but that would have required a lawyer and would have cost more than the pittance I would have gotten from the unemployment anyway.

  So, yes, refusing a direct instruction, even once, is even more severe than that and likely would be enough to have your unemployment denied in a “right to work” state.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, most employers have lots of stuff in their back pocket on almost every employee. That’s mostly what HR is for these days. But this is enough on its own to justify an insubordination firing in most “right to work” states in the US.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  GPT5 just proved what many of us in the software industry on the technical side have been saying since the beginning.

  LLMs are not AI. And they are only as useful as the information they are trained on, and with the industry using all of the internet to train the majority of them, they have tons of false information. And everything an LLM says is based on s confidence level that it’s correct, but those confidence levels are configured so low that it’s often way off. Plus people are used to computers giving specific, correct answers, but LLMs are all about small talk and making things up to fill time because that’s what they’re trained on. People need to learn these aren’t AI and everything they say needs to be taken with that in mind. Double and triple check it before believing it. But since we often don’t even do that with humans, thus the whole anti-vax thing for example, it’s even harder for people to want to do that for something that was explicitly marketed as preventing them from needing to do the research.

  So now that those not profiting directly from AI are seeing that it’s probably never going to get better as promised, they’re losing confidence. But it will stick around for s while. The energy industry is powerful and is lobbying hard for it since it’s the first time in a while our energy demands have spiked so high. And with the mechanisms to monitor climate change being shut down or explicitly destroyed in the US, and conservatives convinced that the natural disasters are just short term, dirty fuel demand is back, more than ever. So they have a ton of incentive to keep it alive ss well as the companies making it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Good excuse to lay off without paying unemployment while power-tripping. That’s all these kinds of things usually are about.

  LLMs for code completion cause me more button presses and clicks to ignore them over standard code completion and the chat doesn’t help people who think logically and conceptually only ones who think verbally. So, it’s useless to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Social media ads passing as posts: How advertising slips into Instagram⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The fact that my Facebook timeline had become a pretty steady ratio of 1 ad:1 suggested post which is essentially an ad):1 post from either someone I follow, a group post from a group I’m in, or a post from an account that I liked or a few other ad-like types of posts, meant I only saw content I wanted on one or two posts out if every 20 or so posts in my timeline and I rarely saw important posts from friends. That was one of many reasons I left.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China's green energy boom could spell the end of the fossil fuel age⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah just meant the ones ive seen that looked similar didn’t have flushing mechanisms much like the urinals that don’t need to be flushed. Those ones aren’t suitable fir pooping, but sounds like this one is different.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China's green energy boom could spell the end of the fossil fuel age⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  OK the white ones like that that I had seen a couple of times didn’t have a flushing mechanism or big enough opening to aim, so if someone pooped in it, it would just sit there until someone came to clean it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China's green energy boom could spell the end of the fossil fuel age⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Squat toilets are usually either a pit or like this one that’s basically a floor mounted urinal. So yeah, can’t poop in a urinal. But sucks when they’re all that pubic restrooms have.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CATL announces sodium batteries that cost as little as $10/kWh, a massive price reduction compared to the current average of $115/kWh for lithium-ion batteries.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t have a YouTube account and my pihole ad blocking gets me bkocked, is there an article it references? Also, what’s the kWh to cubic feet/meters ratio compared to current lithium ion?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK government inexplicably tells citizens to delete old emails and pictures to save water during national drought — 'data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Or maybe stop “AI” from sucking down gobs of power for no good reason other than to steal content and waste websites’ bandwidth that specifically say not to crawl them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My new laptop chip has an 'AI' processor in it, and it's a complete waste of space⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, even if the NPU space can’t be replaced by more useful components easily or cheaply, just removing it is sure to save a small amount of power which equates to a possibly not so small amount of heat that needs to be dissipated, which takes not insignificant amounts of and/or requires slowing the system down. Additionally, the pathways likely could be placed to create less interference with each other and direct heat transfer which is likely to mean more stability overall.

  Of course without a comparable processor without the NPU to compare to, these are really difficult things to quantify, but are true of nearly all compact chips on power sensitive platforms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hackers Went Looking for a Backdoor in High-Security Safes—and Now Can Open Them in Seconds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, but I’m saying they’re making these laws and saying they need it. Many people agree that they need it and because they think they are still secure because they’re using an “encrypted connection”, assuming they don’t think they need to be secure from their government, they are supporting it. If they see that by letting the government steal their data they are also letting that scammer that keeps scamming their grandmother for her credit card to get that credit card number without even needing to scam her anymore, they may think twice about supporting the policy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hackers Went Looking for a Backdoor in High-Security Safes—and Now Can Open Them in Seconds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh totally, but that’s the intended purpose. The thing is they’re saying they can do all that and still allow people to have a secure connection to their bank or whatever, but that’s impossible. Eventually, backdoors always lead to making the security worthless whether it’s bad design like putting hinge screws outside of the door so thrives can just use a screwdriver to remove the door, or a backdoor for locksmiths or government, it’s a weak link it doesn’t matter how thick the door is if a screwdriver removes it or how hard the encryption is to break if it can be bypassed by getting the code used by locksmiths or government, bad actors will get ahold of it and use it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Problem is scraper bots are way more aggressive and harder to block. If they were ignoring Reddit because they were taking content from IA but IA is willing to obey robots.txt whereas scraper bots are not, they just shifted the load of serving the bots or playing whack-a-mole with their block evading mechanisms. They aren’t going to stop the bots. It may result in being able to negotiate a license with the bigger guys, but that’s likely not going to make up for the money they spend on dealing with the bots in the long run. Of course companies like this don’t really think long term, it just looks good to investors this quarter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hackers Went Looking for a Backdoor in High-Security Safes—and Now Can Open Them in Seconds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  And this is the same reason why encryption backdoors would basically make encryption worthless. Doesn’t matter how strong the metal/encryption is if a backdoor exists to be the weakest link.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Local storage backups (local to the servers wherever that is, so “relatively local”) should be the initial backup, then those backups should be what’s synced to the off-site/third-party provider, generally. But it really depends on the types of tech and how those backups are generated.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If this was a self-hosted forum, yes, that’s an option. But for professional purposes, a dedicated off-site backup provider is better than having storage at an office site.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Not too surprising. Data backups need to be with different providers. The article seems to think it’s not “putting all your eggs in one basket” because the provider had redundancy. But that’s not much different from storing physical backups locally because they were stored in a fire-proof safe. Sure you made backups, but by storing them in the same building as the servers means the same disaster that could take out the servers could take out the backups. A “fire-proof” safe will protect it from some things that won’t protect the servers, but there are still types of disasters that could take out both, like a big enough bomb rather than just a fire.

  What if AWS went bankrupt and the servers were repossessed and sold off with the data spread across all the different new owners of the disparate data centers? What if Amazon just decided AWS was no longer profitable and shut it all down.

  Sure that’s not going to happen to AWS right now because it’s hugely profitable, but a serious US market crash combined with a major escalation by the current administration in the increasing surveillance state in the US which could kill the trust in the company, cause a massive migration to EU based companies and cause the subsidiary company that holds the data to go bankrupt without necessarily killing Amazon as a whole. Those subsidiaries often “run at a loss” even with extremely high income in order to divert profit to shareholders, claim tax breaks on “losses”, and eliminate liability to the main company.

  The legal proceedings of bankruptcy or other events could put the data in legal limbo for years before it’s accessible again.