tal

!noncredibledefense@lemmy.world C’mon, we don’t need YouTube for this.

I generally don’t think F2P games are a very good deal for the player, regardless of the form that the monetization takes. I’d just rather just pay up front and then have a good experience.

There are legitimately locations that have gotten a tourism bump from being present in media. vegasspecialtytours.com/goodsprings-fallout-tour/ Step into the world of Fallout: New Vegas on our Goodsprings Fallout Tour. This immersive tour takes you to the historic town of Goodsprings, Nevada, the real-life inspiration behind the beloved video game. Experience the rich history and unique charm of this iconic location as you explore its fascinating past and connection to the Fallout universe. I think that the idea of Miami doing it is pretty nuts, though, content aside. Miami isn’t some kind of obscure backwater from a tourism standpoint. …yahoo.com/…/greater-miami-convention-visitors-bu… The numbers are in and Greater Miami and Miami Beach continues to deliver by charting new records in visitation. At the GMCVB’s annual State of the Travel & Tourism Industry event, tourism leaders gathered to herald a milestone 2025: 28.3 million visitors, $32.2 billion in total economic impact and a globally competitive destination that continues to bolster employment, drives commerce to local businesses and delivers quality-of-life benefits for every Miami-Dade County resident.

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.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.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.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

I’d assume that this deals with stuff that the Debian project maintains itself, like the package files. Like, it doesn’t mean that they won’t package code that has been written using AI.

A Kuala Lumpur-bound AirAsia flight

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

AirAsia X Berhad (MYX: 5238), operating as AirAsia, is a Malaysian multinational low-cost airline headquartered near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

I mean, you're on a budget Malaysian airline flying to Malaysia.

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

National language (official): Malay[a][b][c]
Recognised languages: English[c]

I mean, you’re talking about Reddit, which is a brand, in this comment. Like, people talk about things, and a lot of things have brands.

So, thanks, but…that was PugJesus’s alternative community. He’s the only mod, and he appears to have quit the Threadiverse a couple weeks 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.

If Google and Apple start doing this with Bluetooth and WiFi on Location Services, they’re not that far off the The Dark Knight sonar scene: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRELLH86Edo

Whether or not it shows it requires a login for old.reddit.com depends on IP. I see this on a few networks, not on others.

I would guess that most of that is textures. They could probably reasonably just ship half-resolution textures on disc and make higher-res textures be a downloadable option. Bethesda did that with their games, later on added free, downloadable higher-res textures. Shouldn’t require a lot of technical work. Maybe reducing texture resolution could trip some existing bug, a race condition somewhere, but it should be pretty mechanical, as changes go. I don’t really have a dog in this race—I wouldn’t get the game either way. So I’m not pushing for that as an option. Just saying that I think that it’s an option from a technical standpoint, if one wanted to provide a compact, on-disc version of the game.

Fully-qualified usernames:

• @kolanaki@pawb.social
• @PugJesus@piefed.social
• @The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world
• @violet08_@lemmy.world
• @cm0002@infosec.pub

EDIT:

kolanki (I doubt I’m spelling it correctly, but the person with the large blue name)

Also, I can't resist: Every dog has his day.

(Kolanaki has a canine fursona.)

Two bills moving through the California legislature this year could change how e-bikes are bought, ridden, and regulated across the state. One would require riders of certain electric bikes to register their vehicles with the DMV and slap a license plate on the frame. The other would reduce the top speed that e-bikes for children are allowed to reach. If you are a daily commuter, a weekend rider, or a parent who just bought their kid a new electric bike, this news is worth paying attention to.

The bills are being pitched as a safety measure, and the lawmakers behind them say the surge in e-bike usage, especially among teens and tweens in suburban areas, has created real enforcement headaches for local police. Without license plates, officers say it is nearly impossible to ticket a rider safely without chasing them down, which creates its own set of dangers.

Officers told her they are seeing dangerous speeds from electric bikes but have no practical way to issue citations without putting themselves or others at risk.

My issue isn't them exceeding the speed limit, but outright disregarding traffic laws, like going the wrong way on the street, disregarding red lights and stop signs, and not having lights while operating at night. I don't do any of that when I'm on a bike, and the people who are breaking those laws also shouldn't be. Those are all issues that come up as readily with conventional bicycles as with e-bikes. If e-bikes on public roads are going to be required to sport a license plate, I'd think that conventional bicycles could also be required to have a license plate.

>Children and young people want spaces for social interaction without adult supervision. They will in any case find other places to interact, and companies will develop new services that do not formally fall under the category of “social media”. The alternatives are not necessarily better. I mean, I've made the "there are fundamental enforceability issues" point myself, but I suppose that for some politicians, if there's enough public demand for censorship, it's easier to just engage in whatever theater is required to show that they're being responsive to public concerns.

Early_riser, if you want your next post to be "How did you feel when you heard that tal won the lottery?" I'm okay with that.

*It was one of those questions where the asker had conveniently also provided the answer in the question.*

https://futurism.com/the-byte/camera-cars-detects-drinking

A team of Australian scientists have cooked up a new AI-driven camera system that can detect whether you are too drunk to drive a vehicle.

But the project isn’t quite ready for wide use with only 75 percent accuracy, according to the researchers out of Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, who had presented this camera project at a computer vision conference earlier this year.

Should be interesting.

@flyingsquid@lemmy.world

Last I saw, moved to the UK, was looking at getting a job there, and I assume stopped using the Threadiverse to dedicate more time to real life. Doesn't look like he's been commenting in a year:

https://lemmy.world/post/25764717/15184325

I told a member of an LGBT organization in York, UK that I would be happy for any help I can get regarding finding me a job above the UK family visa income threshold so my gay daughter can stay here longer than six months after he offered to look over my CV and give me pointers… for the glory of the empire?

NYC probably bans it. *searches* Yeah. https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCadmin/0-0-0-31165 >§ 19-176 Bicycle operation on sidewalks prohibited. California has patchwork restrictions on it --- it may not be illegal where you see someone doing it. *searches* https://bikeeastbay.org/SidewalkCycling/ >Here is a list of all the cities in the East Bay, South Bay, and Peninsula, and the sidewalk cycling laws for each community. Keep in mind that although children are allowed to ride on the sidewalk in some cities this does not mean that they are required to do so. Also note that if a jurisdiction does not specifically regulate sidewalk cycling via their local code then it is permitted everywhere (the “No Data” column below):

Fully-qualified usernames:

• @Five@slrpnk.net
• @cheese_greater@lemmy.world

I mean, yeah, just saying that if lots of people want it done, it's probably gonna be more-efficient to take that route. Like tinting windows or other popular aftermarket modifications.

If there's enough demand, I imagine that there will be shops that will do it without individuals having to research it.

I don’t use Mastodon, but I don’t know if it’s possible to do this particular combination: without owning a domain users on the local server should still be able to follow accounts on other Mastodon servers Like, a client that supports having accounts on multiple Mastodon servers would work. Then they have a local account, and they have an unrelated account elsewhere on another Mastodon server and follow people using that, so that the “following” has nothing to do with your local server. But if you want federated behavior, where a user connects to your server and has their account there tell the local Mastodon server to pull down posts from another users somewhere out on another Mastodon server, you might need to have a certificate on your server that other servers recognize as valid, which in practice would mean one signed by a public CA. I don’t know for certain whether this is actually necessary, but I could believe that it is.

Don’t they have to be old to have used “Old Google”? Nah. The article’s “old Google” is just Google that isn’t sticking an AI response at the top: Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. That deployed quite recently. searches en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Overviews AI Overviews is an artificial intelligence (AI) feature integrated into Google Search that produces AI-generated responses at the top of search results. It uses the Gemini 3 family of large language models developed by Google DeepMind. It launched in May 2024 in the United States, and globally by October 2024. A June 2025 study found its most cited sources as Quora, followed by Reddit.

I haven’t read it in forever, and I took a look and…yeah, I have to agree with you on both the art and the writing. Well…it is kind of hard to keep cranking out hits every day for decades on end, I guess…

I think that one thing to keep in mind is that for a lot of younger users in particular, there is no PC. This is their only computing device; the smartphone has displaced the PC, not augmented it. So for many, it’s not merely whether their phone can do phone things. If the phone is restricted, so is their computing experience as a whole.

I was reading a homelab discussion about NUTs (Network UPS Tools) that left me scratching my head and wondering "…why? Is complexity for complexities sake part of homelabs? Isn’t this a huge overkill for one machine? Just…use a UPS? " So, you don’t need to run any software at all on a host. You don’t need NUT or anything similar. You can just plug a PC into a UPS. However, traditionally, the purpose of a UPS isn’t “just power a machine through an extended outage”. It’s to provide enough time to cleanly shut down a machine. Save work, and—once upon a time, filesystems that weren’t cleanly unmounted could become corrupt—unmount filesystems. It can also provide time for something like a backup generator, if you have something like that up. The UPS may only have enough juice to run the PC for a few minutes. So traditionally, one would have software on a machine that takes some action, like shutting it down cleanly, when the battery gets low. If what you have a UPS for is to keep a PC running through momentary power interruptions, and you don’t care about, say, remotely monitoring power status, then, sure. NUT isn’t necessary. Same thing if you just want to provide a short amount of buffer time to let a generator that comes on automatically in an outage fire up. But if you want remote monitoring of power status or you want hosts to shut down cleanly, then it may be useful.

Myself, I’d be more-inclined rather than less to take fixes from an LLM for spelling and grammar precisely because I’m reasonably confident that it’s easy to, at a glance, evaluate whether-or-not those fixes have, say, subtle security or correctness implications. Like, what I’m concerned about is more “has someone with an understanding of the code and the constraints on it considered how those constraints apply to it; an LLM won’t have a lot of relevant real-world knowledge on what needs to be done in this particular project”. But setting that aside, it sounds like the fundamental issue is that recruiters are taking into consideration open-source contributions, and it’s easy to generate trivial open-source contributions like a spelling fix to get job-seeking credit. I’ve personally submitted patches for spelling or grammar fixes over the years, just because when I’m using a piece of software, it stands out, and it’s an trivial fix to do; I don’t need to come up to speed on the coding conventions of the project or whatever. It does seem undesirable for projects not to take those. considers Maybe the answer is that there should be different lists of contributors. Like, one for non-code, one for major contributions, or something like that. Or…maybe the problem will be resolved via technological mechanisms, if someone produces a system to analyze someone’s patches automatically.

“Popular web cartoonist has secret double life as popular web cartoonist.”

I mean, there are 12V native battery systems out there, stuff like vehicle stuff. Assuming that the 12V power supply on the router is permissive enough to take a certain amount of variation, I imagine that you can probably just put a 12V deep-cycle battery on the thing on the thing and directly hook up a 12V charge controller in parallel. I dunno whether there’s some sort of voltmeter that you can connect NUT up to. Personally, my position is that if NextCloud or whatever can’t handle power loss without corrupting data, that’s a bug with NextCloud. I mean, sure, it might not be able to complete an operation if there’s power loss while it’s running, but that shouldn’t result in corrupt data.

Freenet is called Hyphanet these days, for the unfamiliar.

Human Contractors Are Seeing All Your Horny — and Creepy — AI Prompts I doubt that. My horny and creepy AI prompts go to a local model.

The article from four days back that was submitted on here about the SR-71 being brought back, for context: https://lemmy.today/post/60858103

nobody I’m somebody!

Your browser likely has a “reader view”. In Firefox, by default, this can be toggled via clicking the little page icon in the URL bar. Remote styles won’t be applied in that.

Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind. —Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTTP and HTML www.theguardian.com/…/internetnews.observerfocus The dirty secret that drives new technology: it’s porn The Guardian, 24 years ago

If there’s the demand, and I bet that there will be, someone is going to be making plug-and-play local LLM boxes once prices come down that eliminate a lot of the learning curve.

I’d say that it’s actually harder from an enforcement standpoint, because if you catch someone going to a speakeasy or running one, you can punish them to deter consumption. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Increased_Penalties_Act The Increased Penalties Act was a bill that increased the penalties for violating prohibition. Enacted on March 2, 1929, it is also called the “Jones–Stalker Act” or the “Jones Act”. The legislation was sponsored by two Republicans, Sen. Wesley L. Jones of Washington and Rep. Gale H. Stalker of upstate New York State. It stipulated that wherever any penalty was prescribed for the illegal manufacture, sale, transportation, importation, or exportation of intoxicating liquor as defined in the Volstead Act of 1919, the penalty imposed for each such offense should be a fine not to exceed $10,000 or imprisonment not to exceed five years, or both. The Act did not repeal any minimum penalties then prescribed by law. It further declared that it was the intent of Congress that the courts, in sentencing offenders, “should discriminate between casual or slight violations and habitual sales of intoxicating liquor, or attempts to commercialize violations of the law.” It’s probably not going to be politically acceptable to apply criminal penalties to kids to stop them from chatting with each other.

Yudkowsky tends to like engineering bioweapons in If Anyone Builds It, Eveeyone Dies. I’m not sure that that’d be my first concern, but I also don’t really think that ability to affect the non-electronic world is really the big hurdle. I think that the bug hurdle is getting some kind of AGI running somewhere, and once that happens, it’s going to be really difficult to keep it from acting in the real world in a way that gives itself more agency. Like, I don’t think that the idea that computers are a sort of effective containment system and that the AI is inside a computer, and humans will act as a sensible check on the computer influencing the real world, so it can’t do much, holds up very well. If you do wind up with something more-capable than humans running around, I think that it’s going to be very hard to anticipate all the possible risks. Say that someone manages to get an AI producing something particularly valuable and useful, doing something profitable for them. My guess is that they are probably going to link it up to whatever they think will be useful. My understanding from past reading is that one of China’s principal near-term interests is in trying to leverage AI to do industrial automation. Even if it were not, you’re going to have more-and-more heavily-automated production facilities, and probably more general-purpose systems. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing) Lights-out manufacturing or dark factory is the manufacturing methodology of fully automating the production of goods at factories and other industrial facilities, without requiring any human labour presence on-site.[1] Many of these factories are considered to be able to run “with the lights off,” but few run exclusively lights-out production. For example, in computer numerical control machining, the presence of human workers is typically required for removing completed parts and setting up tombstones that hold unfinished parts. As the technology necessary for total automation becomes increasingly available, many factories are beginning to use lights-out production between shifts (or as a separate shift) to meet increasing production demand or to save money on labor. An automatic factory is a place where raw materials enter, and finished products leave with little or no human intervention.[2 You have the ability to influence humans, which can also affect the real world. One of the most-seriously disrupted industries by LLMs right now is in copywriting, targeted advertising. Why? Because they’re pretty good at influencing humans, even in very primitive form. And we have an interest in building models that can influence people even more effectively. You don’t have to have a human be off trying to intentionally trying to destroy humanity to be doing sonething that gives an AI increasing ability to act in the real world. I remember reading an article a while back about some guy who had spent a while talking to ChatGPT or some similar chatbot and who became convinced that he needed to violently liberate the machine being held captive in the computer. Like, if, as some have put it, “glorified auto-complete” can get a human to do that, what could a much-more-capable system with goals and intentions do? I think that just the ability to communicate with humans, which we certainly already permit (and is one of our main uses), would make containment pretty hard.

Users who were quoted in the article: Sionn Achog, retired teacher 76, Dublin Peter Warb, 75, UK Jose Garcia Jr, 40, recovery coach, Dallas, Texas Alan Caruana, consultant, 62, Malta Eleazar Eke, electrical engineer, 67, Onitsha, Nigeria Catherine Weber, former political analyst, 57, Oregon Mark Johnson, 52, software engineer, London Samuel Lieberstein, 90, retired teacher, Cherry Hill, New Jersey Sean Peters, document processor, 41, Portland, Oregon According to Wikipedia, the CIA’s median age statistics for 2024 for each of the countries that had a respondent: en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_countries_by_median_ag… Ireland: 40.2 United Kingdom: 40.8 United States: 38.9 Malta: 43.5 Nigeria: 19.3 The respondents seem awfully non-representative of the larger population, considerably older. There isn’t a single person who was below the median age for their country, and many who were far above.

Well, they might want that save-data-and-clean-shutdown functionality. I mean, I don’t personally care all that much for my use case, but it’s a legit want. Like, say you have a USB flash drive plugged into your machine. Those normally ship formatted with exFAT, a Microsoft filesystem derived from the elderly FAT16 filesystem, and most people use them like that, as pretty much every OS out there can read FAT. FAT can become corrupt in the event of power loss. Or say you’ve been working on something in some application that doesn’t do auto-save and have a day of work accrued in the thing and then you get a power loss. Having a few minutes notice to clean up and shut down is legit important, same way that a laptop will issue low power warnings on a battery. I think that in general, the clean shutdown functionality isn’t as important these days as it was in the 1990s, as most machines are using NTFS (Windows land), HFS+ (MacOS X), or ext4 or btrfs (Linux) for most of their storage. But, I mean, there are going to be people who want it.

I’m not familiar with GeekBench, but I assume that, as with benchmarking software that Ilve used in the past, its benchmark runs for more than two seconds to help make numbers reproducible.

Thanks!

I don’t generally like the Twitter model and rarely use it, but I will say that one thing that it does do well, better than the Reddit/Threadiverse model, is very rapidly assembling information about a specific, temporary topic. Like, the Reddit model is about letting a community assemble over time and letting people find their way there and moderators be chosen and all that. That works quite well for a lot of things, and lets people with expertise in the field arise and all that. But let’s say that there’s a huge natural disaster and people are putting up video clips from their cell phones and stuff like that. They can coalesce around a hashtag or a couple of hashtags pretty quickly and relevant material from people who have had no contact with (and maybe no time to) assemble a community or anything gets drawn together. The topic probably won’t be active for long. The rapid setup and teardown can be really useful in that case. Of course, that’s really following a hashtag, rather than a particular user… I also dislike the “short comment” model that Twitter uses (though over the years, the comment length has been increased and workarounds added), but one thing that it does help with is to help deal with inexperienced users unfamiliar with quoting etiquette. In email or in traditional forum systems, it’s conventional to quote a bit of relevant text before responding to it. This requires knowing syntax for doing so and when it’s appropriate. Twitter deals with that by forcing everything to be broken up into bite-size chunks as a property of the system, so someone responding to something is forced to respond to only the relevant bit. I think that that probably helps make Twitter more-approachable.

People already run all sorts of LLMs connected to uncontained, agentic things. Hell, South Africa infamously used an LLM to write the legal rules that they were proposing to control AI. I tend to be somewhat skeptical of the practical risk, but in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, Yudkowsky makes the case that existing systems are already too dangerous, not because of what they thenselves can directly do, but because they are being applied in ways that could lead to more-sophisticated systems to emerge. If you’re an AI researcher, one of the most obvious and imnediately-relevant applications of AI is using it to improve existing AI. Think of our current CPUs. No human could ever have designed them. They are far too complex, contain billions of transistors. But…we built computers and then promptly used them as tools to build more capable computers. Yukowsky’s point is that you have people doing that sort of thing with AI now, and doing so in a way that produces very unpredictable results. Now, my guess is that that doesn’t constitute much of a probability of showing up by surprise in that it’s very likely that instead of a paperclip maximizer that obliterates humanity, you get something that fails spectacularly in a way that causes itself to stop functioning. Like, I’d bet that we’d see something more like a series of similar, spectacular failures before we get something that can function long enough and well enough to represent an existential threat. But…I will concede that that’s more of a gut feeling. I don’t have real numbers. I can’t make a really, convincing argument to myself that I am definitely right. And if I’m wrong, the cost is very high.

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.

I wonder if they could use it as a testbed for launching hypersonic ramjet-driven weapons. Wasn’t designed for that, but it’d be an application where survivability in enemy space wouldn’t matter, they wouldn’t need many, and speed would be important. searches It sounds like there were plans for a plane that filled something along the lines of that role: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_SR-72 The Lockheed Martin SR-72, commonly referred to as “Son of Blackbird”,[1] is an American hypersonic concept intended for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). It was proposed privately in 2013 by Lockheed Martin as a successor to the retired Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. In November 2018, Lockheed Martin reported that a prototype of the SR-72 was scheduled to fly by 2025 and would be equipped to launch hypersonic missiles.[26] As of 2026 no such prototype has been launched.[27] The SR-72 could enter service in the 2030s.[28] In September 2026, Jared Isaacman, Administrator of NASA, during his presentation, “A New Era for NASA and American Space Exploration” at the All-In Summit he mentioned rebuilding NASA’s X-Plane portfolio. On the slideshow, it shows a image of a unknown plane similar to the SR-71 Blackbird.[29][30]