smoothbrain coldtakes

Deleted comment was praising GitHub Copilot.

It’s literally just a glorified autocorrect and suggestion feature.

It also suggests complete stochastic garbage most of the time. When I type “list” sometimes it will try to infer that I am writing a cookbook and try to autofill to “of ingredients” or even further.

It’s a great concept but such an awful name. “Return of the ugly” is just such a bad and clunky title.

Housing Bubble 2: Impending Crash Boogaloo

Housing Bubble 2: Boomer Madness

Housing Bubble 2: Ah shit here we go again

Generally he is “in charge” from a CEO perspective but does not really make day-to-day decisions, which is why everything isn’t up in flames. For an example of something managed by Musk day-to-day, look at Twitter, which is perpetually burning.

SpaceX is definitely managed by a good team all things considered, in spite of the fact that the ownership at the top is unhinged.

Look at what’s happening in Canada to a much more necessary service. Our grocery chains are heavily vertically integrated, and they gouge us all to hell.

Loblaws owns everything in the supply chain from production to logistics and then some. Not only are they hugely integrated through the food supply chain, but they are also able to leverage their assets to provide financial services, have bought out one of our biggest pharmacy chains, and are currently trying to expand out into the telecommunications business.

What happens when one company owns everything? Well, they get to do whatever they want, basically. When anybody comes around to regulate or otherwise try to reign in the bullshit, they’re simply told to fuck off, because they have nowhere else to turn.

Vertical integration sounds great from a business perspective, but it is truly awful for the consumer long-term.

SpaceX is actually pretty vertically integrated as compared to Boeing for instance, who have always traditionally relied on outside firms for certain components.

SpaceX builds a huge majority of their components themselves, and it’s a massive part of why they have been successful over Boeing with fixed-cost contracts. For example, SpaceX builds all of their own engines, while Boeing contracted out to Aerojet Rocketdyne to produce theirs. In the context of the Starliner, this functionally ballooned costs because the back-and-forth between firms was incredibly inefficient, and it’s something SpaceX didn’t have to deal with.

The same amount of fools who created the largest civilian surveillance network with Ring doorbells.

TSMC equipment only has the materials to function for about two weeks before needing a shipment of replacement parts for the fabs when they wear out.

Again, there are easier ways to do this.

Biometric authentication can be required for some companies. You’d have to opt in to use the system or at least agree to the terms set forth by the employer. This kind of stuff doesn’t just get collected just because; it’s pretty sensitive data.

What you’re talking about is a cyberpunk nightmare; some corporate-assisted mass surveillance designed for like, union busting.

If you’re making vocal and facial profiles of employees you must have some reason to do so, and it can’t just be to burn cash. Like I said before, this stuff costs money, and it’s kind of pointless unless you’re using it in a way that makes money, selling the data somehow.

There are easier ways to spy on your employees. This is not cost-effective.

I use Zoom for work now and each call can be several gigabytes large, depending on resolution of shared materials and a few other factors. If you want to save that kind of stuff long term, you have to pay to keep it somewhere. If you multiply several gigabytes over a few dozen calls a day, you’re going to end up with terabytes of garbage you need to store. Zoom also informs you of when a recording is starting and active, offering for you to leave the call or otherwise implicitly agree to being recorded. You have to pay for all these things because there’s a significant amount of processing power involved. It’s not like it’s free to run facial recognition and speech recognition.

When I did contract work for Apple support, the spying was way more efficient than just listening to my calls. My supervisor could literally always see my monitor through the chat program we had installed. There’s all kinds of remote software for things like this. If an admin wants to see you misuse your equipment, they have easier ways of finding out than sifting through calls to find wrongthink.

There’s a transaction limit on tap payments. Sometimes you need to chip or swipe when it’s over $250 or something.

Cool but is there a better source on this than “I fucking love science”?

It’s a lack of awareness and training. People buying PHEV’s have the right mindset, they want to be more efficient and helpful to the planet, but at the same time nobody is teaching them how to use the car effectively.

PHEVs are kind of pointless because most consumers buying them tend to not actually flip to the electric mode during low-use periods, making the hybridized nature of the vehicle functionally useless.

Don’t forget about the new Snapdragon X series. I heard they were pretty good, on par and better than M3s.

You can enable REBAR on older machines with a UEFI hack.

It’s been part of the PCI spec for ages but Nvidia and AMD only started using it recently.

You can check out the tool here.

You also don’t have to worry about it fucking disappearing on you unless you have a drive failure.

They’re both planning on the same thing, it sounds like.

It doesn’t sound like Disney is licensing their content to Netflix, they’re both just essentially replicating cable TV based on their catalogues with ads interspersed.

Lemmy sucks at sourcing but rocks at being opinionated.

I don’t understand why you needed a whole new server to discuss the NBA when not only does every single instance have duplicate communities for the teams, but also fanaticus.social already holds the top dedicated spot for sports content aggregation.

I love that the federation allows this, but I don’t get why we need to endlessly keep spinning up more instances that already have way too many spaces trying to discuss the same stuff.

It’s also only valuable if people keep contributing to it. It’s highly likely the majority of current existing reddit data has been largely incorporated into many LLMs prior to the API access limiting. Google paying them 60 million dollars is a hilarious pittance to keep training their LLMs, given how much money AI services will likely generate off of the training data.

I don’t actively use reddit anymore, but when I need an answer to something that isn’t programming-related, it’s usually the top source on any given web search. That kind of content is basically the only stuff I would give a shit about. I can’t imagine how much absolute garbage you have to sift through on the platform to get reliable training data. Maybe the ratio is terrible and that’s why Google paid so little.