You’re not alone there. America’s fragile social safety nets and minimal workers’ rights mean we’re all one bad day away from being in your position.
Chemo can cost $50k, and FMLA exists (somehow) but only covers 3 months. A cancer diagnosis could easily wipe out six figures of savings.
Most employers require prompt attendance, so a car crash that leaves you dependent on America’s crumbling public transit systems will likely lead to losing your job.
The GOP is trying to kill off Social Security, so if you ever want to retire, you might have to save twice as much as what’s traditionally advised.
With climate change being what it is, losing your house to a hurricane or wildfire is a much bigger threat than it used to be.
Economic swings, downsizing, and “k-shaped recoveries” can make jobs vanish or become unsustainable without warning.
Even for the top 10%, saving for these contingencies typically precludes a wealthy lifestyle, particularly for younger people with fewer savings. There’s now an entire demographic of (mostly millenial) Americans with traditionally high-paying jobs who still live at or below middle-class aspirations due to saving: HENRY, or High Earner, Not Rich Yet.
Last month, I installed Mint, which is my first ever Linux install. I chose it because people said it would be the most hassle-free.
The bugs currently plaguing me include:
Steam’s UI scaling is off, to the extent that I practically need a magnifying glass to read it.
Bluetooth has now decided that it no longer wants to automatically connect to my speaker.
Discord won’t share audio during screen sharing anymore.
But the big one, the one that made me stop and think, was the keyboard. Right out of the box, my function keys (brightness, airplane mode, etc) would not work. This turned out to be because the laptop was not recognizing its keyboard as a libinput device, but treating it as a HID sensor hub instead. To fix it, I had to:
Find similar problems on the forums and recognize which were applicable to my case.
Learn what the terminal was and how to copy code into it.
Learn that the terminal can be opened from different folders, which alters the meaning of the commands.
Learn the file system, including making how to make hidden files visible.
Figure out that a bunch of steps in the forum were just creating a text file, and that any text editor would do.
Figure out there were typos and missing steps in the forum solutions.
Learn what a kernel is, figure out mine was out of date, and update it.
Do it all over again a month later when for some reason my function keys stopped working again.
For me, this was not a big deal. It did take me two evenings to solve, but that’s mostly because I’m lazy. But for someone with low technical literacy (such as my mom, who barely grasps the concept of ad blockers in Google Chrome), every one of these bullet points would be a monumental accomplishment.
The FOSS crowd can be a bit insular, and they seem to regularly forget that about 95% of the people out there have such low technical literacy that they struggle to do anything more involved than turn on a lightbulb.
I am using an old HP Pavillion 15 to make a tablet. I have all of the internal components, and am making a shell. Does anyone know what the easiest way to make a case for those parts would be?
The absolute easiest way would be to 3D print the whole thing, leaving slots for steel rods to reinforce the frame.
The cooler way would be to just 3D print the rim and make the back and front plates out of laser-cut aluminum. There are laser-cutting services if you don’t have one of your own.
If you don’t have access to a 3D printer, you might consider brass. Unlike aluminum, brass can be folded or hammered into shape, so the front and sides of the tablet could be made from one folded and soldered/brazed sheet, with ports and vents cut with hand tools. I wouldn’t call this easier though – you’ll need some practice to keep it from looking sloppy.
Make no mistake, this is a publicity stunt and you shouldn’t expect Virgin Atlantic to follow through. But SAF is feasible.
Cost: Currently, according to Argus Media, SAF is around $6.69/gal compared to $2.85/gal for jet fuel. Jet fuel accounts for between 15% and 20% of airline operating costs per US BTS reports. So using SAF would increase operating costs by 22-35%. Given that airfare fluctuates around 20% depending on whether or not it’s a tuesday, that’s actually not bad at all. (Also, I think the airlines could fully absorb that price increase if it weren’t for the deadweight of shareholders, stock value manipulation, and executive bonuses.)
Scaling: Despite how hard America tries, there’s only so much used fry oil. Biofuel needs farmland, and there isn’t enough farmland to serve the automotive sector. Given typical yields, we would need about 373m acres of biofuel farmland, which is every last inch of unused farmable land the US has. But aviation is a different story. According to the EIA, the US uses 8.81 million barrels of gasoline a day, 2.98 mb/d of diesel, but only 1.5mb/d of jet fuel. That’s an order of magnitude less fuel, and an order of magnitude less farmland.
Sustainability: This one’s trickier. Biofuel doesn’t need to be produced using fossil fuels, but usually is. The US’s 893m acres of farmland produce only 10.6% of our GHG emissions. I think the biggest concerns would be increased water, pesticide, and herbicide usage. I am also not sure of the impacts on other nations with different geography or agricultural potential. I am not well-equipped to quantify those impacts.
Biofuel sucks CO2 from the atmosphere while the plants or algae grow, then releases it again when the fuel is burned. It’s net-zero in the literal sense. They only have a GHG footprint if fossil fuels are used during the processing. In the US for example, during the processing of corn into ethanol, they burn natural gas for heat because it’s convenient and cheap. So the GHG footprint of American corn ethanol is approximately the same as gasoline.
A subsidy-fueled boom helped build China into an electric-car giant but left weed-infested lots across the nation brimming with unwanted battery-powered vehicles.
Judging by other companies with similar outcomes, these are likely products made to meet the minimum legal definition of “vehicle,” and usually nonfunctional or minimally functional. The companies that built the “vehicles” often sell them to themselves (or rideshare subsidiaries), cashed in the Chinese tax credit, and immediately discard them. For an example of this in action, see the SEC filings and investigative articles around Kandi’s fake sales figures. Also see Out of Spec’s Kandi K27 review for what I mean when I say “nonfunctional.”
The silver lining is that since the discarded EVs are basically made of tin foil with tiny batteries, it’s not as bad of a waste of natural resources as you might expect.
Sodium-ion chemistry, material sourcing, and manufacturing techniques are still in flux. Longevity is still an issue. They’re still a breakthrough innovation, not a solved problem.
As it turns out, capitalism is better at driving iteration than innovation. Research into groundbreaking tech is expensive, risky, and the benefits tend to be spread out over entire industries, so private investors find it difficult to capitalize on (read: privatize) the benefits.
There is still investment in optimizing NMC and LFP batteries not because “big lithium” has its hooks in people, but because low-risk patentable iterative improvement is all the private sector is really good for.
This is why, if you dig deep enough, almost every “world-changing” technology you use today has its roots in government research or grants – microchips (US Air Force and NASA), accelerometers (Sandia Natl Labs, NASA), GPS (US DOD), touchscreens (Oak Ridge Natl Labs), the internet (ARPA), and even the lithium battery itself (NASA). The list goes on, and it gets particularly impressive when you look at medical breakthroughs.
Today, the US DOE has its net spread wide, funding dozens of different battery chemistries. Argonne Natl Lab is working on Na-ion right now, among others. For mostly political reasons, US-funded research doesn’t “pick winners,” so they won’t ever truly go all-in on one tech.
TL;DR: Na-ion batteries are still a breakthrough technology, so expect funding/research from state actors like the DOE or CATL to push it over the line before the private-sector investment floodgates open.
So I’ve been thinking about Linux recently, and I’m told this is where the Linux experts hang out. I have a lot of questions that I can barely articulate, so I’m just hoping someone gets where I’m coming from....
I was writing a post for a tech forum, but I had other things on my mind, stuff I’ve been too nervous to verbalize directly. One thing led to another, and… well, I think you’ll catch my drift if you read the post again.
I hope you don’t mind me being so very circumspect. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to talk about this.
Thanks for the kind words and the understanding. I’d like to think that once I have the courage to ask these questions directly, I’ll no longer need to ask them. But it’s really encouraging to know there are good support communities out there.
I’ve had a lot on my mind that I just can’t find the courage to verbalize directly, but for whatever reason I feel like I can ask it this way without making it feel so terrifyingly real. So I’m deeply grateful for your understanding.
I think maybe I need to get into the spirit of experimentation and exploration. Your OS can grow with you. It should grow with you. All the same, there’s no hurry to choose a distro and stick with it.
I played the Mystic class, briefly. I made a martial-focused build, and the DPR was very close to Warlocks and Paladins. The nova abilities were effective but expensive, comparable to smites. Using psi points to put the exact amount of oomph I wanted into an ability was a ton of fun and turned into a threat-analysis minigame – very thematic for an intelligence caster.
Where the Mystic went nuts was the infinite toolbelt. The best way to explain this is through raw numbers. A level 5 Wizard – the de facto swiss army knife of D&D – can have 4 cantrips and 9 spells prepared, plus 1-2 freebie abilities. A level 5 Mystic could have 2 talents, 5 disciplines (each with about 4 active options and 1 focus), plus 1-3 freebies.
In other words, a Mystic could have 30 abilities to a Wizard’s 15. And it shows. While playing, I quickly realized that I had a solution to every single situation. And as fun as it is to be the guy with the shark repellent spray, it’s pretty obviously bad game design.
I think ultimately what I really wanted was an intelligence-based Paladin.
Not my OC but what I’ve believed for years: there’s no conflict between reducing your own environmental impact and holding corporations responsible. We hold corps responsible for the environment by creating a societal ethos of environmental responsibility that forces corporations to serve the people’s needs or go bankrupt...
Ethical consumption without collective action has no teeth – what if none of the corporations offer ethical goods to consume?
Collective action without ethical consumption has no stamina – if people are unprepared for personal sacrifice, how many will continue to support the reduction of unethical goods once the corporations reduce production and/or raise prices?
Another way to say it is that every movement needs a carrot, a stick, and an ultimatum. The carrot is evangelizing the injustice (MLK), the stick is direct action (Malcolm X), and the ultimatum is an implicit show of force and dedication that demonstrates how many people will resort to the stick if the carrot is not accepted (the mach on Washington).
While I am nearly always in the peaceful outreach camp, I strongly suspect that my efforts will not see fruition until breathless WSJ editorials start describing environmentalists as “dangerous” and “unamerican.”
Several months ago Beehaw received a report about CSAM (i.e. Child Sexual Abuse Material). As an admin, I had to investigate this in order to verify and take the next steps. This was the first time in my life that I had ever seen images such as these. Not to go into great detail, but the images were of a very young child...
So this just got posted on lemmy.dbzer0. They’ve got an AI-based CSAM screen up and running with promising initial results. The model was trained using CLIP, which as far as I understand it means they used written descriptions of what CSAM is or is not.
Yesterday, you probably saw this informal post by one of our head admins (Chris Remington). This post lamented some of the difficulties we’re running into with the site at this point, and what the future might hold for us. This is a more formal post about those difficulties and the way we currently see things....
My mom likes to play No Man’s Sky and Valheim, but her Asus TUF started freezing on games. RMA found no problems and sent it back to her but it still happens. I ordered a Legion for her but now I see these posts about all Nvidia 40-series laptops freezing up. What’s a gaming mom supposed to do?
Exactly. It’s a niche, but it’s a legitimate niche. I needed a “portable desktop” that could run games as well as Solidworks simulations, and a gaming laptop was perfect for me.
It’s a Samsung Series 7 Gamer, and it’s lasted me 11 years so far (yes, you read that right). If I could go back and do anything differently, I would unplug the battery to preserve it for the rare instances when I actually needed it.
Employees say they weren’t adequately warned about the brutality of some of the text and images they would be tasked with reviewing, and were offered no or inadequate psychological support. Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson.
It is true that LLMs and DPMs do not create, they interpolate – that’s why training data and curation of that data is so critical to begin with. Nevertheless, it is correct to say they are being used for “creative activities” as cheap and (in my opinion) unsustainable substitutes for human minds.
Greg Rutkowski, a digital artist known for his surreal style, opposes AI art but his name and style have been frequently used by AI art generators without his consent. In response, Stable Diffusion removed his work from their dataset in version 2.0. However, the community has now created a tool to emulate Rutkowski’s style...
It doesn’t change anything you said about copyright law, but current-gen AI is absolutely not “a virtual brain” that creates “art in the same rough and inexact way that we humans do it.” What you are describing is called Artificial General Intelligence, and it simply does not exist yet.
Today’s large language models (like ChatGPT) and diffusion models (like Stable Diffusion) are statistics machines. They copy down a huge amount of example material, process it, and use it to calculate the most statistically probable next word (or pixel), with a little noise thrown in so they don’t make the same thing twice. This is why ChatGPT is so bad at math and Stable Diffusion is so bad at counting fingers – they are not making any rational decisions about what they spit out. They’re not striving to make the correct answer. They’re just producing the most statistically average output given the input.
Current-gen AI isn’t just viewing art, it’s storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive. It doesn’t create, it interpolates. In order to imitate a person’t style, it must make a copy of that person’s work; describing the style in words is insufficient. If human artists (and by extension, art teachers) lose their jobs, AI training sets stagnate, and everything they produce becomes repetitive and derivative.
None of this matters to copyright law, but it matters to how we as a society respond. We do not want art itself to become a lost art.
It’s absolutely true that the training process requires downloading and storing images
This is the process I was referring to when I said it makes copies. We’re on the same page there.
I don’t know what the solution to the problem is, and I doubt I’m the right person to propose one. I don’t think copyright law applies here, but I’m certainly not arguing that copyright should be expanded to include the statistical matrices used in LLMs and DPMs. I suppose plagiarism law might apply for copying a specific style, but that’s not the argument I’m trying to make, either.
The argument I’m trying to make is that while it might be true that artificial minds should have the same rights as human minds, the LLMs and DPMs of today absolutely aren’t artificial minds. Allowing them to run amok as if they were is not just unfair to living artists… it could deal irreparable damage to our culture because those LLMs and DPMs of today cannot take up the mantle of the artists they hedge out or pass down their knowledge to the next generation.
How poor is the average American?
I’ve been watching a few American TV shows and it blows my mind that they put up with such atrocious working terms and conditions....
TC on open source evangelists (lemmy.ml)
[email protected] - Oh my gosh I just figured it out....
Laptop DIY
I am using an old HP Pavillion 15 to make a tablet. I have all of the internal components, and am making a shell. Does anyone know what the easiest way to make a case for those parts would be?
A plane fueled by fat and sugar has crossed the Atlantic Ocean (wapo.st)
cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/4426053...
China’s Abandoned, Obsolete Electric Cars Are Piling Up in Cities (www.bloomberg.com)
A subsidy-fueled boom helped build China into an electric-car giant but left weed-infested lots across the nation brimming with unwanted battery-powered vehicles.
Sodium-ion battery breakthroughs may be key to our electric future (www.techspot.com)
egg🐧irl
So I’ve been thinking about Linux recently, and I’m told this is where the Linux experts hang out. I have a lot of questions that I can barely articulate, so I’m just hoping someone gets where I’m coming from....
The true story of me discovering the fabled Mystic class (lemmy.ml)
we shouldn't promote individual responsibility *instead* of corporate accountability. we should promote individual responsibility *because it leads to* corporate accountability (slrpnk.net)
Not my OC but what I’ve believed for years: there’s no conflict between reducing your own environmental impact and holding corporations responsible. We hold corps responsible for the environment by creating a societal ethos of environmental responsibility that forces corporations to serve the people’s needs or go bankrupt...
bit of a hot take (lemmy.ml)
A High Priority for Moving Away from Lemmy
Several months ago Beehaw received a report about CSAM (i.e. Child Sexual Abuse Material). As an admin, I had to investigate this in order to verify and take the next steps. This was the first time in my life that I had ever seen images such as these. Not to go into great detail, but the images were of a very young child...
Beehaw on Lemmy: The long-term conundrum of staying here
Yesterday, you probably saw this informal post by one of our head admins (Chris Remington). This post lamented some of the difficulties we’re running into with the site at this point, and what the future might hold for us. This is a more formal post about those difficulties and the way we currently see things....
Just want a solid gaming laptop (reddit.com)
My mom likes to play No Man’s Sky and Valheim, but her Asus TUF started freezing on games. RMA found no problems and sent it back to her but it still happens. I ordered a Legion for her but now I see these posts about all Nvidia 40-series laptops freezing up. What’s a gaming mom supposed to do?
‘It’s destroyed me completely’: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI models (www.theguardian.com)
Employees say they weren’t adequately warned about the brutality of some of the text and images they would be tasked with reviewing, and were offered no or inadequate psychological support. Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson.
Greg Rutkowski Was Removed From Stable Diffusion, But AI Artists Brought Him Back - Decrypt (decrypt.co)
Greg Rutkowski, a digital artist known for his surreal style, opposes AI art but his name and style have been frequently used by AI art generators without his consent. In response, Stable Diffusion removed his work from their dataset in version 2.0. However, the community has now created a tool to emulate Rutkowski’s style...