I might be going the wrong direction of “micro” here but time is the very minimal, tiny, and traditional unix way.

For example:

$ time curl https://lemmy.ca/post/61453347 > /dev/null
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  175k    0  175k    0     0   525k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  526k

real    0m0.343s
user    0m0.030s
sys     0m0.016s

There are also a large number of other profiling outputs you can ask time to spit out by passing it the appropriate command line flags.

It’s also a gift to Russia since middle-eastern oil is effectively shut down now and the price of oil is skyrocketing, so Putin can get a fresh injection of cash into his economy.

So… the doomsday clock has run out of time, is that what you’re saying? Seems apropos.

That may have been the intention but I doubt it ever worked as effectively as they claimed it would. Besides, it will probably cost at least 1 AI data-center of carbon emissions to continuously surveil all these people with TPMS sensors, so the argument could be made that you’re actually reducing carbon pollution at this point by removing yours.

Anything you post on the internet is public knowledge forever. End of discussion. Most people won’t care at all, in most cases almost nobody or perhaps even literally nobody will ever even see it, but the harder you try to hide it, the more the Streisand Effect will magnify it until eventually everyone knows about it.

Anyone telling you they’ll delete your data from the internet without clarifying that it is in fact impossible, is at worst deliberately lying to you usually for their own benefit, and at best making a promise they literally have zero ability to keep.

I would hope that Fediverse services will never lie to you and tell you your data is deleted, because it can’t be.

I’m going down the rabbit hole and people are forced to queue up for what I’m assuming is the equivalent of a serial key?

Not quite. A serial key is permanent, it lasts forever, although some software did try to use online and update services to identify bad serials this was trivial to block, because it’s essentially trying to backpedal a valid key into an invalid one. It only needs to be valid once, then you make sure to block anything that invalidates it afterwards (usually blocking the update servers at the DNS level), job done.

That’s different from a token. Tokens use something along the lines of at least rolling-code type security, similar to how your car keys or garage door opener keep generating new codes so someone with a scanner can’t just record the code it uses once and then have that be copied and replayed over and over again indefinitely. The trick with a token like this is that you need to keep updating it or it becomes invalid after some timeframe or number of uses. Hence the online activation. That’s required to get your next token or set of tokens.

They would be. That’s why you don’t tell them. If you’re treating your insurance company as your friend not an adversary, you probably don’t understand how their profits grow year over year.

I’ve been driving for 30 years. Do you want to guess how many times that’s happened to me?

Meanwhile, I’ve apparently been living in a totalitarian surveillance state for at least a few years now, and you know how many times that’s happened to me? I’ll give you a hint, it’s more than the number of times I’ve run over a nail causing me to drive around on low tire pressure without knowing it.

I’ll drink a cuba libre to that!

These are described as “subprocessors”, so generally, this means that Persona is (potentially) sending any data they receive to these companies/platforms.

The rule is that the market can generally stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Even broken clocks are right twice a day. It doesn’t make them useful, they still belong in the trash.

I’ll probably get vote-murdered for this, because this is unfortunately not a popular opinion for a lot of very justified reasons that I actually mostly agree with, but I’m going to throw this out there anyway, and I hope people hear me out for long enough that you can decide for yourself instead of just kneejerk downvoting.

Imagine if someone created a statistical numerical model that was based on, and could therefore approximately reproduce something close to the cumulative total of all human knowledge ever recorded on the internet which probably represents exabytes of information, but this numerical model was only the size of a few movie files, and you could dump those numbers into a simulator that within some margin of statistical error, reproduced almost any of that information on currently available consumer-level hardware.

If you’re not picking up what I’m putting down, I just described open weight LLMs that you can download and run yourself in ollama and other local programs.

They are not intelligences and they do not represent knowledge, because they don’t know anything, can’t make their own decisions and can never be assumed to be fully accurate representations of anything they have “learned” as they are simply greatly minimized and compressed statistical details about the information already on the internet, but they actually still contain a great deal of information, provided you understand what you’re looking at and what it’s telling you. The same way demographics can provide a great deal of information about the world without needing to individually review every census document by hand, but never tell the entire story perfectly.

While I agree with the suggestions to get a proper encyclopedia or just download Wikipedia, for a more reliable and trustworthy dataset, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice if you dismiss the entire concept of LLMs and vision models just because a few horrific companies are hyping them and overselling them and using them to destroy the world and civilization in disgustingly idiotic ways. That’s not the fault of the technologies themselves. They are a tool, a tool that is being widely misused and abused, but it’s also a tool that you can use, and you get to decide whether you simply use it wisely, or abuse it, or don’t use it at all. It’s your call. It’s already there. You decide what to do with it. I happen to think it’s got some pretty cool features and can do some remarkable things. As long as I’m the only one in charge of deciding how and when it’s used. I acknowledge it was plagiarized and collected illegally, and I respect that (as much as I respect any copyright) and I’m not planning to profit from it or use it to pass off other people’s work as my own.

But as a hyper-efficient way to store “liberated” information to protect ourselves against the complete enshittification of content and civilization? I don’t see the harm. Copyright is not going to matter at that point anyway, the large companies who control the data and the platforms for it have already proven they don’t respect it and they’re going to be the ones dictating it in the future. They won’t even let us have access to our own data, nevermind being able to do anything to prevent them from taking it in the first place. We, the people and authors and artists and musicians and content creators it was designed to protect, now have to protect ourselves, from them, and if that means hiding some machine learning models under my bed for that rainy day, so be it.

Unlikely. Power supplies usually have internal protection, and as a result, if they become overloaded, they will trip off (and the whole computer either shuts down or reboots). Is it possible the internal protection is not working? Maybe. But it is far more likely the issue is with other hardware, or even more likely, with software/device driver issues. Try booting a LiveCD/LiveUSB with Linux on it or something and see if the problem goes away.

I agree that quadlets are pretty ugly but I’m not sure that’s the ini style’s fault. In general I find yaml incredibly frustrating to understand, but toml/ini style is pretty fluent to me. Maybe just a preference, IDK.

Systemd killed my father, but it’s okay because he was Darth Vader anyway.

Subtractive colors like paint create color by selectively removing some colors from existing light.

Additive colors like backlit or light-emitting displays create color by creating colors of light in various proportions that are then combined.

If you are in a dark room, all paint is black. Until you turn on something with RGB, because then you have some light for it to selectively absorb. However if your RGB is only displaying green light, and you shine it on red paint, it will look exactly the same as black paint (within a certain ballpark of imperfect materials, anyway). Green paint will look green, or white, depending on how your eye adapts, and green and white will be indistinguishable.

That’s the difference between the two color models. Does it rely on other light sources (subtractive), or is it a light source (additive)?

How the brain actually perceives color is really, really wild, so this is all a bit… fluid when you start getting into the weird edge cases, but the general principles of additive=light emitting and subtractive=light absorbing are generally applicable.

This is interesting, especially the idea of using the sun itself to cause the molecule to change state directly, instead of relying on electrical or other chemical steps. If they can do something to pull it off, great. Really cool idea.

However I have to point out that we can already store solar energy and release it as heat months (or years) later using synthetic fuels, which are completely carbon-neutral when burned and briefly carbon-negative when produced using renewable energy and atmospheric carbon (if required). It is rather inefficient yes, but with sufficient renewable energy, efficiency no longer needs to be our primary concern. In fact, I think overall we focus on efficiency far too much, to our detriment in many cases, durability and resiliency is often in direct contraction to efficiency, and we have created a lot of systems that are very fragile at the very limit of what’s possible in the name of efficiency and left ourselves very little breathing room. But that’s a different discussion.

Synthetic fuel is a fraught topic because it’s so vulnerable to greenwashing where fossil fuel companies muddy the waters with “carbon capture” and repackage their fossil fuels into “biodiesel” and “blue hydrogen” and other deceitful scams, and in practice there is little understanding of where the synthetic fuels are actually coming from due to the nuance involved. There is no accountability for abuse, and that makes them untenable at this stage.

However, it doesn’t HAVE to be like that. With proper regulation and oversight (which granted may not be possible in a world run by criminals and billionaire sociopaths), synthetic fuels would allow us to avoid turning the massive amounts of investment over the last 100 years into all the world’s fuel-burning equipment which is both functional, practical, and in many cases the best tool for the job, into illegal trash we are forced to dispose of. It is not trash, only fossil fuel is trash. Synthetic fuels would change the economics of fuel usage significantly, and some of that equipment might end up being trash anyway, but probably not all of it. We aren’t in a position to make those kind of fuels practical or affordable yet, but I urge people not to discount them completely for the future. Chemical energy storage is amazing, and fuel is a very potent and reliable form of chemical energy storage we are already very experienced with and well equipped for.

It’s especially important for the people who don’t “like” electric cars, continue to have range anxiety, still use fossil fuels for heat, or backup power, whatever, the idea of synthetic fuels should be left on the table, to leave the door open for their lovely classic gas guzzler to run on environmentally friendly fuel in the future. Because it is absolutely possible. It is a solution that we can at least be open to in the future when the impending crisis has started being addressed properly (if it ever gets to that point… *sigh*). The economy is going to say whatever the economy is going to say about it, and I get there are other priorities that need to be addressed first, but there’s no reason to slam the door in people’s face if they want to keep burning fuels. Provide a path forward to meet their needs, and let them make the decision whether it’s worth it to them or not. The heavy-handed, high-horse style “you’ll use an electric car from now on and you’ll LIKE it!” dictates really don’t help convince anyone of anything, and I think we need to understand that people do need to be convinced. Gently.

I think ActivityPub is closer to the right answer than ATProto, and ActivityPub’s issues (though many, as the author notes) are more manageable in the long run. I think the article makes a good analysis of the fundamental differences, but is a bit glib in referring to Piefed’s topics and discussion merging as a “joyful mess”. It’s not a mess at all. It’s making order out of the chaos, and it’s the right way to build on top of ActivityPub into something that is actually fluid enough for users to actually use.

Mailing lists were built on top of federated email in much the same way, and they formed enduring, resilient, well-structured communities, some that continue to this day (the LKML being perhaps the most notorious)

I think ATProto makes creating enduring communities too difficult, and BlackSky illustrates that perfectly. The author’s criticism of ActivityPub, on the other hand, seems to be that it makes creating communities too easy, and this results in a “mess”. I disagree, I think the mess is a necessary and inevitable part of having community. Communities are messy. They fracture and schism, they rejoin and reshape themselves. That’s normal. It is the responsibility of the software to make sense of the mess and make it presentable, and with ActivityPub, that is not only possible, it is happening. Piefed is the present example. I expect there will be more examples, and a wider variety of them, as the ecosystem continues to develop.

I think the biggest thing that ActivityPub still needs is better portability, for both users and communities, to allow moving servers more seamlessly. The “Personal Data Server” of Bluesky is not a bad concept, although I don’t love their implementation. I think ActivityPub can find a way to handle portability even better, but it doesn’t seem like it’s been a priority, and that’s fine. But it will need to happen eventually.

Americans have had business interests blowing smoke up their ass for so long they just think it’s constantly foggy. Canada’s not much better, but we do our best given our proximity to source of this madness.