The idea that a state government is unnecessarily at the mercy of any corporation is hard to comprehend. Especially, as in this case, a foreign corporation.

Open source shouldn’t only be the standard for governments. It should be the minimum requirement.

Another thing is that I feel like the era of the private phone number has passed. I see the use case for phone numbers for businesses, but people just don’t use them very much anymore otherwise.

Like, we don’t memorize them. We don’t dial them. They’re just entries in our contacts.

At this point, we could create an alternative way of contacting private phones. Something based on whitelisting instead of blacklisting. Something that can be easily shared but not easily guessed. Something that would be easy to trace who called you.

All of these phone scams rely on the idea that a stranger can just up and contact you without any effort. It’s ridiculous. If we got rid of that, we’d save people from untold billions of dollars of scams almost instantly.

My computer is good enough to run any games I want to play, even recently released FPS types of games at reasonably high settings. Still not good enough for Win11. My weak-ass tablet, though, was upgraded straight away.

I admit I didn’t watch the video, since it is 17 minutes and I don’t have time right now, but I’ll just throw something out there that I think is a good rule of thumb.

When you ask questions like this, “Do AI-Generated…” so and so, you can usually find a common-sense starting point answer by substituting, “Do human-Generated…” AI has the ability to plagiarize, and so do humans. AI has the ability to plagiarize even when it’s not asked to, and so do humans. Humans can even accidentally plagiarize, but it’s harder to say that AI does things accidentally.

This rule of thumb doesn’t always work, but neural networks attempt to simulate the way human brains function. Obviously, there are some differences. But it’s close enough to get a starting point.

It’s a complicated situation. A complicated question.

Even people who build their own computers usually buy all the RAM they want at the time that they’re building it.

The biggest difference to them is likely the feeling that they’re losing their ability to upgrade, more than the actual upgrade itself. I still think that feeling is an important factor, though.

Do you remember a few years ago, it came out that some company was working on a new idea that, when you were given an advertisement on a TV, it could require you to say the product name aloud or it wouldn’t continue?

I try not to concede anything related to advertising because everything they want seems so dystopian.

This is kind of an intentional cognitive dissonance for Twitch due to its having a conflict of interests.

On the one hand, it wants to tell viewers and advertisers that it cracks down on adult only content.

But on the other hand, the more adult content they let through, the more money they make.

It would be very easy to either make an age restricted section where adult stuff would be allowed, or to completely banish streamers who are the modern equivalent of burlesque. But one is bad PR and the other is bad for revenue.

I read relatively slowly, but I have the ability to read much faster. I simply like reading more slowly. I have this weird suspicion that people who read very quickly are getting information more quickly, but that they’re either not absorbing it fully, or they’re not enjoying it as much as I do. But that’s obviously a biased perspective.

Every part of your comment has something factually wrong or fallacious.

I don’t get feedback just because you read it.

My reading the part I am giving feedback on is a prerequisite for actually giving feedback. I am obviously a person who graciously responded to your request, not somebody that you somehow ordered to give feedback. I don’t know what you think you gain from viewing it this way.

I’m thankful for feedback but my sentence was accurate.

I didn’t say it was inaccurate, but that it didn’t tell people why to read the article. You didn’t ask me to tell you inaccuracies. You asked for “feedback”. You also don’t seem to be thankful, because if you were thankful, you’d simply accept the feedback instead of throwing up straw-man arguments.

I don’t benefit if you read it.

You have exactly repeated your previous statement that I already proved wrong.

I will offer you one last piece of feedback. Just stop arguing. You can never look gracious pursuing an argument where you ask for advice and then argue with people who took time out of their day to help you.

Upvotes and downvotes don’t determine whether people are factually right, but they do help you gauge what people think when they read your comments, and what I’m seeing is that you’re not ingratiating yourself to the people who you are asking to read your article. Even if you could win this argument, and you can’t, you wouldn’t want to, because you’d look bad in doing so. When you ask for feedback, and feedback is given, just graciously accept it. If it’s bad feedback, then just ignore it.

Goddamn. I clicked through expecting it to be satire. Instead, it’s garbage right wing propaganda.

Like, the first thing it comes out with is that “In 2023, the left is all about starting wars, while the right is the anti-war side.”

Now I’ll have to block the channel so that YouTube doesn’t spam me with Prager shit.

Don’t be tricked.

I don’t benefit if you read it.

You don’t benefit financially, but there are other benefits. For example, you specifically asked for feedback, and you have received some.

It’s true that the actual “story” is very short. 1 kB is 1000 bytes and 1 KiB is 1024 bytes. But the post is not about this, but about why calling 1024 a kilobyte always was wrong even in a historical context and even though almost everybody did that.

Yes. But it does raise the question of why you didn’t say that in either your title:

Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes

or your description:

I often find myself explaining the same things in real life and online, so I recently started writing technical blog posts.

This one is about why it was a mistake to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. It’s about a 20min read so thank you very much in advance if you find the time to read it.

Feedback is very much welcome. Thank you.

The title and description were your two chances to convince people to read your article. But what they say is that it’s a 20 minute read for 10 seconds of information. There is nothing that says there will be historical context.

I get that you might want to make the title more clickbaitey, but why write a description out if you’re not going to tell what’s actually in the article?

So, that’s my feedback. I hope this helps.

One other bit of closely-related feedback, for your writing, in general. Always start with the most important part. Assume that people will stop reading unless you convince them otherwise. Your title should convince people to read the article, or at least to read the description. The very first part of your description is your chance to convince people to click through to the article, but you used it to tell an anecdote about why you wrote the article.

I’m the kind of person who often reads articles all the way through, but I have discovered that most people lose interest quickly and will stop reading.

I also assume that people are answering that way because they thought it was a question.

However, it’s also possible that they saw it described as a 20 minute read, and knew that the answer actually takes about 10 seconds to read, and figured that they’d save people 19 minutes and 50 seconds.

I did say that people and AI would have similar poor results at explaining themselves. So we agree on that.

The one thing I’ll add is that certain people performing certain tasks can be excellent at explaining themselves, and if a specific LLM AI exists that can do that, then I’m not aware of it. I added LLM into there because I want to ensure that it’s an AI with some ability for generalized knowledge. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are very specific AIs that have been trained only to explain a very narrow thing.

I guess I’m in a mood to be reminded of old Science Fiction stories, because I’m reminded of a story where they had people who were trained to memorize situations to testify later. For some reason, I initially think it’s a hugely famous novel like Stranger in a Strange Land, but I might easily be wrong. But anyways, the example they gave in the book was that the person described a house, let’s say the house was white, then they described it as being white on the side that was facing them. The point being that they’d be explaining something as closely to right as was possible, to the point that there was no way that they’d be even partially wrong.

Anyways, that seems tangentially related at best, but the underlying connection is that people, with the right training and motivation, can be very mentally disciplined, which is unlike any AI that I know, and also probably very unlike this comment.

People are able to explain themselves, and some AI also can, with similar poor results.

I’m reminded of one of Azimov’s stories about a robot whose job was to aim an energy beam at a collector on Earth.

Upon talking to the robot, they realized that it was less of a job to the robot and more of a religion.

The inspector freaked out because this meant that the robot wasn’t performing to specs.

Spoilers: Eventually they realized that the robot was doing the job either way, and they just let it do it for whatever reason.

Password manager is one of the few “free” services that I pay for. Still feeling pretty good about 1password.

This is a complicated situation, but in my opinion, probably the correct decision.

Given this is the ruling, if you do believe your phone is about to be confiscated, and you don’t want its contents to be used as evidence, it might be a good idea to turn off your phone. Although the police cannot compel a password, a biometric unlock is not a password. If you turn off your phone, it will generally require a password to enable biometric unlock.

If you’ve been to Reddit since the API meltdown, it’s pretty clear that large sections of it were fucked by angry moderators, and still remain that way. I don’t think the fediverse was ready to take over, but Reddit very clearly has fewer people working for them for free.

Specifically, there are several subreddits where they used to be strict about submissions, and now they let anything mildly related in.

I’m honestly pretty surprised that they still haven’t recovered. At this point, I’m hoping that their mediocrity will continue to push people away until Lemmy can catch up.

I’d prefer him on Mars.

Well, like I said, the point is that I refuse to believe it until I’ve actually used it myself, because they’ve squandered all credibility with me.