@tal@lemmy.today
member since 4 Oct 2023 17:20
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- on ‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI in c/technology@lemmy.world · 16h ago
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on ‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI in c/technology@lemmy.world · 20h ago
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.
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on Social media addiction affecting boomers, BBC hears in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2d ago
Tracie is one of more than 50% of adults aged over 55 who use social media at least once a week, according to a 2026 YouGov poll.
“It’s an epidemic,” she said. “We are addicted to the scroll.”
That…seems like an awfully expansive definition of addiction.
I’d bet that an awful of us here use the Threadiverse at least once a week.
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on Don't mind me. Keep enjoying your OS. in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 2d ago
The dairy industry clearly needs to explore more edgy ad campaigns.
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on Just running emacs you know. in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 2d ago
There should totally be an emacs package to generate a Kickstart file to feed an Debian or Fedora or something ISO that would automate setting all this up in one go on a machine so that people don’t have to go outside emacs to get this sort of thing set up.
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on Just running emacs you know. in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 2d ago
I’ll be here, in a major I haven’t switched out of since 1994, with C-x C-f on :w q, because the point was never the file.
I don’t think that emacs has a way to serialize the Lisp VM to disk or live-migrate it across machines, but there is
desktop-save-mode.www.gnu.org/…/Saving-Emacs-Sessions.html
You can use the desktop library to save the state of Emacs from one session to another. The saved Emacs desktop configuration includes the buffers, their file names, major modes, buffer positions, window and frame configuration, and some important global variables.
I’ve never done it, but I suppose that if one migrated an emacs desktop file, it might be restorable on another host. So…technically, upgrading to a new computer would involve closing emacs, but it’d be sorta like hibernating and restoring a Linux system or something.
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on Just running emacs you know. in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 2d ago
Emacs vs vim? Why not both?
The goal was to combine all of the ease of use and approachability of vim with all of the ease of use and approachability of emacs.
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on Just running emacs you know. in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 2d ago
Note that you can also use emacs as your window manager, if this is running in Xorg, so your emacs window can be in emacs too.
EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager) is a full-featured tiling X window manager for Emacs built on top of XELB.
There’s some work on a Wayland compositor, but that’s not as mature.
EWM is a modern, fast Linux desktop environment based on Emacs. It is written in Rust, built on Smithay, and runs as a dynamic module inside an Emacs session. Wayland applications appear as Emacs buffers, which means graphical windows can be managed with the same commands, keybindings, and workflows as the rest of Emacs.
The ultimate goal of EWM is to let power users be bottlenecked by their own thinking, not by the tools they use. Computers should never stand in our way. EWM is built around the idea that window management, application launching, navigation, text input, and system control should be fast, deterministic, programmable, and composable.
EDIT: I guess technically you could use Wayland, EWM making emacs the compositor, then use xwayland in that, with EXWM making emacs the window manager in that, in which you have an instance of X11 emacs running which itself is running…
EDIT2: No, wait. I don’t know if you can run a window manager directly in xwayland.
considers
You could run it in Xephyr in xwayland, though, and you can run a window manager in that. So Wayland->emacs(EWM)->xwayland->Xephyr->emacs(EXWM)->emacs(X11)->emacs(terminal)->emacs(terminal)…
EDIT3: There have been people who have run emacs on the Linux kernel on bare metal, as the kernel’s initd, but it’s not very functional like that. Someone would have to go out and reimplement systemd in emacs, and that isn’t a thing.
EDIT4: Oh wait, apparently I am out of date.
el-init
A statically compiled Emacs init (PID 1) patchset, Emacs Lisp-based service supervisor and core component of Emacs-OS.
el-init is an Emacs Lisp-based, systemd-inspired init and service-management solution. Whether you are building a full-send Emacs-OS, or simply want to orchestrate your desktop session services from within EXWM, or keep project daemons running while you work, el-init has you covered. Use M-x elinit for the interactive dashboard, or elinitctl from the terminal.
EDIT5: I think the real test is whether one can play this video in
mpvusing the libcaca target in terminal emacs using one of emacs’ virtual terminal software packages in terminal emacs in X11 emacs in an emacs-window-managed Xephyr X11 display server in a Wayland environment with an emacs-driven compositor managed by emacs via el-init running directly on the Linux kernel.EDIT6: Oh, wait. Apparently someone also added KiTTY Graphics Protocol and Sixel support to terminal emacs in the last two months.
github.com/cashmeredev/kitty-graphics.el
Beyond inline images it also does inline
mpvvideo playback…So theoretically, I suppose you might be able to avoid the libcaca target and having to go through text even in the terminal emacs instances, and have the video playing graphically. You could potentially play that video in
mpv(KiTTY Graphics Protocol target,$ mpv -vo kitty) running in terminal emacs itself running in terminal emacs using KiTTY Graphics Protocol running in X11 emacs being window-managed by emacs (EXWM) running in Xephyr running in xwayland being composited by emacs (EWM) running in Wayland on a system with emacs as initd (el-init) on the Linux kernel on bare metal.EDIT7: Bonus points for controlling the
mpvinstance via emms.Emms is the Emacs Multimedia System. Emms displays and plays multimedia from within GNU/Emacs using a variety of external players and from different sources.
Emms can run as a minimalist player and controlled with a handful of M-x Emacs commands, or a fully-fledged, interactive media browser. Emms can display album art, play streaming audio, tag music files, search for lyrics, provide MPD connectivity, control the volume, and more.
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on Just running emacs you know. in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 2d ago
Emacs vs vim? Why not both?
You do have evil-mode.
Evil is an extensible vi layer for Emacs. It emulates the main features of Vim, and provides facilities for writing custom extensions.
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on Microsoft patent describes in-game advertising triggered by boss fights, loading screens, and cutscenes in c/games@lemmy.world · 3d ago
I generally don’t think F2P games are a very good deal for the player, regardless of the form thst the monetization takes.
I’d just rather just pay up front and then have a good experience.
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on Nvidia boss says there is ‘0% chance’ AI destroys the world by 2030 in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago
after everyone collectively waits until the last minute because they don’t want to pay for IT
We handled the Y2K problem. Yeah, a few minor bugs slipped through, but I remember identical concerns in the 1990s about how businesses would wait until the last minute and then there wouldn’t be enough people with the relevant skillset to get it fixed in a short window.
I’m pretty confident that we’ll also handle the Y2038 problem.
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on Nvidia boss says there is ‘0% chance’ AI destroys the world by 2030 in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago
Well, he’s saying “by 2030”. That’s an important qualifier.
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on Nvidia boss says there is ‘0% chance’ AI destroys the world by 2030 in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago
I am not terribly worried about 2026 ChatGPT posing an existential threat to humanity—though some people, like Yudkowsky, are. Yudkowsky’s scenerio is via someone inadvertently managing to produce an advanced AI via poorly-controlled-and-understood efforts to develop one using less-sophisticated, current AIs, and that advanced AI being the problem.
But I don’t think that most people who are concerned about existential risk are worried mostly about the next three-and-a-quarter years, which is what Huang is addressing, but rather what happens with more-advanced AIs that we intentionally develop. It seems very unlikely that we will not develop these, absent some sort of global, actively-enforced agreement not to do so. And…I’m not sure that we even have the ability to realistically enforce such an agreement, even if we decided that we wanted to do so. As I’ve commented before, that’s effectively an arms control treaty, and the history of those has been spotty.
The reason that one wants to be figuring out safety now, rather than waiting for someone to go develop the thing and then start thinking about safety, is that the major advantage we have now is time. One does not want to squander that.
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on The far-right tells a story people buy — so why don’t progressives? in c/europe@feddit.org · 3d ago
Not Europe, but since the article is talking about Trump, I’d say that a major factor in Trump’s success was a really high willingness to tell major lies coupled with prior presidents who had built up credibility that he could expend.
Immigration isn’t new as a concern in the US (in fact, it’s not even a particularly hot topic compared to many times in the past), nor are rural concerns about urbanization (many more people moved out of farms with mechanization of agriculture). But the stupendous rate and degree of lying is quite unusual.
Many people who voted for Trump wanted things like prices to return to pre-COVID levels or a boom in low-skill manufacturing or extractive industry or more-favorable trade agreements.
Democrats didn’t promise those things, because they knew that they weren’t going to deliver them. Trump knew that he wasn’t going to do so either, but he was willing to lie about it.
I am not at all convinced that this is a sustainable strategy, because it relies on an electorate willing to believe such promises.
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on Why are games priced in € (EUR) the same as $ (USD)? in c/games@lemmy.world · 4d ago
I dunno. If someone sets the price at the same number…let’s see.
The current exchange rate is 1.1486 dollars per euro.
www.tradingview.com/symbols/EURUSD/
I’m pretty confident that VAT is higher than that in some countries in Europe.
searches
taxfoundation.org/…/value-added-tax-vat-rates-eur…
This says 19% in Germany to 27% in Hungary. Mostly 20% or a little higher.
That assumes that whatever prices OP is looking at does indeed include VAT for the EU price (which would require knowing his location), and does not include sales tax in the US (which even aside from US convention of showing prices sans tax, presumably is the case if he’s not in the US, as there’d be no way to calculate sales tax anyway, since that would require a specific location in the US).
The prices don’t look to be that far off in that scenario, but the EU price would be slightly lower.
EDIT: Wait, Hungary is one of the EU members that still doesn’t use the euro, right? They use, uh…forints?
goes looking
Yeah:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_forint
So assuming—I don’t know—that in Hungary, Steam lists prices in forints rather than euros, I’m guessing that there probably isn’t a 1:1 dollar:forint price ratio, as a forint is nowhere near a 1:1 exchange rate with the dollar.
EDIT2: Well, unless a publisher uses a 1:1 dollar:euro ratio for the price and then Steam auto-converts to forints before displaying a price to a Hungarian user or something, I guess.
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on EU truckmakers seek 3-year delay to 2030 CO2 targets in c/europe@feddit.org · 15 Sep 2026
insufficient charging networks…meant zero-emission vehicles did not make business sense for buyers.
Ehhh.
The charging network is only going to be built out if there are going to be users of it. Companies are not going to go build chargers comparable to the current fossil fuel network to have them sit idle. And anyone who is willing to take risk on that front is going to expect that mandates on EVs don’t get pushed back, or they lose money on their buildout.
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on Iran and Houthi rebels used Anthropic's Claude AI to target US warships and build hypersonic missiles — Houthi rebels also used the bot to code ballistic missile guidance systems in c/technology@lemmy.world · 14 Sep 2026
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.
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on Iran and Houthi rebels used Anthropic's Claude AI to target US warships and build hypersonic missiles — Houthi rebels also used the bot to code ballistic missile guidance systems in c/technology@lemmy.world · 14 Sep 2026
!noncredibledefense@lemmy.world
C’mon, we don’t need YouTube for this.
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on The Rise of AI Companions: 27% of U.S. adults turn to AI for personal, emotional, social queries in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026
It is kinda interesting to see how much tech has overwhelmed the top rankings. I mean, “tech in the US has doing well” has been a thing all of my life, but over the years, it’s really crept up there. Almost everyone there is self-made wealthy in tech.
- Musk: manufacturing, fintech
- Page: tech
- Dell: tech (personal computers…again, manufacturing, not pure software)
- Bezos: tech (well…again, Amazon is also logistics now, though I do kinda think of it as a dot-com, not to mention being a cloud services provider)
- Brin: tech
- Zuckerberg: tech
- Ellison: tech
- Huang: tech (hardware, not software)
- Ballmer: tech
- Buffet: finance
- Ortega: fast fashion (and not in the US:Europe)
- Walton: retailing
- Arnault: luxury goods (and not in the US:Europe)
- More Walton: retailing
- Slim: Varied (and not in the US)
- More Walton: retailing
- Gates: tech
- Zhao: fintech/cryptocurrency (not in the US:China)
- Peterffy: fintech
- Bloomberg: finance, fintech
I mean, outside of Musk not fitting into pure tech, Waltons doing retailing, Buffet being a famous investor, and maybe Bloomberg, depending upon how you classify him, being finance, it’s all tech now. Like, that’s where the big economic growth has happened. The non-tech stuff is outside the US: two Europeans in luxury goods and retailing, and a Mexican in a huge conglomerate.
And in the US, only the Waltons are on there due to simply inheriting a shit-ton of multigenerational wealth.
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on The Rise of AI Companions: 27% of U.S. adults turn to AI for personal, emotional, social queries in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026
That was one thing that I wondered about for a moment, like, maybe you have people working very specific types of fields—I’d seen some papers in, like, psychology and stuff talking about human-AI interaction, and maybe this is a really hot thing to be doing to be doing in that field—but this survey was specific to “companion” uses, which I don’t think that would likely include professional use the way it was defined here:
The people who have used LLMs for social, emotional and personal purposes are known as “AI companion users” and a representative sample of 1,000 of them were surveyed to discover how they use their social bots, the nature of their relationships and the impact of their encounters with these systems.
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on Why was Concord DoA upon launch? in c/games@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026
I haven’t played it, but:
store.steampowered.com/app/2443720/Concord/
All Reviews: Mixed (849)
Generally, if it’s got a “Mixed” rating on Steam, it’s not going to do well.
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on Good Alternative to Procreate? in c/privacy@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026
You’re totally agnostic as to software, just want some kind of device that isn’t a computer that has a touchscreen that you can draw with?
EDIT: Are you currently using an Apple Pencil? Like, you’re wanting a stylus with pressure/tilt/whatever?
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on The Rise of AI Companions: 27% of U.S. adults turn to AI for personal, emotional, social queries in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026
These are some wild numbers, looking at them together.
So, basically, it’s heavily disproportionately loaded towards high-education users. 25% users have post-graduate degrees.
ccdaily.com/…/datapoints-educational-attainment-i…
This has 14.9% of the US age 25 and older falling into that group.
But it’s also disproportionately loaded towards black and Latino users. This has 30% of the userbase being non-Latino black.
blackdemographics.com/black-population-in-the-u-s…
That’s 12.7% of the US.
I wouldn’t blink at either one of those statistics in isolation.
But…both black and Latino groups, particularly black, typically have lower levels of educational attainment in the US.
I would expect that to mean that there is either some really high concentration in one area—like, a exceptionally high level of black users with graduate degrees are using AI, enough to throw the numbers that far from overall proportions in society, or you have different strong “clusters” of different groups using AI—like, there is a really high level of black AI users and a really strong cluster of high-education users.
considers
It does say that users are disproportionately below 50, and that would explain some of it. Younger generations are both more educated and less white than older ones.
searches
pewresearch.org/…/most-common-age-among-us-racial…
Would need to go dig up demographics for each cohort to figure out what proportional numbers would be, but just glancing at that, that’s definitely not going to explain nearly all of that. The groups are roughly equally-sized for younger age cohorts, so that’s be a fair bit of that on age, but there’s still gonna be a substantial education split.
searches
nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72
For the 2021-2022 school year, this has whites being granted about six times as many masters or doctorates as either black or Latino students, so that’ll be a pretty big educational gap even for younger age cohorts. Yeah. Huh.
drums fingers
Well, I dunno. It’s an interesting pair of figures, though.
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on The Rise of AI Companions: 27% of U.S. adults turn to AI for personal, emotional, social queries in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026
39% said they occasionally tell AI things that they would not tell other people.
I would be a lot less concerned about this were it not for the sneaking suspicion that most users (a) probably are using cloud-based LLMs rather than local and (b) have no idea what the rules on data privacy regarding their conversations on said service are.
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on French police suspect train derailment was sabotage in c/europe@feddit.org · 13 Sep 2026
Yeah, they updated their article. France24 hasn’t yet…
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on Wait, there's books and classes on linux? in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026
What the actual fuck does a package manager do?
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on Wait, there's books and classes on linux? in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026
man,apropos,info… -
on The battle to save the dying heart of rural France: the village bistro in c/europe@feddit.org · 13 Sep 2026
Well, if the root cause is falling populations in villages as populations move to cities, and assuming that consolidation won’t work because people won’t travel to the next village or move there, you could maybe do mobile bistros. Like, have one van that serves two locations, each on half the days. It means that people can’t go every day, but if it means that a bistro gets more patrons per day, that might work for the bistro, and it might be adequate for the patrons.
Mobile clinics and bookmobiles have been similar ways to successfully provide services in low population areas.
At a certain threshold, if people are just retirees living in a village out of inertia rather than because they need to work in an area (as opposed to e.g. farmers), it might be practical to look into more actively-managing decline, shifting populations of depopulating villages en masse into metro areas, or at least consolidating villages. Always going to have more ability to provide services that way, and if one can do a coordinated move, it might let communities remain more intact.
EDIT: One other point, drawing a parallel with the political situation over here in the US. I think that rural depopulation is, depending upon where one is, potentially something that has national implications. Like, under current US party alignment, the Democratic Party is essentially the party of the urban areas, and the Republican Party the party of the rural areas. Some MAGA concerns in the US deal with the fact that people are not happy about depopulation of rural areas. Some political science author I was reading recently wrote something like “There are two Americas. Things are booming in urban America, but they haven’t been going especially well in rural America for decades.” A lot of how Trump got the support that he wanted was in appealing to unhappy rural voters, saying that he was going to do things like bring back assembly-line labor in factories. When he didn’t do it, voters kind of lost faith this term, and his approval plunged.
brookings.edu/…/president-trumps-support-declines…
The breakdown by issue suggests that the economy lies at the heart of rural Americans’ retreat from the president. Only 24% of white rural voters think that the condition of the economy is excellent or good, while 77% rate it as fair or poor. Just 16% say their family’s financial situation is better than it was two years ago (near the end of the Biden administration), compared to 49% who say they are worse off. Sixty-four percent of white rural voters think that the cost of living is the most important economic problem they face, and only 30% approve of Trump’s handling of this issue. By a margin of 49% to 39%, they have concluded that his policies will hurt the country in the long run.
These sentiments are grounded in real experiences in rural communities. In 2025, according to the American Farm Bureau, farm bankruptcies rose by 46%, a figure to which the president’s policies contributed significantly. His tariffs reduced demand for U.S. agricultural products, especially soybeans, while increasing the cost of key inputs such as farm equipment and fertilizer. His immigration crackdown made it harder for ranchers, farmers, and milk producers to find the workers they needed. The war with Iran sent the price of gasoline and diesel fuel soaring. Last year alone, 15,000 farms closed, and the pace of bankruptcies has accelerated to 70% so far this year.
The rural economy is more than agriculture, of course. Many small rural towns depend on a single small manufacturing plant, and the news has not been good. While President Trump promised that his tariffs would jumpstart a manufacturing revival, the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs has declined by 77,000 since the beginning of his second term.
These trends are not entirely new, of course. Manufacturing has struggled to reverse the massive employment losses the sector experienced between 2001 and 2010, and the squeeze on agricultural producers has lasted for most of the past 15 years. Since 2011, the prices farmers must pay to produce their crops have increased by 50% while the prices they receive for them have fallen by 4%. But rural Americans expected change for the better under Trump, and they have not experienced it.
Urbanization is a worldwide affair, and so that kind of political experience is, I’d imagine, similar in many places. You figure that politicians can probably appeal to rural residents people unhappy about urbanization and the depopulation of the areas where they live.
I don’t know what the right answer is, because I don’t think that the things that the MAGA crowd wants are generally very reasonable solutions—like, the US is not going to roll back to the 1950s, as the world economic environment has changed. But I do think that it’s worth keeping in mind that rural depopulation does create real problems for people in rural areas, and it might be worth maybe looking at alternate ways of handling rural depopulation than it has been handled in some places, if one doesn’t want to wind up with a bunch of unhappy people and the political effects from that.
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on French police suspect train derailment was sabotage in c/europe@feddit.org · 13 Sep 2026
If it’s sabotage, given her recent sabotage campaigns in Europe, Russia’s probably on the French law enforcement possible suspect list. However, as of this writing, French law enforcement hasn’t said anything about Russia.
I remember a few years back when, during concerns over Islamic terrorism, some guy in Germany tried bombing a bus with a soccer team. His goal was to try to make money on sports betting. Was not, I think, anyone’s first guess.
I expect that they’ll be putting a lot of resources on finding the responsible party, though.
EDIT: Stock market manipulation of the team’s share price, not sports betting.
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on The Hidden Dangers of Musk’s votesafe.org: Elon Musk is Running a Fake Voter Registration Site Designed to Steal and Sell Data in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
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on Stop Doing Swap Partitions in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
I don’t recall that, but IIRC it does need to be a minimum of installed RAM if you want to be able to hibernate, since then you write out the contents of your memory to swap. That makes having at least as much swap as RAM a good rule of thumb for many systems.
IIRC kernel crash dumps also make use of swap in a similar way, though I assume that in most sane scenarios, it’s not going to actually require as much swap as physical memory, because you won’t have all of your physical memory allocated to the kernel.
On non-exotic Linux systems, I always make sure to have more swap than physical RAM.
- on French police suspect train derailment was sabotage in c/europe@feddit.org · 12 Sep 2026
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on French police suspect train derailment was sabotage in c/europe@feddit.org · 12 Sep 2026
Is this mostly a video?
Yes.
EDIT: There’s a Wikipedia article up that’s text, which I posted a link to in another comment.
There’s also DW’s coverage, which is text:
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on EU tech chief backs global AI rules in wake of extinction warning in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
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 capability to act.
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 god 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.
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on EU tech chief backs global AI rules in wake of extinction warning in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
People already run all sorts of LLMs connected to uncontained, agentic things. Like, sure, if you have some kind of isolation system adequate to contain it, then there’s no risk. But…people are running stuff without such an isolation system, all over, now.
Hell, South Africa infamously used an LLM to write the legal rules that they were proposing to control AI, then didn’t validate the text by human. If there’s one place you would not want to use unvalidated AI output, that’s it.
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 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.
Yudkowsky’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 going very badly by complete surprise. I think 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.
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on FFVII Revelation Director Insists S-E Had No Choice but to Require a Download to Play the Physical Disc Version in c/games@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
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.
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on FFVII Revelation Director Insists S-E Had No Choice but to Require a Download to Play the Physical Disc Version in c/games@lemmy.world · 11 Sep 2026
It might let you download less than would be the case if it were purely digital.
There are people out there who don’t have the most amazing Internet connections.
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on Don’t Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables - Jim Nielsen’s Blog in c/technology@lemmy.world · 10 Sep 2026
I have a bench variable-voltage power supply. Mine is a very low-end one, doesn’t even have an integrated voltmeter, so you need a multimeter or oscilloscope or something to set the voltage.
But…if you need some kind of exotic power at a given voltage and don’t have time to wait for an order to come in, one of those will fill the hole for all kinds of fixed-voltage power supplies.
I have only very rarely needed it. I’ve used it to provide 5V power to a PIC project that I was breadboarding, and another time tried checking whether it was low voltage causing a problem with a given battery-powered device. Maybe one or two other occasions.
If you specifically want barrel plugs, you can get “universal” adapters that will adapt one cable to various diameters and polarities.
I think that USB is also kind of increasingly filling the hole here as a universal standard for DC power on newer products.
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on Don’t Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables - Jim Nielsen’s Blog in c/technology@lemmy.world · 10 Sep 2026
Yeah, I had that problem.
I then had a coworker who was a sysadmin, and randomly dropped into his cable box at work and realized what I was doing wrong. Get a bunch of cable ties. Coil up each cable and cable-tie it.
And honestly, one has to keep perspective. Yeah, I’ve occasionally used a really old cable, but let’s say that the worst happens and I need to occasionally get a new cable. It’s…probably not that much of a disaster. It can be hard to get some old computing hardware, but even very elderly cables are generally commercially available.
I tend to think that keeping around things like IECs and analog audio cables are more-worthwhile since they’re slow-moving standards. Most old PC cables just haven’t found much use, in my experience.
Cables used to be something that brick-and-mortar stores had a large markup on. I remember a guy I once knew who had worked at a PC store telling me that the store made more (like, in absolute terms) selling the parallel cable that came with the printer than with the printer. Back then, having some cables around could avoid that, and having a few on-hand was a good idea. But online retailers have made the competition a lot more intense.
I typically have gotten cables at Monoprice if I’m getting a bunch at once, which in the US has historically has had pretty good cable prices, though I haven’t tried comparing online retailer prices recently.
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on European Commission proposes an EU preference in public contracts in c/europe@feddit.org · 10 Sep 2026
The European Commission unveiled on Wednesday a legislative proposal allowing EU public authorities to favour European companies in public procurement for key public services such as energy, water, railways, ports, airports and postal services.
So…let’s say that a company based in Europe obtains a contract to provide, say, port service. Ten years down the line, say, can they be acquired by a company based elsewhere?
What about obtaining a de facto controlling interest via one mechanism or another?
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on “This is the AI men actually use”: Meta ads pushed apps nudifying real teens in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026
Yeah, honestly, you could go way further back.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurine
A Venus figurine is any Upper Palaeolithic statue portraying a woman, usually carved in the round.[1] Most have been unearthed in Europe, but others have been found as far away as Siberia and distributed across much of Eurasia.
Most date from the Gravettian period (26,000–21,000 years ago).[1] However, findings are not limited to this period; for example, the Venus of Hohle Fels dates back at least 35,000 years…
For context, we figured out agriculture and started to move away from hunter-gatherer life about 12,000 years ago.
These figurines are recognised as some of the earliest works of prehistoric art.
Most have wide hips and legs that taper to a point. Arms and feet are often absent, and the head is usually small and faceless. Various figurines exaggerate the abdomen, hips, breasts, thighs, or vulva, although many found examples do not reflect these typical characteristics. Depictions of hairstyles can be detailed, and clothing or tattoos may be indicated.[5]
The original cultural meaning and purpose of these artefacts is not known. It has frequently been suggested that they may have served a ritual or symbolic function.
I have a guess.
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on “This is the AI men actually use”: Meta ads pushed apps nudifying real teens in c/technology@lemmy.world · 8 Sep 2026
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
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on Miami wants to turn parts of the city into a real-life GTA Vice City, but sheriff opposes the plan in c/games@lemmy.world · 8 Sep 2026
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.
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on Grandma finds the secret knitting app in c/lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world · 8 Sep 2026
I do see people online talking about using Excel to do knitting patterns.
I don’t know if his grandma just “accidentally opened it”—maybe she heard about it from someone else—but it does look like it’s a thing.
I’d probably suggest using a pixel art app or something instead, but, well, Microsoft Office is pretty much everywhere.
Reddit, 5 months ago:
www.reddit.com/r/…/creating_patterns_on_excel/
Knitting website, 15 years ago:
anniebeeknits.wordpress.com/…/charting-in-excel/
Charting knitting patterns in Excel
I do all my charting in Excel, personally. Mostly this is sheer laziness, since it’s the software I know best from my day job, and I can’t be bothered to purchase or learn another program! Anyway, I had some tips and tricks to share with Glenna, and I promised I’d make her a proper tutorial. I’m hardly an expert (at Excel OR at designing) but maybe this will prompt some others to share their tips and tricks too. Here goes!
Knitting website, 16 years back:
chemknits.com/…/how-to-make-knitting-chart-in-exc…
How to Make a Knitting Chart in Excel (Part 1 - Setting up the Chart)
A comment on my peptide beer cozy pattern page inquired how I was able to make the chart look so good. You can go to an office supply store and purchase graph paper. You can download graph paper online. But how can you easily make a chart of your own design and share it on the web? In this article, I will give you a tutorial for using Microsoft Excel to generate your knitting charts. In Part 2, I will discuss how to draw your chart and in Part 3, how to save and share your chart.
It looks like people have developed a set of conventions using Excel functionality to colorize cells based on the characters in them, so they can rapidly input patterns using the keyboard.
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on Grandma finds the secret knitting app in c/lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world · 8 Sep 2026
Textile patterns are one of the earliest commercial computer uses.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine
The Jacquard machine (French: [ʒakaʁ]) is a device fitted to a loom that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with such complex patterns as brocade, damask and matelassé.[3] The resulting ensemble of the loom and Jacquard machine is then called a Jacquard loom. The machine was patented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804,[4][5][6][7] based on earlier inventions by the Frenchmen Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean Baptiste Falcon (1728), and Jacques Vaucanson (1740).[8] The machine was controlled by a “chain of cards”; a number of punched cards laced together into a continuous sequence.[9] Multiple rows of holes were punched on each card, with one complete card corresponding to one row of the design.
The Jacquard head used replaceable punched cards to control a sequence of operations. It is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware.[26] The ability to change the pattern of the loom’s weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor to the development of computer programming and data entry.
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on Pierrakakis: EU cannot afford to be 27 countries | eKathimerini.com in c/europe@feddit.org · 6 Sep 2026
Done!
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on Pierrakakis: EU cannot afford to be 27 countries | eKathimerini.com in c/europe@feddit.org · 6 Sep 2026
Now there’s a candidate for a crosspost to !europeanfederalists@lemmy.world. :-)
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on People Are Telling Their Darkest Thoughts to AI Without Realizing They Can Easily Become Public: a full third of all AI users admit to having told their chatbots a secret. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6 Sep 2026
If there’s the demand, and I bet that there will be, someone is going to be making plug-and-play local AI compute boxes once prices come down that eliminate a lot of the learning curve. Like, preconfigured software and all that.
Joe User is not going to be talking about memory bandwidth or compiling software or setting sampler parameters. But—as the cloud guys demonstrate—he can use it if it’s set up. And there will be more-approachable front ends and such.
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on People Are Telling Their Darkest Thoughts to AI Without Realizing They Can Easily Become Public: a full third of all AI users admit to having told their chatbots a secret. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6 Sep 2026
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.
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on Do analog triggers matter all that much? (In general and aside from racing games) in c/games@lemmy.world · 6 Sep 2026
github.com/xemu-project/xemu/issues/2609
This guy apparently was making a list of XBox games that use analog triggers for an issue on an emulator. Each entry lists what function the game uses the analog trigger for.
It looks like:
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Acceleration (and, I assume, brake). By far the most common. Not always ground vehicles; spaceships and such.
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Rewind/fast forward in some sports games.
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A mining game that used it for drilling.
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Lean in some first person shooters.
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Sidestep in some first person shooters.
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Nah. The article’s “old Google” is just Google that isn’t sticking an AI response at the top:
That deployed quite recently.
searches
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Overviews