have not read a real book cover to cover in two years.

Ebooks? I’d count those. They’re functionally identical to printed books.

A desktop that loves you back has to know you.

We fuckin’ our desktops now?

I don’t think that this is “know” in the Biblical sense of the word. :-)

AI-native.

Hah! Get with the program, KDE. Emacs has had ELIZA since 1985.

$ emacs
M-x doctor RET

I am the psychotherapist.  Please, describe your problems.  Each time                                                                                                                                                                                                             
you are finished talking, type RET twice.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

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.

I kind of suspect that what might happen is that it might open the federal government to a lawsuit, in which case the taxpayer foots the bill for any damages, and it is likely the Democrats will be the ones raising taxes and taking the political flak.

I suspect that the same thing may happen with tariffs. The Trump administration is going to effectively run a deficit related to tariffs, because the government is on the hook to pay back to importers at least a large part of the tariffs it exacted. The country is going to have to pay for that, whether via reduced services or increased taxation. Trump is looking to stall on that as long as he can. If he can stall until the next administration, it’s their problem.

It’s a messaging problem, all right.

!noncredibledefense@lemmy.world

C’mon, we don’t need YouTube for this.

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.

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.

It looks like patches. Maybe if the TV has…what do you call it, local lighting? The brightness is just right to trip those?

searches

Local dimming.

I wouldn’t think that it’d be so visible, but it sounds like it’s at least possible to produce similar artifacts on some televisions.

https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/tv/2019-qled-local-dimming-unsable-on-hdr-content-brightness/td-p/5236850

2019 QLED - Local Dimming unsable on HDR content - Brightness flickering in gray/dark scenes

This is not limited to HDR I believe but more pronounced while watching HDR content. The issue is that the local dimming seems to be unsure what brightness to use causing the brightness to flicker. This happens especially on grey or darker background walls in movies and so on. The biggest issue is, that it causes multiple areas on the screen to flicker. It’s a bit difficult to film, because scenes change fast and the camera is masking this problem a bit. But I could “simulate” this issue in this video. Watch the dark horizontal band starting from the middle of the screen to move up after the top timer bar disappears. The bar disappears in less than 1 second yet it affects half the screen for a whole ~3 seconds. It’s like a shadow or ghosting effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kym5aHsYaEU

Now imagine this happening in every dark scene when there is something moving and the whole area left and right is affected by it. It’s a constant flicker in those areas. It’s not limited to the light source changing, meaning this isn’t like blooming when you use subtitles. This stops when I pause the movie or when there is absolutely no movement/change in the scene or when I enable Game Mode, meaning when Local Dimming is turned off.

It’s so distracting that I can’t really watch anything anymore without looking for it. I noticed this a few times after buying this TV but I rarely noticed it after that. Now it’s suddenly so extreme that I can not watch darker movies because it’s constantly flickering.

Everything from ECO mode to Intelligent Mode, Auto Brightness etc is OFF!

If your TV has local dimming, maybe try disabling it?

You could use a case that puts the motherboard in a horizontal orientation rather than a tower!

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.

https://www.ccdaily.com/2025/09/datapoints-educational-attainment-in-the-u-s/

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.

https://blackdemographics.com/black-population-in-the-u-s-reaches-51-6-million/

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

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/07/30/most-common-age-among-us-racial-ethnic-groups/

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

https://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.

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.

I’d guess that there are probably utilities to export the world file to POV-Ray or Blender or something. They might be able to scale better.

I’m not a huge user of tray apps, but I’d want to have a tray module in there. Steam and blueman-applet, and if you’re on a laptop—which you appear to be based on the battery status—and aren’t some oddball like me who insists on using nmtui, probably the Network Manager applet. They all put useful things in there.

What the actual fuck does a package manager do?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_manager

man, apropos, info…

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.

“Hello I would like to torture my SSD’s FTL because I left three Electron apps open”

If you don’t actually need the swap, Linux isn’t going to make use of swap. If you need the swap, then you’d probably rather use it than have the OOM killer take out a process.

My desktop has plenty of swap available, but is using none of it, because the system isn’t under memory pressure.

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.

https://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.