Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

  • 6 Posts
  • 188 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

help-circle



  • Santa is a stand-in for Jesus… for children. They’re both magical beings that can perform miracles and have similar methods: Both Santa and Jesus have naughty lists and forms of punishment that come later; much later (both are equivalent lengths of time to a child though 🤣). Both bring “gifts”. Both have traditional appearances. Both have followers that wear silly hats and strange clothes. But most importantly…

    Both are imaginary.

    If you believe in Santa as an adult you’re ridiculed. If you believe in Jesus as an adult you’re just labeled, “Christian”. Yet the fact that nearly every child eventually finds out Santa isn’t real is quite disturbing to a lot of Christians. After all, if they could stop believing in Santa–who is so similar to Jesus in every way–then they could stop believing in Jesus.


  • Here’s how it’s going to go:

    • Pentagon will put up enormous resistance because of cost and impractically.
    • Pentagon officials will be fired left and right because, “they can’t get stuff done.”
    • Eventually enough competent people will be replaced with loyalists then they’ll actually start kidnapping immigrants and placing them in facilities that were never meant for large amounts of people.
    • American citizens that look like the conservative enemy of the day will be kidnapped along with legal and illegal immigrants.
    • The US government will get sued over and over again for fucking up basic shit like “accidentally” kidnapping Black/Asian/Latino Americans and even simpler things like keeping people fed (because the Trump administration doesn’t care about competency; only loyalty; or these people, for that matter).
    • Countries will refuse to accept the sheer number of people (same exact problem Hitler had!) leading the Trump administration trying to come up with “solutions”.
    • They’ll force the kidnapped people to do traditional prison work. Except there’s not enough demand for that many license plates so they’ll switch to literally selling their labor, allowing Trump’s personal circle of rich friends to profit at their expense.
    • Due to unbelievable levels of sheer incompetentcy that won’t work out so near the end of Trump’s term–when he’s panicking about having to face justice again–he’ll attempt to implement a more, “final solution.”

  • There’s vastly more malicious code now than there was back then. Every company that has an online presence is constantly under attack. Constantly. There isn’t an IPv4 address that exists that isn’t scanned and have an attempt at hacking performed within seconds of being connected.

    Not only that but today’s malicious code is much better at what it does with hundreds of amazing features and methods of branching out using different attack methods. Today’s malware is so good it updates itself very carefully/as secretly as possible so that some old compromised machine that no one thinks about anymore can become the next vector of attack inside your network.

    All it takes is one active vulnerability

    Keep all your shit up to date, people! When was the last time you checked your router to see if it had updates? Hmm‽


  • The article sucks. The FTC isn’t going after Microsoft’s cloud services because they’re good/bad. They’re going after Microsoft because of forced bundling. Same abuse of monopoly power they were found guilty of when they started forcing everyone to use Internet Explorer.

    Microsoft is forcing customers to use their cloud services under all sorts of scenarios. Many of which have no logical reason other than to force customers into Azure.

    For example, if you have a lot of Windows servers in Azure they will stop supporting you once you reach a certain threshold unless you also sign up to use their enterprise cloud AD service.

    They already do this with regular Windows–you have to use AD if you’re a business customer and you go past a certain threshold of systems–but in that case you can just get some Domain Controllers and call it a day. You can put them wherever you want (locally, in AWS, in Azure, wherever).

    With Azure Windows servers though you’re forced to use Azure AD (or you lose support and possibly access to other bundled services). You can’t host Domain Controllers anywhere else. I mean, they’ll let you have as many off-Azure DCs as you want but they must still be joined/synchronizing to Azure AD.

    There’s probably many other anticompetitive tactics in place within the world of Azure but that’s the one big one I know off the top of my head.







  • It’ll be a good while before an AI generates an Oscar-winning script or a whole movie but most movies and TV shows are very formulaic. Would it really be that surprising if AIs were generating the entertainment equivalent of Hannah Montana in a few years? Or the latest Hallmark Christmas special (LOL)?

    My guess is five years: That’s how long it’ll be before we start getting a flood of half-decent AI-generated shows/movies. Where the script is good but the animation/video are “a little off”.

    I mean, come on: There’s so many successful TV shows and movies that are total shit! You think AI can’t do better with just the tiniest bit of evolutionary improvements (and better hardware)?

    Edit: I expect AI videos to be a revolution! Where we finally break free from the Hollywood and “big mega” cookie cutter stories. It’ll give creative people the power to make the movies they want without heavy-handed censorship and executives that require everything dumbed down for the lowest common viewer.


  • AI will follow a similar curve as computers in general: At first they required giant rooms full of expensive hardware and a team of experts to perform the most basic of functions. Over time they got smaller and cheaper and more efficient. So much so that we all carry around the equivalent of a 2000-era supercomputer in our pockets (see note below).

    2-3 years ago you really did need a whole bunch of very expensive GPUs with a lot of VRAM to train a basic diffusion (image) model (aka a LoRA). Today you can do it with a desktop GPU (Nvidia 3090 or 4090 with 24GB of VRAM… Or a 4060 Ti with 16GB and some patience). You can use pretrained diffusion models at reasonable speeds (~1-5 seconds an image, depending on size/quality settings) with any GPU with at least 6GB of VRAM (seriously, try it! It’s fun and only takes like 5-10 minutes to install automatic1111 and will provide endless uncensored entertainment).

    Large Language Model (LLM) training is still out of reach for desktop GPUs. ChatGPT 3.0 was trained using 10,000 Nvidia A100 chips and if you wanted to run it locally (assuming it was available for download) you’d need the equivalent of 5 A100s (and each one costs about $6700 plus you’d need an expensive server capable of hosting them all simultaneously).

    Having said that you can host a smaller LLM such as Llama2 on a desktop GPU and it’ll actually perform really well (as in, just a second or two between when you give it a prompt and when it gives you a response). You can also train LoRAs on a desktop GPU just like with diffusion models (e.g. train it with a data set containing your thousands of Lemmy posts so it can mimic your writing style; yes that actually works!).

    Not only that but the speed/efficiency of AI tools like LLMs and diffusion models improves by leaps and bounds every few weeks. Seriously: It’s hard to keep up! This is how much of a difference a week can make in the world of AI: I bought myself a 4060 Ti as an early Christmas present to myself and was generating 4 (high quality) 768x768 images in about 20 seconds. Then Latent Consistency Models (LCM) came out and suddenly they only took 8s. Then a week later “TurboXL” models became a thing and now I can generate 4 really great 768x768 images in 4 seconds!

    At the same time there’s been improvements in training efficiency and less VRAM is required in general thanks to those advancements. We’re still in the “early days” of AI algorithms (seriously: AI stuff is extremely inefficient right now) so I wouldn’t be surprised to see efficiency gains of 1,000-100,000x in the next five years for all kinds of AI tools (language models, image models, weather models, etc).

    If you combine just a 100x efficiency gain with five years of merely evolutionary hardware improvements and I wouldn’t be surprised to see something even better than ChatGPT 4.0 running locally on people’s smartphones with custom training/learning happening in real time (to better match the user’s preferences/style).

    Note: The latest Google smartphone as of the date of this post is the Pixel 8 which is capable of ~2.4 TeraFLOPS. Even 2yo smartphones were nearing ~2 TeraFLOPS which is about what you’d get out of a supercomputer in the early 2000s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS (see the SVG chart in the middle of the page).





  • Yes but right wing media does not cover these things and even worse: They give their audiences fresh, daily propaganda suggesting that crimes like this are no big deal (unless Democrats do them) and that the opposition will always seem so, so much worse than the worst Republican criminal.

    It’s the argument right wingers always fall back on when they’ve lost an argument or have run out of ways to change the topic: The other side is worst or “just as bad”. No. No they are not and objective reality proves this. There’s so, so many more criminal prosecutions and convictions of Republicans/conservatives in general than there are Democrats/liberals.

    Those on the right will claim the justice department is out to get Republicans yet law enforcement and the justice department itself have vastly more Republicans/conservatives. If there’s a crime to uncover on the Democrat side of things they are actively and wholeheartedly looking for it.