Roger Moore

@datum@zeroes.ca @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org The local media here in So Cal has been on a crusade against e-bikes for the past year or two. The real problem is that e-bikes are still relatively new, and people don't really know what's what. Unscrupulous manufacturers and retailers have been selling off-road e-motorcycles as suitable for teens even though they're not street legal and far more powerful than the kinds of e-bikes kids are legally allowed to ride. Instead of trying to straighten out the confusion, the media has been creating hysteria about the dangers of e-bikes.

@me_valentijn@m.ai6yr.org @cpm@spore.social @datum@zeroes.ca @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org An important part of it is that the government wants to avoid heavy-handed enforcement if possible. They at least want to try a mix of education and pressuring retailers before having a massive crackdown. Orange County is even trying a buyback program so parents who realize they bought their kid an illegal vehicle can get some money back.

@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org Based on my air quality monitor, toast is also terrible for indoor air quality. I don't even try with my home coffee roaster. It's located on my balcony, and the balcony door is shut tight any time I'm roasting. Fortunately, I have the settings dialed in so I can get the roast I like without having to babysit the roaster.

@dougiec3@libretooth.gr Trump's concept of loyalty requires success. Failing while doing exactly what he told you to do is the worst kind of betrayal.

@mattblaze@federate.social @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org @jf_718@mas.to There's a reason code says you aren't supposed to put smoke detectors in or close to the kitchen. I guess that doesn't work as well with open floor plan designs where there isn't such a clear boundary between the kitchen and the rest of the house.

@jessamyn@glammr.us I'm actually more worried about the humans around me pushing me to use AI than I am about the intrusive pushes to use AI in a lot of software. It's way easier to click "No" on a box in the software, even if I have to do it every time, than to resist my boss saying "just run it through AI to polish up the writing" all the time. I like to think I can write better than the AI can, and I'd rather not have my carefully chosen wording degraded into generic AI speak.

@dougiec3@libretooth.gr It doesn't matter who Trump sidelines. Everyone who works for him is just a functionary carrying out the big man's wishes. Secretary of the Treasury Trump will not be able to fix the problems Secretary of Defense Trump couldn't.

@dougiec3@libretooth.gr Nobody should be surprised by Trump's behavior. We all know that most politicians are attention hounds- even if they don't love attention, they need to stay in the public eye for electoral reasons- but he takes it to a whole other level. There is no spotlight Trump won't try to hog and no camera he won't mug for.

@The_Whore_of_Blahbylon@mastodon.social There's also a housing supply problem. Our population is growing, and average household size is shrinking. We aren't building nearly enough new housing to keep up.

@cstross@wandering.shop I expect TESCREAL types to dismiss the ethical concerns. If we can improve the lives of trillions of hypothetical future humans, it would justify murdering and dissecting millions of actual contemporary humans.

@3fecta.bsky.social Just to give it some more force, mandatory immunization in the US armed forces goes back to George Washington inoculating the Continental Army against smallpox at Valley Forge. I guess George was a victim of the Woke Mind Virus.

@Axomamma@mastodon.online @cigitalgem@sigmoid.social Or take a big leap and install Debian or FreeBSD or something else that doesn't have a corporate overlord trying to force AI on you.

@Theriac@plasmatrap.com @amydiehl@mstdn.social What's next are labor saving pen plotters that write dumb messages on people's cups based on an AI analysis of their order history.

@TimWardCam @quixoticgeek I don't know if the AI boom was designed specifically to justify building a bunch more fossil fuel powered generating capacity, but that sure looks like it's an effect. It stinks, because building a ton of renewable power would be a nice consolation prize for the AI boom collapsing.

@lawyersgunsnmoney@mstdn.social @Lana@beige.party I disagree. Discourse with fascists is pointless because they don't live in the same factual universe as the rest of us, but pointing out their lies and hypocrisy still has value. If fascists want to destroy the concept of objective truth, continuing to insist on it is an important form of resistance. It provides a life line to people drowning in fascist lies.

@hgrsd It's possible the lesson is supposed to be for oppressors- don't mistreat others just because they're different- rather than the oppressed. Also, the moral of a story has to logically relate to the central conflict. It's hard to tell a compelling story about the importance of treating others well even when they're different without showing some people being mistreated for being different.

@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com Subcontracting essential government services was never a good idea, and it gets worse as we allow businesses to be ever more rapacious. There may be times when subcontracting makes sense, but it should be limited. In a case like this, maybe the company could build the system but transfer enough knowledge that the government could run and maintain it in-house after it's built.

@shanecelis @Catvalente Confabulation has an existing technical meaning relating to creating false memories in response to brain damage or dementia. I don't think we want to use that to describe AI "hallucinations". I would call them "fabrications" or just "bullshit". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation

@jsnell @marcoarment Apple clearly knows how to sell very high-end computers, too. Look at the price for the Mac Studio models; they are clearly mass consumer products, but they sell well enough to justify coming out with new models regularly. I think the problem was thinking the Vision Pro was going to be a mass market product, not a niche, high-end one.

@vtrlx@mastodon.social I'm surprised you chose to default to using a proportional font if code editing is an intended use case. I have a feeling I'm not going to be the only one who asks. Do you have a FAQ or something where you explain your design choices?

@oldclumsy_nowmad @3fecta.bsky.social To pick a nit, the process used at Valley Forge was technically variolation (inoculation with smallpox in a way intended to avoid a bad infection) rather than vaccination (inoculation with cowpox). The distinction was significant because variolation had a 1-2% fatality rate, so it was only "safe" compared to a natural smallpox infection, which was fatal in up to 30% of cases. Vaccination with cowpox wasn't invented for another 20 years or so.

@Gorfram @azonenberg @petergleick I strongly recommend a recent video from @TechConnectify that talks about this at length. He makes a very clear distinction between reusable energy infrastructure, like solar panels and rechargeable batteries, and consumables like fossil fuels. https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?si=T71MHlqDSm1I07Q5

@jsit Capitalism absolutely uses productivity to pay for leisure; it just restricts leisure, and anything else good, to the capitalist class. Capitalists would let their workers starve to death if they thought they could get away with it.

@rbender @jsnell @marcoarment My guess is they overproduced based on unrealistic sales projections and are still trying to unload the stock.

@infobeautiful@vis.social There's also the whole business about paying for drugs. The current system is just a haven for all kinds of corruption and rent seeking. Any kind of government run healthcare that took that out of the hands of profit seeking businesses- or even just reined in the rank corruption currently running rampant in the sector- could save a lot of money.

@infobeautiful@vis.social While I won't argue the single payer system would be simpler, the picture shown is oversimplified. Some of the administrative stuff shown in the current system (Billing & negotiation of care) would still exist under single payer; it would just happen between the government and the providers rather than the insurance companies and providers. If you really want to simplify things, go to a National Health Service, where the government is the provider, not just the insurer.

@MissConstrue@mefi.social @darwinwoodka@mastodon.social It absolutely should get swatted down, but I'm worried that it won't be. DOJ has been jurisdiction shopping. They aren't just doing this in Texas; they're doing it in a specific part of Texas that guarantees they're going to get a wingnut judge who is overseen by the wingnut 5th Circuit. I no longer have any confidence these courts will follow the Constitution when they have an opportunity to advance right-wing goals.

@darwinwoodka@mastodon.social @MissConstrue@mefi.social Except this isn't about anything that happened in Texas. This is an attempt to use a Grand Jury in Texas to investigate things that happened in New York. It's blatantly unconstitutional- the Constitution says crimes must be tried in the state and district where they happened- but the Trump DOJ isn't going to let the Constitution slow them down.

@cybervegan @arclight The reason people are taken in by LLMs is because there's a whole industry devoted to deceiving them. The LLM industry is as much a marketing machine as an engineering one. It doesn't help that the mainstream media is helping sell the con. As with all con jobs, the victims could have saved themselves by being more skeptical, but the majority of the blame belongs with the con artists.

@chu @gallowaylass People who haven't experienced it just have no idea how bad for profit medicine in the USA is. It's always a huge culture shock for foreign coworkers. I sincerely think people who haven't been exposed to it discount the truth as unbelievable horror stories designed to scare them.

@GrahamDowns @TerryHancock @SnoopJ It's more about being able to make decisions effortlessly than quickly. The idea is to know what to do in a plausible but unfamiliar situation so we don't get overwhelmed by the moment. It's used for all kinds of training, not just ethical questions. It's why people like firefighters and soldiers train so much; they want to be able to respond correctly even when they're under enormous stress.

@disorderlyf @SnoopJ The problem is that the metaphor adds extra details that complicate the basic moral question. Either those details are important, in which case you can't fault people for considering them, or they are unimportant, in which case the metaphor is flawed for including them.

@faraiwe@mstdn.social @tiffanycli@mastodon.social It has to be taken by some court, or it will sit unchallenged. Part of the problem is that the Supreme Court itself made this kind of thing inevitable by preventing lower courts from making nationwide injunctions. That makes it inevitable that much of what Trump does will make its way to the Supreme Court, because it's now the only court allowed to slap him down definitively.

@sanpan@mas.to @brianbilston@mastodon.online Whenever God closes a window, malware opens another. Edit: Or maybe it should be, "Whenever God closes a door, malware opens a window."

@TechConnectify@mas.to This video is a great example of why YouTube remains valuable despite its problematic corporate ownership. Now you just need a condensed version for the people who can't manage the (gulp) feature-film-length runtime.

@GrahamDowns @TerryHancock @SnoopJ Of course sometimes people really do have to make snap decisions. One of the ways we can improve our quick decision making is to consider possible cases in detail in advance so we're ready when they come up. That said, we should be more generous judging people forced to make quick decisions.

@DoomHammerNG @scalzi It's actually the exact opposite. Edge notices you're trying to download another browser and tries to discourage you. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft goes further and makes it impossible for Edge to download Chrome.

@LukefromDC@kolektiva.social @SheDrivesMobility@norden.social Niantic has always admitted their games were mostly a tool to build a geospatial library. They never said it was for military applications, but anyone who looked very hard knew the games were just a means to an end. I'm curious how useful it will be given that A) the data is frequently out of date and B) they deliberately excluded sensitive areas from their games.

@DoomHammerNG @scalzi For now, at least, it's just "Hey, I noticed you're trying to download Chrome. Don't you know Edge uses the same rendering engine but is designed to work with the rest of Windows?" There are other places where Microsoft flat out refuses to accept that you want to default to using another browser; they say outright that they'll only respect the change for a week.

@SwampYankee @marcoarment VR is a fun gimmick technology, but I haven't seen anyone propose a use that would justify it as a mass market product at the price it would apparently cost to make it work.

@ketan The use of "hallucination" for a LLM making stuff up is an evil but brilliant marketing move by the LLM companies to make their product seem more intelligent. We should describe these things as "fabrications" or plain old "bullshit" instead.

@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz These species may be new to scientists, but there's a very good chance the locals knew about them already. So the best description would be something like "researchers just described two species previously unknown to science".

@pjakobs @bluca Init scripts are last century's software, as anyone who was running Linux in the 20th Century can assure you.

@Verso@mastodon.social One thing I wish they would do is have dictionaries with special vocabulary that you could install and have a whole genre added to your phone in one step. It would be really cool if AI were smart enough to recognize and install them automatically, but at least let me install the whole Pokedex at once rather than forcing me to teach autocorrect the names of all 1000+ Pokemon individually.

@bigzaphod@mastodon.social @dxzdb@mastodon.social @petergleick@fediscience.org I suspect a lot of those payback time calculations were based on conservative estimates of solar output. If the system puts out more power than predicted, breakeven time is going to come a sooner.

@jfmezei@cosocial.ca @NunavutBirder@mas.to They aren't getting enough calories to survive during the winter; they're eating whatever they can find to extend how long they can survive on the fat they built up in the summer.