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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I think I may not be presenting my position well, and thus am coming off as a right wing partisan hack of the sort that wants to defund the EPA. That’s not my position.

    A lot of people (mostly conservatives and big businesses) that complain about ‘red tape’ as a way of attacking various regulations. For example, people will say it’s impossible to build a power plant because of environmental red tape.
    A lot of that regulation is positive though. For example, even if the land is cheap, you can’t build a power plant next to a nature preserve because the pollution will kill all the birds. And I like that regulation. The power people will of course complain as will the mines that were going to sell the plant coal. In cases like this, IMHO, they can all fuck off.

    At the same time though, the ‘red tape’ that many businesses complain about does sometimes actually exist. That is, to do business you have to get endless streams of licenses, approvals, permits, etc for things where the bureaucracy and licensing process adds little or no value to either the industry or the population at large.
    From what I’ve read, this sort of thing exists a lot in Germany. I’ve talked to a few people who were starting a business in Europe and they specifically avoided a few countries for that reason.


  • First- understand that everyone goes through this, everybody has an answer for you, but the answer that worked for them may not work for you. There’s no right or wrong answer. A lot of people say ‘the way to get over someone is to get under someone’ personally I’ve never subscribed to that sort of thinking. It leads to unhealthy rebound relationships IMHO.

    The only thing that will really fix this is time. So there is no magic bullet. There are things you can do to help though or pass the time faster. The biggest one is find ways to not ruminate. Focus your attention on other things, ideally useful things. Take some time to improve yourself in fun ways. Hit the gym is an obvious one, but I generally recommend take up a hobby or learn an instrument or take a class. Basically learn some fun new skill and focus your attention on that. It serves as a distraction from your grief, but also a source of engagement and a little happiness.
    It WILL get better.







  • I agree with this 100%. That affects both the types of interactions, and the types of users.

    When Reddit really took off 12 or so years ago, it was primarily a forum for discussion. I loved it because there would be in-depth, respectful, quality discussions on almost every page. I spent hours debating science and politics and technology and relationships and other things of substance with other intelligent respectful open-minded people.

    For a few years now, Reddit has been trying to become a quick content scroll app- bombarding the user with page after page of memes and videos and low effort crap that only holds attention for 12 seconds but results in another page load and thus another ad impression. In ‘new reddit’ and the apps, there’s very little focus on discussion or comments. Just quick content to flip through.

    And that affects the discussions on Reddit (quality discussions are now the exception rather than the norm) and also the people who join and stay at the site. There’s a lot more animosity, assumption of bad faith, etc.

    But I also think that because Lemmy’s design DOESN’T push people into quick content, but IS focused on discussions, that trend can reverse. People who want quick content will quickly grow bored here and leave. And we can keep the discussions respectful and open-minded.

    I also think that the ‘welcome to lemmy’ posts should talk more about community and culture; what sort of interactions users should and shouldn’t expect here. That should include an explicit warning that if you’re going to start arguments and assume everyone else is an idiot, this probably isn’t for you, but if you want to have good respectful discussions this is your new home.


  • Absolutely I use ad block. Ublock origin, plus a couple other privacy related extensions, plus browser configured with most privacy settings turned up all the way.

    Most publishers seem to have no interest in giving me a good browsing experience, only in shoving as many ads as possible down my throat and violating my privacy as much as possible. So I have zero sympathy. I have sympathy for the smaller websites that then get locked as well, that wouldn’t otherwise have intrusive ads, but I am not going to subject myself to the larger ones just for their benefit.

    Without ad block I have found a lot of websites almost totally unusable, or significantly more time wasting. Reddit is of course a big one, new Reddit without ad block is a total clusterfuck. YouTube is also pretty bad.

    Thing is, I’m happy to pay. I’m looking forward to an era when I can do microtransactions in crypto to pay a website a couple pennies for content I like.


  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDeleted
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    1 year ago

    I’d do a few things.

    First, make signing up computationally expensive. Some javascript that would have to run client side, like a crypto miner or something, and deliver proof to the server that some significant amount of CPU power was used.

    Second, some type of CAPTCHA. ReCaptcha with the settings turned up a bit is a good way to go.

    Third, IP address reputation checks. Check IP addresses for known spam servers, it’s the same thing email servers do. There’s realtime blacklists you can query against. If the client IP is on them, don’t allow registration but only allow application to register.


  • Or maybe power grids are teetering because utilities raked in profit for the last two decades by ignoring upgrades that would obviously be necessary… Just a thought :)

    My utility sells $400 Wi-Fi touchscreen thermostats for like $25, the catch being you let them turn your AC down/off when grid load peaks. A few truckloads of thermostats are cheaper than grid upgrades, so they do the thermostats and kick the can down the road more.


  • My point stands- drive the car.
    You’re 100% right with everything you say. It has to work 100% of the time. Good enough most of the time won’t get to L3-5 self driving.

    Camera only is not authorize in most logistic operation in factory, im not sure what changes for a car.

    The question is not the camera, it’s what you do with the data that comes off the camera.
    The first few versions of camera-based autopilot sucked. They were notably inferior to their radar-based equivalents- that’s because the cameras were using neural network based image recognition on each camera. So it’d take a picture from one camera, say ‘that looks like a car and it looks like it’s about 20’ away’ and repeat this for each frame from each camera. That sorta worked okay most of the time but it got confused a lot. It would also ignore any image it couldn’t classify, which of course was no good because lots of ‘odd’ things can threaten the car. This setup would never get to L3 quality or reliability. It did tons of stupid shit all the time.

    What they do now is called occupancy networks. That is, video from ALL cameras is fed into one neural network that understands the geometry of the car and where the cameras are. Using multiple frames of video from multiple cameras at once, it then generates a 3d model of the world around the car and identifies objects in it like what is road and what is curb and sidewalk and other vehicles and pedestrians (and where they are moving and likely to move to), and that data is fed to a planner AI that decides things like where the car should accelerate/brake/turn.
    Because the occupancy network is generating a 3d model, you get data that’s equivalent to LiDAR (3d model of space) but with much less cost and complexity. And because you only have one set of sensors, you don’t have to do sensor fusion to resolve discrepancies between different sensors.

    I drive a Tesla. And I’m telling you from experience- it DOES work. The latest betas of full self driving software are very very good. On the highway, the computer is a better driver than me in most situations. And on local roads- it navigates them near-perfectly, the only thing it sometimes has trouble with is figuring out when is it’s turn in an intersection (you have to push the gas pedal to force it to go).

    I’d say it’s easily at L3+ state for highway driving. Not there yet for local roads. But it gets better with every release.


  • This is absolutely true, and this is how the internet was back in the old days before Big tech and megaplatforms. People would set up little servers on their cable modems using spare laptops. It was experimental, it was imperfect, but it was ours. One side effect of this, was that you had to be at least a little bit smart to get yourself connected to it. Even if that just meant knowing that connecting to it was something that you wanted to do. That weeded out a lot of idiots who contribute low quality discussion. Also, because there is no giant company with a financial incentive to get everybody to use it as much as possible, things were built for raw functionality rather than trying to make them easy for people to get addicted to in 30 seconds. That naturally makes them more usable for anybody with an IQ over 90.

    Also, no advertisements. No sponsored posts.


  • I’m not sure what kind of serious trouble they are actually in. I have spent most of today being driven around by my Tesla, and aside from the occasional badly handled intersection and unnecessary slowdown it’s doing fucking great. So I would Tell anyone who says Tesla is in serious trouble, just go drive the car. Actually use the FSD beta before you say that it’s useless. Because it’s not. It is already far better than anyone expected vision only driving to be, and every release brings more improvements. I’m not saying that is a Tesla fanboy. I’m saying that as a person who actually drives the car.