News to me, but a guy named Sam Russell came up with a new software only CRC32 algorithm that is competitive with hardware accelerated implementations. It's a surprisingly elegant solution.
Yeah, I think it's a tough one for some people. Case in point: my parents.
My father has always had a million hobbies, and his work was what was preventing him from fully exploring them. He's taken to retirement like a fish to water.
My mother on the other hand (still working at 73) like most academics has been very dedicated to her work, and her main hobby outside of work has been hiking.
I'm a little worried that she'll struggle a bit to adapt to retirement.
I really like the idea. I sometimes get the idea some people just start raging at the world in general when they get their comments rejected/banned, and start to develop some sort of persecution complex.
Will this fix the problem? I am not sure, but I do appreciate the effort.
I believe whoever solves the emotional dysregulation that leads to some persecution complexes will genuinely deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. While I doubt this will solve the problem completely, I do see potential for it to prevent discourse from spiraling quite as badly as it tends to.
I predict that a feature like this would probably chase off some undesirable community members, while genuinely helping some people improve their ability to engage in good-faith discussion and debate. And if it eases the burden on moderators and the community at large who currently police these things, it seems like a clear win. I’m sure it could be mis-calibrated to tone policing, but I’m not one to let perfect be the enemy of good.
It's about Somali speaking gig-workers in Kenya transcribing and translating audio for a company called Appen, that then gets passed on to the US military to train translation systems for the US military that presumably get used in US military operations in and around Somalia.
The workers don't get told what the data will be used for or who the final client is.
To maybe save others a google. Appen is an Australian company focusing on linguistics/translation. Different from Appin, the hack for hire service out of India.
Why do companies insist on connecting every single device to the internet?
Fortunately it's mostly an optional feature, so still works just fine without it, but in general it's a pretty strong signal to me to not buy that product.
In addition to collecting and selling every scrap of you your private data they can get their hands on, having 24 hour access to the internet also means that at any time they can push updates that disable features you paid for so that they can start charging you a monthly fee to regain access to them.
Any CEO whose company engages in spying and theft should be criminally charged and thrown behind bars just as you or I would be for those same acts, but right now companies can do pretty much anything they want to you and if they do happen to face any consequence it'll just be a slap on the wrist that costs them a fraction of the profit they made ripping you off and violating your privacy.
I thought this was pretty much a known fact by now. To make more money. They sell the data, or monetize it somehow. They disguise doing it under all kinds of "features" which indeed might be useful for some people.
What should ring your alarm bells is any device that needs you to make an account, at least once when setting it up. That's valuable data, who/where/email/phone number etc. If you cannot fully use the product without at least one initial access to the internet, your data will be monetized, that's the reason you're not able of using it, they need to get something out of you.
Of-course there's features that don't work, or make any sense, without internet access. But if you cannot wash your clothes without an account/initial access to the internet...that's sus.
At one of the AWS builds I worked at there was a water dispenser. It had one button to dispense cold still water, one for fizzy, one for hot water, etc.
Instead of JUST PRESSING THE BUTTON WITH YOUR FINGER, you could—and I am not making this up—download an app that would allow you to pair to the dispenser via a QR code, and then remotely trigger the water-dispensing action… so that you wouldn't have to press the button.
Absolutely insane.
Yeah, I imagine that this feature was dreamed up during the early part of the COVID pandemic where it was hypothesized that COVID spread on high-touch surfaces. Still doesn't make it any less insane. (And also, that theory was pretty clearly highly sus from the start.)
It's cheap to do, some people like it and it can be sold to them as a premium feature, and it enables future enshittification with subscriptions and other revenue opportunities.
Ignore the security issues for a bit, because most buyers don't know/think about those. If it wasn't for the enshittification, having your dishwasher online would be useful. Not groundbreaking, but being able to look up how long it still has without having to walk to the kitchen, get a notification when it's done, be able to look up error codes or check the status of consumables would be kind of nice if it weren't for the downsides that come with it. But those downsides are not something people think about.
Another similar story:
My aunt passed away last year, and an acquaintance of my cousin sent her one of those "hug in a box" care packages you can buy off Amazon.
Except when it was delivered, this one said "hug in a boy" and "with heaetfelt equqikathy" (whatever the hell that means). When we looked up the listing on Amazon it was clear it was actually wrong in the pictures, just well hidden with well placed objects in front of the mistakes. It seems like they ripped off another popular listing that had a similar font/contents/etc.
Reminds me when one Valentine's Day or whatever a new booth popped up at the mall where my gym was. They sold these nice heart-shaped chocolate boxes. I bought one for my sister. When she opened it, she found one piece of chocolate, and the rest of the box was filled with blocks of Styrofoam... The next day the booth was gone.
What's next is no custom built PCs. They want us running dumb thin clients and subscribing to compute. Or it will be like phones. We'll get pre-built PCs that we aren't allowed to repair and they'll be forced to be obsolete every few years.
"they"? i see companies jacking their prices up, plain and simple. and us idiots still pay. ask yourself does intel no longer wish to sell CPUs to consumers? doesnt sound reasonable that intel would want to decimate their main market so AI companies can rule the world for some reason
If the custom PC market forcibly gets converted to pre-built PCs only, I don't see why intel is selling less CPUs. So I don't understand your point here.
he said thinpcs and dumb clients with the compute power in the cloud, not pre-built gaming pcs. intel sell both desktop and server, if you cut out desktop for all but the low powered i3 it takes to run a thinpc, they lose a massive chunk of revenue.
You act like companies do long term planning. They don't. Its always next quarter. And if you don't believe me, just look back to the pandemic, look at peleton, or car manufacturers or any of the dozens of examples
Very cool! I was having a conversation with my colleagues yesterday about building something to detect when you get scanned by a SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellite (we're in earth observation), but you'd have to get a directional antenna to not be drowned out by terrestrial radio signals.
reply