Comment Re:Silicone Valley (Score 2) 66
Freenet is also based on middle-out compression.
Freenet is also based on middle-out compression.
No. Trying to push 30TB into Freenet will be interpreted as an attack on the network by other peers and they'll disconnect from your peer.
Freenet is better viewed as a communication medium than a storage medium. Data is prioritized according to demand, somewhat like an LRU cache. You can't upload 30TB and expect the network to preserve it for you.
On liability, running a Freenet peer is more like running network infrastructure that automatically routes and caches other people's traffic than intentionally publishing it. US law explicitly recognizes this distinction in the DMCA's provisions for transitory network communications and system caching. We discuss this in more detail in the FAQ.
You obviously haven't tried Freenet. You can join our room on River and you'll see no spam, no fraud, no hate speech, none of that.
Decentralized doesn't mean unmoderated. Systems built on Freenet can be moderated however their creators and communities want. River is moderated.
The difference is that nobody running one service gets to decide what everyone else is allowed to run.
praying to AI god to save us is more realistic. Throw this on the pile of things which AI needs to fix, pretty soon.
Yeah we can always have an LLM discuss recycling based on the word soup it has ingested from the internet, maybe make a video defying all the laws of physics showing recycling of a mixed waste landfill, and consume a lot of electricity in the process.
There are several breakthroughs on the near horizon that will help.
First up is Commonwealth Fusion, based on a technology breakthrough in 2011 is planning to have net gain sometime in 2027 (delayed from "latter part of 2026"), and is so certain of the results that they are building a commercial fusion plant in Virginia... and have already purchased (IIRC) the land and are in the permitting stage. (More info.
Second up is Tesla Robotics, which is putting the transformer model into a physical robot, so that it can do physically what the LLM chatbot can do with words. For all the discussion about AI and whether it's intelligent or any good or whatnot, it's obvious that AI systems are *useful* at glueing words together. Robots will give us access to lots of cheap labor, and part of that will be robots that to cleanup work for humans. Picking up garbage on roadways, going through landfills and sorting, grabbing bits of rope and plastic from shorelines comes to mind(*).
And finally, Verdox, has figured out a way to capture CO2 from the atmosphere electrochemically. Their system works in the manner of an oxygen concentrator that you may have seen people wheeling around (except it's electrochemical and not physical). They claim their system is efficient at extracting CO2 at atmospheric pressure, which is wildly more efficient than distillation, which is our current method.
I figure in about 50 years we should be well on our way to fixing these civilizational problems. Robots powered by AI and cheap energy, running around doing all the cleanup work that humans don't want to do.
(Cue the climate alarmists who run around and screech about "it's not enough!" and "it'll be too late by then".)
(Note that Tesla has designed its own AI processor chip and is building a semiconductor fab plant that will be able to make them in bulk. Their combination of robotics and AI processing chip will be wildly valuable in the future.)
All of those words have meanings and make sense as he used them. Your lack of comprehension isn't his fault.
What's crazy is imagining that a computer can definitely do what a brain does when we don't even know how the brain does it. MAYBE it can, but we have no proof of that.
What he (Dolgov) is saying is a belief that stems from rationalization. It *seems* like it's a proof because that's how he's phrasing it, but in the final analysis he's a biased observer expressing an opinion and bolstering it with a rationalization.
It's what we get every time we ask an expert for advice about something they don't directly know. Ask a physicist about dark energy, or a doctor about your unusual symptom, or a nutritionist about what you eat, or an economist about whether the Fed should lower rates... you'll get a reasonable sounding answer backed by rationalization.
We don't have proof that a computer can self-drive using only cameras (and not "computer can do what a brain does", which is a much wider problem set), but we have abundant statistical evidence that it can.
Tesla claims claims (mid 2026) that self driving has about 1/7 of the collisions of human driving. Fully deployed FSD would reduce driving fatalities by 90%.
While not a proof in the inductive-logic sense, it's probably good enough to become general consensus. Given the enormous amount of data they train on (10 billion miles driven?), I suspect the p-value is astronomically small.
And of note, I recently purchased a Tesla with self driving. The system requires you to be attentive while it's active, but I can say with complete honesty that full self driving is here now.
And it works. It'll go into a crowded parking lot and back itself into a parking space, it'll correctly navigate lane closures and safety cone situations, and just yesterday it correctly stopped for a road worker holding a stop sign, waited, and then proceeded when he turned the sign to "slow".
The reason I got the car is because a friend kept badgering me about... of all things... getting old. Our population is aging, and old people driving is a constant source of problems. Having a way for them to get around without being a danger to others seems like a good thing.
Oh, and coming off a day hike or a day of physical labor or something and being really tired it's nice to be able to hit the "start self driving" and have the thing take me completely home because I'm really beat and not very attentive.
This would be a good time to point out that every political argument has two sides and two points of view.
I've seen the arguments for both sides of this issue, and have come to the conclusion that there is merit for both. People should really look at the specific charges being made, with examples, before coming to any conclusion.
Every time someone tries to rein in the news media, it's received by shouts of first amendment, freedom of speech, chilling effects, and so on; and yet, this leads to insane situations. Google most egregious US media failures in the last 10 years for a list of incidents, and note how many of these affected major political events such as a presidential election or national policy.
Should a journalist be able to walk into a church during service and interrupt the proceedings, and not be held accountable because he's a journalist? Should a major news outlet be able to report something without at least a cursory check to see if it's accurate? Should an interview answer be swapped with the answer from a different question?
I've come to the conclusion that knee-jerk framing is on purpose, everyone wants to get "ahead" of an issue, and if an erroneous/misleading/false statement is made they will simply say "oops... I made a mistake" and there's no repurcussions... except that the lie went out to the audience and a small percentage got outraged in the right direction, regardless of whether the statement is true or not.
A "straw-man" argument is where you put your opponent's viewpoint in the most absurd terms and then attack the absurdity. A "strong-man" argument is where you put your opponent's viewpoint in the strongest possible terms and then try to attack it.
Choose the "strong-man" argument here. Find out what the administration is complaining about, and see if you can fault their logic.
Had a look at the criminal complaint just to find out where the perpetrators had gone wrong.
Sending anonymous tweets and E-mails, they purchased pre-paid debit cards to send packages to their home, various harassment techniques such as ordering a pizza "pay on delivery" at 4:30 AM, and so on and so on... how on Earth did the NPD ever figure this out?
Turns out the perpetrators flew from California to Boston area (Natick) to put a GPS on the Steiners' car, which they couldn't do because it was kept in a locked garage, so they rented vehicles to surveil the Steiners, their license plates were noted and given to Natick Police Department (NPD), and the rental agency was contacted.
Once the eBay operatives were identified, they tried various misdirects and obfustication techniques, but NPD a) verified their statements, and so figured out they were lying, and b) contacted eBay directly, which had a security team respond in good faith, and the whole plan unravelled.
One, single mistake is all that stood between a long campaign of harassment and getting found out. One good local police department who took the trouble to look deeply into the problem and figure out the truth despite a torrent of misdirection and obfustication.
I wonder how many more campaigns of harassment are ongoing, led by people who know how to conduct vehicle-based surveillance, or encouraged by ineffective or lazy policing.
I have the "New Tab Override" extension installed, it allows me to load my own local
My personal page has a 4x3 grid of links to my most often needed pages, and I like this a lot.
I hope they haven't removed this functionality, it might be the last straw that pushes me away from Firefox. I'm really starting to hate their "do it our way and no other" mentality.
The US military mostly does not use capitalism. It is the largest anti-capitalism organization in the USA. They care about lives, not bank accounts. It is run in a bureaucratic system that is far more similar to socialism than the Republican party wants to admit.
Therefore it has to deal with the various weaknesses of that system, one of which is over-use of resources for 'trendy' and 'popular' ideas at the expense of the less sexy but more efficient programs.
Right now that means drones and AI rule.
In the hopes of clarifying some concepts and descriptive words:
The US army runs under fascism. Management is top-down, everyone has to do what their superior says to do, and if you don't do it there are grave consequences.
All militaries across the globe run under fascism. All militaries throughout history have run under fascism.
Almost all businesses are run under a similar system: there is one person at the top, usually with a vision of what he wants to happen, and everyone from there down what their immediate superior says to do. There is some leeway in the case of business: you can disagree with your superior and perhaps have a discussion, doing the right thing against orders is OK if it works out, and the penalties for disobeying aren't as severe (getting fired versus getting sent to Leavenworth, or being shot).
The fascist model of governance is one of a handful of governing types we know about, and is useful in situations where decisions need to be made quickly based on experience (military planning) or based on vision (business planning). Military actions fall squarely within those situations. It's not the best model for an economic system, where divergent opinions and "try it and see" is more efficient, or a political system where individual corruption can lead to violations in human rights or reasonable policy.
The US military is not capitalistic, but it is not "anti-capitalism" system in the sense that it works against capitalism in any way.
The US military isn't socialist, except that it tries to provide for it's members in compensation for the risks they take. It's similar to businesses providing health insurance or stock options or reimbursement for college courses - we don't normally think of employment perks as "socialism", and in the same manner we shouldn't think of military benefits as socialism either. Socialism is a foundational principle, not a system of perks.
I don't know that using AI is a weakness of the system. The military is famous for actually studying the effects that certain decisions have. You can look up the government's studies on whether and how much coffee improves performance, whether sleep learning is of any use, and the minimum IQ to allow before it takes more resources to manage an individual than the resources the individual brings by enlisting.
Looking into new technologies and their application to warfare is something the US military does very well.
And apropos of nothing, it's completely obvious that drones are a tectonic shift in military technology, this came as a complete surprise from the Ukraine war, and we totally should be pivoting away from expensive missiles and more towards swarms of cheap drones.
I don't know why you're characterizing drones as trendy and popular, either.
No, they won't object to the labels. They will claim that forcing them to put the actual nutritional information is the violation of their free speech. I mean, if they can lie about recycling, why can't they lie about the nutritional content or the ingredients?
A simpler explanation is that this is a biased news report intended to stir up outrage.
Take a moment to look at the arguments against.
It looks a whole lot like manufacturers are *not* trying to lie about packaging or content, it's the complete opposite of that. The manufacturers want the labels on based on the product material, and not based on whether there are recycling program within the state. The stamp should describe the product, not the availability of recycling to the end consumer.
If the bag your product came in has a polypropylene triangle on it (a "5"), it means the bag *can* be recycled. If California doesn't have facilities for doing that, it doesn't make the bag non-recyclable. California only manages to recycle 2% of this type, manufacturers want to put the stamp there to inform the consumer, the language of the bill would force them to remove the stamp because California doesn't recycle this type of plastic, and of course the manufacturers wouldn't do that for just California they would do it for everyone.
That's what this is about, not lying.
Furthermore, the plaintiffs the Pack act, which would install one standard country-wide, eliminating the maze of state-wide regulations.
Stop adding to the outrage, look at both sides of an issue before commenting.
If we assume a best case scenario, that is all sunlight is captured by the 60 x 60 feet reflector and then send down to earth in a 3 mile diameter circle this would correspond to a light intensity of approximately 0.02 W / m2 or 2 Lux.
This is barely brighter than the light from a full moon. Probably not even enough for any color vision. So in which scenario does that help? And that already entails that a full satellite is only dedicated to you.
Try this: go outside away from the city during a full moon.
I think you'll be surprised.
In the middle ages, when it was too hot during the day, farmers used to till and plant fields at night under the full moon. It allowed them to get more work done during the planting season.
Also try this: go outside between the hours of 2:00 PM and 7:00 PM in Spain right now (July).
I think you'll be surprised.
To the landlord belongs the doorknobs.