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transcriptase

4,423 karma · joined August 10, 2011

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transcriptase··on During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
You can’t put a price on some round-rim glasses wearing EU bureaucrat named Klaus-Dietrich von Regulieren sleeping soundly because of that banner.
transcriptase··on AI sycophancy panic
I still suspect what happened was when the midwits all got access to ChatGPT etc and started participating in the A/B tests, they strongly selected for responses that agreed with them regardless of whether they were actually correct.

Some of us want to be told when and why we’re wrong, and somewhere along the way AI models were either intentionally or unintentionally guided away from doing it because it improved satisfaction or engagement metrics.

We already know from decades of studies that people prefer information that confirms their existing beliefs, so when you present 2 options with a “Which answer do you prefer?” selection, it’s not hard to see how the one that begins with “You’re absolutely right!” wins out.

transcriptase··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
Swap China for Russia/Iran and Venezuela for Syria/Yemen if you want an idea how that plays. Spoiler: not well for the proxies.

Without some sort of underlying religious ideology to neutralize being concerned about the likely outcome of hellfires dropped on you from 20k feet if you kill American soldiers, I can’t see many stepping up.

transcriptase··on IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world
“it’s easy peasy” says guy who demonstrably already knows and has time to learn a bunch of shit 99.9% of people don’t have the background or inclination to.

People like you talking about IPv6 have the same vibe as someone bewildered by the fact that 99.9% of people can’t explain even the most basic equation of differential or integral calculus. That bewilderment is ignorance.

transcriptase··on Why users cannot create Issues directly
I wonder if a good public flogging would compel chrome and web devs to have 80 tabs take up far less than a gigabyte of memory like they should in a world where optimization wasn’t wholesale abandoned under the assumption that hardware improvements would compensate for their laziness and incompetence.
transcriptase··on Meta made scam ads harder to find instead of removing them
I suspect there are either employees or contractors getting a cut because even getting a legitimate ad that doesn’t break any rules through review can be an exercise in frustration.

I once spent days getting rejection after rejection for ads for a Christmas light show event at a vineyard (not winery, it was a dry event), on the grounds that I was apparently selling alcohol.

Meanwhile I get ads for black market cigarettes, shrooms, roids, cannabis, and anything else you can imagine.

transcriptase··on OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026
There’s a very negative immune response to the idea of Netflix running ads.

And yet they’re there, in the form of prominent product placement in all of their original series along with strategic placement in the frame to make sure they appear in cropped clips posted to social media and made into gifs.

Stranger Things alone has had 100-200 brands show up under the warm guise of nostalgia, with Coke alone putting up millions for all the less-than-subtle screen time their products get.

I’m certain AI providers will figure out how to slyly put the highest bidder into a certain proportion of output without necessarily acting out that scene in Wayne’s World.

transcriptase··on GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder
I’ll be very surprised if during all the time he spends doing nothing and winning, he hasn’t planned ahead for his company not becoming the very thing he hates and sets it apart.

I’d put a controlling interest in a trust with ironclad instructions to have Valve do the opposite of Ubisoft/EA. That would buy it another half-century at least.

transcriptase··on GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder
People said the same thing when Steam launched, yet my profile sits there with a badge saying 20+ years and I can’t recall a time I’ve encountered an issue that was the fault of Valve versus a developer or publisher.

At this point the games I “own” on physical media like CDs have theoretically started to degrade before the threat of Valve revoking my ability to install or play has come to pass.

transcriptase··on Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis
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transcriptase··on Rainbow Six Siege hacked as players get billions of credits and random bans
I’ve seen so many cases of cheaters online where even the most braindead of checks would neuter most cheats:

Are they moving faster than conceivably possible by a real player? Even the most basic (x2-x1)/t > twice the theoretical will catch people teleporting or speed hacking.

Is their KDR or any other performance metric outside 5 standard deviations from the mean?

Here’s one: is everyone they encounter reporting them for cheating along with one of the above? Do people leave their matches constantly?

Defining and detecting objectively impossible things is not impossible.

transcriptase··on Apple releases open-source model that instantly turns 2D photos into 3D views
I love how virtually no GitHub instructions related to AI simply work as written.

Each assumes you already have their developer environment configured to have the tool work, but simply don’t have it compiled yet.

transcriptase··on Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?
Make sure another LLM summarizes pages upon loading, but doesn’t load any content before that completes. Each page should have a few megs of JS tracking scripts siphoning the users CPU to create massive logs on AWS that nobody will ever use to improve anything.

Oh and put everything behind the strictest cloudflare settings you can, so that even a whiff of anything that’s not a Windows 11 laptop or iPhone on a major U.S. network residential or mobile IP gets non-stop bot checks!

transcriptase··on Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?
I look forward to the eventual launch of a new and improved version of your app using electron.

What’s the point in having 64 Gb of DDR5 and 16 cores @ 4.2 GHz if not to be able to have a couple electron apps sitting at idle yet somehow still using the equivalent computational resources of the most powerful supercomputer on earth in the mid 1990s.

transcriptase··on BMW Patents Proprietary Screws That Only Dealerships Can Remove
Only dealerships and anyone with a few bucks to spend on Aliexpress once someone bothers making a removal tool.
transcriptase··on I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)
> And using hex instead of decimal for magic computer numbers should be more intuitive, not less.

How? Why is using hex any more intuitive than binary or a md5 hash for anyone who doesn’t do networking for a living?

>If you do anything peer to peer at all, calls or file transfers or games, there's a benefit. And the typical benefit grows over time as more and more ISPs install CGNAT.

Again how? I’ve been doing all of those without issue for nearly 30 years. What measurable benefit does the user see that hasn’t been a solved problem since Windows XP?

Will my teams calls suddenly stop saying “poor network connection” on my 1000/1000 rock solid fibre connection? Will torrents suddenly find more seeds and peers? Will my games… have lower latency? Because I can’t think of another way anything networking related could be solved that wasn’t decades ago.

When you say benefit, it should probably be noticeable or measurable in some way that doesn’t involve dashboards and millions of dollars in rack mounted gear.

transcriptase··on I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)
The basic thing proponents don’t understand is that nobody in their right mind can intuitively understand IPV6 addresses because they look like MAC addresses with trisomy and are a pain in the ass to remember or type for absolutely no benefit to the non-network engineer. And there are infinitely more people with home routers and a few dozen devices than there are people running ISPs, fortune 500s, and data centres. Play with your convolution all you want, in 20 years the rest of us will still be happily assigning 192.168.x.x and ignoring it. V4 space running out is no more the average persons problem than undersea cables or certificate authority.
transcriptase··on Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo
Ah Manifest 3: Will still happily allow an extension to silently transmit all of your browsing and AI chat history to data brokers to be packaged and sold to the highest bidder.

While conveniently and regrettably unavoidably nerfing ad blockers :(

For your safety of course.

transcriptase··on US Tech Force
Right… because those definitely don’t already assist three-letter agencies and the presence of the largest tech companies on the planet on your CV will definitely somehow become a net negative because uh, orange man bad? I assume that’s what the 3 year window is about?
transcriptase··on Claude CLI deleted my home directory and wiped my Mac
We’re far more interested in what the heck you were trying to do (and how) that resulted in that outcome…
transcriptase··on Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux
China quite literally and unambiguously stole trillions of dollars in IP, trade secrets, and data from research labs in the West by explicitly and systematically embedding spies, hacking, and blackmailing/threatening employees/students wherever economically beneficial information existed for nearly 20 years. And this is on top of the practice of CCP sanctioned theft from and screwing over of nearly every company that outsourced manufacturing there from 1990 onward. The fact that they finally have enough domestic knowledge to actually innovate as a result of that isn’t some testament to what you think it is.

If someone spends a billion dollars researching some new technology and you have someone exfiltrate the blueprints, improve on it slightly, and then undercut who you stole from in the market because you had no investment to recoup… you’re not some enlightened morally righteous free thinker. You’re just a parasite.

transcriptase··on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
The entire lab supply industry is disgusting in this respect. The funding (and recent grants) that a given professor or research lab has is generally publicly available information that vendors will buy in easily digestible formats from brokers and companies that scrape the websites of major granting agencies.

All of their products, however realistically commoditized, will require a drawn out engagement with a rep who knows how much money you’ve received recently and even has an outline what research you plan to do over the next few years since even the detailed applications often get published alongside funding allocations.

The exact same piece of equipment, consumables required to use it, and service agreements might be anywhere from X to 10X depending on what they (as a result of asymmetrically available knowledge) know you need and how much you could theoretically spend.

transcriptase··on Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products
You’re assuming that there’s no cost involved in moving a potential victim through the pipeline. I’m sure AI has changed the game, but the general idea was that beyond the initial blast of spam you would have someone actually responding to those who fell for it. Putting in signals that it was a scam filtered out individuals who would waste scammer time because they would eventually figure it out before falling victim. By selecting for people who literally can’t pick up on obvious signs of a scam, you save yourself a lot of time and energy.
transcriptase··on Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products
So it’s like Copilot in Excel, that can’t interact with or seemingly even see the contents of the spreadsheet that’s in focus.
transcriptase··on Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive
I get this too. I’ve had it apologize for repeating something verbatim, then proceed to do it again word for word despite my asking for clarification or pointing out that it’s incorrect and not actually searching the web like I requested. Over and over and over until some bit flips and it finally actually gives the information requested.

The example that stands out most clearly is that I asked it how to turn the fog lights on in my rental vehicle by giving it the exact year, make, model, etc. For 6-8 replies in a row it gave the exact same answer about it being a (non-existent) button on the dash. Then finally something clicked, it searched the Internet, and accurately said that it was a twistable collar midway down the turn signal stalk.

transcriptase··on Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive
Though they will never admit it and use weasel language to deny like “we never use a different model when demand is high”, it was painfully obvious that ChatGPT etc was dumbed down during peak hours early on. I assume their legal team decided routing queries to a more quantized version of the same model technically didn’t constitute a different model.

There was also the noticeable laziness factor where given the same prompt throughout the day, only during certain peak usage hours would it tell you how to do something versus doing it itself.

I’ve noticed Gemini at some points will just repeat a question back to you as if it’s answer, or refused to look at external info.

transcriptase··on Europe's New War on Privacy
Politicians and bureaucrats who lacked a strong father figure is my genuine unironic non-disparaging answer.

There are a great many people in this world who not only look to government for a sense of safety and direction, but seek to impose that paternalism on everyone else for “their own good”.

transcriptase··on The fall of Labubus and the mush of modern internet trends
What is trend-chasing? I genuinely have no idea… is it getting onto something early and hoping it catches on so you were early? How could one even do that in an age where everything is being manipulated by algos and bot farms to make it appear that way?
transcriptase··on $1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux
Show us on the doll where they’re wrong.
transcriptase··on Okta's NextJS-0auth troubles
More than likely. Look at the users most recent comment with the random “ at the end too.
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