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19 hours agoAh, thanks! Well, that’s one lone ray of light.
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Cake day: September 14th, 2025
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I’m still grouchy about a sandwich place that I liked that recently changed ownership putting in kiosks that apparently do facial recognition, as once I walked up, they suggested items that I’d purchased last time. That started me looking, and I’ve been noticing that a lot of the ordering kiosks that places have been installing around where I am have cameras (though none have been actively making suggestions). I can only imagine that that gets hooked into the tracking and advertising system at some point too, though.
Between increasing use of facial recognition and ALPRs, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to avoid targeted ads. I don’t have a fix for that. I mean, it’s illegal to block use of ALPRs. A lot of places also have anti-masking laws, though I suspect that in practice, they aren’t enforced much, and someone could theoretically put something on their face. I don’t especially want to run around wearing stuff on my face, though.
kagis
It sounds like that was a joke from some years back.
Skyrim: Special Edition Announced For Samsung Smart Refrigerators And Alexa
If that headline has confused you then let’s be very clear, this is a joke by Bethesda…
They do have a screen and Internet connectivity, but I don’t think that ATMs are actually a great route (unless they force people to stop and wait to get their money, which I don’t think will fly and will cut into capacity). There isn’t much eyeball time on them. The reason a car or a refrigerator works is because you’re likely to be around it a lot.
I will say that the rise of gas pumps at gas stations that play back advertisements is pretty obnoxious, though.
To enhance our service and offer additional content to our users, advertisements will be displayed on the Cover Screen for the Weather, Color, and Daily Board themes.
I really hope that Steam games don’t head down this path over time. Internet-connected refrigerators I’m willing to avoid, but that’s not the only vector for this sort of thing.
EDIT: And as has been pointed out on here before, some Internet-connected cars are starting to have updates to show ads on their UIs pushed out. Any time you’ve already spent the money and are kind of locked in and the manufacturer has Internet connectivity to the device and can update the thing subsequent to purchase, you’re kind of in a bad position regarding leverage.
I’d be pretty comfortable saying that buying enough battery storage to power-shift a year of power is more expensive.
What I want to do is find out what the maximum size battery I would need in order to store all of summer’s electricity for use in winter.
I mean, I think that it’s probably not a good idea for this guy to try to go fully off-grid if he has access to the grid, but for the sake of discussion, if one were honestly wanting to try it and one is in the UK, I’d think that one is probably rather better off adding a wind turbine, since some of the time that the sun isn’t shining, the wind is blowing.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/322789/quarterly-wind-speed-average-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/
Wind speed averages in the United Kingdom are generally highest in the first and fourth quarters of each calendar year – the winter months.
The UK is one of the worst places in the world in terms of solar potential:
https://globalsolaratlas.info/
But it’s one of the best in terms of wind potential:
1·23 hours agoMy bet is that personal flying vehicles will happen and gradually spread — probably not as a mass replacement for ground-based vehicles — but it’ll be fully-autonomous vehicles. It won’t be Average Joe becoming a pilot.
EDIT: Well, okay, I mean, you can get personal flying vehicles today — in the US, you don’t need a license or anything to fly something like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_parachute
…whereas you do to operate a car on public roads. Just not allowed to fly over built-up areas. But I’m talking about heavier vehicles.
I haven’t blocked anyone on this account, but it’s new.
On my last one, I think I blocked three users. I believe all were basically trying to flood a community so that it was unreadable (one, IIRC, was just posting the same large Simpsons or Futurama image repeatedly throughout a thread to try to stop people from talking).
4·1 day agoAfter all, enterprise clients soon realized that the output of most AI systems was too unreliable and too frequently incorrect to be counted on for jobs that demand accuracy. But creative work was another story.
I think that the current crop of systems is often good enough for a header illustration in a journal or something, but there are also a lot of things that it just can’t reasonably do well. Maintaining character cohesion across multiple images, for example, and different perspectives — try doing a graphic novel with diffusion models trained on 2D images, and it just doesn’t work. The whole system would need to have a 3D model of the world, be able to do computer vision to get from 2D images to 3D, and have a knowledge of 3D stuff rather than 2D stuff. That’s something that humans, with a much deeper understanding of the world, find far easier.
Diffusion models have their own strong points where they’re a lot better than humans, like easily mimicking a artist’s style. I expect that as people bang away on things, it’ll become increasingly-visible what the low-hanging fruit is, and what is far harder.
While I’d personally rather have more users over here producing comments and posts and such, I’d point out that unless something has changed, you can browse Reddit without an account or logging in, from a Web browser. You just can’t post, comment or vote.
Specifically for subreddits flagged as NSFW, Reddit’s “new” Web UI will demand that mobile users install their app, but you can bypass that by using the “old” Web UI.
goes to check to see if that still works
Huh. Actually, there is a change, but not the way I’d expected. It looks like at least where I am, California, now even the new Reddit Web UI lets anonymous users into NSFW subreddits using a mobile web browser, just by clicking on an “I declare that I am 18+” button. That definitely had not been the case. Maybe these countries declaring age restriction laws basically made them review their policy, and some of the changes have actually made it more-permissive, based on geolocation of IP.
e.g.
https://old.reddit.com/r/nsfwcyoa
Now both are accessible. I will bet that that’s not what people in the UK see, though (well, not unless they’re on some sort of VPN with an exit node in a place with different laws).
5·1 day agoJust an occasion glance every like 15 minutes…like a little drip
“Not like those people with a check-every-three-minutes habit that are fiends for the stuff.” :-)
How else do you even find a community to sub to?
Hit lemmyverse.net, or check and see what people you talk to and find interesting are commenting in. Every subscription to a remote community had to start with at least one user on your home instance doing that.
There’s also !communitypromo@lemmy.ca and !newcommunities@lemmy.world (the latter specifically for those communities just starting out) that will have a list of communities actively seeking new users.
I also try to recommend communities that I’ve found interesting when they’re relevant and come up in my comments with the
!communityname@instancesyntax. Lile, the other day someone posted a question about dice on !asklemmy@lemmy.world, and I mentioned !clacksmith@lemmy.world, which is devoted to people making dice (and has pretty pictures of them). That last one obviously relies on people actually sticking those recommendations in their comments though!
31·1 day agoSlate Star Codex has an article from back when, “I Can Tolerate Anything But the Outgroup”.
It’s talking about a variety of things, but one point at the core of it, a point that I think is pretty interesting, is that people tend to have social groups that are extraordinarily politically-clustered and highly non-representative of their countries as a whole…and often don’t realize it.
There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.
This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.
I don’t mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.
And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.
About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.
People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.
I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.
To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit.
Recently, there was a thread on Reddit asking – Redditors Against Gay Marriage, What Is Your Best Supporting Argument? A Reddit user who didn’t understand how anybody could be against gay marriage honestly wanted to know how other people who were against it justified their position. He figured he might as well ask one of the largest sites on the Internet, with an estimated user base in the tens of millions.
It soon became clear that nobody there was actually against gay marriage.
There were a bunch of posts saying “I of course support gay marriage but here are some reasons some other people might be against it,” a bunch of others saying “my argument against gay marriage is the government shouldn’t be involved in the marriage business at all”, and several more saying “why would you even ask this question, there’s no possible good argument and you’re wasting your time”. About halfway through the thread someone started saying homosexuality was unnatural and I thought they were going to be the first one to actually answer the question, but at the end they added “But it’s not my place to decide what is or isn’t natural, I’m still pro-gay marriage.”
In a thread with 10,401 comments, a thread specifically asking for people against gay marriage, I was eventually able to find two people who came out and opposed it, way near the bottom. Their posts started with “I know I’m going to be downvoted to hell for this…”
But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW.
On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.
But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?
When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.
It gets worse. My formative years were spent at a university which, if it was similar to other elite universities, had a faculty and a student body that skewed about 90-10 liberal to conservative – and we can bet that, like LW, even those few token conservatives are Mitt Romney types rather than God-n’-guns types. I get my news from vox.com, an Official Liberal Approved Site. Even when I go out to eat, it turns out my favorite restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, is the most liberal restaurant in the United States.
I inhabit the same geographical area as scores and scores of conservatives. But without meaning to, I have created an outrageously strong bubble, a 10^45 bubble. Conservatives are all around me, yet I am about as likely to have a serious encounter with one as I am a Tibetan lama.
(Less likely, actually. One time a Tibetan lama came to my college and gave a really nice presentation, but if a conservative tried that, people would protest and it would be canceled.)
For me, the “holy shit, I live in a bubble” moment was the first time I started looking up polls on ghosts. Like, if you asked me what percentage of Americans believed in ghosts, I’d have probably guessed…I don’t know, somewhere south of one percent, maybe? I mean, just extrapolating from my social circle and my own experiences. Sure, if we were talking medieval times, people maybe believed in ghosts and witches and stuff, but in 2025? Nah. We know, more-or-less, how the universe works now, and the supernatural is just something fun to joke around about, right?
But that’s not what polling finds at all. Depending upon how you ask the question in your poll, you’ll get different levels, but it’s a lot, north of a third of society.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4400922-americans-ghosts-aliens-devil-survey/
Nearly half of U.S. adults, 48%, believe in psychic or spiritual healing. Slightly fewer, 39%, express a belief in ghosts, while between 24% and 29% say they believe in six other supernatural phenomena, including telepathy, communication with the dead, clairvoyance, astrology, reincarnation and witches.
5·1 day agoNote that if you like DNS-over-HTTP, on Linux,
systemd-resolvedhas support for it and can be set up to do it for systemwide resolution, rather than just having one’s Web browser do it for Web browsing.kagis
Some people setting it up:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1092498/dns-over-tls-with-systemd-resolved
Long run, my thinking is that the best approach is to have something like “user curation lists” and let other users subscribe to them. Could be posts, users, communities or whatever. Then you find something that approximates your preferences, subscribe to “Bob’s community whitelist” and/or “Jim’s community blacklist”, and that reduces some of the human-time load to try to identify interesting content. My understanding is that BlueSky has something vaguely along these lines.
But I think that there are probably more-immediate problems on the Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin developer plates right now, like dealing with the scraper-bots that are severely loading all of the instances that permit anonymous access.
In general, I’d suggest browsing by “Subscribed” rather than “All”.
First, “All” doesn’t actually show you everything out there, because your home instance doesn’t know about everything out there. It only shows you communities that at least one user on your home instance (lemmy.cafe, for you) has subscribed to. You’re seeing content from communities on “.moe” TLD instances because at least one user on your home instance is subscribing to those communities. On very large Threadiverse instances, like maybe lemmy.world, with many users, this is closer to seeing everything, since odds are better that someone on your home instance has subscribed to it. But it’s not everything.
But secondly, I’ve seen a number of posts from people who invariably don’t like one type of content or another — yours isn’t one, to be fair — complaining that lemmy defaults should exclude X from the All feed, for some X, because they don’t like X and find it difficult to exclude X. And the problem is that there’s no global X that fits everyone.
The Internet as a whole is a firehose, and invariably, there’s stuff out there that people aren’t going to want to see, and people who are going to create communities that someone doesn’t like. Might be spam or just noise, might be test material, you name it.
If you really want to see everything out there, you’re probably going to want a script anyway. You’re probably going to want to pull down https://lemmyverse.net/communities or something similar — they spider the Threadiverse, and do actually build a list of all communities out there — which actually does list everything out there, then filter by whatever criteria you want, then subscribe to everything left.
EDIT:
on “.moe” TLD instances
Sounds like, from the other comment, that it’s not “.moe” TLD instances that you’re thinking of, but rather communities that end in “moe”. Though in general, if the objection is to sexed-up young anime girls, I expect that it’s most-likely inclusive of both.
looks at MEGA hat in image
I distinctly remember, back with early Trump, when the MAGA thing was being done, joking about how people could do it in Europe and call it MEGA. I did not expect it to actually happen.
Well…
From an evolutionary standpoint, we’re basically the same collection of mostly-hairless primates that, 20,000 years ago, hadn’t yet figured out agriculture and were roaming the land in small groups of maybe 100 or so at most, living off it as best we could.
From that standpoint, I think that we’ve done pretty well with a brain that evolved to deal with a rather different environment and is having to navigate a terribly-confusing, rather different situation.
I mean, you see any other critters that have been outperforming us on improving their understanding of the world?
They made an Internet-connected fridge and didn’t put an NTP client on it?