• 3 Posts
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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: September 29th, 2024

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  • Bloomberg reports that “Humane’s team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial intelligence into the company’s personal computers, printers and connected conference rooms,” per an HP executive.

    congrats to HP on the launch of their new “you thought inkjet printers were shitty now? hold my aquifer and watch this” division.

    but also:

    HP is buying Humane’s CosmOS, bringing on Humane technical staff, and will get more than 300 patents and patent applications, Humane says in its press release.

    this is a relatively cheap way for HP to set itself up as an AI patent troll and extract rent from other companies that are trying to do AI-related bullshit. (from 2017: Stupid Patent of the Month: HP Patents Reminder Messages)


  • Encryption lengths are getting long so you’d think it was high time.

    that’s unrelated - AES-256 for example can be executed just fine on either a 32- or 64-bit machine. in theory there’s nothing stopping you from running it on an 8-bit or 16-bit CPU (although other considerations related to the size of AES’s lookup tables make this unlikely). from some random googling, here is an implementation of Chacha20, another 256-bit encryption algorithm, for 8-bit microcontrollers.

    when we talk about 32 vs 64-bit CPUs, in general we’re only talking about the address space - the size of a pointer determines how much RAM the computer is able to use. 32-bit machines were typically limited to 4GB (though PAE helped kick that can down the road)

    CPU registers can also be sized independently of the address space - for example AVX-512 CPUs have a register that is 512 bits wide even though the CPU is still “64-bit”.


  • What’s the relevance of either of those questions for an election that happened three months ago? I don’t like relitigating unspooled events.

    my brother in Cthulhu, you started this post by saying:

    this is where thinking Biden wasn’t doing enough has led.

    you should decide if you’re for or against re-litigating things

    Projecting your political beliefs and rationales on others is not Beeing Nice.

    meanwhile, one paragraph above, you’re projecting an opinion onto me that I don’t have:

    You’re welcome to your opinion that Biden or Harris would have been worse


  • I just find it almost comical that anyone thought Trump would be an improvement if not for the drastic outcomes we’re going to see.

    OK…just to make sure I understand you correctly - the people you’re mad at, are people who either voted for Trump, or didn’t vote at all, because of their opinions about Biden’s response to the genocide in Gaza.

    if that’s accurate, two questions:

    a) what is your estimate for the size of that group of people?

    b) how many actual individual people in that group can you identify by name? how many do you know personally? (vs having read a news story quoting them)



  • I fear I’ve become something of an accelerationist in the past few days…

    yeah, go ahead and pass this, you tech-illiterate xenophobic fucks.

    we need to divide and conquer the fascist coalition. make them hate each other. make them consumed by infighting. give them more “oh I didn’t realize there would be negative consequences that affected me personally” moments.

    there’s a whole lot of Silicon Valley techbro types who are on board with Musk and Trump because they think it’s all lower taxes, less regulations for their startups, and less “wokeness”. go ahead, pass a law that makes it a federal crime for them to click a GitHub download link. make it so that every Hacker News thread about AI is filled with American engineers bemoaning that they’re legally prohibited from keeping up with the state-of-the-art. make their startups uncompetitive because they’re required by law to pay inflated prices to subsidize OpenAI and other “American-made” plagiarism machines.















  • And I’m pretty sure that’s the approach that lawmakers have taken with this

    well, sometimes…I linked in this comment to some statements made by the Republican congressman who sponsored the original bill. he was pretty clear that he wanted the ban because he thinks TikTok is pushing propaganda, not just from the Chinese, but the Chinese Communist Party (which has been a long-standing right-wing bogeyman - that congressman was even the chair of the “House Select Committee on the CCP”)

    I believe that’s the primary angle they’ve taken to get around First Amendment concerns.

    this is true, in the same way that Trump in his first campaign promised a “Muslim ban” and then when they tried to actually implement it they realized they needed to frame it as a “travel ban…applying to countries that happen to have a lot of Muslims…oh and also North Korea because look at us, we’re definitely not discriminating against people based solely on religion”

    everyone (except the right-wing hacks on the Supreme Court) saw through the “travel ban” facade pretty easily. it’s been disappointing to see how many people uncritically repeat “well, there’s a data privacy angle to it too…” as if it’s a legitimate justification and not just another facade.