overview for sunbeam60

WTF Just Happened? | The Corrupt Memory Industry & Micron [GN] in c/technology@beehaw.org

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 7 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

You made the dreadful mistake of saying something positive about LLMs. We shall now proceed to downvote you accordingly.

Introducing Proton Sheets in c/technology@lemmy.world

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 1 points 17 hours ago

Point taken. Thank you for the reminder. I was probably being harsh. Appreciate the feedback.

Sam Altman’s Dirty DRAM Deal in c/technology@lemmy.world

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 2 points 19 hours ago

Man, I luckily upgraded to 64GB (when MSFS 2024 said “that’s preferred”) before all this.

Introducing Proton Sheets in c/technology@lemmy.world

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 1 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

In a personal context, agreed. In a business context, I completely disagree. Analysts, finance, operations etc all have much more complex requirements.

Introducing Proton Sheets in c/technology@lemmy.world

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 3 points 22 hours ago

Google Sheets is competing with Excel. Proton Sheets is competing with Google Sheets. So Proton Sheets is competing with Excel.

I used Word as a comparative example to say that parts of the office/docs suite are easy to compete with (there’s only so may things a word processor can do), while others (like Google Sheets or Excel, whichever order you prefer) is incredibly difficult to compete with; a formatting error on import of a Word doc is acceptable. An unsupported formula ruins the entire thing.

After Years of Controversy, the EU’s Chat Control Nears Its Final Hurdle: What to Know in c/technology@lemmy.world

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk -1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Agreed. The EU ain’t perfect, but I’d take it over any alternative.

Introducing Proton Sheets in c/technology@lemmy.world

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 7 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Does if have FILTER, array formulas, spill zones, MAP, data tables, query engines, SQL engine etc etc?

To compete with Word: Easy. To compete with Excel: Very, very difficult (pretty much only Google Sheets have managed).

Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn in c/technology@lemmy.world

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 1 points 1 day ago

Fortunately I live in a country where the government can (broadly) be trusted.

Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service in c/technology@lemmy.world

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 2 points 2 days ago

I thin Zig actually stands out pretty well from the pack. You sound maybe a little jealous or something?

Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service in c/technology@lemmy.world

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 1 points 2 days ago

The build system was basically a black box until 0.14.

Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service in c/technology@lemmy.world

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The Zig core team is pretty chill and pretty united around strong engineering ethos. And tbf their own compiler is pretty performant and produces similar level quality code. The argument that compiler dev is hard falls fairly flat when they are succeeding in developing their own compiler.

Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn in c/technology@lemmy.world

[+] sunbeam60@feddit.uk -9 points 2 days ago (11 children)

I hope to Darwin social media ends up requiring ID. I believe it would do wonders for democratic discourse. It was only last week, a number of large US right-wing accounts were revealed to be driven from outside the US. Is it healthy for democracies that so many people pay heed to foreign actors?

If you write an op-ed for a newspaper, the newspaper need to identify you as there is an editor who is responsible for what gets written in the paper. This ensures there’s someone who can stand to account for any libellous statements.

With social media we immediately reneged on this and allowed them to wash their hands; “we are just a channel” is a pretty bleak statement to make when the discourse on social media destroys the lives of minorities, encourages suicide, undermines our democracy with AI and troll farm bots.

And we can do this is a privacy preserving way - of course the social media companies feeds the opposite narrative because they don’t want to implicated in the piles of shit they shovel on top of our democracy.

If social media was required to ensure they could tie an account to a real person, which they needn’t reveal unless forced to by a court order, we would know that we were engaging with a real opinion, not something coughed up by a Putin-run AI bot or a Chinese troll farm.

The system required isn’t that complex.

A social media

a social media company is opening a new account.
it sends the person opening the account to any of the multitude of ways we can already verify identity online.
the person is identified and issued an identity token, which gets sent to the social media company.
the social media company says “great, this person is real and we can, if required by a court order, work with the identity company to reveal who this person is is”. Right now, all the social media company has is a token.
the account is opened.

In a system likes this, the identity company doesn’t know who the person is; that sits with the social media company.

Nor does the identity service know which account is actually posting for this real person, all they know is they verified someone as part of an account opening process.

Social media should be treated like the press - make them accountable for what gets posted and allow them to place this accountability on a real person by labelling posts “op-eds” if, and only if, they know who is doing the posting.

We are letting large, anonymous money-men ruin our democracy behind the veil of “free discourse”. It’s not free to the many people who gets harmed by it.