Jrockwar

joined 1 year ago
[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Is there pirate software on F-Droid?? (I'm assuming that's what OP is referring to based on us being on /piracy)

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 1 points 5 months ago

In a car with ABS, two sets of tyres with different grip will have a different point at which tyres lock up, with grippier tires locking up later and ABS letting the brakes bite harder before acting.

Now a harder question is whether a tyre with less rolling resistance will be less grippy. All things equal, yes, it will. Tyres grip by deforming and creating friction in the contact patch, and the point of these tyres is to reduce friction.

To make up for this, manufacturers use clever designs (e.g. where tyres can deform more under certain conditions) so that they can retain characteristics similar to tyres with more rolling resistance. Of course, everything in engineering is a compromise, which means that A) these tyres are more expensive because of the additional complexity and B) the design and materials science can only go so far and they have indeed slightly less grip; otherwise all the tyres would be like this.

As an anecdote, Toyota sold the GR86 with Michelin Energy Saver tyres fitted as standard (in Europe at least) for "grip" reasons: they allowed the car to drift at really low speeds (some car journalists commented that it was remarkably easy to take roundabouts sideways at legal speeds).

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 7 points 5 months ago

Well, they've already lost £200M on Suicide Squad alone, so here's to hoping they can continue losing money thanks to their greed.

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 45 points 5 months ago (6 children)

Oh boy. £120 to just unlock the base characters or "dozens and dozens" of hours of grind for each of them.

We'll see how this goes, but I see this going the way of Suicide Squad. I wonder when, if ever, Warner Bros. Is going to learn that players are actively pushing back against corporate greed and live service games are already way past the limit of microtransactions that players deem acceptable.

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 13 points 5 months ago

I've found the article here, gone in, and immediately forgot that it wasn't the onion as it didn't sound like something remotely true. Then I was immediately confused about how they'd made the satire look so real, with even fake-pipe photos. That's been a confusing 5 minutes...

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 1 points 5 months ago

That middle paragraph is very misleading. It's Generative AI as a service that is actively harmful to the environment. Having a 15 W chip to do tasks like erasing objects from a photo is not any more harmful to the environment than a GPU that uses 15W. In fact, NPUs can be more efficient at some tasks than GPUs.

The problem is opening your phone/browser, and being able to call on demand GPT-4 to wake up a cluster of 128 Nvidia A100s operating at around 300-400W each. That's 51.2 kW.

Now you can draw some positives and negatives from that figure, such as

  • Given that an iPhone 15 Pro's A17 has a thermal design power of 8 W, GPT-4 on the server is about 6400 more energy intensive than anything you can do on an iPhone. 10 seconds of GPT need a similar amount of energy to an iPhone 15 Pro operating flat out at maximum power for 18 hours. Now in those 10 seconds, OpenAI says they "handle multiple user queries simultaneously", but still - we're feeding the machine.
  • 51.2 kW is also roughly how much power a large SUV needs to roll at constant speed on a motorway. Each of those large clusters uses a similar amount of energy to a single 7-seater SUV, but serving many users at the same time. Plus unlike cars, a large portion of their energy usage comes from renewables. So yes, I agree that it's a significant impact but largely overrepresented and we have bigger fish to fry; personal transport is a way bigger issue.
[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 2 points 5 months ago

Which country?

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 6 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Hallucination is a technical term. Nothing to do with thinking. The scientific community could have chosen another term to describe the issue but hallucination explains really well what's happening.

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 26 points 6 months ago

I agree with the philosophy, but not with the approach.

If you own/make the OS, and you know that the registry can get orphan entries which slow down the system, don't wait for the user to open an "optimisation app" to clean that up. Just make sure the registry is cleaned transparently and in the background.

This seems to me like a tactic to get less tech-savvy people to accidentally set Edge as their browser and ensure their Ads and Microsoft's tracking is working as the mothership mandates. Worst part is we have evidence to think I'm not being the slightest bit cynical here...

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I'm talking about TV ads, magazine covers. General models (not the super-skinny runway models which don't necessarily follow typical beauty standards) or porn (which follows its own set of trends I'd say, like over exaggerated bodies, breast implants...).

I don't know if it's the best example but I'm talking generally about the difference between people like Jennifer Aniston in 1997 vs Scarlett Johansson in 2020, for example.

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 22 points 6 months ago (3 children)

You don't have to go that far - if you look at 90's female models, or actresses that were considered "hot" at the time, they had a significantly different body type from today. They were a lot skinnier, there was more diet and less gym involved in the female bodies of the 90s and early 2000s.

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