Category Archives: News

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HDMI Forum Rejects Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Driver Support Sought by AMD

Posted on 2024-02-28 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Maybe we shouldn't be using an interconnect designed by a consumer electronics standard body that exists primarily to support copyright-based rentseeking in most of our computers? Shame HDMI has propigated so far, largely on the basis of VESA picking a dumb connector for early DisplayPort.
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The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing

Posted on 2024-02-28 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I've been suggesting that most of the shitty floating point formats could be replaced with {-1,0,1,NaN} as a joke about the terribleness of shitty number representations, and the general sloppiness of the current "AI" hype cycle... it kind of looks like it's not actually a joke, you _can_ replicate a lot of the "AI" models with only {-1,0,1}. And that definitionally doesn't involve any multiply hardware, so it's _ridiculously_ more power efficient.
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Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu

Posted on 2024-02-27 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Uh-oh. Nintendo managing to shut Yuzu down would present a substantial threat for a _lot_ of emulation and compatibility projects.
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UK Senate Council has ‘profound concerns’ about proposed changes to its responsibilities

Posted on 2024-02-27 by pappp

Source: Latest News

Article note: It is ...not untrue... that the faculty senate can be slow-to-obstructive, but it's almost certainly better than autocrats with purely administrative roles (read: no real connection to teaching or any particular discipline) making academic decisions.

University of Kentucky Board of Trustees Chair E. Britt Brockman speaks to the board on Friday, February 23, 2024.

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Punk is dead and so are we

Posted on 2024-02-26 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This is: 1. Really fun writing with a _ton_ of references both philosophical and cultural. 2. _Wildly_ fucking depressing. 3. By it's own admission, a solid current-context presentation of an idea that has been circulating for something like 40 years.
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Some OpenBSD features that aren’t widely known

Posted on 2024-02-24 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Several of these things are super cool. I haven't played with an OpenBSD box in years, and don't really have time to right now, but I immediately see the applications of many of these. About half of them have _very complicated_ Linux equivalents with systemd and selinux and such, but these are elegant.
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Every. Single. New. Google. Product

Posted on 2024-02-24 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: _Such_ a good bit.
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Google sends Gemini AI back to engineering to adjust its White balance

Posted on 2024-02-22 by pappp

Source: The Register

Article note: "The statistical model of extant images didn't produce the demographics we wanted, so we slapped a supervisory process on top to artificially bias the system, and - completely predictably - that artificial bias is being applied in distasteful ways." is the most "AI" and "AI ethics" are both full of shit story.

Big Tech keeps poisoning the well without facing any consequences for its folly

Comment  Google has suspended availability of text-to-image capabilities in its recently released Gemini multimodal foundational AI model, after it failed to accurately represent White Europeans and Americans in specific historical contexts.…

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Reddit files for IPO and will let some longtime users buy shares

Posted on 2024-02-22 by pappp

Source: Engadget

Article note: The customer for the data was _google_, and they are in fact going to IPO on the news.

After years of speculation, Reddit has officially filed paperwork for an Initial Public Offering on the New York Stock Exchange. The company, which plans to use RDDT as its ticker symbol, will also allow some longtime users to participate by buying shares.

In a note shared in the company’s S-1 filing with the SEC, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said that many longtime users already feel a “deep sense of ownership” over their communities on the platform. “We want this sense of ownership to be reflected in real ownership—for our users to be our owners,” he wrote. “With this in mind, we are excited to invite the users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to buy shares in our IPO, alongside our investors.”

The company didn’t say how many users might be able to participate, but said that eligible users would be determined based on their karma scores while “moderator contributions will be measured by membership and moderator actions.”

The filing also offers up new details about the inner workings of Reddit’s business. The company had 500 million visitors during the month of December and has recently averaged just over 73 million “daily active unique” visitors. In 2023, the company brought in $804 million in revenue (Reddit has yet to turn a profit). The document also notes that the company is “exploring” deals with AI companies to license its content as it looks to expand its revenue in the future.

Earlier in the day, Reddit and Google announced that they had struck such a deal, reportedly valued at around $60 million a year. “We believe our growing platform data will be a key element in the training of leading large language models (“LLMs”) and serve as an additional monetization channel for Reddit,” the company writes.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/reddit-files-for-ipo-and-will-let-some-longtime-users-buy-shares-234127305.html?src=rss
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Is It OK to Be Mean to a Chatbot?

Posted on 2024-02-20 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: "We've put googly eyes on our FAQ page so our customers/victims will empathize with it, instead of treating us like the faceless value-extraction machine we are." Swear at chatbots like you swear at any other obstructive software.
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