Especially for an event that might happen at most once a decade.
It's not like it happens every other month.
Aren't basically all fans BiFL? They're very simple devices, without much to go wrong. I've never had a fan, even base-budget home-brand department store ones, ever break, unless they fell over, or got hit enough to snap parts, but even BiFL things will break if you abuse them.
At most, the pedestal fans I've used wilt slightly, and that's easily fixed by tightening the screw in the neck.
It won't be long before you end up with language models that suggest ways to break other language models.
It just doesn't really do anything useful from a layman point of view, besides being a TurboCyberQuantum buzzword.
I've apparently got AI hardware in my tablet, but as far as I'm aware, I've never/mostly never actually used it, nor had much of a use for it. Off the top of my head, I can't think of much that would make use of that kind of hardware, aside from some relatively technical software that is almost as happy running on a generic CPU. Opting for AI capabilities would be paying extra for something I'm not likely to ever make use of.
And the actual stuff that might make use of AI is pretty much abstracted out so far as to be invisible. Maybe the autocorrecting feature on my tablet keyboard is in fact powered by the AI hardware, but from the user perspective, nothing has really changed from the old pre-AI keyboard, other than some additions that could just be a matter of getting newer, more modern hardware/software updates, instead of any specific AI magic.
All fun and games until a moth ends up in your transistors.
It's rather reminiscent of the old days of GPS, when people would follow it to the letter, and drive into rivers, go the wrong way up a one-way street, etc.
Why is there a minimum hold time of 30 minutes when calling any government service? Always “we’re experiencing a high volume of calls”.
It's particularly bad for Centrelink, where you might not even make it to the hold queue, and just get a busy tone/automatic hang-up.
They're basically never not "experiencing an unusually high volume of calls". At some point, you'd think that the high volume of calls would just become the norm. Your average worker is juggling a whole bunch of different people all at once, and that doesn't seem at all sustainable.
And the hold music is terrible.
Tom Scott did a video on it. It used to be better, but newer computerised systems, where they're both using old files, and it's crushed to death because it's cheaper to store/process that way.
As an aside, I feel like the sound quality has also gone downhill. it used to be either clear, or at least somewhat audible, but now, it's just incomprehensible gibberish at times.
Anyone know if those power meter monitors are any good? Was thinking of getting one that sits on the counter, since I'd rather not do it by app, but nearly all of the ones that I looked at either had no way of getting one, or needed an app.
There's a company that comes by every few weeks and offers to attach a chromecast-looking dingle to the power meter, but it seems a bit dodgy/fragile.
Other companies? Companies also need things, so they would also need things to buy and sell. Buying and selling to each other doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, particularly if the goods are non-physical. A company selling editing services for articles to a company that writes those articles for a news company who might be selling stocks to an investment company, and ad space to an ad company, etc.
Realistically, though, that doesn't tend to be that high a priority, or much of a long-term worry. Most of the concern these days seems to be focused more on the short-term profit more so than anything else, even if it will ultimately harm the company.
Not that it would really matter for most, since a lot of the people who might otherwise be affected would likely be out and away by the time that that rolls around. It would barely affect them.
Eating as a family is often better than eating alone. Especially when you're going to be sharing the food like cats do.
Maybe the giant spiders are meant to be a way for you to learn to hunt, before graduating to actual food?
They could be meowing at you like a drill sergeant.
I wonder if it would actually materialise, consisting the recent case where an airline company's AI chatbot promised a refund that didn't exist, but were expected to uphold that promise.
That risk of the bot offering something to the customer when the company would rather they not, might be too much.
It seems more likely that companies will either have someone monitoring it, and ready to cut the bot off if it goes against policy, or they'll just use a generated voice for a text interface that the client writes into, so they don't have that risk, and can pack more customers per agent at a time in.
They're usually built for the lowest bidder.
and that's even before it has to contend with you having an accent, or the mic quality being anything less than crystal clear, with a perfect connection.
Depends on whether scammers will also use a similar AI system to do their job for them. If they do, they might be basically indistinguishable.
Does this also affect Chromium, or is it just Google Chrome?
The article mentions it being affecting Google Chrome through Chromium, but it's not clear if it also affects Chromium on its own, or other Chromium-based browsers.
Nitpicking, but I'm not sure that it was ads that killed dash sat navs. At least in my experience, they never really developed to that point where car companies would put ads in.
It was more that they were expensive options to install, a pain to keep updated, and generally weren't all that good.
Even before the live traffic and automatic detour features, phones didn't cost money to keep the onboard maps up to date, and you already had one, so you didn't need to either buy an add-on, or get a special unit for it.
With android CarPlay and Apple Auto, you could just put your phone map on the screen, which was basically the same thing, but a cheaper equivalent, since the hardware was on your phone instead.
Error message? McAfee can't write to the drive because it's full of photos of their grandchildren and dogs, so it clicks up "can't write to c:\temp\sqlite_arcane_computer_magic.log: Disk is full", and it goes from there?
Given the rumours surrounding the CEO of Twitter, and how he may have pushed for his account to be prioritised because the algorithm knocked it down for being blocked so much, this feature doesn't seem like it has long for the world, unless he makes them add an exception for him.
The developer still has their phone number up. But SQLite was written in the early days when not everyone had a dedicated internet line, so if there was an urgent need for them to be reached, they could be called and then connect to the internet.
Although depending on where you are, phone numbers are already public information, and can be trivially looked up. There's a non-zero amount of movies where a character goes and calls the phone number of a friend from a phone book, and that was before you had such fanciness as computers to do the looking for you.
Why are spirit mediums treated as fake, when they are a very real thing?
In our world, the police going to a spirit medium for the DL-6 case, and being ridiculed might be logical, since spirit channelling isn't a real thing, but in the world of Ace Attorney, it is.
Not only is it a known and established practice, with detectable physical effects, but the monarchy of at least one country is specifically sought out for their spirit-channelling powers by other governments, so that they can commune with the dead, and receive advice that way.
However, it also seems to be disbelieved, and ridiculed as a pseudoscience, despite that.
What would inorganic species call themselves?
I've been using "mechanoid" as a classification (similar to humanoid, etc), but a friend pointed out that it's both too generic, and that said inorganics might just consider it biology, with organics being the weird outlier.
Why is "Dear X" considered more formal than "To X" in e-mail/writing?
You wouldn't start off an e-mail with "My Dear X", or "Dearest X", since that would be too personal for a professional email, so "To X" being more impersonal seems like it would make the letter more professional-sounding, compared to "Dear X".
How do the Doctor's enemies keep track of which Doctor is which?
Doctor Who zips all the way up and down through time, popping in at any time and place. If you don't have a time machine to follow them around with, it should be impossible to keep track of which incarnation was where. And yet, the Doctor's enemies somehow manage to do just that, with the Daleks being accurate enough to determine he was on his last regeneration on Trenzalore.
How long does a wand last?
One of the options for students enrolling into Hogwarts, if they come from a wizarding family, is that they have the option of using a hand-me-down wand. But short of wands being damaged beyond repair, we don't see many people replacing them, even though it happens enough that hand-me-downs are a valid option for new students.
So how long does one last? Does a wizard normally use one wand in their lifetime, or is it the kind of thing where an old, worn-out wand is fine for schoolwork, but you'd need something newer/better for adult life?
What caused the change in electronic terminology?
What caused the shift from calling things like rheostats and condensers to resistors and capacitors, or the move from cycles to Hertz?
It seemed to just pop up out of nowhere, seeing as the previous terms seemed fine, and are in use for some things today (like rheostat brakes, or condenser microphones).
Why cut/bulk in cycles instead of doing it all in one go?
You often see people in fitness mention going through a cut/bulk cycle, or mention one, with plans to follow up with the other. Why is it that cutting and bulking so often happen in cycles, rather than said person just doing both at once, until they hit their desired weight?
How much of a TARDIS is essential to its function?
While we hear of the TARDIS having engines that are implicitly essential to it working, we've also see a TARDIS work without the rest of the machine.
"The Doctor's Wife" and "Inferno" show that a TARDIS is capable of operating as just the console, which would seem to imply that they're just a power source to allow the console to do its thing and move the whole ship around, or to allow for the pilot to do silly things like tow an entire planet one second out of phase.
Was the Federation right to grandfather in Earth's laws against genetic modification?
One of the recent laws in Trek that gets looked at a bit, is the genetic engineering ban within the Federation. It appears to have been passed as a direct result of Earth's Eugenics Wars, to prevent a repeat, and seems to have been grandfathered into Federation law, owing to the hand Earth had in its creation.
But we also see that doing so came with major downsides. The pre-24th century version of the law applied a complete ban on any genetic modification of any kind, and a good faith attempt to keep to that resulted in the complete extinction of the Illyrians.
In Enterprise, Phlox specifically attributes the whole issue with the Eugenics Wars to humans going overboard with the idea of genetic engineering, as they are wont to do, trying to improve/perfect the human species, rather than using it for the more sensible goal of eliminating/curing genetic diseases.
Strange New Worlds raises the question of whether it was right for Earth to enshrine their own disasters with genetic engineering in Federation law like that, particularly given that a fair few aliens didn't have a problematic history with genetic engineering, and some, like the Illyrians, and the Denobulans, used it rather liberally, to no ill-effects.
At the same time, people being augmented with vast powers in Trek seems to inevitably go poorly. Gary Mitchell, Khan Noonien-Singh, and Charlie X all became megalomaniacs because of the vast amount of power that they were able to access, although both Gary and Charlie received their powers through external intervention, and it is unclear whether Khan was the exception to the rule, having been born with that power, and knowing how to use it properly. Similarly, the Klingon attempt at replicating the human augment programme was infamous, resulting in the loss of their famous forehead ridges, and threatening the species with extinction.
Was the Federation right to implement Earth's ban on genetic engineering, or is it an issue that seems mostly human/earth-centric, and them impressing the results of their mistakes on the Federation itself?
Why don't mages use subconscious magic when they get their wands?
One of the ways that you can find out whether a child has magic or not, is to see whether they are able to use it subconsciously, such as by defenestrating them, and seeing if they stop themselves from being killed. But once they get their wands, that use of subconscious magic seems to stop entirely.
Logically, you would expect students to fire off similar magic when their lives were at risk, or their emotions ran particularly high. Is it a function of having the wand that stops it, or is it just a matter of that only happening for really young mages, and that they learn to control themselves as they enter childhood?
Why doesn't the SGC upgrade the dialling computers?
When we're introduced to the Stargate, it's in the early-mid 90s, so them needing a big, bulky computer system would make sense, but as the show progresses, we see Tau'ri computer technology develop, either conventionally in the form of laptops like what the Atlantis team use, or computer crystals like what they fitted onto their starships.
Through it all, however, the SGC continues to use the same computer with comparatively dated hardware. Why keep it, instead of upgrading it to something more modern? Especially since one of the main issues that the SGC kept facing was that their dialling computer was not sophisticated enough to respond to some of the status codes put out by the stargate, causing all kinds of unpredictable behaviour.
What's the food like on your world?
Can humans eat it? Do they have food at all? What do they have as a staple foodstuff?
Why does the OSS use children as spies?
The optics of the US using children of spies can't possibly be good, in addition to the risk of misuse, and all of that.
Why does anyone even live in the cities?
In the GTA series, the various cities that the games are set in are usually rampant with crime. If it isn't the player characters going on a rampage, then it is either the police, or the other citizens that will be easily driven into a homicidal rage for such minor things as being bumped into while walking down the road/minor collisions.
Why would anyone bother to live there? It seems wildly unsafe, even before the various other criminal enterprises get involved.
Why doesn't Superman learn to use magic?
One of Superman's known weaknesses, besides that of kryptonite, is that he's as vulnerable to magic as the average human (besides what he can avoid with his super-reflexes).
So why doesn't he learn to use magic? His Super-intelligence and speed would make it much easier for him to learn magic compared to the average person, and he's already well aware that magic exists.
Knowing magic would help him cover a major weakness of his, so it seems illogical that he doesn't pick it up, or look into it.
Was the USS Discovery upgraded completely, or does it still keep its original technology?
Inspired by a bit of discussion over on discord, where there was an argument over whether the USS Discovery had been upgraded by the 32nd century Federation.
On the one hand, the Discovery did undergo a vast overhaul, being fitted with an upgraded power/propulsion system, detachable nacelles and the works, however, we also know at the end of Discovery Season 3, that Burnham resetting the Discovery's computers effectively put much of the ship back to the 23rd century baseline (or as much of one as it could return to). We're also shown that the Discovery still uses microtapes in its computer room.
So was the Discovery upgraded completely to 32nd century standards, or is it still a 23rd century ship underneath the 32nd century paint?
Why could the Ancient One not see past the spoiler?
In Doctor Strange, the Ancient One knows that she is going to die soon because she cannot look past a point in the future, and believes it to be when she will die.
However, we also know from Infinity War, that Doctor Strange was able to look past the point of his own death, and determine how to undo the "snap", but we can put that down to the assistance of the eye of Agamatto and the Time Stone.
However, the question remains: Why is it that you can't look into the future past your own death?
The Federation should not have been surprised that their holograms developed sapience
We already know from TOS that Mutlitronic computers are able to develop sapience, with the M-5 computer being specifically designed to "think and reason" like a person, and built around Dr Daystrom's neural engrams.
However, we also know from Voyager that the holomatrix of their Mk 1 EMH also incorporates Multitronic technology, and from DS9 that it's also used in mind-reading devices.
Assuming that the EMH is designed to more or less be a standard hologram with some medical knowledge added in, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that holograms were either sapient themselves, or were capable of developing sapience. It would only be a logical possibility if technology that allowed human-like thought and reasoning into a hologram.
If anything, it is more of a surprise that sapient holograms like the Doctor or Moriarty hadn't happened earlier.
Bringing technologies back from the future ensures that the Federation won't develop their present counterparts
We often see technology from the future brought back to the present, whether as a case of a chance encounter, or something more.
However, it’s also fairly uncommon to see those technologies pop up against after they’ve been introduced. One such example is the ablative armour generators that Admiral Janeway fitted to the Voyager, being prototypes from a future Starfleet, which are seen in that episode, and then never again, even in shows that are set after the time she left.
The reason for this might be that the Federation does not want to run the risk of being accused of violating the temporal prime directive (or accidentally running afoul of it in some other way), and shelves that particular technology entirely.
From their standpoint, it would be rather difficult to separate a technology that the Federation developed of their own accord, compared to one that they might have developed from being inspired by, or reverse-engineering a piece of future technology, so they shelve it, rather than risk the trouble, never developing the preliminary steps to reach that future technology.
The only anachronistic part of this is the Doctor’s mobile emitter, which is a variant of 26th century technology, and was developed into Picard, but that can be explained by it being reverse engineered from 26th century technology, by someone in the 20th century, technically making it technology from the past. Since it is Earth technology from their own past, they might be able to get away with iterating on their own version without risking trouble with the various temporal enforcement agencies.
Posts and Comments not always sending.
I'm not sure whether it's an issue with Federation, synchronisation, or something else, but I've noticed that sometimes, when writing a post, and submitting it, the Lemmy interface will hang on some posts, getting stuck on the loading circle, which is probably related to the known issue with the interface not sending or interpreting errors correctly.
As an example, I was writing a post and a comment on a non-local community, and noticed that I sometimes had to copy the post, cancel the "sending" post, and paste it, and try again for it to "take" and the post to send successfully.
However, since I can't recreate the issue reliably, I'm not sure whether it's an issue with server load on lemmy.world, or an issue with Federation.
EDIT: I checked some of the posts and communities that I was having issues posting in, and it seems to be affect both local and Federated/remote communities.
One of them was on !nostupidquestions, and another was on [email protected].