NPR News
The Wilson Center's Michael Kugelman says that for many Bangladeshis, a successful youth-led mass movement has shattered a long malaise and kindled a newfound optimism about the country's future.
NPR NewsThe Food and Drug Administration has told food manufacturers the psychoactive mushroom Amanita muscaria isn't authorized for food, including edibles, because it doesn't meet safety standards.
NPR NewsA reflection on the comedy stylings of Pope Francis, who is telling priests to lighten up and not be so dour.
Mother Jones“So where’s my German friends?” Donald Trump asked a fawning Mar-a-Lago crowd on Election Day, before flashing a grin and a thumbs up for a photo with a group of young men. The German friends in question: Fabrice Ambrosini, a former politician forced to resign after a video surfaced of him doing a Hitler salute; […]
The Verge
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images
Between The Penguin, Dune: Prophecy, and I Saw the TV Glow, Max has you covered when it comes to last-minute streaming options to get you through the holidays.
Kotaku
The year is wrapping up but the gaming news keeps coming. This week, tales of hurt feelings and anger among some developers and fans of Black Myth: Wukong emerged after it failed to take home Game of the Year honors at this year’s Game Awards. Additionally, the announcement that pricey Killzone skins were coming toHel…
Mastodon Feedpzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑") wrote:
Uh-oh. All we need is religion added to the volatile mixture in the powder keg.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/12/21/the-imagery-that-should-scare-the-wealthy/
The Verge
You’d be hard-pressed to find an OLED TV for less right now. | Image: LG
One of the best Black Friday deals has returned — and this time, it’s done so with an added perk. Right now, LG’s B4 Series OLED TV is matching its all-time low at Best Buy, where you can pick it up in the 48-inch configuration for $599.99 ($200 off) with a $50 digital gift card. The larger 55-inch panel, meanwhile, is on sale at Best Buy with a $100 digital gift card for $999.99 ($400 off), its best price yet.
Although LG is likely to introduce its 2025 lineup at CES in a few short weeks, the B4 is likely going to remain a bargain, especially at this price. You don’t get the same brightness levels or performance speeds as LG’s flagship C4 or G4 — the B4 lacks the AI-focused a11 processor found in the latter — but it provides all the core benefits you’d expect from an OLED panel. It offers deep blacks and wide viewing angles, along with four full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports that are capable of 4K 120Hz gaming, making it a great pick for use with modern consoles like the PS5 or Xbox Series X.
Personally, as the current owner of a 48-inch OLED, I find the smaller size more than big enough for my entertainment needs. It’s not as much of an eyesore in my living room as my previous 65-inch panel, yet I have little trouble watching movies and playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth from my couch. The real question is whether you need all the bells and whistles on LG’s high-end TVs or if an entry-level OLED will suffice.
Mastodon Feedcstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:
I'm probably the wrong guy to be posting about this on the internet, but Proko has done an "advent calendar" or "12 days" of sketchbook tours from some fabulous artists. Yeah, it's a (very mild) promo for proko's lessons, but if you have an interest other artists' sketching habits or just want to see artists talking about their great art, then maybe check it out:
The Verge
A screenshot from TCL’s The Audition. | Screenshot: TCLtv Plus
Earlier this year, TCL released a trailer for Next Stop Paris — an AI-animated short film that seems like a Lifetime movie on steroids. The trailer had all the hallmarks of AI: characters that don’t move their mouths when they talk, lifeless expressions, and weird animation that makes it look like scenes are constantly vibrating.
I thought this might be the extent of TCL’s experimentation with AI films, given the healthy dose of criticism it received online. But boy, was I wrong. TCL debuted five new AI-generated short films that are also destined for its TCLtv Plus free streaming platform, and after the Next Stop Paris debacle, I just had to see what else it cooked up.
Though the new films do look a little better than Next Stop Paris, they serve as yet another reminder that AI-generated videos aren’t quite there yet, something we’ve seen with many of the video generation tools cropping up, like OpenAI’s Sora. But in TCL’s case, it’s not just the AI that makes these films bad.
Here are all five of them, ranked from tolerable (5) to “I wish I could unsee this” (1).
This futuristic short film basically has the same concept as Ray Bradbury’s short story “All Summer in...
Mastodon Feedpzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑") wrote:
Curious. All these billionaires are college dropouts who know nothing about physics, but they like to claim they could have been physicists. So why don't they go back to school?
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/12/21/a-common-thread-among-billionaires/
Mastodon FeedReblogged by mbrubeck@mefi.social:
solar_seattle@mas.to ("Solar Seattle") wrote:
The sun will rise in #Seattle #Washington tomorrow at 7:55, 30 seconds later than the day before.
It will set at 16:20, 27 seconds later than the day before.
The Verge
Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
A collection of fun, affordable, and unique gifts fit for everyone on your list.
The VergeStellar hardware from a controversial figure.
NPR NewsPaul Ninson had an old-school, newfangled dream: a modern library devoted to photobooks showing life on the continent. He maxed out his credit cards, injured his back — and made it happen.
Mastodon FeedGargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:
She’s full of crimes.
The Verge
Image: Asus
Asus has announced the Asus NUC 14 Pro AI, the first Copilot Plus-capable AI mini PC that crams an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor into a form factor resembling a black M4 Mac Mini. First introduced at IFA in September, Asus is providing a little more detail about the mini PC’s specs than it did before, but still isn’t saying it will become available or how much it will cost.
The NUC 14 Pro AI will come in five CPU configurations, from the Core Ultra 5 226V processor with 16GB of integrated RAM to a Core Ultra 9 288V processor with 32GB of RAM. The company says it has up to 67 TOPS of GPU performance and 48 NPU TOPS, and that its M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 x 4 slot supports 256GB to 2TB NVMe SSDs.
All of that is packed into a PC that measures 130mm deep and wide and just 34mm tall; comparatively, the Mac Mini is 127mm deep and wide and 50mm tall. Here are some pictures from Asus’ website:
The Asus NUC 14 Pro AI features a fingerprint sensor on top and a Copilot button on the front for speaking voice commands to Microsoft’s AI assistant. Also on the front are two USB-A ports, a Thunderbolt 4 port, a headphone jack, and a power button. Around the back, you’ll find a 2.5Gbps ethernet jack, another Thunderbolt 4 port, two more USB-A ports, and an HDMI port. For connectivity, it features Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.
Asus still hasn’t said when the NUC 14 Pro AI will be available, nor how much it will cost.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
mathias@rhizospherelabs.com wrote:
There’s an idea I run into frequently but don’t know if we have a proper term for — using a lower end computer (often an older laptop like one of the classic Thinkpads) when developing software. Not just for using what you have and keeping it out of the landfill; but that those machines are both plenty fast and that it forces you to consider performance. Is there a better term than “low-end computing”?
Mastodon Feedcstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:
Code like other people matter.
NPR NewsIt comes weeks after Netflix's attempt to broadcast live boxing between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson was rife with technical glitches.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
ThompsonArt@mastodon.art ("Aled Thompson") wrote:
A Flying Fire Fox
Mastodon FeedReblogged by rmrenner ("The Old Gay Gristle Fest"):
zeta0134@mstdn.plus ("Zeta") wrote:
Good grief! The entire sprite system has been overhauled, and now I can have way more metasprites without breaking the art budget.
Please enjoy this updated flail, which is now (hopefully) much easier to understand in motion thanks to 20 unique on-hit animations!
Mastodon Feedcstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:
I already haven't been hanging out here as much the past week, and I think I'll take a more definitive break starting today.
I hope you have good holidays, if that's your thing. Otherwise, I hope you have good days.
I've got the urge to make a Christmas card again, but if I manage it, it'll be next year's. I actually have two ideas, but I'm trying not to abandon the first.
I don't have a card this year, but this is the one I made in 2013. See you next year!
Mastodon Feedjsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
yahhhh
‘Walk Away (Album Version)’ by Tom Waits
The Verge
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
The US Commerce Department has awarded Samsung and Texas Instruments with a combined over $6 billion in “direct funding under the CHIPS Incentives Program’s Funding Opportunity for Commercial Fabrication,” according to a pair of announcements published on Friday.
Samsung will get the larger of the two awards at $4.745 billion. The Commerce Department says the company will use this as part of its planned $37 billion investment in Texas chip facilities that include two new “leading-edge logic fabs and an R&D fab” in Taylor, Texas, and the expansion of its plant in Austin.
The company was originally slated to receive $6.4 billion. In a statement reported by Bloomberg, the company said that its “mid-to-long-term investment plan has been partially revised to optimize overall investment efficiency,” which suggests the company has dialed back its plans, according to the outlet.
Texas Instruments will receive $1.61 billion to bolster the $18 billion it plans to spend on projects like constructing two wafer fabs in Texas and a third in Utah. The Commerce Department announced smaller awards this week too, including $407 million in funding for Amkor Technology, a US-based company that...
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:
Startup set to brick $800 kids robot is trying to open source it first - Ars Technica:
"The $800 robots, aimed at providing emotional support for kids ages 5 to 10, would soon be bricked, the company said, because they can’t perform their core features without the cloud."
This is Web 3.0, the new Internet, the newer Internet of Things. We’re no longer able to buy products and services, only compute. Fleeting, short-term, ... https://micro.fromjason.xyz/2024/12/21/startup-set-to.html
Mastodon Feeddavid_chisnall@infosec.exchange ("David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)") wrote:
I finally turned off GitHub Copilot yesterday. I’ve been using it for about a year on the ‘free for open-source maintainers’ tier. I was skeptical but didn’t want to dismiss it without a fair trial.
It has cost me more time than it has saved. It lets me type faster, which has been useful when writing tests where I’m testing a variety of permutations of an API to check error handling for all of the conditions.
I can recall three places where it has introduced bugs that took me more time to to debug than the total time saving:
The first was something that initially impressed me. I pasted the prose description of how to communicate with an Ethernet MAC into a comment and then wrote some method prototypes. It autocompleted the bodies. All very plausible looking. Only it managed to flip a bit in the MDIO read and write register commands. MDIO is basically a multiplexing system. You have two device registers exposed, one sets the command (read or write a specific internal register) and the other is the value. It got the read and write the wrong way around, so when I thought I was writing a value, I was actually reading. When I thought I was reading, I was actually seeing the value in the last register I thought I had written. It took two of us over a day to debug this. The fix was simple, but the bug was in the middle of correct-looking code. If I’d manually transcribed the command from the data sheet, I would not have got this wrong because I’d have triple checked it.
Another case it had inverted the condition in an if statement inside an error-handling path. The error handling was a rare case and was asymmetric. Hitting the if case when you wanted the else case was okay but the converse was not. Lots of debugging. I learned from this to read the generated code more carefully, but that increased cognitive load and eliminated most of the benefit. Typing code is not the bottleneck and if I have to think about what I want and then read carefully to check it really is what I want, I am slower.
Most recently, I was writing a simple binary search and insertion-deletion operations for a sorted array. I assumed that this was something that had hundreds of examples in the training data and so would be fine. It had all sorts of corner-case bugs. I eventually gave up fixing them and rewrote the code from scratch.
Last week I did some work on a remote machine where I hadn’t set up Copilot and I felt much more productive. Autocomplete was either correct or not present, so I was spending more time thinking about what to write. I don’t entirely trust this kind of subjective judgement, but it was a data point. Around the same time I wrote some code without clangd set up and that really hurt. It turns out I really rely on AST-aware completion to explore APIs. I had to look up more things in the documentation. Copilot was never good for this because it would just bullshit APIs, so something showing up in autocomplete didn’t mean it was real. This would be improved by using a feedback system to require autocomplete outputs to type check, but then they would take much longer to create (probably at least a 10x increase in LLM compute time) and wouldn’t complete fragments, so I don’t see a good path to being able to do this without tight coupling to the LSP server and possibly not even then.
Yesterday I was writing bits of the CHERIoT Programmers’ Guide and it kept autocompleting text in a different writing style, some of which was obviously plagiarised (when I’m describing precisely how to implement a specific, and not very common, lock type with a futex and the autocomplete is a paragraph of text with a lot of detail, I’m confident you don’t have more than one or two examples of that in the training set). It was distracting and annoying. I wrote much faster after turning it off.
So, after giving it a fair try, I have concluded that it is both a net decrease in productivity and probably an increase in legal liability.
Discussions I am not interested in having:
- You are holding it wrong. Using Copilot with this magic config setting / prompt tweak makes it better. At its absolute best, it was a small productivity increase, if it needs more effort to use, that will be offset.* This other LLM is much better. I don’t care. The costs of the bullshitting far outweighed the benefits when it worked, to be better it would have to not bullshit, and that’s not something LLMs can do.
- It’s great for boilerplate! No. APIs that require every user to write the same code are broken. Fix them, don’t fill the world with more code using them that will need fixing when the APIs change.* Don’t use LLMs for autocomplete, use them for dialogues about the code. Tried that. It’s worse than a rubber duck, which at least knows to stay silent when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.
The one place Copilot was vaguely useful was hinting at missing abstractions (if it can autocomplete big chunks then my APIs required too much boilerplate and needed better abstractions). The place I thought it might be useful was spotting inconsistent API names and parameter orders but it was actually very bad at this (presumably because of the way it tokenises identifiers?). With a load of examples with consistent names, it would suggest things that didn't match the convention. After using three APIs that all passed the same parameters in the same order, it would suggest flipping the order for the fourth.
NPR NewsThe FDA said studies have shown that by aiding weight loss, Zepbound improves sleep apnea symptoms in some patients.
Mastodon Feednikitonsky@mastodon.online ("Niki Tonsky") wrote:
I propose we replace semantic versioning with pride versioning
Mastodon Feedcstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:
Before I forget, and just for the purposes of this thread where I seem to be dumping all my art related things, the post linked below contains a christmas card I made in 2013.
https://social.coop/@cstanhope/113691963939292523
(apologies to any followers who already saw the post)
