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Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

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  • How I hacked my washing machine

    Technology technology
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    O
    And a washing machine is still a washing machine, smart features or not. Every washing machine is going to have a controller board that can break.
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    U
    Still, a 2025 University of Arizona study that interviewed farmers and government officials in Pinal County, Arizona, found that a number of them questioned agrivoltaics’ compatibility with large-scale agriculture. “I think it’s a great idea, but the only thing … it wouldn’t be cost-efficient … everything now with labor and cost of everything, fuel, tractors, it almost has to be super big … to do as much with as least amount of people as possible,” one farmer stated. Many farmers are also leery of solar, worrying that agrivoltaics could take working farmland out of use, affect their current operations or deteriorate soils. Those fears have been amplified by larger utility-scale initiatives, like Ohio’s planned Oak Run Solar Project, an 800 megawatt project that will include 300 megawatts of battery storage, 4,000 acres of crops and 1,000 grazing sheep in what will be the country’s largest agrivoltaics endeavor to date. Opponents of the project worry about its visual impacts and the potential loss of farmland.
  • Alibaba Cloud claims new DB manager beats rival hyperscalers

    Technology technology
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    Niemand hat geantwortet
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    D
    Deserved it. Shouldn't have beem a racist xenophobe. Hate speech and incitement of violence is not legally protected in the UK. All those far-right rioters deserves prison.
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    M
    Don't get them wrong, they don't do this for you, or even morals. It just affects other interests too much.
  • We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent

    Technology technology
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    dsilverz@friendica.worldD
    @technocrit While I agree with the main point that "AI/LLMs has/have no agency", I must be the boring, ackchyually person who points out and remembers some nerdy things.tl;dr: indeed, AIs and LLMs aren't intelligent... we aren't so intelligent as we think we are, either, because we hold no "exclusivity" of intelligence among biosphere (corvids, dolphins, etc) and because there's no such thing as non-deterministic "intelligence". We're just biologically compelled to think that we can think and we're the only ones to think, and this is just anthropocentric and naive from us (yeah, me included).If you have the patience to read a long and quite verbose text, it's below. If you don't, well, no problems, just stick to my tl;dr above.-----First and foremost, everything is ruled by physics. Deep down, everything is just energy and matter (the former of which, to quote the famous Einstein equation e = mc, is energy as well), and this inexorably includes living beings.Bodies, flesh, brains, nerves and other biological parts, they're not so different from a computer case, CPUs/NPUs/TPUs, cables and other computer parts: to quote Sagan, it's all "made of star stuff", it's all a bunch of quarks and other elementary particles clumped together and forming subatomic particles forming atoms forming molecules forming everything we know, including our very selves...Everything is compelled to follow the same laws of physics, everything is subjected to the same cosmic principles, everything is subjected to the same fundamental forces, everything is subjected to the same entropy, everything decays and ends (and this comment is just a reminder, a cosmic-wide Memento mori).It's bleak, but this is the cosmic reality: cosmos is simply indifferent to all existence, and we're essentially no different than our fancy "tools", be it the wheel, the hammer, the steam engine, the Voyager twins or the modern dystopian electronic devices crafted to follow pieces of logical instructions, some of which were labelled by developers as "Markov Chains" and "Artificial Neural Networks".Then, there's also the human non-exclusivity among the biosphere: corvids (especially Corvus moneduloides, the New Caleidonian crow) are scientifically known for their intelligence, so are dolphins, chimpanzees and many other eukaryotas. Humans love to think we're exclusive in that regard, but we're not, we're just fooling ourselves!IMHO, every time we try to argue "there's no intelligence beyond humans", it's highly anthropocentric and quite biased/bigoted against the countless other species that currently exist on Earth (and possibly beyond this Pale Blue Dot as well). We humans often forgot how we are species ourselves (taxonomically classified as "Homo sapiens"). We tend to carry on our biological existences as if we were some kind of "deities" or "extraterrestrials" among a "primitive, wild life".Furthermore, I can point out the myriad of philosophical points, such as the philosophical point raised by the mere mention of "senses" ("Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, ..." "my senses deceive me" is the starting point for Cartesian (René Descartes) doubt. While Descarte's conclusion, "Cogito ergo sum", is highly anthropocentric, it's often ignored or forgotten by those who hold anthropocentric views on intelligence, as people often ground the seemingly "exclusive" nature of human intelligence on the ability to "feel".Many other philosophical musings deserve to be mentioned as well: lack of free will (stemming from the very fact that we were unable to choose our own births), the nature of "evil" (both the Hobbesian line regarding "human evilness" and the Epicurean paradox regarding "metaphysical evilness"), the social compliance (I must point out to documentaries from Derren Brown on this subject), the inevitability of Death, among other deep topics.All deep principles and ideas converging, IMHO, into the same bleak reality, one where we (supposedly "soul-bearing beings") are no different from a "souless" machine, because we're both part of an emergent phenomena (Ordo ab chao, the (apparent) order out of chaos) that has been taking place for Æons (billions of years and beyond, since the dawn of time itself).Yeah, I know how unpopular this worldview can be and how downvoted this comment will probably get. Still I don't care: someone who gazed into the abyss must remember how the abyss always gazes us, even those of us who didn't dare to gaze into the abyss yet.I'm someone compelled by my very neurodivergent nature to remember how we humans are just another fleeting arrangement of interconnected subsystems known as "biological organism", one of which "managed" to throw stuff beyond the atmosphere (spacecrafts) while still unable to understand ourselves. We're biologically programmed, just like the other living beings, to "fear Death", even though our very cells are programmed to terminate on a regular basis (apoptosis) and we're are subjected to the inexorable chronological falling towards "cosmic chaos" (entropy, as defined, "as time passes, the degree of disorder increases irreversibly").
  • Spyware and state abuse: The case for an EU-wide ban

    Technology technology
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    M
    I'm surprised it isn't already illegal to install software on someone's phone without their consent or knowledge. Sounds like a form of property damage.
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    mrjgyfly@lemmy.worldM
    Does that run the risk of leading to a future collapse of certain businesses, especially if their expenses remain consistently astronomical like OpenAI? Please note I don’t actually know—not trying to be cheeky with this question. Genuinely curious.