Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.
US states don’t have inter-state border controls beyond some weight checking for semis
California does have agricultural border checkpoints, though that doesn’t really change things from the topic of whether population movement could be viably limited.
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https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/plant/PE/ExteriorExclusion/borders.html
Apparently the term is “California Border Protection Stations (BPS)”.
Yeah, if they wanted to do so, in theory they could. However, even if that were the case, it’d be unlikely to happen until 2029. The President has a veto on legislation, and Congress requires a two-thirds supermajority in both legislative houses to override that veto on a given piece of legislation.
Congress can play hardball with the budget, refuse to fund the Executive, but outside of that, generally, there’s a strong bias towards the status quo in the US system of government: lots of ability to block other entities from changing from the status quo.
IIRC, despite wildly-conflicting statements on the matter to different audiences, Trump hasn’t been particularly opposed to skilled immigration, so maybe he might not veto an increase there.
If you’re thinking about, like, the high-school-diploma-only green card lottery being greatly expanded to crank up unskilled legal immigration, it’s theoretically possible, but I would bet against it happening for political and economic reasons. For unskilled labor, illegal immigration is probably more-advantageous to to the US than legal immigration; you can get labor, and thus economic production for the country, without needing to pay out a variety of government benefits that one otherwise would need to pay out. Milton Friedman (Nobel-prize winning economist, was involved with designing the income tax system in the US) has some old video where he’s giving a talk at some university and was happily saying something like “immigration is only good because it’s illegal”. I mean, he’s intentionally being provoking there for the effect, but he’s got a point.
goes looking for said video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eyJIbSgdSE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfU9Fqah-f4
Like, the people who are gonna get citizenship are gonna be the kids of illegal immigrants born in the US, not the illegal immigrants themselves. Those kids are gonna go through the education system and ideally acquire a skillset there.
In practice, would probably be better to do all this legally, have some kind of unskilled work visa that doesn’t provide benefits, but I can’t imagine that there’s any way that a “two-tiered citizenship” would stand muster politically.
I’d been using Reddit for quite some time. I wasn’t willing to use it if they weren’t going to allow third party clients.
So Democrats could still waive sovereign immunity in the future?
Well, hypothetically, I expect so.
Are there any limits to the amount of money on class action lawsuits?
So, I don’t think that there are limits to class action suits as such, but in…I think the 1990s or so, can’t recall the exact timeframe, there was a wave of tort reform, and a lot of states placed limits on punitive damages on lawsuits in general as some kind of multiple of compensatory damages. I don’t know if federal torts have such limits or if so, what they are off-the-cuff.
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It sounds like there is such a limit on punitive damages in case law implied by the US Constitution according to BMW of North America, Inc v. Gore, but I don’t think that it’s spelled out precisely what that limit is.
I mean, if you suffer $1 in damages and then try to sue for $1 in compensatory damage and $1 trillion in punitive damages, I’d imagine that it’d probably run afoul of that.
Actually…I’m not totally sure whether punitive damages can be applied to the government at all. I mean, the idea behind them is to deter and the idea is that elections are supposed to do that if the party involved is the government.
goes looking
https://legalclarity.org/are-eeoc-punitive-damages-available-against-the-federal-government/
Punitive Damages and the Federal Government
Punitive damages are penalties intended solely to punish an employer and deter future intentional misconduct. While generally available in private sector Title VII claims where the employer acted with malice or reckless indifference, the law explicitly prohibits their award against the federal government, or any state or local government entity. This prohibition is rooted in the doctrine of sovereign immunity, which protects the government from being sued for money damages unless Congress has clearly waived that immunity.
When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which authorized compensatory and punitive damages, it included a specific exception. The statute states that punitive damages cannot be recovered against a government agency or political subdivision. Therefore, a federal employee cannot receive punitive damages in an EEOC administrative claim or a subsequent civil lawsuit against the federal agency. The focus of recovery against a federal agency remains on restoring the employee to the position they would have occupied without the discrimination.
So I’d guess probably punitive damages are available in the general case of the US waiving sovereign immunity, because otherwise the CRA wouldn’t have had that exception prohibiting punitive damages present. So I suppose probably one can go for punitive damages, as long as there isn’t some similar exception restricting punitive damages in whatever waiver on whatever you’re thinking of suing over.
EDIT: Honestly, though, if you think that the Trump administration has caused some general harm and you’re hoping that the Democrats explicitly want to pay for it, my bet, without knowing the specifics of what you’re concerned about, is that a more-likely outcome would be the Democrats explicitly budgeting funds for it, not arranging to send it to court with the idea of losing a lawsuit and then being ordered to pay out funds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity
The federal government of the United States has sovereign immunity and may not be sued anywhere in the United States unless it has waived its immunity or consented to suit. The United States has waived sovereign immunity to a limited extent, mainly through the Federal Tort Claims Act, which waives the immunity if a tortious act of a federal employee causes damage, and the Tucker Act, which waives the immunity over claims arising out of contracts to which the federal government is a party.[55] As a sovereign, the United States is immune from suit unless it unequivocally consents to being sued.[56] The United States Supreme Court in Price v. United States and Osage Indians observed: “It is an axiom of our jurisprudence. The government is not liable to suit unless it consents thereto, and its liability in suit cannot be extended beyond the plain language of the statute authorizing it.”[57]
Cryptographic signature.
More IPv6 deployment.
Whack-a-mole with automated bots on social media. The war with spam email was a long one. This one may be too. My guess is that in the end, the bots will lose out, maybe via some kind of zero-knowledge proof of identity stuff.
YouTube cracking down on ad-blocking.
Continued rise of dark-mode interfaces.
Either a general acceptance of least-common-denominator stuff (e.g. accepting that one can’t restrict what content is visible that might come from some other country) or an increasing number of countries mandating that their ISPs block stuff that they want blocked. If the blocking happens, probably an increase in use of software that seeks to evade such blocking.
I do wonder a bit what the impact will be from the shift we’ve seen from PCs being the primary way to access the Internet to mobile devices. Like, for example:
https://www.thetimes.com/world/us-world/article/touch-typing-learn-practice-gen-z-speed-rjhlvrb00
In 2000, 44% of American high school students had taken a keyboard skills course, but by 2019 this had fallen to 2.5%.
In the US, teachers say that they have often assumed that young people can type because they spend so long with their devices. But students say they often use tablet devices or their phones instead, making them proficient at scrolling and tapping, but less skilled at typing.
If the ability to touch-type goes into serious decline, the ability to enter text rapidly will as well, and I’d expect that to have various knock-on effects in UI; brevity of input text may become more important.
Some things that I don’t expect to see:
The rise of VR as the primary mechanism to navigate the Internet, a la the Metaverse in Snow Crash or the probably-named-after-it Metaverse that Facebook’s banged on. Various people have tried various implementations, and it hasn’t caught on. I am skeptical that it makes a lot of sense — working in 2D works pretty well for most things.
Voice interaction becoming the primary mode of communication or computer control, not unless we get some sort of sensors and systems that can pick up subvocalization or something. You can’t control software near other people via voice without being obnoxious.
Mother fuckers just base 58 that shit.
I’m assuming that this is the point you’re making, but just to clarify:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base32
The most widely used[citation needed] base32 alphabet is defined in RFC 4648 §6 and the earlier RFC 3548 (2003). The scheme was originally designed in 2000 by John Myers for SASL/GSSAPI.[2] It uses an alphabet of A–Z, followed by 2–7. The digits 0, 1 and 8 are skipped due to their similarity with the letters O, I and B (thus “2” has a decimal value of 26).
This is generally considered to be a preferable encoding for things like this.
RAM prices will continue to rise for at least the first half of the year, just going on the fact that I’ve read plenty of statements to that extent and no disagreement.
The Democrats will win control of the House in the US in the midterm elections. That’ll set off a number of investigations which will have Trump and Trump cabinet members spending a lot of time in House hearings, and news about that will be a major news item for the next two years, as the parties angle for political advantage there.
xAI will not build an artificial general intelligence. Elon Musk will, following tradition, issue a new prediction as to how AGI is imminent and maybe one more year down the road.
The Trump administration will not invade Canada or Greenland. Trump will continue to suggest that he might whenever a topic comes up that he doesn’t want news coverage of, the present undesirable topic being the expiring ACA subsidy and people’s healthcare prices going up.
I remember the “are the Doom developers Satanists” era. Oh, and there was Night Trap, when CD-ROMs came out and games incorporating full-motion video had their brief time in the sun. IIRC Congress had a fit about that for a while too.
EDIT: And Mortal Kombat.
EDIT2: And Jack Thompson.
Thompson charged that the group placed “homosexual-education tapes” in public schools.
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as “murder simulators” to rehearse violent plans.
EDIT3: Clips from 1993 Congressional hearings:
I don’t know what a Halo battleship is (like…a spaceship in the Halo series?), but basically an amphibious assault ship — can deploy amphibious craft and aircraft — with a deck gun, cruise missiles, SAM array, CIWS, and torpedoes, so kinda an agglomeration of multiple modern-day real-world ship types. Yeah, and then you can either have AI control with you giving orders or you directly control the vehicles.
There have been a couple games in the line. Carrier Command, a very old game, which I’ve never played. Hostile Waters: Anteus Rising, which is a spiritual successor and is oriented around a single-player campaign. Carrier Command 2, which is really principally a multi-player game, but can be played single-player if you can manage the workload and handle all the roles concurrently; I play it single-player. I like both, though I wish that the last games had a more-sophisticated single-player setup. Not a lot of “fleet command” games out there.
But in this context, it’s one of the games I can think of, like Race the Sun or some older games, Avara, Spectre, Star Fox, AV-8B Harrier Assault/Flying Nightmares that use untextured polygons as a major element of the game’s graphics. Rez wasn’t untextured, but it made a lot of use of untextured polygons and wireframe. Just saying that one can make a decent 3D game, and one that has an attractive aesthetic, without spending memory on textures at all.
I think that there should be realistic video games. Not all video games, certainly, but I don’t think that we should avoid ever trying to make video games with a high level of graphical realism.
I don’t particularly have any issue specific to violence. Like, I don’t particularly subscribe to past concerns over the years in various countries that no realistic violence should be portrayed in video games, and humans should be replaced by zombies or blood should be green or whatever.
Whether or not specifically the Grand Theft Auto series should use realistic characters or stick with the more-cartoony representations that it used in the past is, I think, a harder question. I don’t have a hard opinion on it, though personally I enjoyed and played through Grand Theft Auto 3 and never bothered to get through the more-realistic, gritty, Grand Theft Auto 5. Certainly I think that it’s quite possible to make very good games that are not photorealistic. And given the current RAM shortages, if there’s ever been a good time to maybe pull back a bit on more-photorealistic graphics in order to reduce RAM requirements, this seems like a good time.
Yesterday, I was playing Carrier Command 2. That uses mostly untextured polygons for its graphics, and it’s a perfectly fine game. I have other, many more photorealistic, games available, and the hardware to run them, but that happened to be more appealing.
EDIT: I just opened it, and with it running, it increased the VRAM usage on my video card by 1.1 GB. Not very VRAM-dependent. And it is pretty, at least in my eyes.
So, it’s not really a problem I’ve run into, but I’ve met a lot of people who have difficulty on Windows understanding where they’ve saved something, but do remember that they’ve worked on or looked at it at some point in the past.
My own suspicion is that part of this problem stems from the fact that back in the day, DOS had a not-incredibly-aimed-at-non-technical-users filesystem layout, and Windows tried to avoid this by hiding that and stacking an increasingly number of “virtual” interfaces on top of things that didn’t just show one the filesystem, whether it be the Start menu or Windows Explorer and file dialogs having a variety of things other than just the filesystem to navigate around. The result is that you have had Microsoft banging away for much of the lifetime of Windows trying to add more ways to access files, most of which increase the difficulty of actually understanding what is going on fully through the extra layers. But regardless of why, some users do have trouble with it.
So if you can just provide a search that can summon up that document where they were working on that had a picture of giraffes by typing “giraffe” into some search field, maybe that’ll do it.
I don’t use OpenHAB or Home Assistant, but I’d be extremely surprised if they don’t have existing functionality for connecting microphones, speakers, and LLMs to set up voice-controlled stuff.
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Willow Is a Practical, Open Source, Privacy-focused Platform for Voice Assistants and Other Applications
Willow is an ESP IDF based project primarily targeting the ESP32-S3-BOX hardware family from Espressif. Our goal is to provide Amazon Echo/Google Home competitive performance, accuracy, cost and functionality with Home Assistant, openHAB and other platforms.
100% open source and completely self-hosted by the user with “ready for the kitchen counter” low cost commercially available hardware.
https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Rhasspy (ɹˈæspi) is an open source, fully offline set of voice assistant services for many human languages that works well with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_(unit)
Britain
Main article: English units of measurement
A digit (lat. digitus, “finger”), when used as a unit of length, is usually a sixteenth of a foot or 3/4" (1.905 cm for the international inch).[6] The width of an adult human male finger tip is indeed about 2 centimetres.
Full standardization on decidigits it is!
We’d have achievement parties, work on multiplayer cheevos, and just compete for the highest gamescore in general.
I take it that “cheevo” is what people are calling achievements now.
My understanding from a very brief skim of what Microsoft was doing with Copilot is to take screenshots constantly, run image recognition on it, and then make it searchable as text and have the ability to go back and view those screenshots in a timeline. Basically, adding more search without requiring application-level support.
They may also have other things that they want to do, but that was at least one.
EDIT: They specifically called that feature “Recall”, and it was apparently the “flagship” feature of Copilot.
Not the position Dell is taking, but I’ve been skeptical that building AI hardware directly into specifically laptops is a great idea unless people have a very concrete goal, like text-to-speech, and existing models to run on it, probably specialized ones. This is not to diminish AI compute elsewhere.
Several reasons.
Models for many useful things have been getting larger, and you have a bounded amount of memory in those laptops, which, at the moment, generally can’t be upgraded (though maybe CAMM2 will improve the situation, move back away from soldered memory). Historically, most users did not upgrade memory in their laptop, even if they could. Just throwing the compute hardware there in the expectation that models will come is a bet on the size of the models that people might want to use not getting a whole lot larger. This is especially true for the next year or two, since we expect high memory prices, and people probably being priced out of sticking very large amounts of memory in laptops.
Heat and power. The laptop form factor exists to be portable. They are not great at dissipating heat, and unless they’re plugged into wall power, they have sharp constraints on how much power they can usefully use.
The parallel compute field is rapidly evolving. People are probably not going to throw out and replace their laptops on a regular basis to keep up with AI stuff (much as laptop vendors might be enthusiastic about this).
I think that a more-likely outcome, if people want local, generalized AI stuff on laptops, is that someone sells an eGPU-like box that plugs into power and into a USB port or via some wireless protocol to the laptop, and the laptop uses it as an AI accelerator. That box can be replaced or upgraded independently of the laptop itself.
When I do generative AI stuff on my laptop, for the applications I use, the bandwidth that I need to the compute box is very low, and latency requirements are very relaxed. I presently remotely use a Framework Desktop as a compute box, and can happily generate images or text or whatever over the cell network without problems. If I really wanted disconnected operation, I’d haul the box along with me.
EDIT: I’d also add that all of this is also true for smartphones, which have the same constraints, and harder limitations on heat, power, and space. You can hook one up to an AI accelerator box via wired or wireless link if you want local compute, but it’s going to be much more difficult to deal with the limitations inherent to the phone form factor and do a lot of compute on the phone itself.
EDIT2: If you use a high-bandwidth link to such a local, external box, bonus: you also potentially get substantially-increased and upgradeable graphical capabilities on the laptop or smartphone if you can use such a box as an eGPU, something where having low-latency compute available is actually quite useful.
I know open ai bought ~40% of microns memory production.
IIRC Micron was the only Big Three DRAM manufacturer that OpenAI didn’t sign a contract with. I think that they signed contracts with SK Hynix and Samsung for their supply, and didn’t with Micron.
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Yeah:
OpenAI ropes in Samsung, SK Hynix to source memory chips for Stargate
Not signing was actually probably to Micron’s advantage; I understand that OpenAI didn’t let Samsung know that they were negotiating with SK Hynix and didn’t let SK Hynix that they were negotiating with Samsung and signed both deals concurrently. That is, each of Samsung and SK Hynix probably sold the DRAM that went to OpenAI for less than they could have gotten on the open market, since neither was aware at the time of signing that the supply on the open market outside of themselves would sharply decrease during the period of the contract, which would be expected to drive up prices.
I mean, they still made a lot more money than they had been making. Just that they could have probably managed to get even more money for the DRAM that they sold.
IIRC the 40% number was OpenAI signing for 40% of global production output, not for any particular company’s output.
Not quite what you’re asking, but up until about the 1870s, the US had effectively unrestricted immigration.
Some economist at the Cato Institute, Alex Newrath or something like that, did some interview with NPR Planet Money a few years back and estimated what potential immigration would be if restrictions were dropped.
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Alex Nowrasteh.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/172501563