Well I didn’t want to have a bio, but Lemmy doesn’t let me null it out, so I guess I’ll figure out something to put here later.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • By that logic, there’s nothing guaranteeing iMessage on iPhones is secure or private either because it’s closed source. If you don’t want to trust Beeper mini, you’ll be free to run their iMessage bridge on your own Matrix stack when they open source it at some point, which they’re promising to do (and you still won’t know that Apple isn’t scraping your messages on the iOS side). When I decide to trust a company, it’s because I look at what they’re transparently communicating to their end users. Every indication is that they are trying to get out of the middle of handling encrypted messages. Their first move to make this happen was allowing people to self host their own Beeper bridges (which you can still do with Beeper Cloud if you prefer and you will know that your messages are always encrypted within the Beeper infrastructure). They aren’t going to release the source for their client ever because that’s the only way they make any money.







  • I would highly recommend the recent Freakonomics Radio series about whaling. It’s Episodes 549-551 and the bonus episode from 2023-08-06. If you’re firmly against killing any living creature (or at least sentient creatures), I highly doubt it will change your mind (and I don’t think that it should or that it tries to), but I also think it is really fascinating learning about the history of the whaling industry and hearing the perspective of a modern whaler in the bonus episode. Putting aside the obvious ethical issues with killing sentient creatures, it’s interesting to consider things like whether there’s a sustainable level of whaling, what a sustainable quota would look like, and how much we’re in competition with certain whale species for harvesting fish as food for our own species. I personally appreciated how unbiased Freakonomics tried to be in their discussion of the topic.









  • If ChatGPT only costs $700k to run per day and they have a $10b war-chest, assuming there were no other overhead/development costs, OpenAI could run ChatGPT for 39 years. I’m not saying the premise of the article is flawed, but seeing as those are the only 2 relevant data points that they presented in this (honestly poorly written) article, I’m more than a little dubious.

    But, as a thought experiment, let’s say there’s some truth to the claim that they’re burning through their stack of money in just one year. If things get too dire, Microsoft will just buy 51% or more of OpenAI (they’re going to be at 49% anyway after the $10b deal), take controlling interest, and figure out a way to make it profitable.

    What’s most likely going to happen is OpenAI is going to continue finding ways to cut costs like caching common query responses for free users (and possibly even entire conversations, assuming they get some common follow-up responses). They’ll likely iterate on their infrastructure and cut costs for running new queries. Then they’ll charge enough for their APIs to start making a lot of money. Needless to say, I do not see OpenAI going bankrupt next year. I think they’re going to be profitable within 5-10 years. Microsoft is not dumb and they will not let OpenAI fail.





  • I don’t know exactly what the percentage of new laptops that can use USB-C charging is, but it’s a pretty large percentage. My Lenovo Yoga came with a USB-C charger and that’s all it uses for charging. That said, I actually do agree with you that this is not really a problem for laptops and IMHO it’s often a lot easier to fix/replace a broken DC barrel type charging port than a USB port on a laptop because a DC barrel generally just has 2 relatively large solder points. I’m a lot more nervous handling my laptop with a USB-C charging cable attached than I would be with a DC barrel. However, I’m in favor of legislation that reduces the number of proprietary port standards (like Lightning).