Technology

In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, HG Wells published a novel about the possibilities of an even greater conflagration. The World Set Free imagines, 30 years before the Manhattan Project, the creation of atomic weapons that allow “a man [to] carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city”. Global war breaks out, leading to an atomic apocalypse. It takes the “establishment of a world government” to bring about peace.

What concerned Wells was not simply the perils of a new technology, it was also the dangers of democracy. Wells’ world government was not created through democratic will but imposed as a benign dictatorship. “The governed will show their consent by silence,” England’s King Egbert menacingly remarks. For Wells, the “common man” was “a violent fool in social and public affairs”. Only an educated, scientifically minded elite could “save democracy from itself”.

One use of LLMs that I haven’t seen mentioned before is to use them as a sounding board for your own ideas. By discussing your concept with an LLM, you can gain fresh perspectives through its generated responses.

In this context, the LLM’s actual comprehension is irrelevant. The purpose lies in its ability to spark new thought processes by prompting you with unexpected framings or questions.

Definitely recommend trying this trick next time you’re writing something.

I’ve just watched the video. I find it pretty outrageous. The word about it should spread.

One of the defining economic challenges of our time is how to distribute the value generated by groundbreaking technologies, such as generative artificial intelligence and recent innovations in biomedicine and manufacturing. To improve living standards, the benefits of transformative technologies must be widely shared. So far, however, these benefits have been monopolised by a small cadre of tech billionaires.

So i have vintage story, and it's not exactly on steam. I also have an ever changing list of mods and two gaming computers. I want to be able to have all my files from one update on the other and vice versa. What would be the best way to do this? my first thought was tortoiseSVN but i thought i would check and see if there's a more modern approach

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/12896912

As the EU’s new flagship tech laws, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, are coming into full application, Big Tech is working hard to shoot them down. As of today, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) becomes fully applicable, following its counterpart the Digital Services Act (DSA) on 17 February.

However, as the EU’s new tech laws are coming into full application, tech corporations like Apple, Amazon, Meta and TikTok are already undermining them at every turn. To subvert these new regulations, tech corporations have filed a number of lawsuits against the European Commission and attempted to weaken the rules with malicious compliance that protects their profits at the expense of their users.

As of today, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and ByteDance, the six gatekeepers designated by the Commission in September 2023, have to fully comply with all obligations in the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The DMA aims to make digital markets in the EU more contestable and fairer. It establishes new rules for 10 defined core platform services, such as search engines, online marketplaces, app stores, online advertising and messaging, and gives new rights to European businesses and end-users.

On June 5, 1981, journalists from around the world gathered at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. to watch as the Voyager 2 spacecraft became the first man-made object to reach Saturn. In the aftermath of this historic event, the main attraction wasn’t NASA’s staff. It was fellow journalist Jerry Pournelle. Pournelle had something none of them had ever seen before: a portable computer, the first mass-market one in history.

“There were over 100 members of the science press corps packed into the Von Karman Center (the press facility),” Pournelle wrote in his regular column for Byte magazine a few months later. “Most had typewriters. One or two had big, cumbersome word processors…nobody had anything near as convenient as the Osborne 1.”

Just six years earlier, the Altair 8800 had been unveiled at the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club. There, Steve Jobs recognized that the future of computing lay in the consumer market, not the hobbyist. But Jobs was not alone. He stood alongside someone who would go on to become a “frenemy” of sorts. Like Jobs, he was intensely charismatic. Like Jobs, he had a near-supernatural ability to sense what consumers wanted before they knew it themselves. And, like Jobs, he knew how to sell his ideas to the world.

Worldcoin, co-founded by Altman in 2019, has been offering tokens of its own cryptocurrency to people around the world, in return for their consent to have their eyes scanned by an orb.

The scans are used as a form of identification as it seeks to create a reliable mechanism to distinguish between humans and machines as artificial intelligence becomes more advanced.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/15735868

Bill SB 1596 passed Oregon's House by a 42 to 13 margin. Gov. Tina Kotek has five days to sign the bill into law

Like bills passed in New York, California, and Minnesota, Oregon's bill requires companies to offer the same parts, tools, and documentation to individual and independent repair shops that are already offered to authorized repair technicians.

Unlike other states' bills, however, Oregon's bill doesn't demand a set number of years after device manufacture for such repair implements to be produced. That suggests companies could effectively close their repair channels entirely rather than comply with the new requirements. California's bill mandated seven years of availability.

MindTheTech, a well-funded conference in Midtown focused on supporting the Israeli tech industry, was disrupted by pro-Palestine protesters on Monday morning, who were promptly forced out of the event. Moments after I tweeted videos of the disruptions, I was also kicked out without explanation.