Yeah, I’ve been debating getting one, but it’s a bit expensive for how much I’d actually use it (like once/month or so). I’m happy to throw $500 at a toy, but not $1k+.
Vive would be OK if you’re on a budget, you could probably get good deals on used stuff but if you wanted something new, it might be a good idea to wait a bit to see what Valve does.
I got a cv1 before Facebook bought them. It’s been downhill from there. Not to mention the lack of linux support which forced me to keep a windows partition just for it.
It’s in storage now, I don’t know if I’ll be able to reinstall it when I put my machine back together in a few months.
All in all it’s was a fine piece of kit killed by, I’m not even sure, greed probably.
Facebook (or Meta) sends me threatening emails every week about my Oculus account being deleted if I don’t bow down to Zuckerberg and link my Facebook account to it.
The question is when the US government is going to take any measures against them.
Apple is not that strong in the EU but I think in the US it controls more than 50% of the market and your authorities are simply closing their eyes in front of their anti competitive practices.
Well, there was recently a judgement on both Apple and Google anticompetitive practices having to do with app stores. Somehow apple won theirs, despite their apps being completely locked to their store while Google lost theirs despite always having supported side loading apps and other app stores already existing. The US legal system is a joke.
I ordered a BananaPi board years ago but then life took me places where I didn’t have time or energy to follow up. I’ve recently rejoined the hobbyist homelab market, so I’ve quite interested. I’d read that drivers could be an issue with non-Pi boards but haven’t ever found out. Which boards / companies are recommendation-worthy at the moment?
Asking twice because two people had similar replies and I’m looking for feedback, not because I want to spam the thread.
You can expect them to drop at maybe one more good product, as going public is what companies do when they want to raise a lot of funds for some project
But after THAT, when it turns out that the new product is just… Making money instead of making ALL the money, the investors will take over and from then on it’s fucked.
But yeah RPi has alternatives now. No need to tie yourself to them when they DO sink.
I ordered a BananaPi board years ago but then life took me places where I didn’t have time or energy to follow up. I’ve recently rejoined the hobbyist homelab market, so I’ve quite interested. I’d read that drivers could be an issue with non-Pi boards but haven’t ever found out. Which boards / companies are recommendation-worthy at the moment?
Asking twice because two people had similar replies and I’m looking for feedback, not because I want to spam the thread.
The question is always: What do you want to use it for?
When raspberry started the landscape was very difficult. Small computer boards were expensive, now there’s the N100 if you need a tiny cheap computer. Microcontrollers were really dumb and unconnected, now there’s the ESP32 which has WiFi and Bluetooth and decent performance. Right in the middle of this wide spectrum is the raspberry pi and its clones.
This is a very different situation than in the introduction era where PCs were heavy and expensive and microcontrollers were dumb. There was a much wider niche for the raspberry then. For a small server I would now get a $100 N100 from aliexpress. For embedded electronics I would grab a $10 ESP32. Only in the middle is the raspberry pi, but the problem is, it’s only in the middle in terms of performance, not price. A raspberry pi with case, PSU, storage etc costs more than a decked out N100, while actually being slower.
The only remaining usecase I see for a pi 5 would be an electronics project where you need some more compute than a microcontroller can provide, like some machine vision project. Otherwise:
Do you want to make some electronics IoT thingy: Get an ESP32
Do you want a small light computer or server: Get an N100
Ad soon as they go public, their product is their share price. And even before then, since most growing private companies seek out private investment long before going public.
“More recently, you have described our DMA compliance as ‘hot garbage,’ a ‘horror show,’ and a ‘devious new instance of Malicious Compliance.’ And you have complained about what you called ‘Junk Fees’ and ‘Apple taxes.”
I’m sorry, but this exchange is just plain hilarious to me. 🤣 It reads like a recording between a couple going through an acrimonious divorce.
This is going to be an effective way to tank the Google/Yelp review score of your restaurant. And pay toilets are also stupid in Europe, I say that as a European.
Where is this mystical European place where people charge for toilets? I swear, I hear this all the time when it comes to US vs EU differences and I don't know what they mean.
I mean, I know places that have toilets just for customers, so you need to ask for a key or a code to use it when you're there, I know of a couple of cities that charge a nominal fee, like a quarter for outdoor latrines for some reason, and I know of one specific train station that licensed toilets out to a private company and they tried to charge for them, which is very shitty and everybody hated it.
The idea of restaurants charging extra to pee is not a thing in the European places where I've been/lived.
I've never been charged for a mall toilet in Europe. But hey, that's the problem with saying "Europe". I can tick off maybe a copule dozen malls in maybe three or four countries, so we only have like twenty or thirty countries left to verify, assuming the practice is set at the national level and not regional.
In my mind this was a German thing that people kept saying was a European thing, but I haven't peed in enough public places in Germany to tell you.
I've been in the UK dozens of times and never seen those. I guess I just don't pee out that often, but in the pubs and restaurants I've been to it's never come up.
I’m in the UK, and where I live, it’s almost exclusively local council owned toilets that charge a fee. So these aren’t toilets inside private businesses, they’re separate buildings located in car parks, at beaches, and so on. So the fee to use them is almost certainly a combination of preventing homeless people from squatting in them (since they’re not watched over by staff) and to cover the costs of electricity, water, and sending someone over to clean them once in a while (since the majority of people using them are not residents of the area who have paid council tax). The fee is nominal, £0.20, and most of them now have card readers so people don’t need to have a 20p coin on them.
Right. That tracks with my experience. So when Americans are all weirded out by "paid toilets" in Europe, do they mean those? I always read that as them finding they had to pay for toilets in businesses or restaurants.
Yep, I’m assuming that’s what Americans get weirded out by. Which is just weird because it’s definitely a minority of toilets anyway. The vast majority of toilets in cafes, restaurants, bars, and large shops (or indeed any business where it’s normal to be there for more than 10-15 minutes) are either publically accessible and free to use, or can be accessed with permission. It’s generally frowned upon to walk into a business, use the toilet, and not buy something though, and even cafes and restaurants will only let you use the toilets if you buy at least one drink, so it could be that Americans are running into that.
There’s also a thing that only some businesses have toilets positioned in a place where customers can access them - obviously if it’s a tiny shop and the only toilet they have can only be reached by going through the stock room, they’re not going to let people just wander in and out (and may also be barred by their insurance policy from letting non-staff into the back rooms.) They might bend that rule for someone they know, but not for someone they don’t - in my home town, I know several businesses that would let me use their toilets in a pinch, but they wouldn’t let a complete stranger do so (they trust me not to nick stuff, or know where to find me if I do!) So there’s definitely a bunch of social conventions about when and where you can use a business’s toilets, which I can easily see Americans tripping over. As I understand it, the approach to customer service is quite different in the US compared to here.
In an ideal world, yes, the council-owned toilets would be free to use (and there’d be some mechanism for taxing tourism so the people that are using the beach and car park toilets are the ones paying for them). But I really do think Americans and Australians are overstating how common this is, because it really is a minority of toilets - I only actually know of two in my area, compared to dozens of other toilets that are completely free to use.
I'm not entirely sure of the logic of why somebody would be cleaner after paying 50 cents than otherwise. It seems like a move to keep away homeless people, but even then, it's not that hard to secure fifty cents and unless they have a timer going in there, which seems ill-advised, it wouldn't help either.
In any case, I've only ever seen them in outdoor latrines and rarely in public transportation hubs. They are definitely not the norm anywhere I've been.
In the past 10 years I have only used public toilets like 20 times, probably had to pay for half that.
Also it just occurred to me that here most tourist attractions have paid toilets as well. (castles and such) As for malls, I’m talking about the fancy mall with restaurants, jewelry stores and a multiplex, not the Walmart type.
Yeah, no, me too. I've peed in a couple of those in just the past few months, and in hundreds in my life, and I haven't paid money once. Like I said elsewhere, the one time I've seen a paid toilet in a place it was a public transportation hub and both I and other patrons seemed full-on outraged.
Clearly we have experience in different places and it seems like this is a regional thing. I just don't know which regions that is.
There are plenty of public toilets that charge a small fee. Train stations and airports for example. Also at gas stations it's pretty common. But I have never seen it at a restaurant or bar. Maybe sometimes there's a sign that says it's 50 cents for non-customers or something. But never for customers.
Yeah, right? That's my experience, too. I feel like outdoor latrines charge like a coin, presumably to keep people from squatting in there, but most places don't even have those. Maybe otherwise people are conflating customer-only toilets with paid toilets? I've never seen a paid toilet in an airport, though, and only once in a train station, and people seemed to be quite pissed about it and using the restaurants' facilities instead.
Munich central train station toilet had donations when I was there in 2012. Money went to charity. It was so clean though that I sat in the cubicle longer than usual before heading out into the hustle and bustle of the streets.
But public and restaurant toilets in general were cleaner in Germany. It was not unusual to see a toilet brush in the cubicle for you to clean your own shit up. Much more civilised than Australia.
I also didn’t see out of control drunks on Saturday nights like we get in Australia, despite alcohol being really cheap and available from your corner store where you buy milk and bread. They would often have a couple of seats outside the store for you to chill and drink.
Keep in mind things have changed over the decades, with a general push towards a public health code for establishmends of “free bathrooms, free tap water”.
Historically, Germany used to be famous for having only a few stops along the highway, with toilets you had to pay for. Tourist traps along France, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, used to let restaurants and bars charge for bathroom use, patron or no patron. Gas stops varied wildly, from free bathrooms, to “hole in the ground” ones, to “ask the manager for a key” ones. Rest areas along highways tended to have just a free “hole in the ground” type toilet, and it was up to you to avoid touching anything, then wiping off your shoes .
As for public bathrooms (outside an establishment), it still varies from place to place. Public events are required to put a number of free porta-potties, tourist traps may want to either finance installations with a fee, or reduce the number of free-standing turds in the bushes.
Still, over time the general move has been from “pee posts” for sailors to freely urinate onto, or people going down some stairs to sea/river level and taking a dump right there, to having public bathrooms with a “donation” policy, to public bathrooms with free piss walls/areas and a self-cleaning booth for a nominal fee.
As fas as I know there's nothing keeping restaurants or bars from charging to use the toilets. Also as far as I know, and I've used public toilets in restaurants and bars in most of the countries you list many, many times over several decades, those are exceedingly rare and absolutely not the norm. That was true 40 years ago and it's true today.
The type of toilet is a different thing and yeah, until maybe the late 90s a lot of Europe was no stranger to squatting toilets. Honestly, for pubs and places where you're mostly disposing of the drinks you're having, I'm not even sure they're a bad idea. Less accessible and whatnot, but I'm not sure a sit down toilet with a carefully developed patina of beer urine developed over years of sloppy drunken aim is a safer or cleaner proposition.
Right now it depends on the health code, which depends on each city’s council and particular situation (like, if the city has no potable tap water, then it makes no sense to have a regulation to serve it for free).
On the EU level, there has been back and forth about:
free restrooms for patrons
free public restrooms
free tap water at bars and restaurants
free feminine hygiene products at restrooms (along with toilet paper)
It’s an ongoing debate, that on one side would provide all of the above for basic humanitarian reasons, but on the other side has restaurant owners up in arms about extra expenses.
40 years ago
That’s about when I saw a guy take a dump directly into the river instead of going to the “pay what you wish” bathroom. They’ve remodeled the piers since then, removed the stairs going down to water level, put a couple free public restrooms along the way, and enacted stricter regulations that turned the river from foamy brown to murky green.
OK, what I'm increasingly getting from this thread is that one-off kinda scammy touristy places get over-reported and maybe mixed up with outdoor stand-alone toilets? Stuff gets presented like "in EU you have to pay for public toilets" in clickbaity travel articles, but it seems to be more like people were in one scammy place that was chargning and that's what gets talked about? Maybe I just don't go to enough tourist traps.
Well for Finland I have experience from all over and pay toilets aren’t rare in cities. From Tallinn or Stockholm, it was like that at least in city centers, not sure I would call those touristy places or just high-traffick places. Touristy places make me think more of old towns and such.
Where was this? The times I've been in France I was there with friends and I've been in Paris for maybe four hours in my entire life, but that sounds like it was either in the 90s or you were being scammed in more ways than the toilet.
I mean, what I can tell you is I'd definitely found a different toilet unless this was a free-standing outdoors latrine and I was in a hell of a hurry, just based on the fee, let alone the squatting toilet thing.
Around 03/04 - Near the Eiffel tower - walked into a restaurant, asked for the restroom, was sent down the stairs, found the door had one of those things like a gumball machine on it where you put coins in and turn the handle to unlock the door. The urgency I had to go forced me to pay for it, go in the bushes outside (police everywhere), or go in my pants.
All over the place in Europia. From train station to public parks, in multiple countries, it is somewhat common for a turnstile with a coin slot for a small charge. Doesn’t bother me if it allows for cleaner, safer facilities and keeps the riff raff out.
The issue is, at least in the US, the “riff raff” is usually just unhoused people looking for a place to do their business in private and maybe wash up a bit. Adding a paywall to public restrooms is just cruel.
Along what others have mentioned, we still have the ‘Old lady sitting in front of the toilet building’. It’s less common these days but there are still some of these around in eastern Europe. She keeps the facilities clean(er) and takes money from entrants. They usually have a little stand or something.
I don’t even care. All the kids crying for an iPhone so their texts show up the “right” color don’t deserve to play fortnite. Iphone gained such a large market share that there’s very little higher end competition left amongst android phones. If the market weren’t so lopsided, maybe we’d get options beside a Samsung s line or an Asus rog. I don’t want to give up my micro sd card slot or battery access.
They also ruined Oculus by not supporting my Rift S anymore, and forcing everyone to move over to Meta accounts.
I literally will never purchase an Oculus again. I owned a DK1 and a DK2, then skipped the CV1 for the Rift S. I am done with Oculus now, maybe I will look at HTC or some other HMD instead if I ever need to replace my Rift S.
Maybe a lawyer could tear this apart and find loopholes, but the law should be so simple as to say:
“A company providing mobile computing services and products, being hardware, software, or networking, shall allow under all circumstances and without restriction, the installation and usage of applications from all sources.”
But of course, I’m not a Lawyer, so there’s probably a loophole to be found in that.
It was invite only, not open registration, so not surprising they didn’t have many users. Although Bluesky is the same and that seems to have loads. Hmm.
I had an account but literally used it for five seconds and then largely forgot about it.
I think it should take for someone to make a mastodon instance that just doesn’t boast about federation yet is federated for this to take off more. People say “join mastodon” or “join lemmy” but then you’re hit with a list of servers and you just give up. Contrary to something like “join talkfunhouse.com” which is actually a federated instance
“helped” is very misleading. Companies can’t refuse to provide information they have when served a search warrant / court order. These companies DID NOT choose to provide the info on their own.
“helped” is very misleading. Companies can’t refuse to provide information they have when served a search warrant / court order. These companies DID NOT choose to provide the info on their own.
You are suggesting all these companies are completely helpless against legal requests. That is not correct. A company should first make clear that the legal request is actually completely legitimate and correct. After that they can look at whether they should provide the information or not.
As someone who has worked fraud and online investigations, and both written and served search warrants; it is not an option. A probable cause affidavit is presented to a judge and if the judge agrees there is sufficient probable cause, a search warrant is issued. This is an order by the judge and not optional. The judge can hold the company in contempt if they refuse to obey his/her order.
Read the blog by the guy behind cock.li , he refused multiple illegitimate warrants so far.
What matters is the jurisdiction of the service, not the one of the warrant author, otherwise china would have already warranted all data of all other world citizens lol
That is true. But I wasn’t debating about this specific case, but rather the generalized statement.
The comment I replied to implies “If there is a warrant, it is always legitimate and you have to follow it, because a lawyer said so”. That is not true and if it were the world would quickly go to shit, which I pointed out.
There is a great talk from the Lavabit CEO who discusses what happened to him and his company when they found out Snowden had an email at his company. I won't link it since it's YouTube but it's an hour long but he talks about his experience with the FBI and the courts. You can search for M3AAWG 2014 Keynote, I highly recommend it.
Yep, which I think is why it’s more important to see what data is being collected and stored, rather than giving up data based on how trustworthy an entity seems
If the tool doesn’t collect or log the data to begin with, then there’s nothing that can be stolen/taken/demanded
The solution in this case might be for Proton (and the other companies) to list out risks and data collection information along the way.
We need X in order to do Y. Read more on how Y works. Now here are some risks, and how to avoid them:
It’s a much much bigger issue than this. Would you rather live in a world where other countries have good AI and you do not? Would you like it if only China has powerful AI? I get the copyright issue, but some things are more important than other things. This is an arms race, and everyone slowing down isn’t exactly an option.
You could have a much more complex understanding of what they are. It isn’t nearly as simple as you are imagining. If you genuinely are curious about what you’re overlooking, then here is a link.
It seems like you severely misunderstand what “AI” as we have it nowadays is (it’s not actual AI) and what it is capable (not very much) and most importantly not capable of (most things it is advertised to do). Even if investor magazines and tech CEOs try to make it seem like that, we’re not one step away from creating HAL9000. LLMs are extremely over hyped and in the most areas they have been deployed a straight up dysfunctional scam. The only arms race that is happening right now is about who can waste the most money and violate the most privacy laws with this nonsense while all the necessary data centers and their insane power and water demands accelerate the destruction of our environment even more.
Sure, thanks for your interest. It’s an incomplete picture, but we can think of LLMs as an abstraction of all the meaningful connections within a dataset to a higher dimensional space - one that can be explored. That alone is an insane accomplishment that is changing some of the pillars of data analysis and knowledge work. But that’s just the contribution of the “Attention is All You Need” paper. Many implementations of modern generative AI combine LLM inference in agentic networks, with GANs, and with rules-based processing. Extracting connections is just one part of one part of a modern AI implementation.
The emergent properties of GPT4 are enough to point toward this exponential curve continuing. Theory of mind (and therefore deception) as well as relational spatial awareness (usually illustrated with stacking problems) developed solely from increasing the parameter count describing the neural network. These were unexpected capabilities. As a result, there is an almost literal arms race on the hardware side to see what other emergent properties exist at higher model sizes. With some poetic license, we’re rending function from form so quickly and effectively that it’s seen by some as freeing and others as a sacrilege.
Some of the most interesting work on why these capabilities emerge and how we might gain some insight (and control) from exploring the mechanisms is being done by Anthropic and by users at Hugging Face. They discovered that when specific neurons in Claude’s net are stimulated, everything it responds with will in some way become about the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance. This sort of probing is perhaps a better route to progress than blindly chasing more size (despite its recent success). But only time will tell. Certainly, Google and MS have had a lot of unforced errors fumbling over themselves to stay in what they think is the race.
I’m happy to take the time to alter your perspective, if you are open to new information.
You took some time, but spent it explaining at a fairly technical level, rather than a lamens term approach. I doubt you managed to change many people’s perspective, but you maybe reinforced some.
This is another good use case for gAI. Copy/paste the comment into a GPT and tell it to re-write the content at the desired reading or technical level. Then it’s available for follow-up clarification questions.
The term "AI" has been in use since 1956 to describe a wide variety of computer algorithms and capabilities. Neural nets and large language models fall very firmly under the term's umbrella.
What you're talking about is a specific kind of AI, artificial general intelligence (AGI). Very few people believe that an LLM on its own can become AGI and even fewer believes that current LLMs are AGI, so unfortunately you're jousting with a strawman here.
If you are genuinely open to understanding the path we are on, the new situational awareness paper would be very eye-opening. It is 160 pages, so it’s probably a bit too much to get through, but there are really good videos that explain it. Matthew Berman has a great video about it. I’m not interested in swaying you and not going to debate, I’m 100s of hours deep into this and have been absolutely obsessed with it. Nobody doubted its impact as much as me. Education on the matter will undeniably change your mind tremendously. The information is there if you want a peak at the future.
I think it’s “legally grey” in the sense that governments have largely made no policies one way or the other on the data harvesting. It’s not banned, but it’s not openly encouraged either, and there’s no real legal precedent to point to for this specific matter besides the general data harvesting big tech does.
The area with the largest similarity I feel is music sampling, and as far as I know, the music industry was very quick to ensure that data harvesting for AI had to follow the same copyright laws as sampling.
There are many laws that go entirely against the constitution of a country. You can start by looking at DMCA laws that violate a bunch of rights in MANY countries. Legally gray is falling short, those are illegal, and still get enforced because $$$
It's similar to my own reaction to the people getting angry about Reddit data being used to train AIs. As someone who's been commenting rather prolifically on Reddit for 13 years I'm actually quite pleased by the thought that my views and interests are being incorporated into the foundations of modern AI. The only downside is that all those people I argued with over that period are also getting in there. :)
Good answer, no way AI will possibly ever catch up to such brilliant responses as this. Certainly, there is no reason to want to have our views represented in the next generation of technology.
Well honestly, that’s too soft. They did not decide. They were pushed by regulators to follow the law. So bowing to pressure is more appropriate in my view.
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