technology

I don't think I agree with the ending, but this is still good to share with anyone you know touting AI accomplishments that are present today.

Wow this looks legit great for 30k USD

So... you've probably noticed that when downloading a game or doing serious p2p piracy, your internet latency suffers: websites take longer to load, video chats stutter, online games glitch.

Well, good news! You can do something about that if you have a router capable of running the free OpenWrt firmware.

The problem of downloads (or uploads) clogging up the pipes is called bufferbloat. Basically, there's a traffic jam somewhere, usually where your ISP throttles your internet speed. This means data packets have to queue up behind whatever data is clogging up the pipes, and so they get delivered with a noticeable latency.

Some boffins have looked at that and identified ways to improve the situation:

1. Have shorter buffers, so stuff cannot queue up as much.
2. Create express lanes where other traffic can skip the queue of Final Fantasy asset deliveries.
3. Tell the Final Fantasy asset delivery service to slow the fuck down.

Unfortunately, the queuing policy and the size of the buffers coming into your home is controlled by the ISP, so you can't really do much about that, but you can actually do #3.

This works by setting a speed limit on the OpenWrt router in your home, which tells anyone sending too much shit your way to slow down, which means the buffer on the ISPs side never get full, and therefore no traffic jam! You won't even notice you're downloading Final Fantasy. The web browsing and video chatting will feel like there's no download going on at all. You got to set the bandwidth limit 10-20% below your actual internet speed though, which I think is well worth it.

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm

https://boingboing.net/2024/04/12/twitter-users-can-no-longer-hide-their-blue-checks.html

Hey Guys I Switch To Windows 11 From Windows 7 And I Have A Weird Penguin On The Screen Telling Me To Switch To This "Linux" Thing, Anybody Know How To Fix It?

I found a way to retrieve the text of comments deleted by user or mod. I don't think it is an issue of federated instances not respecting the deletion.

Is it a bug?

Or is "deleting" always really just "hiding"?

• OpenAI’s Sora has increased competitive pressure on Adobe

• Adobe has built AI models with stock library, procured media

also:

https://www.wired.com/review/humane-ai-pin/

This wearable, touch-activated “second brain” is too bare-bones and not all that useful.

https://www.engadget.com/the-humane-ai-pin-is-the-solution-to-none-of-technologys-problems-120002469.html

The Humane AI Pin is the solution to none of technology's problems

For a long time I hated markdown.

Now I love it.

What do you think?

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Wed, Apr 10th 2024 05:29am - Karl Bode

However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they’re arguably worse in prisons. For decades, journalists and researchers have outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resulting sky high rates (upwards of $14 per minute at some prisons) for inmate families.

Most of these pampered monopolies have shifted over to monopolizing prison phone videoconferencing as well. And the relationship between government and monopoly is so cozy, several of these companies, like Securus, have been caught helping to spy on privileged attorney client communications.

There’s not much in the way of oversight, so the problem just keeps evolving. Case in point: Ars Technica notes that a civil rights group has filed a two new lawsuits against two Michigan counties, two county sheriffs, and two prison monopolies, Securus and Viapath (formerly known as Global Tel*Link Corporation, or GTL.

The lawsuits allege that Michigan banned in-person visits in order to maximize revenue from voice and video calls as part of a “quid pro quo kickback scheme” with prison phone companies. It’s something the group states has become increasingly common over the last decade as telecom monopolies lobby governments and private prison contractors to ban in-person visits to make more money:

“Why has this happened? The answer highlights a profound flaw in how decisions too often get made in our legal system: for-profit jail telecom companies realized that they could earn more profit from phone and video calls if jails eliminated free in-person visits for families. So the companies offered sheriffs and county jails across the country a deal: if you eliminate family visits, we’ll give you a cut of the increased profits from the larger number of calls. This led to a wave across the country, as local jails sought to supplement their budgets with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from some of the poorest families in our society.”

Much like telecoms out in the broader free world, government has such a cozy relationship with telecom monopolies, the incentive to hold them accountable for much of anything is largely muted. In instances like domestic surveillance, it’s often impossible to determine where government ends and private monopolies like AT&T begin.

One lawsuit documents how Securus lobbied to have in-person visits eliminated and video kiosks installed where in-person visitation centers used to be. A contract was signed that doled out kickbacks to government so they got a big chunk of the revenue, incentivizing prisons to keep inmate populations high:

“Securus pays the County 50% of the $12.99 price tag for every 20-minute video call and 78% of the $0.21 per minute cost of every phone call. The contract promises the County an entirely new revenue stream, as well as a minimum guaranteed annual payment of $190,000 paid up front. And the contract gives Securus the right to terminate its video call service or pay the County less money if the jail population decreases by more than 5% or if
the jail fails to ensure a minimum number of monthly paid video calls.”

Much with the broader prison industrial complex, it’s not hard to see how perverse financial incentives point in all the wrong directions. It’s also not hard to see how this sort of relationship can easily be sold to cash-hungry counties and municipalities as more profitable, safer, and more secure. A win all around, unless you’re a poor inmate family member with limited resources and no personal lobbyists.

Efforts to do something about prison telecom monopolies were scuttled by FCC boss Ajit Pai, whose former clients included Securus. Pai not only routinely opposed efforts by ex-FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn to drive change in the prison telco sector, one of his very first acts as FCC boss was to pull the rugs out from underneath his own lawyers as they tried to support those reforms in court (they, as intended, lost).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/13405960

Researchers have demonstrated the "first native Spectre v2 exploit" for a new speculative execution side-channel flaw that impacts Linux systems running on many modern Intel processors.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/13402469

"We have a technical debt that stretches back many decades."

Link to the project: https://www.openinterpreter.com/01

Link to the GitHub: https://github.com/OpenInterpreter/01

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14106579

On Monday, it appears X attempted to encourage users to cease referring to it as Twitter and instead adopt the name X. Some users began noticing that posts viewed via X for iOS were changing any references of "Twitter.com" to "X.com" automatically.

If a user typed in "Twitter.com," they would see "Twitter.com" as they typed it before hitting "Post." But, after submitting, the platform would show "X.com" in its place on the X for iOS app, without the user's permission, for everyone viewing the post.

And shortly after this revelation, it became clear that there was another big issue: X was changing anything ending in "Twitter.com" to "X.com."

https://www.hindustantimes.com/business/elon-musk-admits-i-may-have-done-more-to-financially-impair-x-than-to-help-it-101712739876659.html

What do people here use for their notetaking app? I'm still on microsoft onenote out of laziness, but it is undeniably garbage.