/tech/ - Technology

Facial recognition. Gait recognition. Automated License Plate Readers, many of whom now identify based on make and model. DNA databases. Cellular location tracking. "First responder drones" will become a thing with police departments soon. Cash based transactions are becoming less accepted and every credit card purchase is sold to advertisers (and the feds). For most people in Western countries acting normally, anyone going anywhere or doing anything in the physical world is tracked in a dozen ways. Taking elaborate measures to avoid this surveillance makes you look extremely weird and suspicious to most normal people. Any serious leftist movement dealing with harsh state repression is going to need a reliable toolkit for defeating this stuff.

AGI by 2027. What are the implications for the world and the future of mankind and communism?

>Everyone is now talking about AI, but few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them. Nvidia analysts still think 2024 might be close to the peak. Mainstream pundits are stuck on the willful blindness of “it’s just predicting the next word”. They see only hype and business-as-usual; at most they entertain another internet-scale technological change.

>Before long, the world will wake up. But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness. Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them. A few years ago, these people were derided as crazy—but they trusted the trendlines, which allowed them to correctly predict the AI advances of the past few years. Whether these people are also right about the next few years remains to be seen. But these are very smart people—the smartest people I have ever met—and they are the ones building this technology. Perhaps they will be an odd footnote in history, or perhaps they will go down in history like Szilard and Oppenheimer and Teller. If they are seeing the future even close to correctly, we are in for a wild ride.

>Let me tell you what we see.

<I. From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs
>AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible. GPT-2 to GPT-4 took us from ~preschooler to ~smart high-schooler abilities in 4 years. Tracing trendlines in compute (~0.5 orders of magnitude or OOMs/year), algorithmic efficiencies (~0.5 OOMs/year), and “unhobbling” gains (from chatbot to agent), we should expect another preschooler-to-high-schooler-sized qualitative jump by 2027.

<II. From AGI to Superintelligence: the Intelligence Explosion
>AI progress won’t stop at human-level. Hundreds of millions of AGIs could automate AI research, compressing a decade of algorithmic progress (5+ OOMs) into ≤1 year. We would rapidly go from human-level to vastly superhuman AI systems. The power—and the peril—of superintelligence would be dramatic.

>old drive from 2016 "might" be dying
>look into getting a drive with at least 2 tb since I wanna hoard my warez
>"oh get a toshiba bro they're reliable
>not even a fucking year later
>Current Pending Sector Count: 1864
You've got to be fucking kidding me, comrades.

This is the next installment of threads in my project log series since the imageboard was completed >>27187, and ran out of motivation for the calendar-based forum >>27553, leaving it as merely a (relatively complete) calendar. The idea this time around is to make something of a GNU Emacs replacement, but broken up into a number of tightly coupled smaller packages. Namely the approach is going to be "frames" over "windows" where windows are controlled by a programmable tiling window manager and run in Xephr for individuals who don't want to replace their window manager. Further there will be a command processor for mapping keybindings to functions and command names to functions. Next there will be a prompt package which will be responsible for prompting the user, more likely than not this will be either at the cursor position or in the center of the display. Lastly, the text editor itself will be responsible for very little beyond saving and reloading state, and rendering the text buffer; these two functionality will likely also be split into separate packages.

Presently, the implementation is in C, Xlib, Cairo, and Pango but is little more than a demo to edit and render text taken from various tutorials glued together only started yesterday afternoon. It is however already capable of indexing in text based on pointer events, so it seems the stack will be powerful enough to write the gui. Am likely to start with morphing the present program into the prompt package and once have the basics of the centered view created (this would be something akin to dmenu) am likely to begin rewriting in Common Lisp. Don't yet know how to handle the interprocess communication ideally it would be bidirectoinal and work well with programs not written in Common Lisp, though this latter point isn't the biggest priority. Getting the interprogram communication right is going to be critical for having the environment work well overall. Anyway that's all for now.

Feel free to discuss any consumer electronic products you use.
Picture two are my Chi-Fi: Tin-HIFI T2.
They're mostly neutral with some deviation in the highs.
Much less bass heavy than most Chi-Fi judging from the graphs.

Picture one is my phone, an ironic branding for a midrange device.
Am hoping to install Lineage 21+ after an unlock token arrives.
Interesting apps are as follows:

- NewPipe (youtube alternative)
- personalDNSfilter (global adblock)
- KurobaEx-Beta (leftypol client)
- Obsidian (note taking software)
- OsmAnd (google maps alternative)
- Messanger (RCS is a monopoly)
- Aurora Store (bad play replacement)

I recently got a smartphone again and things are worse than 5 or 6 years ago. I got an Android because they have inexpensive ones and I don't believe in paying around $1k for a phone.

Turns out you need a Gmail account and a whole Google relationship for the phone to work. Then you can't even send texts without your legal name and email address being linked to your number. For anyone you contact to read.

I'm no paranoid nut or anything, but this is far more involved than it used to be. And there's simply no way to opt out. It may be different with Apple phones, but I remember when I had one of those they wanted me to link up a bunch of shit too. It was similar but different.

Not to mention you kind of already need a phone to activate a phone. Because without some texted code to cell phone you can't get the new one going.
I know I'M the problem here because I'm questioning and not just agreeing to all their shit, but I want to understand it.

Do you guys know what's up with all this and if there's any way around it? I had a flip phone for a long time but each year it's more and more of a hassle to get along without having the same as everyone else. And everyone INSISTS on communicating via text message, so there's really no dealing with that on a little flip with just numbers. And I checked; they don't even fucking MAKE Blackberry type smartphones with physical keyboards anymore. If you can find one it won't work with any current carrier. The phones are all very big and they don't offer small smartphone options unless you want a folding one which is even more costly.
The cheapest I could get was $200 and I still feel ripped off.

Thread for watching rocket launches and shit.

What's the deal with block-based coding? I'm surprised it's not more common for the obvious stuff like markup languages, since they're both sandwich shaped, and whenever I look into it I see it pitched as:
>no coding
even though it is, just you have premade snippets.
>usually pitched as a teaching tool rather than part of a serious workflow
which is weird beause I see node based coding, another kind of visual coding, used in gamedev and shader stuff quite regularly.
>seemingly only used for high level programming
why? like is there something low level programming languages do that can't translate to blocks?

Do you use block-based coding for anything, or have experiences to share about it?

>99% of backend web applications are REST APIs that perform basic CRUD operations.
>Vast majority of soydevs and product managers somehow still manage to fuck up codebases beyond repair
How does this happen? I'm tired of working on fragile legacy codebases that are on the brink of imploding half the time. Most of the teams I have worked with are filled with careless assholes who don't follow any proper coding guidelines, standard processes or even use common sense. Maybe it's because I'm in fintech. I know some of the red flags to watch out for, let me know of some more please.

Is indie app/web development a viable way to earn money? I'm tired of debugging dogshit legacy codebases. I plan on building dozens of freemium apps hoping that at least one sticks. I have 2.5 years of web and mobile dev experience.

Also, please don't move this to /tech/ jannies, it's an incredibly slow board.