Futurology Today

Pool pump has been a bit weak lately: The stream of water pouring out of the hot tub "waterfall" into the main pool had become more like a trickle. This usually indicates a significant clog or that the pool filter needs cleaning.

Considering I haven't cleaned the filter in almost a year I figured that was likely the problem. It wasn't 😮‍💨

Turns out that there's something stuck in the intake at the bottom of the pool which means I have to dive deep with a screwdriver in the super cold water and carefully clear out whatever is in there. Probably a plastic bag or similar.

Note: Never attempt such a thing while the pump is on! In fact, lock it down with some tape and maybe a warning label that says not to turn it on while you're doing your difficult work.

Been a long time since I had to hold my breath under water. I wonder if I can still reach 2 minutes? 🤔 Probably not with this water temperature 🤣

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Designers of last year’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 used the processing power of the PlayStation 5 so Peter Parker’s outfits would be rendered with realistic textures and skyscraper windows could reflect rays of sunlight.

That level of detail did not come cheap.

Insomniac Games, which is owned by Sony, spent about $300 million to develop Spider-Man 2, according to leaked documents, more than triple the budget of the first game in the series, which was released five years earlier. Chasing Hollywood realism requires Hollywood budgets, and even though Spider-Man 2 sold more than 11 million copies, several members of Insomniac lost their jobs when Sony announced 900 layoffs in February.

Cinematic games are getting so expensive and time-consuming to make that the video game industry has started to acknowledge that investing in graphics is providing diminished financial returns.

It was clear this year, however, that the live service strategy carries its own risks. Warner Bros. Discovery took a $200 million loss on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, according to Bloomberg. Sony closed the studio behind Concord, its attempt to compete with team-based shooters like Overwatch and Apex Legends, one month after the game released to a minuscule player base.

“We have a market that has been in growth mode for decades,” Ball said. “Now we are in a mature market where instead of making bets on growth, companies need to try and steal shares from each other.”

Ismail is worried that major studios are in a tight spot where traditional games have become too expensive but live service games have become too risky. He pointed to recent games that had both jaw-dropping realism — Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (individual pebbles of gravel cast shadows) and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (rays of sunlight flicker through the trees) — and lackluster sales.

https://pygyat.vercel.app/

https://github.com/shamith09/pygyat

This the right place to post this?

Summary

The CDC identified rare mutations in the bird flu virus from the first severe U.S. human case, found in a Louisiana resident over 65 with severe respiratory illness.

The mutations, located in the hemagglutinin (HA) gene responsible for cell attachment, differ from those in local backyard flock samples and align with severe cases seen abroad.

The patient was infected with the D1.1 genotype, recently found in U.S. wild birds and poultry, not the B3.13 genotype seen in humans and livestock elsewhere.

The CDC states no person-to-person transmission occurred, and public risk remains low.

Summary

A ninth U.S. telecom firm has been hacked in the Chinese espionage campaign “Salt Typhoon,” which gave Beijing access to private texts and calls of Americans, including senior government officials.

The Biden administration confirmed the breach after issuing guidance to detect Chinese hackers.

Officials call for mandatory cybersecurity regulations, as voluntary measures are deemed insufficient.

The FCC will address the issue next month, while further U.S. actions are expected.

China denies involvement.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/30140601

Oleksandr deserted from the front line in eastern Ukraine after watching his fellow servicemen being pulverised by Russian bombardments for six months. Then, those remaining were ordered to counterattack.

It was the final straw for Oleksandr, 45, who had been holding the line in the embattled Lugansk region in the early months of the war. Even his commanding officer was reluctant to send his men back toward what looked like certain death. So when Oleksandr saw an opening to save his life, he did.

"We wanted to live. We had no combat experience. We were just ordinary working people from villages," the soft-spoken serviceman, who declined to give his last name, told AFP.

His decision is just one of many cases plaguing the Ukrainian military, which has already suffered at least 43,000 losses in nearly three years of fighting, President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed this month. The government is also struggling to recruit new troops. Together, these manpower problems present a critical hurdle for Ukraine, which is losing territory to Russia at the fastest rate since the early days of the February 2022 invasion.

The issue was put under the spotlight in September when 24-year-old serviceman Sergiy Gnezdilov announced in a scathing social media post that he was leaving his unit in protest over indefinite service. "From today, I am going AWOL with five years of impeccable soldiering behind me, until clear terms of service are established or until my 25th birthday," he wrote.

Figures published by the Ukrainian general prosecutor's office show that more than 90,000 cases have been opened into instances of soldiers going absent without leave or deserting since Russia invaded in 2022, with a sharp increase over the past year.

Oleksandr said that after leaving the frontline, he remembered little from the year he spent at home in the Lviv region owing to concussions he suffered while deployed. He recounted "mostly drinking" to process the horrors he witnessed but his guilt was mounting at the same time. He ultimately decided to return after seeing young Ukrainians enlist or wounded troops return to battle -- despite pleas from his family.

His brother was beaten during the historic Maidan protests in 2013 that toppled Ukraine's pro-Kremlin leader, and later died. His sister was desperate. "They're going to kill you. I would rather bring you food to prison than flowers to your grave," he recounted his sister telling him during a visit from Poland.

It was guilt, too, that motivated Buch, who identified himself by a military nickname, to return to battle. The 29-year-old deserted after being wounded in fierce fighting in southern Ukraine in late 2022 during the liberation of Kherson city. "Just staying under constant shelling gradually damages your mental state. You go crazy step by step. You are all the time under stress, huge stress," he said of his initial decision to abscond.

In an effort to address manpower shortages, Ukrainian lawmakers in August approved an amnesty for first-time offenders who voluntarily returned to their units.

Both the 47th and 53rd brigades in December announced they would welcome back servicemen who had left the front without permission, saying: "We all make mistakes." Prosecutors said in early December that 8,000 servicemen that went absent without leave or deserted had returned in November alone.

Still, Siver, commander of the 1st Separate Assault Battalion, known as Da Vinci, who also identified himself by his military nickname, said the number of Ukrainian troops fleeing the fighting without permission was growing. That is partly because many of the most motivated fighters have already been killed or wounded.

"Not many people are made for war," said Siver, describing how his perceptions of bravery had been reshaped by seeing those who stood their ground, and those who fled. "There are more and more people who are forced to go," he told AFP, referring to a large-scale and divisive army mobilisation campaign.

But other servicemen interviewed by AFP suggested that systemic changes in military culture -- and leadership -- could help deter desertions.

Buch said his military and medical training as well as the attitudes of his superiors had improved compared to his first deployment, when some officers "didn't treat us like people". Siver suggested that better psychological support could help troops prepare for the hardships and stress of battle.

"Some people think it's going to be like in a movie. Everything will be great, I'll shoot, I'll run," he said. "But it's different. You sit in a trench for weeks. Some of them are knee-deep in mud, cold and hungry." He said there was no easy solution to discouraging desertion, and predicted the trend would worsen. "How do you reduce the numbers? I don't even know how. We just have to end the war," he said.

Summary

Donald Trump’s proposed mandate to end federal telework and fire non-compliant employees faces major obstacles, including widespread union contracts protecting remote work.

About 56% of federal workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements, many of which include telework provisions.

Additionally, a record 10% of federal jobs are fully remote, and many agencies lack sufficient office space to accommodate full-time in-office work due to post-pandemic real estate reductions.

Critics argue that enforcing this mandate would be costly, contradicting Trump’s goals to reduce government spending and personnel.

About half a year ago I bought a used UPS. It didn't have enough output to power my main PC, but it's perfect for my home server and network.

Starting on Christmas eve and continuing even today, my neighbourhood has been getting intermittent brownouts. It's only affecting one phase (house is on a three-phase 240V connection), which happens to be the one powering my network (also all of the light fixtures, stupid Soviet house), and the UPS works beautifully. I didn't lose any of my services even once. Without it, I would probably be reinstalling Proxmox and praying to the RAID gods to restore my hard drives.

"It pays for itself as soon as it is needed" is proven true once again.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24102825

DeepSeek V3 is a big deal for a number of reasons.

At only $5.5 million to train, it's a fraction of the cost of models from OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic which are often in the hundreds of millions.

It breaks the whole AI as a service business model that OpenAI and Google have been pursuing making state-of-the-art language models accessible to smaller companies, research institutions, and even individuals.

The code is publicly available, allowing anyone to use, study, modify, and build upon it. Companies can integrate it into their products without paying for usage, making it financially attractive. The open-source nature fosters collaboration and rapid innovation.

The model goes head-to-head with and often outperforms models like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet in various benchmarks. It excels in areas that are traditionally challenging for AI, like advanced mathematics and code generation. Its 128K token context window means it can process and understand very long documents. Meanwhile it processes text at 60 tokens per second, twice as fast as GPT-4o.

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approach used by the model is key to its performance. While the model has a massive 671 billion parameters, it only uses 37 billion at a time, making it incredibly efficient. Compared to Meta's Llama3.1 (405 billion parameters used all at once), DeepSeek V3 is over 10 times more efficient yet performs better.

DeepSeek V3 can be seen as a significant technological achievement by China in the face of US attempts to limit its AI progress. China once again demonstrates that resourcefulness can overcome limitations.

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WATCH: United Health Group CEO Tells Employees “We Guard Against… Unnecessary Care” in Leaked Video

I've been coding for years in a multitude of languages, but other than one c class I had in college I mostly learned through osmosis, or learned new things as they were needed.

So my knowledge is honestly all over the place and with a ton of gaps.

I'm trying to learn rust and starting going through The Rust Book and afterwards I plan on going on Rust by Example and trying to code my stuff as strictly following best practices as possible.

Is that a waste of time? I mean rawdogging it has been working for me for a decade now. Should I just yolo and write what I wanna write in Rust and learn as I go?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24102825

DeepSeek V3 is a big deal for a number of reasons.

At only $5.5 million to train, it's a fraction of the cost of models from OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic which are often in the hundreds of millions.

It breaks the whole AI as a service business model that OpenAI and Google have been pursuing making state-of-the-art language models accessible to smaller companies, research institutions, and even individuals.

The code is publicly available, allowing anyone to use, study, modify, and build upon it. Companies can integrate it into their products without paying for usage, making it financially attractive. The open-source nature fosters collaboration and rapid innovation.

The model goes head-to-head with and often outperforms models like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet in various benchmarks. It excels in areas that are traditionally challenging for AI, like advanced mathematics and code generation. Its 128K token context window means it can process and understand very long documents. Meanwhile it processes text at 60 tokens per second, twice as fast as GPT-4o.

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approach used by the model is key to its performance. While the model has a massive 671 billion parameters, it only uses 37 billion at a time, making it incredibly efficient. Compared to Meta's Llama3.1 (405 billion parameters used all at once), DeepSeek V3 is over 10 times more efficient yet performs better.

DeepSeek V3 can be seen as a significant technological achievement by China in the face of US attempts to limit its AI progress. China once again demonstrates that resourcefulness can overcome limitations.

I just heard that Apple has effectively killed iTunes for windows. They will no longer supply updates of any sort. Which means if I have MP3 music there’s no realistic way for me to put that onto my iPhone.

Now what I’m trying to figure out is if I got a new computer right now and I needed to install a piece of software to move my MP3’s onto my phone (on the basis I got a new phone) Could I download the iTunes software.?

Is iTunes even still downloadable?

If iTunes is not downloadable, how would I move music which I legally own onto my phone?

I would prefer to stay with an iPhone. So I guess the questions are about the iPhone.

My understanding is I could use Apple Music and sync my music archive from my computer onto my phone through Apple Music. But the problem is then have to keep paying Apple Music subscription, which is stupid since I already own the music.

"BRICS, the Global South-led forum for economic cooperation, continues to grow in influence, as its seeks to de-dollarize and transform the international monetary and financial system.

After admitting four new members (Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE) in 2024, BRICS officially welcomes nine new nations as partner countries on January 1, 2025. They are:

• Belarus
• Bolivia
• Cuba
• Indonesia
• Kazakhstan
• Malaysia
• Thailand
• Uganda
• Uzbekistan

With its nine members and nine partners, BRICS now makes up roughly half of the global population and more than 41% of world GDP (PPP).

The group is an economic powerhouse, including top producers of key commodities like oil, gas, grains, meat, and minerals."

linky

The ole saying... Oh Ben Franklin how you have aged so well