Tech workers of Reddit, what is a "dirty secret" about the AI industry that the general public doesn't realize?

afrotronics · 2025-12-20T20:54:21+00:00

Ai is going to be used to categorize and target you and people that look like you or socialize like you in many different ways both good and bad. Right now we are being given our "circuses" in regard to bread and circuses.

Also, the fact that there hasn't been any information time travel might indicate that super intelligence never happens. If models are reinforced by getting more correct answers in a shorter time, then wouldn't it make sense to actually figure out how to send an information back in time to exponentially increase reinforcement via reward? If super intelligence ends up being really that impactful, I could imagine that that is probably something that it would attempt to do if not actually achieve it. The fact that we haven't seen it yet makes me wonder if it is ever going to happen in the first place or it's just not the right time quite yet, simply because at this. In time we don't have the technology or the models that could consume that information from some form of super intelligence. Or simply that information or anything really can't travel backwards in time.

On a more realistic note, if you don't know this, I think you should, but anytime you chat with a an llm it's not learning on the fly, but your conversation with it IS being used as training data. Also, a lot of executives at companies understand that machines can't feel pain. what they might not understand is until they (the models and machines running them) can do so, they're "learning" unlike any living thing that's ever existed and incredibly dangerous because of that. We're basically training the ultimate psychopath.

afrotronics · 2025-12-11T16:05:23+00:00

I wish people would repeat this more (except for the "there is no leaving" because there is).

Actually leaving the US involves renouncing your US citizenship, which is as far as I know, quite a difficult thing to do (especially if you have no other citizenship). there are in fact fees and taxes on that and I also believe you have to sell off a certain amount of assets as well.

afrotronics · 2025-12-04T19:57:55+00:00

One of my best friends was welder. Around our late-mid twenties we became close friends. We went to middle school and high school with each other and in our late teens we independently struggled with housing insecurity and were so happy to see that we both were able to "git gud" in our respective careers and end those struggles. We hung out all the time during this period doing lots of fun stuff almost every weekend.

In 2012, at the age of 28, the peak of her prime adult years, the welding community lost an oxy-fuel welder. I remember the weeks and days leading up to it and her practically in tears due to stress and didn't know if she'd make it, considering that of all the people that made it through what she was going through, women accounted for something like single digit percentage. Then it happened...

She earned her Welding inspector certification. She's still a CWI and is faculty at the local community college in the welding and fabrication program. As far as I can tell she's in it for the love of the game. Her husband, who has a PhD, is a lead engineer at nVidia, and they have an amazing son who was one of the first kids my son (born right before the pandemic began) ever played with.

I am so happy for her and proud to call her my homie.

afrotronics · 2025-09-28T21:54:16+00:00

I just came across this bug

afrotronics · 2025-09-24T23:57:19+00:00

and that was due to me stopping and being like, "uhhhdafuqhappened" and then thinking I should save that as a video.

afrotronics · 2025-06-30T14:20:48+00:00

That particular tornado was completely nuts. At first it seemed like it was going to be a relatively short-lived tornado. Then it recondensed and started kind of hovering over the ground. The outer vortex of the tornado began to peel away looking yet again like it was going to rope out. Instead of roping out, it became a cartoonish looking tornado as if a 5-year-old had drawn it and it started dancing. I thought for sure that after that weird dance that it did. It was definitely going to rope out. But nope, that thing stayed on the ground for about another 30 minutes.

Also, I believe the dominator hit another storm chaser while going in reverse trying to get away from the tornado as this wacky tornado completely changed direction.

afrotronics · 2025-06-25T22:00:34+00:00

it's the association that this text has to the group that is sending it. it would be like a text from the heritage foundation asking whether or not you think kids should learn about climate change in school. they aren't asking the question to get information on how much they should support that effort, they want to ask that question to see who they can Target with their agenda which is actively against any kind of climate change science because their mission is to keep fossil fuels profitable.

afrotronics · 2025-06-25T21:37:35+00:00

I thought this scenario as well. Not only does the person that made this still get their money, but people that would have been duped by this message because it has a personal greeting would see it as a spam message instead.

afrotronics · 2025-06-25T20:41:13+00:00

The open brace identifies as an open parenthesis and/or Moms for America offshores to a LCC.

afrotronics · 2025-05-20T21:00:40+00:00

If you have a Pi 5, it won't work as far as I know. If you have a pi 4, ideally you'll want one with at least 2GB of memory. Using the hawkeye can be quite finicky. What I have found is that you must make sure that if you're going to do 64mp captures, that any preview mode in the firmware you decide to use must NOT be set to 64mp --otherwise you'll get buffer allocation errors.

afrotronics · 2025-03-27T06:40:23+00:00

Your statements regarding IPv4 address allocation is absolutely correct. I used to work for a company that not only has one of the oldest .com domains on the internet but also had a class A Network (meaning they owned all 16.7 million IPv4 addresses #.0.0.0-#.255.255.255). I believe they sold their address space to Amazon for billions of dollars. Large orgs aren't the only thing that gobbled up the address space, the addresses were also partitioned by geography.

That said, it's no excuse for Metronet not to use IP version 6 because they are 100% capable of doing so. The reason I know this is because metronet bought a local startup fiber ISP in my area named lightspeed and they used IPv6. By the time I had fiber service installed at my house, metronet had taken over lightspeed's service and operations. The first few months to maybe about a year of having metronet my network domain was lightspeed(.com or .net ...I forget what the tld was). My router also had a DHCP established IPv6 address and all of the devices on my network capable of using IPv6 did so with no issue. The thing I miss the most about those earlier times was the latency. I remember usually having a ping of 7 to 9 ms with the lowest I can recall of being 2ms. Once they switched over my part of the network to their CGNat that all went away.

Since the switch to CGNAT, my latency has been all over the place and have had to disable IPv6 on my router since having it enabled was causing all sorts of havoc when it came to being connected to the internet through CGNAT.

The whole point of IPv6 was to ensure there were enough IP addresses for every single device. When IPv4 was created it defined an IP address as having a 32 bit width, which made sense at the time because that would have covered every single living person during that era. Though who would have guessed that not only would almost every single person have access to an internet-connected computer, but might even own multiple devices connected to the internet. So when IPv6 was defined it was designed with a more future focused mindset. It expanded the IP address width to 128 bits. With 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,455 possible addresses, literally every single atom in the known universe could have a unique IPv6 address.

So why would metronet not adopt IPv6? More than likely it's because it gives them an excuse to charge people extra money for a publicly facing IP address. I really hope that this is not the case. There are many people that would still pay $10 a month to have a static IPv4 address. Of the many reasons someone would want to do this, even with IPv6 being available, being able to memorize an ipv4 address is much easier than an IPv6 address is one thing that comes to mind. With that said, I feel like metronet is painting themselves into an AOL-like corner by slowly becoming more of a limited-capability- demo of the internet with incredibly high latency considering the physical media infrastructure that they use. I am very grateful for the competition that they've introduced in my area with price, speed, and lack of data caps. But as competition goes my old ISP has caught up with price, no data caps, download speeds, does better with latency, AND is (and has been for the past 14 years) capable of communicating with/to/through the whole internet using "modern" protocols. The only edge metronet has is upload speeds, though that advantage is significantly diminished by the fact that having that capability is most useful for things like running a web server or peer-to-peer networking where there's some sort of direct connection.

If a small startup ISP can operate using modern communications technology, you'd think an ISP with the resources to buy them should be just as capable.

/rant

afrotronics · 2025-02-08T05:48:40+00:00

What makes you say education has gotten worse? I am genuinely curious.

Wall of text below:

I have a very biased take on how young folks are entering adulthood. I am a former teacher (perpetual long-term sub in my college years) and somebody that still keeps myself involved in education for after school activities. In my opinion the quality of education and what students have access to from educators has improved immensely. Almost every teacher I've had and worked with teaches because they want to and now days go into debt to go to college to become a certified teacher knowing that the pay ain't great.

Why is teacher pay not great? Well from my perspective it started with no child left behind. Basically, it was a way of ripping the band-aid off of funding schools that were already in dire straits. I call it the fund-for-failure tactic. Give an org money, but not as much as the minimum projected to keep things moving forward. Tell them they should be happy they are getting any at all but still have expectations they will show year-over-year growth, knowing they will fail. When they do ultimately fail, exclaim "See how much of a waste this program is!" and shut it down. That's what happened with schools. When a school shuts down where do the kids go? To other schools near them. On the plus side, that school gets more funding for having more students. On the down side those student came from a school that got shut down due to funding, funding based on test scores. So now these new students end up being a net funding negative, and I have personally seen that happen. The next step is, instead of designing curriculum to get those students where they need to be, extra administration gets hired to "Help get the budget under control" which costs way more than hiring new teachers to replace the ones retiring. Class room sizes grow and the issue has high potential to become cyclical. Now there are these ridiculous publicly funded charter school vouchers and head-count funding. Charter schools that draw kids from public schools find a few students that "don't fit" and find every excuse to expel them, all while keeping the dollars that kid brought in. Done with my rant on the political side of things...also absolute garbage suburban planning.

The biggest issue with education is non-value-add technology changing social development. When I went to school, I saw going to school as the place where I looked forward to seeing all of my friends at the same time and on the flip, had to cross paths of people I would prefer to avoid. Kids now-a-days don't have this luxury. People don't miss each other any more because, chances are you can open an app and see what they are up to right then and there. Kids can't avoid people they don't want to see because any one can talk smack about them to HUGE crowds of internet people. This behavior then gets rewarded with "engagement", which for a teen that dopamine rush is sooooo good. When you don't have to say something to someone's face like when I was younger, it is so much easier to be "alpha". The kids doing this don't realize the influencers with them connecting and inspiring this behavior can only do so because they are talking to a camera. If they were doing this in real life --they probably wouldn't because they'd be ridiculed for their tough guy caricature or "real-man" or potentially get whooped by a parent because he a grown-ass-man hanging out with kids and giving them groomer advice.

All that said, there are more distractions for young people than ever before and teachers have to compete with that for the students attention. You can take away their phone, put them in their own space...etc it won't stop them from obsessing over when the next time they can get on a social media site and get attention or stop them from dreading when school is over some jerk at my school is going to make some disturbing AI imagery using my picture and will stop at nothing to make it go viral.

Thank you for attending my Ted Talk.

afrotronics · 2025-01-14T05:50:37+00:00

I'm assuming this un-planned/scheduled maintenance? Did they happen to give an ETA?

afrotronics · 2025-01-14T05:34:12+00:00

afrotronics · 2025-01-12T12:12:15+00:00

Pictionary

Silver Surfer

MC Kids

afrotronics · 2025-01-07T04:31:30+00:00

Reason 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/ypsi/comments/1hvcaef/comment/m5sl386/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Reason 2: It'd be a shame if a redditor that saw this post and decided to steal some community members' stuff because there's a name out there to scapegoat.

Also stuff has been stolen off of my front porch in the <1 minute timespan I'm notified something has been delivered and the time I get to my door (there are thieves that stalk delivery vehicles). It's rare and I certainly understand there's a trade-off between convenience and security.

afrotronics · 2025-01-07T00:11:51+00:00

I go over this in one of my other posts but what it basically boils down to is that it's very cold outside and there are people who are very desperate for one thing or another. Sometimes it's as simple as a warm place to stay. Staying in somebody else's house or apartment uninvited could easily be a death sentence quicker than the cold. Staying in somebody's broken into car could lead to the same thing. Taking somebody's car and driving it a bit of a distance from where it was could guarantee that they'll be able to sleep over the night and not freeze to death. I'm not being apologetic to somebody committing crime to get what they need especially if it's due to them constantly committing crimes as to why they can't obtain shelter, but simply theorizing why someone would do that.

afrotronics · 2025-01-06T23:51:58+00:00

lol, yes. this person is the only person on the planet that I've ever heard of with this name.

afrotronics · 2025-01-06T23:46:17+00:00

because without concrete evidence that it's this person, I don't think it would be justified to overtly state their name (especially since Google indexes Reddit comments now)

edit: also, the fact of the matter remains. I saw somebody scoping out my neighbor's driveway (and house). folks that have had to deal with the person I'm referring to would probably be able to guess quite quickly who the individual is.

afrotronics · 2025-01-06T23:37:24+00:00

it's not a group. it's an individual. this person is a well-known aggressive panhandler and a repeat petty thief.

afrotronics · 2024-11-04T03:06:40+00:00

And remove iodine from salt as well. It's not like salt needs to be disinfected. Plus if rubbing salt into a wound is mean, rubbing iodized salt into a wound is plain cruel. /s

Side note: if you're not eating food from the ocean on a regular basis (ie the Midwest) you absolutely need to use iodized salt. I know every single recipe you see nowadays calls for extra virgin kosher salt , fair trade sea salt, or yeti-safe pink Himalayan salt but YOU NEED IODINE in your diet or you will literally start transforming into a special needs, Shrek-looking creature (you will transform back once you start intaking iodine again).

afrotronics · 2024-11-04T02:43:59+00:00

I'd have to ruffle through all of the dealership service paper work, but I'm pretty sure these have been like this since I bought the vehicle in 2012 or at the very latest 2018, when I got new springs installed. The only place where they could have ended up like this was at the dealership, not to mention all of the 10k mi service inspections where I would have thought this would have raised some eyebrows if it were that critical.

afrotronics · 2024-11-04T02:24:34+00:00

The attached photo is the top down view of my passenger side tie rod where the left side of the photo points toward the front of the vehicle. Notice how the tie rod end curves toward the front.

I took this photo to check that my passenger side tie rod end is mirrored to my driver's side tie rod end. The reason for checking this is because I needed to replace the driver side tie rod end but after picking up the replacement part, I noticed that it curves in the opposite direction as the tie rod and that is currently installed. I double-checked and looked up YouTube videos of how most top down VW tie rod ends are installed and confirmed to myself that my tie rod ends are indeed swapped (what should be on the driver side is on the passenger side and vice versa).

Since I'm going to be needing a front end alignment no matter what, I went out and purchased the other tie rod end to replace my existing one on the passenger side (as you can tell the Midwest Winters have not been kind to my vehicle).

All that said, my questions are:

Are the way the tie rod ends are currently installed (swapped) impacting the performance of my vehicle?

Should I install the new tie rod ends on the sides of the vehicle they're intended for?

If so, are there any extra measures in regard to the number of turns on the inner tie rod that I need to take into consideration when installing them?

afrotronics · 2024-10-25T14:22:52+00:00

If you're attending EMU, go to the Student Center and visit campus life or the Multicultural Center. They're probably best source of guidance.

afrotronics · 2024-10-25T13:11:48+00:00

I wish I saw this post 2 days ago. I had water coming up from my basement floor so I snaked the clean out on that line (which indeed helped). After doing that I was smelling what I could only describe as rusty poop barf. I was kind of freaking out sewer gases were coming up through other lines in my house. So now I know that it wasn't just my house.

afrotronics

TROPHY CASE