ThePowerOfGeek

@ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Netflix will show generative AI ads midway through streams in 2026⁩ ⁨⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I started using it right after they launched their streaming service. Back then it was awesome. No ads, nice UI, and lots of great content, so for a good price.

  But that was a long time ago.

  I cancelled my subscription several months ago. And I should have done it much sooner. The difference between what is was way back in the day and what it is now is jarring.

  I think a lot of people keep paying for nostalgia reasons, and because of a futile hope that Netflix might somehow go back to that earlier version. In retrospect I think that was a big part of why I kept my subscription for as long as I did (which was obviously a mistake on my part).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Company Regrets Replacing All Those Pesky Human Workers With AI, Just Wants Its Humans Back⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Now, the company says it imagines an “Uber-type of setup” to fill their ranks, with gig workers logging in remotely to argue with customers from the comfort of their own homes.

  So they’re using their spectacular failure as a chance to exploit their new ‘employees’ via the gig economy.

  Fuck them. They have learned nothing about respect or decency, and I hope they continue to crash and burn.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Airlines Are Selling Your Data to ICE⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The same courts that the government routinely ignores, and that has a sham, corrupt supreme court at it’s head? Yeah, good luck with that, unfortunately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Disqualifying in a social sense? Unfortunately, yes I think it would be. It doesn’t matter how awesome your husband is, for a significant chunk of the American electorate, a candidate’s calibre is eclipsed by the voters’ prejudices. And there is a hysteria-level paranoia towards LGBT folks among these people.

  It took ages for a Catholic to be elected President due to evangelical paranoia about ‘papists’. And we still haven’t elected a woman, which is insane when you consider women make up half of the electorate. We did have a black guy elected twice, but that was due to a few mitigating factors: a) the timing was right (in the sense that he ran when diversity was seen as more acceptable); b) he was ridiculously charismatic; c) he was also half white; d) he was a Protestant Christian (despite what the ‘secret Muslim’ clowns kept screaming).

  IMO it sucks that someone’s orientation, ethnicity, gender, religion, or heritage still bars so many good candidates from running (because this isn’t just a case of the visible candidates like Harris, Buttigieg, or even the likes of Carson, Hilary Clinton, or Palin getting denied at the final hurdle; many candidates never make it close to running due to these biases). But this is the ass-backwards, self-immolating world we live in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨McDonald’s reports largest U.S. same-store sales decline since 2020⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The same trash, but now in smaller portion sizes for more money! Great, eh!

  The ones around me barely even employ any front-facing staff, so they also aren’t providing as many jobs to the local economy. And their seating is uncomfortable. All around just a horrible, overpriced experience for shite food.

  I’m in the same boat as you: I only go there once a year for a school fund-raiser because my kids really want to. There’s not even anything I find appealing to eat there, so I don’t usually get anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to Red Pill⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah yes, more antivax nonsense. Just what the world needs right now. Especially with the growing measles outbreak due to people not vaccinating their kids.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Comcast announces a five-year price lock for Xfinity internet plans⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not if you’re willing and able to pay an arbitrary $30 a month extra. That lifts the oh-so essential data cap. Yeah… fuck Comcast, or whatever they are calling themselves this month.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI isn’t ready to replace human coders for debugging, researchers say⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve found the same thing.

  Whenever I ask an LLM for a pointer, I end up spending just as long (if not longer) refining the question than just figuring it out myself it’s doing a search on SO it in other online resources.

  But even the IDE integration is getting annoying. I write a class with some functionality baked in, and the whole time it’s promoting me with a shit load of irrelevant suggested code. I get the class done, then I go to spin up a unit test. It knows which class I’m trying to create a unit test for, which is cool. But then the suggested code is usually completely wrong or it’s much more convoluted than it needs to be. In the latter case, the first several characters of the suggested code is good, but then there’s several lines after it of shite. And hitting tab injects all of it in, which then requires me to delete it all. So almost every time I end up hitting escape anyway.

  I’ve heard a few people rave about ‘vibe coding’ - usually people with no or little programming experience. I have to assume that generated code was either for very simple atomic actions and/or it’s spaghettified, inefficient garbage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Adobe Gets Bullied Off Bluesky⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Krita is my graphics app of choice these days. But there are many alternatives that are great (like Gimp and Photopea).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which Browser Should I Use In 2025? - Hackaday⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. Most recently it was a shitty site that looked like it had been built in 2000 and I had to use to pay an EMS bill: services.webillems.com

  Tried several times on Firefox and it wouldn’t let me proceed with the payment. It kind of acted like it had. But when I called them to confirm they said it never went through. Tried multiple times with the same results. So I then tried on Chrome and it went through first time.

  There’s have been others too. But like I said before, it’s rare. But annoying.

  It’s down to these sites using stale, poorly-written legacy code and/or never being upgraded.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which Browser Should I Use In 2025? - Hackaday⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m really not. I use Firefox 99.5% of the time (I need to switch to Librewolf). But there are some rare occasions - usually shitty old billing websites - where Gecko simply does not work due to said shitty old website. Not paying those bills is an impractical solution. Having a fallback for those rare occasions isn’t unreasonable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which Browser Should I Use In 2025? - Hackaday⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Vivaldi and Librewolf are good recommends. So good call by the author.

  I wish I could completely ditch Blink based browsers for Gecko ones, just because I dislike how dominant Blink is thanks to Chrome. But some sites don’t render correctly on Gecko. So a fallback is needed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Replit CEO Amjad Masad says learning to code is a waste of time, citing Dario Amodei's prediction that AI may generate essentially all code by next year.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a more viable solution than replacing most software engineers, honestly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 is closing a loophole that let you skip making a Microsoft account⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The sad thing is they know the large majority of users will comply. Most people put familiarity and convenience above their own privacy and general well-being.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Pair programming with Grok.

  Spotty DOGE intern developer: “what’s a for loop?”

  Grok: “Look it up yourself, noob! Holy shit do I hate Elon Musk in every fucking way!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah yes, a classic tale…

  “We’re going to take this perfectly efficient and functional COBOL code base and rewrite it in Java! And we’ll do it in a few months!”

  So many more competent people and organizations than them have already tried this and spectacularly crashed and burned. There’s are literal case studies on these types of failed endeavors.

  I bet they’ll do it in Waterfall too.

  It’s interesting. If they use Grok, this could well be the deathknell for vibe programming (at least for now). It’s just fucking traffic that their hubris will cause grief and pain to do many Americans - and cost the lives of more than a few.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Signal downloads spike in the US and Yemen amid government scandal | TechCrunch⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So who exactly is downloading the app as a result of this latest government scandal? I’m going to guess it’s the maga crowd because they are this as an endorsement from their new king. But hopefully I’m wrong and it’s a broad sweep of different users from across the political spectrum.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Great Tech Heist - How "Disruption" Became a Euphemism for Theft⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Digital vampirism

  I like this phrase. It distills down what the article is getting across perfectly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Starlink is now accessible across the White House campus, which was already served by fiber cable, after service was “donated”, as some cite security concerns.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Imagine how galling this must be for Jeff Bezos. He’s put so much effort into his Bond villain persona. The guy even now looks like Dr Evil. But he’s being out eviled by a pudgy, dorky-looking South African nepo-baby.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“Awful”: Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure. The device I use is an Onn streaming a Android TV box. I think I got the 2023 4k streaming version and it was about $20, from Walmart. You can probably get cheaper models, but I wanted one with an Ethernet port.

  Then I installed a couple of alternative launchers from the Play store on device. I also loaded F-Droid as well (though I had to do that directly through an apk). I can’t remember which launcher I went with in the end, but it was either FLauncher or Projectivity. They were both good.

  The wrinkle here is that the OS defaults back to the default launcher (which has ads and a lot of clutter on it). But I used a free command line tool called adb to switch the default launcher off.

  I’ve been very happy with the new setup. My kids (who use it all the time) occasionally complain that an app will crash while they are watching something, and take them back to the home screen/launcher. But I haven’t run into that, and it’s probably just them accidentally hitting a remote (which I know they accidentally do a lot).

  I documented the process and posted them here, in another thread a few months ago.

  Additional note: The default YouTube app isn’t very conducive to quick profile switching, which can be annoying. To switch profiles you basically have to go back to the OS level and do it there, then go back into the YouTube app. It’s an Android TV quirk. But I discovered that if you side-load the Amazon Fire version of the YouTube app onto the device, you can switch profiles within that version of the app, and it works just fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“Awful”: Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Some good options already listed. But here’s another.

  Hey an Android TV box (Onn brand or similar) and install an open source launcher on it, like Projectivity. You have to use adb to disable the default launcher after the new launcher is installed, otherwise it keeps defaulting back to the default one. But once don’t it’s smooth sailing. You have a dedicated streaming device with a remote control and a nice UI with zero ads on the home screen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“Awful”: Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So glad I ditched Roku. My modified Onn box (with an open source, ad-free launcher) is so much better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Impact of AI on White Collar Indian Work: An Analysis of ‘Bullshit Jobs’.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting article. It fits beyond the recent trend of AI and into slightly more traditional automation. It also covers some good concepts on job categorizations in general.

  The ultimate point seems to be that AI-driven job automation is just a subtle evolution on general white-collar job automation that has been happening for 30+ years. And that makes a lot of sense. Although generative AI is expanding that automation into other areas beyond office and some manufacturing job roles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Tesla protests are getting bigger — and rowdier⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Isn’t driving around in one of those poorly-made death trap vehicles enough then?..

  …Nah, probably not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Tesla protests are getting bigger — and rowdier⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fits in perfectly with the Tesla brand then, doesn’t it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk blames X outages on “massive cyberattack”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Musk calls it a “massive cyber attack”.

  I call it “systemic infrastructure and personnel losses caused by the malignant narcissistic man-child who is running the company into the ground”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Given the context, no I don’t think you are being aloof. They both knew what they were doing, and no amount of toadying up to you can make up for that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨She Built a Microcomputer Empire From Her Suburban Home⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Good article. Thanks for sharing it OP.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self-hosting minecraft⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Additionally, there’s are some pretty nice free plugins for Java Minecraft server (e.g. Deluge) that allow Bedrock users to play on it too - from a PC, Xbox, PlayStation, phone, or whatever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Severance the new Lost?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh no, that’s giving me Game of Thrones / ASOIAF / George RR Martin /Kind Bran vibes!