kassiopaea
@kassiopaea@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
I’ll admit I don’t spend enough time on here to have a well-formed opinion, but aside from the occasional obvious spam post, I don’t see a lot of obvious bot activity… Depending on the instance/community, you’re going to get a lot of very strong and, uh… controversial opinions.
Keep in mind that the (still relatively) niche nature of Lemmy/Piefed (and the fediverse writ large) means that a higher proportion of people around here are going to be far from the center of the political gradient… and the western world is very much experiencing a cultural/political paradigm shift which is driving people to the fringes.
I also think that a lot more people are using the platform than a year or two ago and that has knock-on effects on moderation that we still need to figure out how to deal with.
- Comment on Apple Envy 4 weeks ago:
I make no claim against the lack of freedom on Apple devices, but “un-free” doesn’t mean “user-hostile”. We’re talking about the perceived quality of experience for the user, not anything else. Like, look, don’t get me wrong, I still hate Apple (and all the big tech corpos) out of principle- but they provide an objectively better user experience for the vast majority of people.
- Apple has been, while extremely restrictive, very consistent on what users are allowed to do with devices… Google has repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted to actually commit to popular features or services that they put out.
- Apple has put forward several measures to increase [perception of] user privacy where Google has repeatedly shown that they have no interest in doing anything other than collecting as much of your data as possible and using it for their ad business.
- iOS/iPadOS accessibility features blow Android’s out of the water in terms of breadth and quality; where with Android you often have to rely on third-party apps that may or may not work consistently or break with an update.
- Comment on Apple Envy 4 weeks ago:
I fully agree with that sentiment, for what it’s worth. Apple is authoritarian but at least they’re mostly transparent about it.
- Comment on Apple Envy 4 weeks ago:
Fair, but I think that while Apple is generally more authoritarian with regard to developer experience, they’re less user-hostile overall and generally strike a good (at least compared to the current alternatives) balance between freedom, privacy, and usability for most people.
I think Google (and Silicon Vally writ large) is coming to terms with the fact that past a certain size userbase, authoritarianism is necessary to maintain control, consistency, and (very importantly) safety… where Apple has pretty much always embraced it; for better or worse.
I could easily turn this into a larger critique about society and governance, federated republics being necessary in the long-term versus corporate monoliths, and the “10x everything” culture being the root of the new tech-right, but I will digress, lol.
- Comment on Apple Envy 4 weeks ago:
Are we seriously going to pretend that Google hasn’t been just as evil for years now? At least Apple is able to provide a halfway-decent UX…
- Comment on The AI Was Fed Sloppy Code. It Turned Into Something Evil. | Quanta Magazine 1 month ago:
I’d like to see similar testing done comparing models where the “misaligned” data is present during training, as opposed to fine-tuning. That would be a much harder thing to pull off, though.
- Comment on How do AI data centers manage to *consume* water, but when I cool my house, my A/C *makes* water? 1 month ago:
Because evaporative cooling is much cheaper and easier to accomplish at scale, and megacorps don’t care about long-term resource constraints until it begins to affect their wallets.
- Comment on AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning 1 month ago:
Certainly sounds like they had their “friends” write the whole damn article too.
- Comment on YSK Employers do NOT verify your total work history unless you're applying for a government position. 2 months ago:
I know this is true for most employers, but I’m not sure I’d be willing to be confident that there’s no way for any company to know. I’ve heard more than one report of companies that sell that sort of information to certain partners.
- Comment on TIL about Fedi-Search, an open sourced frontend to easily search the Fediverse with a lot of mainstream engines 2 months ago:
Honestly I think proper search is one of the biggest things holding the fediverse back from mainstream adoption. It needs exposure, and it needs to be easy to find information and communities around obscure topics in order to really replace silos like reddit and facebook. I’m glad to see this exists, and I particularly like that it supports kagi.
- Comment on Destroyed my Glass Print Bed - What to do now 2 months ago:
Mine was also glued to the heat bed when I broke it… I ended up replacing both the glass plate and the heater because trying to separate them wasn’t worth the effort. A PEI sheet should work okay on the thin aluminum as long as the bed is trammed reasonably well and you can use mesh bed leveling. Otherwise, yeah, stick with glass and be sure to use a release layer.
- Comment on Supreme Court to decide whether ISPs must disconnect users accused of piracy 2 months ago:
i prefer to do mine in the czech republic, personally
- Comment on 'Technofascist military fantasy': Spotify faces boycott calls over CEO’s investment in AI military startup 2 months ago:
Laziness doesn’t exist. Everyone has their own struggles and it’s pretty fucked up to judge someone because they don’t choose to put their limited energy toward overcoming the obstacles that you take you’ve taken for granted having the ability to overcome. We should be encouraging curiosity and exploration, not demonizing people who got left behind and are too scared to try new things.
- Comment on 'Technofascist military fantasy': Spotify faces boycott calls over CEO’s investment in AI military startup 2 months ago:
Being able to upload to Google Play Music was such a great feature. Honestly though, maybe it’s best that they killed it when they did. That way it can live on in memory as the example of what a music streaming service should be like… instead of becoming an enshittified zombie like spotify is today.
- Comment on $440 Charge For A Wheel Scuff Raises Questions About Hertz's AI Rental Car Damage Scanner 2 months ago:
Hertz is the worst rental company I’ve had to deal. Enterprise is the only one I’ll use if I have a choice.
- Comment on tattoo printer 3 months ago:
I clicked the link and immediately thought “wow this is going to be nothing more than an obnoxious load of marketing wank” as soon as I saw the loading bar appear and take 20 seconds to fill.
I was right.
- Comment on Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash 3 months ago:
Human posting of AI-generated content is definitely a problem; but ultimately that’s a moderation problem that can be solved, which is quite different from AI-generated content being put forward by the platform itself. There wasn’t necessarily anything stopping people from doing the same thing pre-GPT, it’s just easier and more prevalent now.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 3 months ago:
This. I often see people shitting on AI as “fancy autocomplete” or joking about how they get basic things incorrect like this post but completely discount how incredibly fucking capable they are in every domain that actually matters. That’s what we should be worried about… what does it matter that it doesn’t “work the same” if it still accomplishes the vast majority of the same things? The fact that we can get something that even approximates logic and reasoning ability from a deterministic system is terrifying on implications alone.
- Comment on Step by Little Step - A short game about Farewells 3 months ago:
That was beautiful, but I didn’t think it would still hurt this much.
It’ll be two years this month.
- Comment on What would it take to make Gemini suitable to be president of the world? 3 months ago:
There’s no president of the world yet.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 3 months ago:
I’ve always hated that. I feel like I’m seeing it less and less on newer vehicles, though, so maybe manufacturers are also realizing that it’s stupid as hell.
Or maybe it’s just not worth the cost to have two different but mostly identical versions of a very expensive and highly integrated modern taillight housing for different markets.
- Comment on Samsung teams up with Glance to use your face in AI-generated lock screen ads 3 months ago:
It wasn’t just the norm for websites, it was the norm for every single kind of established platform that offered “free” content; see TV, radio, and even our goddamn public roadways.
Apple did not create an ad platform for the iPhone when it was introduced. The iAd platform was introduced in 2010 with the iPhone 4 as “mobile ads done right” (well after Google’s acquisition of AdMob in 2009, and certainly after the iPhone launch in 2007). It was subsequently shut down in 2016.
Developers never needed to “hack” ways to put ads in mobile apps. Mobile ad platforms already existed at the time, and developers were happy to use them extensively once they realized that smartphones were becoming a truly mass-market product (just like TV advertising, imagine that).
- Comment on Samsung teams up with Glance to use your face in AI-generated lock screen ads 3 months ago:
“I blame RCA for television ads. If they hadn’t made the first mass-market television set, we wouldn’t have TV ads interrupting my morning cartoons!”
that’s how you sound rn
- Comment on Samsung teams up with Glance to use your face in AI-generated lock screen ads 3 months ago:
Well, it was the norm for websites, why would anyone expect it to not transfer over to every other conceivable platform like it has today? The fact that Apple made a device that allowed people to put adware on a device in your pocket is pure happenstance, and I’m not even sure how true that is given the existence of Blackberry and early Windows Mobile devices.
That said, have you ever heard of WildTangent? Because they’ve been around for a loooong time, and were really attractive to poor and stupid kids like me that really started using the internet circa 2005 and wanted to play computer games.
- Comment on Samsung teams up with Glance to use your face in AI-generated lock screen ads 3 months ago:
Again, what are you basing that on? Many websites, games, etc. that had traditionally only been accessible on a desktop/laptop were already primarily using ads for monetization at that point (I should know, I was using a lot of them). Blaming Apple for simply making the first handheld devices capable of running similar software makes absolutely zero sense.
- Comment on Samsung teams up with Glance to use your face in AI-generated lock screen ads 3 months ago:
How so? I went from Android to iPhone and one of the biggest reasons I kept it was the lack of consumer-hostile intrusive bullshit that seems to be everywhere on Google and Samsung products.
- Comment on Forbidden Tech 4 months ago:
Fair enough. I shouldn’t be posting within 30 minutes of waking up anyway…
- Comment on Forbidden Tech 4 months ago:
The problem is that people read a few things on the internet, think they’re now suddenly domain experts, and do it anyway.
- Comment on Forbidden Tech 4 months ago:
That would immediately blow the fuse in the lights and/or start a fire if the two strands were on different circuits that happened to be on different electrical phases.
While I wouldn’t doubt that some people are stupid enough to do that, it’s actually summer that it’s done the most for because of storms and power outages, and people learn that backfeeding is a thing (that you shouldn’t do unless you absolutely know what you’re doing).
- Comment on Forbidden Tech 4 months ago:
Well at that point all you need to do is cut a normal extension cord and strip the ends. Maybe add a switch or a button for extra safety.