golli
@golli@lemm.ee
- Comment on Google, Snap, Meta and many others are "quietly" changing privacy policies to allow for AI training | It is sneaky and possibly illegal, according to the FTC 1 day ago:
But are those notifications and pop ups directly saying something like “from now on we will start to train ai on your information”?
Or is is one of the hundredth change of terms and conditions that people usually just skip, which mentions the major change in some fine print. Or a pop up designed with dark patterns to influence people into just accepting without actual informed consent?
- Comment on Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else” 1 week ago:
I wonder if this method doesn’t overproportionally eliminates valuable workers, who can easily switch companies.
- Comment on Neuralink to implant 2nd human with brain chip as 85% of threads retract in 1st 5 weeks ago:
with 85% of the promised functionality no longer functional
To be fair 85% of threads retracting doesn’t seem to translate to an equal amount of functional loss. The article mentions
Neuralink was quick to note that it was able to adjust the algorithm used for decoding those neuronal signals to compensate for the lost electrode data. The adjustments were effective enough to regain and then exceed performance on at least one metric—the bits-per-second (BPS) rate used to measure how quickly and accurately a patient with an implant can control a computer cursor.
I think it will be impossible for us to asses how much it actually impacts function in real world use case.
It seems clear that this is a case of learning by trial and error, which considering the stakes doesn’t seem like the right approach.
The question that this article doesn’t answer is, whether they have learned anything at all or if they are just proceeding to do the same thing again. And if they have learned something, is there something preventing it to be applied to the first patient.
- Comment on Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead" 1 month ago:
people find a lot of value in the products and services they offer
This is definitely true to some degree, but there imo is also another side to this.
Yes, they there are underlying problems/demands that they solve, but they definitely also create and shape those since psychology sadly works extremely effective. And they really try their hardest to manipulate customers.
Another aspect is that they might have originally created that value and given the users what they wanted, which got them in the position they are in now. Sometimes even operating at a loss to bully competition out of the market. But once they achieved this dominant position enshittification commences. Which wouldn’t be that much of an issue, if they wouldn’t also often prevent competition from growing enough to be able to compete.
Example Google search: The demand for a way to navigate the web is real and google fulfilled it best, which made them huge. Timejump to the present: the demand is still the same, but now google shows you what they want you to see and pay billions to be the default search engine to hinder any competition from gaining any traction.
- Comment on Microsoft announces the Proteus Controller, a gamepad for Xbox gamers with disabilities 1 month ago:
It’s a ton of money when comparing it to mainstream electronics, but I’d imagine that $300 single payment is a drop in the bucket for something medical. Anyone who needs it probably spends similar amounts or more adapting other everyday things for ease of use.
It’s a niche probably low volume product that requires a good amount of hardware and software engineering.
- Comment on Meta will shut down its Teams competitor Workplace next year 1 month ago:
I wonder how much Meta’s image played a role in adoption of their service. Not that the likes of Microsoft/Google are great either, but subjectively I’d still rather let them in then Facebook.
Overall this seems like a sizable blow for Meta imo, considering they are heavily investing in being the platform for VR/AR. Productivity might be one of the important use cases, if it ever gets mainstream traction.
- Comment on iFixit hails replaceable LPCAMM2 laptop memory as a 'big deal' 1 month ago:
And even then they’ll think of the most malicious way to comply:
Forced to change the connectior to USB C? Better only give it USB 2.0 speeds on the regular and Plus model.
Forced to allow third party app stores? Better give it as many restrictions and limits as possible. I assume/hope they’ll eventually be forced to open up more, but they’ll fight it for as long as possible.
- Comment on Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT 1 month ago:
Agreed. As you said it’s a similar situation as with reddit, where I decided to delete my comments.
My reasoning is that those contributions were given under the premise that everybody was sharing to help each other.
Now that premise has changed: the large tech companies are only taking and the platform providers are changing the rules aswell to profit from it.
So as a result I packed my things and left, in case of reddit to here.
That said I think both views are valid and I wouldn’t fault those that think differently.
- Comment on Apple iPhone sales decline 10% in first three months of 2024 1 month ago:
I think the answer to this is both yes and no:
Yes, iphones have good build quality and especially in regards to software updates have been great, keeping even older models up to date. Whereas only recently some android manufacturers changed their update policies to support models for longer.
And No, because apple consistently has made it difficult and costly to repair phones, e.g. by pairing all kinds of parts to each other through software.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
As said, i am not really that knowledgable in the whole blockchain topic, so anyone feel free to correct me where i am wrong:
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Why should i trust those parents/friends (or doctors if present)? Presumably this would be a global system? So why should i trust a group of random people from idk Somalia? I probably don’t even fully trust any institutions there. My understanding (simplyfied) is that with bitcoin the coins themself are mined by finding solutions to hard math problems that once found can be easily verified by anyone. So at the base you have something i myself can verify to be true. Whoever finds the right number first gets the coin and after that you only need to keep track of trades and this is where the blockchain helps.
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What data would be stored on this block chain? Honestly seems like a bit of a privacy nightmare. I wouldn’t want all family history and identifiable information to be public, so it can serve as an ID.
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To go along with the point above, how would you verify that a specific certificate on the chain belongs to you? Similar to a password for a crypto wallet? So that it can be lost without ability to be recovered, that your parents have control over it from the start, and that people who gain access to it can abuse it? Basically all issues similar to the US social security number? Or by having a passport or similar do the job, which kind of defeats a lot of the purpose of that blockchain being the source of ID.
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It wouldn’t be enough to make a birth/death certificate. You would still need a system to change/add information. Like what if somebody changes their names? Also not every child will be added from the start, so you will need to handle late additions (that e.g. make date of birth even more unsure). Also a small number of people might also require new identities for security purposes (think victims of abuse), how do you handle the need for an institution having the ability to create such fictional new identities?
I could probably find more issues.
So imo truth ultimately has to come from somewhere in the real world. And at places that might benefit from some system that is seperated from institutions (because they are poor, authoritarian, oppressive or have unstable governments for example) will at the same time have more difficulties providing something you can trust.
And in reverse regions that might have an easier time like the EU don’t really seem to need it. Also as far as electronic IDs go the EU is planning that with eIDAS 2.0 and the EUID. Don’t think it invloves a blockchain at any stage.
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- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
But the accuracy of this information would still depend on external institutions or persons that you have to trust, right? I have admittedly never dived too deep into the whole block chain topic, but that seems to go against the underlying idea.
- Comment on Google lays off hundreds of 'Core' employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico 1 month ago:
To be fair there are still a bunch of other aspects that may prevent even full remote jobs to be outsourced to other countries. Among others: language skills, time zone differences, cultural differences, legal frameworks and probably many more.
To give an example for issues that may arise from these differences:
An employee might cost your german company triple the salary in Germany compared to India. On paper it seems like an easy choice, you just outsource and even if you have to pay 2 person to do the job you still save money. But suddenly you run into many problems:
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They will likely not speak German and maybe not even great English. This might be irrelevant for the actual work to be done. But do they exactly understand what the task is, can they give accurate feedback, can they make use of existing resources or do those need to be translated, can they communicate with the rest of the company or your customers?
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They work in different time zones. And while most remote work is probably time agnostic, meetings with other team members, departments or your customers suddenly become much harder to schedule.
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Their culture might be different. So e.g. they might not be as straight forward when running into problems and instead try to hide them, which will mean everything looks fine until the house of cards suddenly crumbles.
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Having employees in different countries means you will need to have different workflows for hr to deal with contracts, payrolls, retirement plans, health insurance and so on. Also how does the other country handle IP, patents and non compete clauses? Could the employee just walk away and start their own business or go to your competitor? Or in reverse can you ensure that they e.g. don’t copy/paste code from somewhere else ignoring licenses.
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- Comment on Nextcloud Hub 8 is now available 2 months ago:
Bloat and bad performance aside, you don’t see a benefit in having a all-in-one solution that in a way acts as a drop in replacement for people wanting to switch away from the likes of Google/Apple? I certainly do.
Yes, having a dedicated app selected for each use case will likely give better results. But it also means more management. And many users don’t actually need more than basic functionality.
- Comment on Apple keeps flogging 8GB of RAM for its Mac computers but it's still a dead horse 2 months ago:
Exactly my point. Not sure if there is a better term, but in some way it is a bait-and-switch tactic.
With the “starting at” sticker price of the lowest configuration they get you into the mindset of wanting (and being able to afford) a their premium device. And then once you are mentally commited they it’s the choice between spending even more or compromising on a premium device (where you really should have to).
- Comment on Apple keeps flogging 8GB of RAM for its Mac computers but it's still a dead horse 2 months ago:
Honestly imo 200€ phones are allright, but you do get what you pay. And the A14 at least here in Germany starts at like 120€, which is substantially below 200€. So if you get it and end up comparing it to an iphone, then it most certainly will look lackluster.
I would say that the sweet spot is probably in the 300-350€ range. There you have a decent amount of selection and get some really solid phones that are good for daily drivers. Like the already mentioned pixel A series that gets you clean software and shoots some of the best pictures. Or the samsung a54/55 that gets you a nice allrounder, which still includes a headphone jack and sd-card slot.
- Comment on Or we could do metric time 2 months ago:
So we basically make the Purge a reality?
- Comment on Apple keeps flogging 8GB of RAM for its Mac computers but it's still a dead horse 2 months ago:
I think it’s mostly to have a price tag that doesn’t immediately turn off people.
Yes, Apple is expensive in general, however people are generally fine with paying a premium. But if they’d come at you immediately with the full price for a reasonably specced machine, it would still turn many people off.
Instead they fix you on with a high, but still somewhat reasonable price and then upsell you in steps for everything. Like sure you could buy the 128gb iPhone pro, but then the storage will fill up fast with photos and videos. A great camera system being the huge selling point of the device.
On a side note I actually find the 256gb non upgradeable/replaceable ssd much more egregious, than the 8gb RAM. As you say, for people with basic needs (and that is actually a quite large group), it is enough for daily use. Those people just browse the Web, view photos and write short documents in word. However especially if they have an iPhone and take lots of picture/videos, they will still fill up that storage fast. And then it gets really frustrating, unless you maybe pay even more to outsource everything to the icloud and pay monthly.
- Comment on Traveling personal cloud options? 2 months ago:
Downside might be that this requires a good internet connection, which depending on where OP travels might not always be available.
- Comment on Traveling personal cloud options? 2 months ago:
This seems a bit impractical. 2 phones to keep charged and manage.
Depending in your use case can’t you just get some external USB storage?
- Comment on Voting compulsory for 16 and 17-year-olds in Belgium, court rules 3 months ago:
TIL that voting in Belgium is mandatory and tbh I am somewhat intrigued by the concept.
What I do find weird on the other hand is the requirement to register to be able to vote. Or maybe I just don’t quite understand the mechanism. Here in Germany you automatically are registered to vote wherever you have registered your primary residence. So you only have to do something in advance if you want to vote by mail. The only people that do have to register somewhere are homeless people without residence on file, which is a small number.
- Comment on Amazon Prime Video drops Dolby Vision and Atmos unless you pay extra 4 months ago:
Not sure if that counts, but they bought MGM and they’ve made an MGM+ channel that you can subscribe to for 5€/month, but only if you are a Prime subscriber aswell
- Comment on SAG-AFTRA Approves AI Voice Actors, Enrages the VA Community 5 months ago:
I absolutely agree with this take. This isn’t something that will just go away. Especially for something like video games it just makes too much sense. The best time to address this topic might have been a long time ago, but they are still in a position where they can shape how things will play out. In the short term it might be better to not do so, but eventually someone else will take the opportunity if they don’t.
- Comment on Solar energy storage breakthrough could make European households self-sufficient 7 months ago:
Agreed. Not that i dislike people doing stuff by themself on a small scale, but i really wish the focus would be more on larger scale projects and giving people easy access to invest in those.
Dont make everyone get a small solar panel and a tiny battery in their house. Let them invest in something like a large wind turbine in their area and maybe directly reap some of those benefits.
- Comment on X adds video calling — and lets strangers ring you: Turned on by default, tool lets anyone you follow potentially call you up 8 months ago:
That and i think we also adopted technology differently. Places like China or india in a way skipped most of the PC/Laptop phase and went straight to smartphones as their main device to access everything.
And on a PC/Laptop you’ll access most things through a browser. And i think even to this day many will prefer to do some things on a larger screen rather than a smartphone, even if by now it is the primary device.
- Comment on Google paid a whopping $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine everywhere 8 months ago:
Personally i find $10 a month to be too expensive, but don’t we all pay for search engines in a way? With Google you don’t pay directly but with your information and by getting influenced in your behaviour (e.g. to buy something from someone who in return pays google for advertisement).
- Comment on Europe wants easy default browser selection screens. Mozilla is already sounding the alarm on dirty tricks 9 months ago:
They could make groups based on enginey and then randomly shuffle those. And within those either list browsers by popularity or again shuffle.
Would also help to educate people how little actual choice there is
- Comment on Where to find guide on self hosting for a complete beginner? 9 months ago:
Tailscale might also decent be an option for remote access, right?
- Comment on Why doesn't the United Kingdom rejoin the European Union? 9 months ago:
Others have already mentioned some of the many reasons why.
But i would like to add that even if they’d rejoin, they could not do so with the same conditions that they had before. Since they joined the predecessors of the EU so early, they had a number of privileges that a new joining member nowadays would not be granted. So from that side “going back to how things were before” wouldn’t be possible to begin with.
- Comment on Thinking about switching away from TrueNAS scale to OMV 10 months ago:
Somewhat late reply, since i didn’t have the time to start my conversion to OMV sooner. Definitely looks nice and installation was easy.
You are spot on that my first issue has partially to do with permissions. Following a guide at the time i structured my media library to some level with data sets in my zfs pool on truenas scale. But those apparently are more like filesystems rather than just directories. Which makes the whole giving permissions for my dockeruser a bit difficult (and also otherwise seems a bit less then ideal for OMV).
So since i wanted to structure it slightly different i made a new shared folder on my zfs pool and directories for my media in there and moved a few test files. Downside now is that this solution would mean that i have to move a ton of files, which would mean a ton of writes to my drives.
Apparently they changed that in one of the recent updates, but so far i really like the setup with docker compose. So much easier than the whole deal with applications in truenas scale. Copy+Paste stuff into a file, change some variables and a full stack of media applications is up and running so fast.
- Comment on Thinking about switching away from TrueNAS scale to OMV 10 months ago:
Currently doing some digging. Seems like there is a plugin (sharerootfs) that solves the problem that you’d waste so much space when installing ovm on a ssd.