elrik
@elrik@lemmy.world
- Comment on Netflix has closed its AAA gaming studio 3 weeks ago:
If only this meant the removal of the annoying tiles for games that show up in the app above everything else (often using up the entire screen) even though I’ve never tapped on them once.
I don’t want your games Netflix. I barely want your shows.
- Comment on It's a matter of perspective 4 weeks ago:
What? The first ordinal you start counting at doesn’t change the total count, and alternatively the last item would be indexed at 2 if you used 0-based indexing.
- Comment on It's a matter of perspective 4 weeks ago:
Rectangular prisms have 6 sides though.
- Comment on LG TVs start showing ads on screensavers | LG's TV business is heightening focus on selling ads and tracking 1 month ago:
Probably the best idea I guess as long as you can set the TV up without Internet.
- Comment on LG TVs start showing ads on screensavers | LG's TV business is heightening focus on selling ads and tracking 1 month ago:
I’m pretty happy with Chromecast currently for its simplicity. I meant to try and replace the TV firmware so it’s more or less a dumb TV that just displays its inputs without having ads and other gimmicks.
- Comment on LG TVs start showing ads on screensavers | LG's TV business is heightening focus on selling ads and tracking 1 month ago:
The TV I currently have is Android OS but the built in Chromecast is noticeably lower quality. Not sure if it’s an older version or what.
Regardless, IMO the displays themselves outlast their software support, and I prefer to just plug in whatever the latest device.
I’ll also mention Android OS on my TV takes a full minute to “boot” and that itself makes me want to yeet it out the window.
- Comment on LG TVs start showing ads on screensavers | LG's TV business is heightening focus on selling ads and tracking 1 month ago:
My TV is probably going to kick the bucket in a year or two at most. Filtering “non smart TVs” on a site like BestBuy shows only commercial display options at this point.
Are there any well maintained projects out there that are able to replace the firmware on newer smart TVs to get rid of these features? I really just want a dumb display with an input for a Chromecast with CEC support (or similar device if Google decides to enshittify that platform with screensaver ads too).
- Comment on LG TVs start showing ads on screensavers | LG's TV business is heightening focus on selling ads and tracking 1 month ago:
This is giving me 1998 MS Publisher vibes and I’m here for it.
- Comment on OpenAI Threatening to Ban Users for Asking Strawberry About Its Reasoning 1 month ago:
“Prompt engineering” must be the easiest job to replace with AI. You can simply ask an LLM to generate and refine prompts.
- Comment on Pharmaceutical Commercials (sound on!) 1 month ago:
It’s a gif with audio.
- Comment on Google is facing another crucial court case in the US – and it could have major consequences for online advertising. 2 months ago:
I’m not sure how true this perception is in more recent years. Many popular sites, with enormous traffic volumes that could drive digital impression ad revenue, are instead pushing subscriptions or other monetization models.
For instance, the New York Times makes — by far — more money on digital subscriptions than digital advertising. Digital advertising revenues are also declining for them.
Another example is Spotify, where ad revenue from their ad-supported tier did not cover their operational costs and now represents around only a tenth of their revenue compared to subscriptions.
The exceptions to this are generally search and social media sites, where the product for sale on these sites are the users themselves. They’re just advertising platforms, which of course make their money from digital advertising.
So I’d say one issue with digital advertising is that it often does not pay the bills for the site owner. Its value is tied to its ability to convert visitors to buyers, but it has to be ramped up to such an extreme level it instead only creates bad experiences.
- Comment on Google is facing another crucial court case in the US – and it could have major consequences for online advertising. 2 months ago:
I go through significant efforts to block digital advertising at multiple levels. Yet, I do not find it difficult to discover new things to buy (from both small and large businesses).
For myself, I suspect most of that is supported through online communities related to my interests and hobbies. Those purchases feel more informed and often more intentional too.
- Comment on Google is facing another crucial court case in the US – and it could have major consequences for online advertising. 2 months ago:
What if we just got rid of digital advertising altogether in the US? How many issues of privacy, health and personal finance would disappear or be greatly reduced?
It’s hard for me to imagine what that would look like or the downsides other than to the digital advertising industry itself.
- Comment on A symbol for the fediverse ⁂ 2 months ago:
Its use looks contrived to me on the linked GitHub page. The comparison with @ and # is flawed because those symbols are part of the resource name, whereas here the symbol is superfluous. It’s like adding a 🌐 in front of every web URL.
- Comment on Why are so many leaders in tech evil? 2 months ago:
I remember when I was growing up
You can basically stop right there. You were young and naive, viewing the world through the rose colored glasses of youth.
- Comment on Google is no longer asking — feed the AI or you’re not in search results 2 months ago:
The context is not the same. A snippet is incomplete and often lacking important details. It’s minimally tailored to your query unlike a response generated by an LLM. The obvious extension to this is conversational search, where clarification and additional detail still doesn’t require you to click on any sources; you simply ask follow up questions.
With Gemini?
Yes. How do you think the Gemini model understands language in the first place?
- Comment on Google is no longer asking — feed the AI or you’re not in search results 2 months ago:
If it’s just that and links to the source, I think it’s OK.
No one will click on the source, which means the only visitor to your site is Googlebot.
What would be absolutely unacceptable is to use the web in general as training data for text and image generation.
This has already happened and continues to happen.
- Comment on If anything happen to Linux today, like what happened to Windows, most of the internet would be dead. 3 months ago:
Those companies aren’t “the Internet.” They’re products connected to the Internet.
The OP argument is like saying the Internet is dead because Netflix is down.
- Comment on If anything happen to Linux today, like what happened to Windows, most of the internet would be dead. 3 months ago:
Doubtful. By far, most servers responsible for Internet traffic are not running crowdstrike software.
This incident was a bunch of fortune 500 companies caught with their pants down.
- Comment on How do you rank sums of single-digit numbers ? 4 months ago:
8+8=16 is absolutely S tier
- Comment on 'Russian spy agency forgot to pay its bill’: Did a delinquent ChatGPT account expose a pro-Trump Russian bot campaign? 4 months ago:
The account’s discovery raises questions on just how many bots are operating on X
I have yet to encounter an actual user of the platform X in the real world.
- Comment on Adobe Says It Won’t Train AI Using Artists’ Work. Creatives Aren’t Convinced 4 months ago:
What then will they use to train it?
- Comment on Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training 5 months ago:
This is another one of those situations where for them (and every other company with access to similar content) the upside is just too much money to ignore.
What is the downside? Lost customers? No problem, they’ll charge the remaining customers more for new premium features based on the newly trained models. Also if they didn’t develop those features in the first place, a competitor would have pulled away customers anyways.
Fines from some government for the egregious violation of a TBD law relating to AI that doesn’t even exist yet? Lol, just the cost of business.
And policy changes? Who actually believes they’ll discard the model parameters they’ve already spent presumably millions of dollars training?
- Comment on Dangerous? Signal Blasts Google Effort to Use AI to Scan for Scam Phone Calls 5 months ago:
I mean, yeah, exactly. Keep in mind scammers are targeting vulnerable people. Granted I don’t see how such a feature will work on my grandmother’s flip phone.
- Comment on Dangerous? Signal Blasts Google Effort to Use AI to Scan for Scam Phone Calls 5 months ago:
It might be a good feature for the elderly as long as it’s local and optionally enabled (especially if it can be enabled only for unknown callers).
Yes, I understand you would never really know if it’s not always enabled. But then again, you currently don’t know if anything similar isn’t already enabled.
For other users, again potentially useful if it’s opt in. However, many people (myself included) simply don’t answer the phone anymore unless it’s a caller we already know. I use Google’s call screening feature for any other caller not in my contact list already, and I would estimate about 1 in 20 or 5% of such calls I receive aren’t spam (marketing or fraud). Of those non-spam calls, the majority are appointment reminders I don’t need.
So would I turn this feature on? No, I don’t have a need. Could it be beneficial for the elderly? Yes, but probably not implemented in a way where it would actually be effective.
- Comment on Report: Microsoft to face antitrust case over Teams 6 months ago:
Unpopular opinion I guess, but I think Teams is actually pretty good at my workplace.
- Comment on Glorious Victory 6 months ago:
Isn’t it available on PS5?
- Comment on It's important to get a good interest rate 6 months ago:
Yes. Effectively you will not have any credit history, so you simply won’t qualify for lower interest credit products or will be rejected on applications that have a credit score threshold.
- Comment on There it is 6 months ago:
That’s awesome - nice work!
- Comment on A photography depicting the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza - 2565 BCE. 6 months ago:
Only those who could lift more than average survived for the photo, obviously.
