glockenspiel
@glockenspiel@lemmy.world
- Comment on Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do 1 year ago:
Skepticism is good. However, there is a lot of evidence that Gen Z is quite tech illiterate in general, but especially compared to the Millennial cohort. Colleges and universities have had to force Gen Z students into basically remedial computing courses just to teach them how file systems work and other simple-yet-taken-for-granted concepts work. Drop rates for CS degrees are climbing as Gen Z moves into higher education and hits a very difficult wall for them.
And, in the end, that last bit was definitely another scam targeting their relative ignorance in the space. That is why so many “influencers”/scam artists target/targeted them with “career guides” or code boot camps or whatever. And I think that disillusionment is also part of the backlash against devs in general as “tech bros” despite very few devs actually working in the Valley for those companies under those conditions.
- Comment on Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do 1 year ago:
Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do
Temu is legitimately malware. The company had their source dumped and they obfuscated their malware-like practices to avoid Google’s automatic detection. I presume they did the same with their iOS client. It is very telling that they have been extremely successful despite the same exact company and team doing this before with another app, Pinduoduo. That’s right; same dev team and everything. Temu goes above and beyond the normal surveillance capitalism stuff we are used to and circumvents system security in order to sell your raw data on the market. The entire scheme isn’t to build a retail space (although it is doing that as well); it is to get as many people to download the app so they can steal an absurd amount of data which is normally protected.
- Comment on And now Bezos is trying to inserts ads everywhere 1 year ago:
Greed isn’t the ultimate human trait. Cooperation and curiosity are. We never would have built societies without either. We never would have advanced to the point we have without both. Everyone has greed in them, just like everyone has the opportunity to be angry or sad. But the notion that it is the ultimate human trait or somehow stronger than other characteristics is truly capitalist propaganda meant to justify their immoral hoarding of our wealth.
After all, if greed is the most natural and strongest human attribute… well, the do-nothing takers at the tippy top of the food chain can just continue to suck our blood and deprive us of our agency since it is natural.
There is a reason we don’t live in libertarian hellscapes. It is because greed is not the ultimate human trait.
- Comment on You can now use Python in Microsoft Excel 1 year ago:
Well one thing we can all agree on: it is a blessing to non-working capitalists who own huge stakes of Microsoft.
Because this will require expensive per-seat subscriptions to their Power Platform or Azure Services. And if Power Platform is any indication, likely some features of Python will be gated behind per-use models on top of that.
- Comment on Kentucky's largest school district had to cancel class for two days so it could overhaul a 'disastrous' new bus system that left kids on buses until 10 p.m. 1 year ago:
Seems like arguing semantics. “Low” is relative. There are people who argue that living in minimum wage is 100% possible by oneself. People perform truly shit jobs that greatly endanger their lives simply because the pay is right.
Capitalists want a market economy right until the moment labor is treated the same way.
- Comment on ChatGPT In Trouble: OpenAI may go bankrupt by 2024, AI bot costs company $700,000 every day 1 year ago:
I don’t think it does. I doubt it is purely a cost issue. Microsoft is going to throw billions at OpenAI, no problem.
What has happened, based on the info we get from the company, is that they keep tweaking their algorithms in response to how people use them. ChatGPT was amazing at first. But it would also easily tell you how to murder someone and get away with it, create a plausible sounding weapon of mass destruction, coerce you into weird relationships, and basically anything else it wasn’t supposed to do.
I’ve noticed it has become worse at rubber ducking non-trivial coding prompts. I’ve noticed that my juniors have a hell of a time functioning without access to it, and they’d rather ask questions of seniors rather than try to find information our solutions themselves, replacing chatbots with Sr devs essentially.
A good tool for getting people on ramped if they’ve never coded before, and maybe for rubber ducking in my experience. But far too volatile for consistent work. Especially with a Blackbox of a company constantly hampering its outputs.
- Comment on Google Wants To Destroy The Internet... 1 year ago:
Apple already shipped attestation. It’s in Safari in both desktop and mobile. Unfortunately. It’s I’d just going to take a couple big players to make this a blight everywhere. Netflix implementing this might do it. Google’s main sites would work.
- Comment on Lina Khan: The most feared person in Silicon Valley is a 34-year-old in DC 1 year ago:
The judge got fed up because her son works for Microsoft and thus the family is heavily invested–stock wise–in the company.
The judge should’ve been forced to recuse. Microsoft also should’ve had its breakup orders enforced decades ago, instead of having it tossed out by a cabal of judges.
Microsoft would be a totally different company if they didn’t have just Azure to subsidize all their own projects which operate at cost or loss to run competitors out.
- Comment on Intel 'Downfall': Severe flaw in billions of CPUs leaks passwords and much more 1 year ago:
Now it’s more like “upgrade to maintain your level of performance, because our patched CPUs take a 50% performance hit” (per the article).
That is quite convenient for them. I’m sure not a conspiracy given depth of the issue, just very convenient if people heed the call.
Which most won’t. Enterprise is likely already on the newer gens aa part of normal refresh cycles. Maybe this just accelerates that a bit.
- Comment on The U.S. Government Wants To Control Online Speech to “Protect Kids” 1 year ago:
It is always Blumenthal behind these anti-internet and anti-free speech bills. Always. He was behind the last few attempts under other names as well.
- Comment on Lemmy is popular nowadays, yet is losing its active users 1 year ago:
Not by a long shot. Connect is good, don’t get me wrong, but Sync has some major points that others usually just completely gloss over or ignore entirely–including Connect.
Like tablet-friendly UI.
And no, Infinity, “tablet-friendly” does not mean like 5 columns of independently scrolling content which take you to one big comment section which is a mobile UI stretched to screen size.
Tablet UI–let alone good, productive tablet UI like Sync has with pagination and all–is always overlooked.
- Comment on Automaker Tesla is opening more showrooms on tribal lands to avoid state laws barring direct sales 1 year ago:
There are lots of reasons:
Naked corruption, be it financial or (more like since this is state level), nepotism.
When many of these laws were instituted, it was generally illegal for producers to own their own means of distribution. Movie studios couldn’t own movie theaters for example. That’s why streaming went from a small collection of collaborative entities with most things you’d want to watch, to four (or more) dozen, all price fixing and moving in unison just like the cell industry does.
Theoretically, tax money is more likely to remain in a state if a car dealership is local to that state. Ford selling vehicles in Georgia, for example, would almost surely send all their profits back to Michigan or whatever tax haven is cool these days (which wasn’t as much of a problem when these laws were made).
I’m not defending dealers, though. They are rent-seeking parasites that grossly underpay the people in the garage who keep things humming along. There is a very real dealership-owner (or children) to state politician pipeline in my state and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
- Comment on Say goodbye to the name Twitter’s Bird. Elon Musk changing Twitter logo to ‘X’ 1 year ago:
Exactly. And let’s not forget that the rich have stronger class solidarity. Bezos got a lot more than a $300k loan; he got the experience of a wealthy education which is primarily for the networking. He got access to his parents’ network as well.
See also Bill Gates, who, in a bout of nepotism, used his mommy’s rich connections with IBM to secure Microsoft. People don’t understand that Microsoft made nothing of actual worth in their early days. They were middlemen, buying DOS from someone else and claiming it as their own.
Like, oh, Tesla.
- Comment on Learning computer/OS for kids, that teaches command line? 1 year ago:
It’s all fun and games until the kids bust out
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