RedstoneValley

@RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Perceiving AI as a 'job killer' negatively influences attitudes towards democracy— When people perceive AI as replacing human labour, trust in democracy and political participation decline⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The article itself looks like it’s written with AI. Inconsistencies, repetitions, dull language and an unnecessary bullet point summary at the end. While I haven’t read the actual study, nothing in the article seems to explain what makes this causation instead of correlation.

  Personally I’m a bit annoyed with articles like these because they try to create the impression that criticism of AI only stems from it being too powerful, instead of recognizing that the technology has very real capability limits. What is presented as two opposing viewpoints is effectively just one. AI boosters and AI doomers are both strong believers in something that hasn’t happened yet and probably won’t happen for a very long time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But think of the landlords!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Just a reminder that the underlying problems that lead to this kind of architecture aren’t explicitly left-wing. When you were born all the land already belonged to someone else. These might be private properties, corporate owned properties or state owned properties. If you weren’t lucky enough to inherit something from your parents you are forced to live in these boxes. This problem gets worse over time. Lack of opportunities to earn enough money to buy a plot/house, paired with a lack of space in cities also contributed to the situation. It’s shit everywhere because we as humans have continuously failed to implement better solutions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bye, X: Europeans are launching their own social media platform, W⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It will probably fail silently, if it doesn’t pick up enough momentum. * Sad failed platform noises *

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bye, X: Europeans are launching their own social media platform, W⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Y tho

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s exactly the reason why you get good results when prompting a chatbot. You have the knowledge to ask the right questions with the needed keywords and lingo. What’s problematic is that Microslop and big tech in general are advertising AI as a generic tool for everyone and their grandmother. The result is garbage in, garbage out. It’s not going to work as advertised.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Most of the hype isn’t about machine learning stuff for cancer diagnoses though. When the average C-level guy talks about AI they mean almost exclusively LLMs. Fancy autocomplete is their solution to everything, from summarizing an email to agentic OSes. And that’s just not going to happen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK you can add a noAI version of DuckDuckGo to Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t have a link right now, but if you look it up at the usual suspects like wired, ars technica, the register, 404 media, or even Ed Zitron or Cory Doctorow, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of stuff. The search degradation started around the time Sundar Pichai became CEO at Google and it made quite a splash during all that time. Also, there have been several “rollouts” in recent years which changed the search result appearance, content and the page rank algorithm over time, this was published by Google itself. They did of course not disclose how the algorithm works.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  True. It’s also a good idea to check for Linux compatibility before buying hardware. That’s an annoying extra step to do, and makes it harder for new users. But on the other hand, there are now more vendors including this info on their own, and a lot of hardware is pretty much standardized (like USB HID devices etc).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK you can add a noAI version of DuckDuckGo to Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The fact that search engine results gotten worse itself and that this was done deliberately is well documented, and it is documented that Google and others have a history of trying to prevent users from clicking through to the actual websites and keeping them in their ecosystem. They have developed similar things in the past, like Google AMP.

  I have no definitive proof that they worsen their search results for promoting AI, but if you look at this thing there are a lot of indicators for this to be true. Controlling what the user will see and where they will go next is vital for these companies and it’s the reason why content algorithms exist and why they are creating “bubbles” to put individual users into. It’s all about controlling the content the user will see. Now if you think about it and ask yourself if having an AI box dominating the upper half of the screen giving you answers that the search results below don’t is beneficial to these goals, the answer is most likely yes.

  Also you can do your own experiments which will make it pretty evident. Search for a few more obscure search terms. Use niche topics that will not yield a lot of results. In most cases the AI will nail it and the search results below won’t. Even if you use advanced search techniques it is really difficult to get the information that the AI gave you as a regular search result. But when you ask the AI for a source you get a website which has the content you were looking for.

  Now the question is: Why is the AI that much better than the regular search engine? If you have used Google in the past, only a few years ago, it was perfectly possible to get those results through regular search, which is now bordering on being impossible. Odd, isn’t it? It seems like they gave AI a much bigger index to work with than their own search engine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK you can add a noAI version of DuckDuckGo to Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As I said elsewhere, the problem is in fact that search engine providers deliberately make their search results worse to push AI usage. This keeps the user entirely under their control and at the same time hurts the websites the AI training data was stolen from, because no one will bother to visit them any more. I’m not saying DDG does this, but they get their search results from other search engines where this is the case.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You might have been unlucky. I never had serious installation issues when installing Ubuntu on a lot of different computers in the past five years. Just started the installer, click next a few times and reboot into the new installation. It used to be some tinkering required to get everything to work, but apart from having to enable the proprietary Nvidia driver in a GUI (and having to search for it) everything else just worked. My last Windows install however was a shitshow. Took ages and I had to disable a ton of surveillance stuff. On top of that I had to go through some weird hoops to keep the thing from requiring me to create a Microsoft account. What distro did you use? I guess some are more difficult than others

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, I live in the EU and I still have hope that there will be sufficient regulation to prevent the worst when it comes to privacy issues. There already is a lot of protection in place compared to the US (I know, recent developments point in the opposite direction, but the EU at least has some vocal privacy advocates which do their job well) Also I think there are not so subtle differences between recording telemetry (e.g. with anonymized user stats) and spying on users and selling all the data to the highest bidder.

  But you are absolutely right that a working business model that is fair to the user, affordable and open still needs to be found. What we can see is that the US model is not sustainable. My prediction is that the tech conglomerates will enshittify themselves out of business in the long run. Because the competition does not need to improve much when the big player’s products get significantly worse over time. The competition can just sit there and wait until those big tech products become so unattractive to users that there is a real incentive to switch to an alternative. This effect can be observed when looking at Windows vs. Linux for example. While Linux has been pretty stable and easy to use for years now, Microsoft makes the Windows experience worse on an almost weekly basis, and now you need to use command line scripting to fix the worst things. Which is ironic, because it used to be exactly the opposite, Linux was the OS where you had to tinker on the command line to make it work. But these days are long gone. And as Microsoft doubles down in shitting on their customers with restrictions, ads and forced AI everywhere, millions of people feel compelled to stay on Windows 10 and wait how the situation develops or try something else. Windows was always disliked or seen as a necessary evil, but this time they might have gone too far.

  Oh and about your last paragraph… people in the US are now beginning to learn the hard way why being the product is bad. When big tech is in bed with a fascist government and provides all the surveillance data which is suddenly being used against “ordinary people who have nothing to hide” it becomes pretty clear why being the product is a very very bad idea. Just takes a while to make the connection I suppose.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Good point… I found that apart from technical interoperability it often works pretty well if you explain to your friends that your alternative (signal,Matrix, whatever…) is just that. An alternative which is always good to have just in case. Don’t try to force them to uninstall WhatsApp, even if this would obviously be the best choice. Instead encourage them to try the alternative and keep WhatsApp in case they don’t like it. Test it with them. In practice this often means they find out that it works just as well and does not hurt to have on the device. Even if they don’t use it actively yet, the next time someone asks them if they have Signal (or whatever) they will be happy to say that they already have it. Patience is key.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product

  There are many reasons, but I disagree on this one. Most of the existing tech in cloud infrastructure, protocols, social media apps etc. is built on the shoulders of open source software components and operating systems along with interfaces and APIs the US conglomerates themselves have opened to speed up adoption. This of course does not include the surveillance and ad network components, but we don’t want those anyway.

  Some more valid reasons in my opinion:

  1. Lock-In effect in general: If your friends, neighbors, even governments all use product x (i.e. Whatsapp) and expect you to use those too in order to communicate with them It is very difficult to switch to something else because the people you want to talk to have to be convinced one by one to give it a try. (it’s possible, just very hard to do)

  2. Lock-in effect in business: High costs of switching to other products, sunk cost fallacy etc.

  3. US Tech for decades gave away their products “for free” misleading customers into thinking that this should be the norm. People understand when something doesn’t cost money but they still don’t understand that they are paying with their data and ultimately with their freedom and well-being. Alternative products and infrastructures cost money. People need to eat. If you don’t take the dirty road of advertising and selling surveillance data there is no way around that fact. At least when we’re talking about products at scale.

  On the plus side of this: there is nothing that stops enthusiasts like us from setting up self-hosted projects and providing services to a community. And just like the home computing enthusiasts in the 1980s paved the way for tech we use today, every new movement starts small with a bunch of nerds, aka “early adopters”.

  There are plenty more reasons why this is hard and plenty more reasons why we should do it anyway. But I’m on my first coffee so I’ll stop here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Worst in Show' CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Didn’t find anything, and it would probably void the warranty. But on the upside, using the app isn’t necessary to operate the bike, and the most important features work with the controller/display on the handlebar. The motor lock is disabled for now and I’m resorting to more traditional methods of bike security… a chain lock. The motor lock has a huge disadvantage anyways because it depends on a bluetooth connection to the app on a phone. If that phone for some reason doesn’t work or is unavailable then the bike is essentially bricked. It’s a heavy and bulky cargo bike, so being stranded somewhere with a blocked motor would be bad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Worst in Show' CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  About the Bosch E-Bike, I have a bike with a Bosch motor and they really are that bad. The bike comes with an app and you need to give them your personal data to “unlock” basic features of the app and an electronic bike lock. If you want to let another person use that bike, you need a subscription. I deleted the app. Fuck Bosch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Microslop' is heading for Edge – major browser redesign is inspired by Copilot, and it's already seriously unpopular⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh let me know if you find a solution. This is a task I have to accomplish this year too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LG Electronics unveils 2026 Gram Laptop line with aerospace composite - up to 50% lighter than macbooks⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have an old Chromecast but it’s not 4k. The new ones are enshittified as well as far as I know

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11’s 2025 problems are getting impossible to ignore⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  First of all, don’t feel bad about it. That said if you want to improve yourself in the virtualization department and get rid of Oracle’s VirtualBox, I recommend having a look at virt-manager with KVM/Qemu as a VM host. It’s a bit more of initial setup but once this is done it works pretty much the same way as VirtualBox.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11’s 2025 problems are getting impossible to ignore⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There is only a subset of Windows games left that does not run on Linux. Mostly games with kernelbased Anti-Cheat and a few other outliers. I’ve been gaming exclusively on Linux for years now. Have a look at the ProtonDB website to see if your favourite games are running on Linux

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LG Electronics unveils 2026 Gram Laptop line with aerospace composite - up to 50% lighter than macbooks⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I had to setup a custom pihole LG blacklist to keep it from displaying ads in the menu. And LG is well known for spying on their customers in the worst way possible

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LG Electronics unveils 2026 Gram Laptop line with aerospace composite - up to 50% lighter than macbooks⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well the problem is we only use the TV for streaming and my partner wants Netflix and other commercial stuff. Which means I would have to connect another internet device to the TV where the same problem happens again. Going exclusively Jellyfin or whatever is not a solution at this time

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LG Electronics unveils 2026 Gram Laptop line with aerospace composite - up to 50% lighter than macbooks⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not going to buy anything from LG any more. My ongoing battle against my own LG TV’s enshittification (forced ads and AI everywhere, getting worse every update) has soured my opinion on LG. They can go to hell.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Make Amazon Pay⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I did that one year ago, and I don’t miss it. Amazon degraded to a marketplace of low quality Chinese crap anyway. It’s really easy to avoid

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk Had Grok Rewrite Wikipedia. It Calls Hitler “The Führer.”⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly this. If you use it as part of a compound word or as a verb it’s totally fine. However “der Führer” (the Führer) is exclusively used to describe Hitler, and it usually has a negative or ironic vibe depending on who says it.

  About the Führerschein… führen and fahren have the same etymological root… It is still used in “Führen eines Fahrzeugs” which simply means “driving a car” and that is where the term comes from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Same here. I’m not actively using it, but it fills up with spam. Training AI on that… excellent idea 😈

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nextcloud plans to invest over €250 million in digital sovereignty⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s also sad that Nextcloud with their pile of hot PHP garbage seem zo be the ony viable option (apart from selfhosting) when looking for an alternative to OneDrive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tragic Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Somewhat disappointingly, the images and videos shared in the report were taken in the vicinity of the ROV shop at the Marine Institute”

  There, saved you a long read

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I just saw your post during a meeting and I’m about to apply this mantra now

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t worry, he’ll come back to developers crying for help when his precious coins get stolen due to sloppy coding