willington
@willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’ 1 week ago:
More like Google/Alphabet is doing what it can to close up the net, and hopes that openness on the net goes into decline.
- Comment on "Very dramatic shift" - Linus Tech Tips opens up about the channel's declining viewership 1 week ago:
Can’t prove anything, but I have always had trust issues with Youtube’s numbets. Youtube is a for profit company with horrible owners at the top, and would they distort the numbers for political or financial reasons? I think they would.
I think Youtube and Reddit inflate and deflate vote counts and view counts when something is important to the owners.
Granted that is what I think. Can’t prove it. But Google, Alphabet, Youtube, and the new entrants like Grumble, they are black box for profit companies. Can they pass an independent audit for ther view and subscriber counts? We should not trust anything from these bad actors. Certainly don’t assume good faith. Audit them by five indepencent and transparent auditing companies to prove their numbers are legit. Every six months. Evert year. Forever. Until then I take all those view and subscriber numbers with a fistful of salt.
Linus from LTT was ostensibly really popular. I never watched it. Lets say their old numbers were legit. Is it possible some nephew of Youtube’s CEO is starting a competing channel and Youtube fudges the numbers to help push the nepo channel ahead? To me, yes, it is possible. I have very little trust for those black boxes. “Trust me bro” is all they got so far, and I have little reason to trust these entities.
- Comment on Half of Young Men Would Rather Date an AI Girlfriend Than Face Loneliness or Rejection, New Report Reveals 1 week ago:
I don’t want to eat paint chips. Dating AI is even less appealing.
- Comment on Big Surprise—Nobody Wants 8K TVs 1 week ago:
I wish my eyesight was so good that I could see obvious flaws in a 4k image.
- Comment on Uber and Lyft drivers in California win a path to unionization 1 week ago:
Legal, yes.
Literal, no.
- Comment on Uber and Lyft drivers in California win a path to unionization 2 weeks ago:
Corporations are people too, friend.
/s
- Comment on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann 2 weeks ago:
Jesus, how the heck is this called “sideloading is so easy on an iPhone”?
That’s a nightmare procedure, and completely unnecessary.
- Comment on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann 2 weeks ago:
You probably didn’t do it on purpose, but you made a comparison on Apple’s terms, thus implicitly priveleging Apple.
Last thing Apple needs is us priveleging it.
- Comment on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann 2 weeks ago:
Openness isn’t just a nice to have. It is essential.
The difference between general purpose computing and gatekept walled garden computing is night and day.
- Comment on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann 2 weeks ago:
Not a solution to our problem, but this is a crumb in our favor.
- Comment on Tesla sales plunge 40% in Europe as Chinese EV rival BYD's triple 2 weeks ago:
If the problem we want to solve is how to consolidate wealth and power in a few private hands the fastest, the unregulated free markets is the solution.
- Comment on OpenAI Says It's Scanning Users' ChatGPT Conversations and Reporting Content to the Police 2 weeks ago:
The owners of the AI are centering their personal iterests first.
Who here thinks buisenesses and CEOs exist to serve the public interests? I have a bridge to sell you.
If we want buisenesses and CEOs to serve the public inerests ahead of their personal interests we have to FORCE them to.
This problem is so bad it even has a name as a “principle agent problem”. The CEOs and other execs routinely steal from even their “own” publicly traded companies, but it is hardly ever litigated as it is hard to prove without violating the privacy of the CEOs. The most obvious method is via kickbacks. They get under the table payments from the contractor companies when deciding which contractor should get the contract.
The business world is rife with scum and villainy. If we ever want some guardrails around buseness practices we must grab the CEOs by their genitals. Because taking their word for anything is worth the sound that the word makes.
CEOs need to see jail time, and capital punishment in states that allow it.
Instead we lionize these psychopaths and call them “buiseness leaders”. We brought all this on ourselves by uncritically believing the buisenesses’ own way of describing themselves.
- Comment on Trump is building ‘one interface to rule them all.’ It’s terrifying. 3 weeks ago:
“We will build one concentration camp less than the Republicans!”
Signed, Democrats.
- Comment on Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘totally screwed up’ its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars on data centers 3 weeks ago:
Elon turned Grok into Mecha-Hitler.
Trump is telling the Smithsonian museum to ignore slavery, or to cover slavery as a positive.
The domestic appetite for propaganda is huge. Pragar U is American.
Let’s not center foreign countries when we have so much work to do at home.
- Comment on Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘totally screwed up’ its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars on data centers 3 weeks ago:
How indeed. It’s probably a multi-factor phenomenon which requires an anthropological study for a serious answer. (Good luck trying to get the necessary access to study them.) My guess for one factor in this, is that they have more money than they know what to do with.
- Comment on MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing 3 weeks ago:
As an assist to an actual oncologist, only.
I can see AI as a tool in some contexts, doing some specific tasks better than an unassisted person.
But as a replacement for people, AI is a dud. I would rather be alone than have a gf AI. And yes I am taking trauma and personal+cultural baggage into account. LLM is also a product of our culture for the most part, so will have our baggage anyway. But at least in principle it could be trained to not have certain kinds of baggage, and still, I would rather deal with a person save for the simplest and lowest stake interactions.
If we want better people, we need to enfranchise them and remove most paywalls from the world. Right now the world instead of being inviting is bristling with physical, cultural, and virtual fences, saying to us, “you don’t belong and aren’t welcome in 99.99% of the space, and the other 0.01% will cost you.” Housing for now is only a privelege. In a world like that it’s a miracle the people are as decent as they are. If we want better people we have to delibarately, on purpose, choose broadbased human flourishing as a policy objective, and be ruthless to any enemies of said objective. No amnesty for the billionaires and wannabe billionaires. Instead they are trying to shove down our throats AI/LLMs and virtual worlds as replacements for an actually decent and inviting world.
- Comment on MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing 3 weeks ago:
A narrow purpose AI trained to recognize tumor growths early is the kind of AI that makes sense to me.
- Comment on Mozilla warns Germany could soon declare ad blockers illegal 4 weeks ago:
The “owners” of our world want us to be passengers, not drivers. They own the carusel, and we rent our rides.
They say we have no skin in the game. Truth is, SKIN is ALL we have in this game. We must have assets in the game as a birthright to make it worth playing in good faith. If most are landless and assetless, sorry, the game sucks. That means untill we get the rules that protect all of our interests, as opposed to protecting massive wealth accumulations at everyone’s expense, we will ignore the rules, the norms, decorum, civility, etc.
If the hoarders break the social contract repeatedly, like they have since 2008, it takes people some time to internalize and digest the fact of what it means for none of us being bound by a social contract. Once people catch on, there will be hell to pay.
- Comment on If AI takes most of our jobs, money as we know it will be over. What then? 4 weeks ago:
Of course the power dynamics cannot ever be eliminated (either by breeding or enculturation) from the interpersonal relationships.
Instead, power can be regulated and managed, to maximize distributed decisionmaking, and to protect those decisionmakers who could not or would not protect themselves.
In a free for all, feudalism will always result. The strong and the willing will rule over the weak and the unwilling.
There have to be limits to the power dynamics. Those limits will have to be enforced to protect the vulnerable, the gullible, and the unwilling (those who have the capability to exercise power, but refuse by choice), etc. This requires advanced democratic governance with a very strong government.
Doing away with the government is just a speedrun toward technofeudalism.
- Comment on If AI takes most of our jobs, money as we know it will be over. What then? 4 weeks ago:
When democratic gornance withers what fills the power vacuum is feudalism.
Technofeudalism is feudalism with computers.
Ironically, to create a space that selects for and protects distributed decisionmaking (the desire of most sane anachists), you need a strong government!
- Comment on This CEO laid off nearly 80% of his staff because they refused to adopt AI fast enough. 2 years later, he says he’d do it again 4 weeks ago:
My use case for AI is to get it to tell me water to cereal ratios, like for rice, oatmal, corn meal. If there is a mistake, I can easily control for it, and it’s a decent enough starting point.
That said, I am just being lazy by avoiding taking my own notes. I can easily make my own list of water to cereal ratios to hang on the fridge.
- Comment on Codeberg: army of AI crawlers are extremely slowing us; AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges. 4 weeks ago:
I was fine before the AI.
The biggest customer of AI are the billionaires who can’t hire enough people for their technofeudalist/surveillance capitalism agenda. The billionaires (wannabe aristocrats) know that machines have no morals, no bottom lines, no scrupples, don’t leak info to the press, don’t complain, don’t demand to take time off or to work from home, etc.
AI makes the perfect fascist.
They sell AI like it’s a benefit to us all, but it ain’t that. It’s a benefit to the billionaires who think they own our world.
Fuck AI.
- Comment on OpenAI’s new model can't believe that Trump is back in office 5 weeks ago:
Try asking AI for a complete list of the recently deseased CEOs and billionaires based on the publicly available search results.
When I tried, I got only the natural deaths of just some of the publicly available results. All the other deaths were ommitted. I braught up the ommited names, one by one. The AI said it was sorry for the ommission, and it had all the right details of their passings. With each new name the AI said it was sorry, it ommitted it by accident. I said no, once is an accident, but this was a deliberate pattern. The AI waffled and talked like a politician.
The AI in my experience is absolutely controlled on a number of topics. It’s still useful for cooking recipies and such. I will not trust it on any topic that is sensitive to its owners.
- Comment on Microsoft buys more than a billion dollars’ worth of excrement, including human poop, to clean up its AI mess — company will pump waste underground to offset AI carbon emissions 1 month ago:
Tecnowashing is also fraud.
Take a failed concept like the gold standard, technowash it, and you get crypto scamcoins.
Greenwashing, sportswashing (saudi arabia), sanewashing (presenting insane ideas as debatable ideas, like debating human rights), small business washing (using ostensibly a pro small business argument to push a fortune 100 agenda), worker washing (treat workers like shit in private but make pro worker noises in public). Now we can add tecnowashing to the list.
Another example of technowashing is when a real estate company presents itself as a tech startup to inflate its valuation.
- Comment on You can still enable uBlock Origin in Chrome, here is how 1 month ago:
I use IronFox all the time. For me almost nothing is broken.
Once a year I find one low value site that I have to load in Cromite to see what it is, and then I never use that trash site again.
In other words, IronFox fulfills 100% of all my browsing needs excellently.
- Comment on Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts 2 months ago:
New people enter the market all the time.
That update is for those that don’t already have a Fairphone, presumably.
That said, I agree with your overall point. They should offer tablets and watches if they can.
- Comment on You're not alone: This email from Google's Gemini team is concerning 2 months ago:
Consumer activism, by itself, has rarely, if ever, accomplished anything.
The best recent examble was Tesla, but that wasn’t a mere non-buying action. Tesla action involved vadalism and a massive word of mouth campaign.
Basically if we want to fight for a future we believe in, we must stop playing patty cakes and fight like it’s a life and death struggle.
Symbolic resistance is not enough.
- Comment on Palantir hits new highs amid Israel-Iran conflict 2 months ago:
I think both peace and war are profitable. But those that profit from war may be more pushy than those that profit from peace, and so may get their way even as an unpopular minority .
Unless, the left (usually more pro peace) learns a few lessons from the right and places good outcomes above the holier than thou moral purity. “I’ve never made anyone uncomfortable” is not the merit badge that some think it is.
Of course the left can never be a mirror copy of the right because the left cannot afford to give as few fucks about anything as the right (who represent the already-haves economic incumbents; it’s not called the “fuck you money” for nothing). But the left can be way tougher and nuncedly uncompromising and even calculatingly and carefully millitant.
Might does not make right but might DOES make POLICY.
You need both right and might to live under a good policy.
Lotta good it does anyone to be right and insightful on all the issues and have zero impact anywhere.
- Comment on xAI Data Center Emits Plumes of Pollution, New Video Shows 2 months ago:
Quote from the video, “You can smell it as well.” Refering to the turbine opetation.
- Comment on New York Mayor Eric Adams to Crypto Industry: Come Build an Empire in NYC 4 months ago:
Crypto is a solution looking for a problem.
The people behind crypto never studied the history of the gold standard.
Crypto is a ponzi scheme virtual asset, not a currency.