efstajas
@efstajas@lemmy.world
- Comment on New Crazy Taxi title will be an open-world, massively multiplayer AAA game, according to Sega 4 months ago:
I literally pulled the original game out of a cereal box in 2010 and proceeded to have hours upon hours of fun with it. It was on one of those funny small CD-ROMs. Good times.
- Comment on Netflix mulls introducing free ad-supported tier. The circle is complete 4 months ago:
Sure, Patreon is great, but Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living, considering how hard it is to get people to commit to monthly subscriptions.
- Comment on Netflix mulls introducing free ad-supported tier. The circle is complete 4 months ago:
Would you put blame on doctors for contributing to the opioid?
I’m gonna assume by “contributing to the opioid” you mean over-prescribing pain medication for the commission? If so, that comparison is so far-fetched that it’s completely meaningless. You’re really going to compare that with independent creators having skippable ad reads that have to be clearly marked as such on content you get for free?
- Comment on Netflix mulls introducing free ad-supported tier. The circle is complete 4 months ago:
This is a bit unnecessarily tough on independent content creators… what exactly do you expect them to do? Make no money from their content? How would they be able to make a living?
- Comment on Q: “Are we doomed?” A: “We would be, if not for the amazing developments in renewable energy.” 4 months ago:
Doomerism like this is fucking stupid and definitely leads to the wrong thing, which is to do nothing. If we’re already fucked, why even try? The truth is that IF we try, we very well might be able to avoid the worst. Which is worth fighting for.
- Comment on The US population only accounts for 4.2% of the world. 4 months ago:
Many networking foundations originated in the US, but what we’d think of as “the Internet” today was invented in Switzerland by a British man.
- Comment on The new Chinese owner of the popular Polyfill JS project injects malware into more than 100 thousand sites 4 months ago:
I know. Just the “full-stack meta frameworks” part alone makes any ADHD person feel nausea.
But why? What’s bad about this?
I disagree. Geminispace is very usable without scripts
That’s great, I’m not saying that it’s impossible to make usable apps without JS. I’m saying that the capabilities of websites would be greatly reduced without JS being a thing. Sure, a forum can be served as fully static pages. But the web can support many more advanced use-cases than that.
If only one paradigm must remain, then naturally I pick mine. If not, then there’s no problem and I still shouldn’t care.
So you can see that other people have different needs to yours, but you think those shouldn’t be considered? We’re arguing about the internet. It’s a pretty diverse space.
For me it’s obvious that embeddable cross-platform applications as content inside hypertext are much better than turning a hypertext system into some overengineered crappy mess of a cross-platform application system.
Look, I’m not saying that the web is the most coherent platform to develop for or use, but it’s just where we’re after decades of evolving needs needing to be met.
That said, embedded interactive content is absolutely not better than what we have now. For one, both Flash and Java Applets were mostly proprietary technologies, placing far too much trust in the corpos developing them. There were massive cross-platform compatibility problems, and neither were in any way designed for or even ready for a responsive web that displays well on different screen sizes. Accessibility was a big problem as well, given an entirely different accessibility paradigm was necessary within vs. the HTML+CSS shell around the embedded content.
Today, the web can do everything Flash + Java Applets could do, except in a way that’s not proprietary but based on shared standards, one that builds on top of foundational technologies like HTML, and one that can actually keep up with the plethora of different client devices we have today. And speaking of security — sure, maybe web browsers were pretty insecure back then generally, but I don’t see how you can argue that a system requiring third-party browser plug-ins that have to be updated separately from the browser can ever be a better basis for security than just relying entirely on the (open-source!) JS engine of the browser for all interactivity.
I ask you for links and how many clicks and fucks it would take to make one with these, as opposed to back then. These are measurable, scientific things. Ergonomics is not a religion.
The idea that any old website builder back in the day was more “ergonomic” and / or approaching the result quality of any no-code homepage builder solution you can use today is just laughable. Sorry, but I don’t really feel the burden of proof here.
Besides — there’s nothing really preventing those old-school solutions from working today. If they’re so much better than modern offerings, why didn’t they survive?
- Comment on I will not be taking questions. 4 months ago:
Ah yes! “Just teach” the cat. Easy
- Comment on The new Chinese owner of the popular Polyfill JS project injects malware into more than 100 thousand sites 4 months ago:
So what does it say about us diverting from purely server-side scripted message boards with pure HTML and tables, and not a line of JS? Yes, let’s get back there please.
Ironically, proper SSR that has the server render the page as pure HTML & CSS is becoming more and more popular lately thanks to full-stack meta frameworks that make it super easy. Of course, wanting to go back to having no JS is crazy — websites would lose almost all ability to make pages interactive, and that would be a huge step backwards, no matter how much nostalgia you feel for a time before widespread JS. Also tables for layout fucking sucked in every possible way; for the dev, for the user, and for accessibility.
people want nice, dynamic, usable websites with lots of cool new features, people are social
That’s right, they do and they are.
By the way, we already had that with Flash and Java applets, some things of what I remember were still cooler than modern websites of the “web application” paradigm are now.
Flash and Java Applets were a disaster and a horrible attempt at interactivity, and everything we have today is miles ahead of them. I don’t even want to get into making arguments as to why because it’s so widely documented.
And we had personal webpages with real names and contacts and photos. And there were tools allowing to make them easily.
There are vastly more usable and simple tools for making your own personal websites today!
- Comment on Those Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil and Death Stranding iPhone ports have bombed 4 months ago:
I think it’s mostly just that phones by themselves absolutely suck as a form factor for pretty much everything but casual games.
- Comment on Photographers Push Back on Facebook's 'Made with AI' Labels Triggered by Adobe Metadata. Do you agree “‘AI was used in this image’ is completely different than ‘Made with AI’”? 4 months ago:
I do think it’s a problem when 100% of people seeing “made with AI” will assume the entire thing is AI-generated, even if all you did was use AI for a minor touch-up. If it’s really that trigger happy right now, I think it’d make sense for it to be dialled down a bit.
- Comment on Tesla must face fraud suit for claiming its cars could fully drive themselves 5 months ago:
No, the other user is claiming that they don’t have a “working” full self driving but is being vague about what they mean by “working”.
I don’t think the other commenter is being is vague at all. “Full self driving” quite literally means Level 5, maybe level 4. That’s just what those words mean. There’s no argument here.
Full Self Driving is just the name of the software
Yes, which is the problem.
The end goal of it is to eventually be capable of level 5 self driving so that’s why it’s named like that even though it has been a work in progress all of it’s existence.
Which is exactly why calling it “full self driving” now doesn’t make any sense. It’s false advertising at best, and a super dangerous overpromise at worst.
Wouldn’t make much sense to call it “partial self driving under supervision” because Full Self Driving is a better marketing term.
Of course it’s a “better marketing term”, because “full self driving” is the pinnacle of self driving tech, what Tesla and everyone else in the race is trying to achieve. The problem is that what they have is not full self driving. I’m not confused as to why they call it that, I’m arguing the point that they shouldn’t call it that.
Misleading? Well yeah perhaps but that’s what marketing teams do. Nothing new there.
Not at all. This is not typically what marketing teams do at all. It’s pretty damn unusual for a major corporation to sell a product under the technical term for what it may be at some point. Or do you have any other examples of this?
Not a single Tesla owner is under the illusion that you can just enable the system and take a nap.
Maybe not, but do you really think no-one bought a Tesla based on Elon’s promise that it’d be fully self driving by 2019? Or that you could monetize it by having it run as a robotaxi at night by 2020?
Doesn’t mean people don’t do that but they know that they shouldn’t.
Tesla and Musk not constantly overpromising and misrepresenting their product with false confidence might help with preventing people from placing undue trust in the system.
Personally I don’t see a huge issue with that name. It’s level 2
As you say, it’s level 2. “Full self driving” is level 5. You still don’t see the problem with the name?
it does what the name implies: drives itself
It quite literally does not drive itself given that a driver needs to be around and alert to take over at any moment.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
It’s monetized through server boosts (upgrading a community to have premium features) and premium accounts that give users additional perks and features.
- Comment on Tesla must face fraud suit for claiming its cars could fully drive themselves 5 months ago:
Wait, so in your mind products need to have “working” in their name in order to be held to the standard of … working? I don’t understand what you’re trying to argue at all. They’re calling and selling this product as “full self driving”. It’s not full self driving. It doesn’t need to be called “working full self driving” in order for it to be misleading.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
It’s been a pretty common practice for years for online services. At my previous job we implemented something like this too, making a guess at the gender of users based on just their name and some additional information. The only reason we did that is because we didn’t want to ask people for their gender when they registered, we only needed the data for investor reporting and marketing decisions, and both of those use cases are OK with a rather large margin of error.
I assume Discord would do this for similar reasons.
- Comment on Sony Music warns AI companies against “unauthorized use” of its content 5 months ago:
What’s the point of posting that “anti commercial ai license” on every comment? It’d be so easy to filter it out of a training dataset. Or am I missing something?
- Comment on RIP Twitter Dot Com: Elon Musk Moves Social Network to X Web Address 5 months ago:
Pretty funny that it took that long. Expertly executed rebrand.
- Comment on Tesla must face fraud suit for claiming its cars could fully drive themselves 5 months ago:
I don’t see anyone claiming they have “working full self driving”
… They’re literally calling it “Full self driving”.
- Comment on Google has an idea to prevent phone scams, but it'll mean allowing its AI to listen in on your calls 6 months ago:
Before I get deeper into this argument, the main point I was trying to make is that people are clearly assuming based on the headline that the transcript analysis happens in the cloud, and aren’t aware of them at least claiming that it’s fully on-device. If Google wants to steal phone transcripts, they can do this already, this feature doesn’t change anything about it.
Other than this… I know that people especially here are super wary of google and their privacy-related claims for very good reason. I am too. I know this is a very sensitive topic. But realistically, for this particular discussion…
“Ofcourse they will gather all that data, because why wouldnt they?”
There are so, SO many reasons why a massive company like Google, especially one that is constantly under scrutiny for their privacy practices, wouldn’t secretly record / analyze / store / whatever private phone conversations and tbh most probably just aren’t. There is immense regulation around this topic in practically all markets they operate in. If Google was found straight up sending transcripts of phone conversations to their servers without very explicit consent (aka more than some clause in ToS somewhere) it’d realistically be the biggest scandal in Google’s history, and likely significantly hurt, if not kill, at least their phone division. In many markets just the recording of phone conversations is already illegal, and Google can’t just do it anyway based on some ToS clauses — it’s just illegal.
I’m not trying to say that I don’t believe they do this because they’re good people or anything, but because from a pure business standpoint it’d be immensely risky for gathering data that is also hardly usable in practice due to how sensitive it is. The circle of people that would even be allowed to know of its existence internally would have to be tiny and extremely trusted to prevent leaks.
The truth is that they can amass so much data through other potentially dubious yet totally legal ways already, so an immense and illegal overstep of privacy convention like this is just unnecessary.
- Comment on Google has an idea to prevent phone scams, but it'll mean allowing its AI to listen in on your calls 6 months ago:
God, everyone, read the article, please. The feature in question uses an on-device AI model, meaning none of the audio or transcript leaves the phone. If Google wanted to secretly record and steal your phone transcripts they could do so already. They wouldn’t need this feature.
- Comment on Hey Apple, I have this great idea for a next spot where we burn a pile of books. Call me. 6 months ago:
I’m really close to getting a new iPad but this ad actually made me want it a lot less. It made me consider whether I actually need another piece of tech in my life. Thanks Apple for saving me a thousand bucks haha
- Comment on Hey Apple, I have this great idea for a next spot where we burn a pile of books. Call me. 6 months ago:
Idk. I guess I’m not offended, the ad just made me sad haha. I definitely understand that some creative professionals would be offended by the implication that a goddamn iPad could somehow replace a trumpet or a piano or literally any of those things shown in the ad. It’s definitely lacking taste.
- Comment on Apple introduces M4 chip 6 months ago:
Yeah for sure everything you say makes sense, but at the same time there is a definite lack of software that makes use of all that power for a broader range of professionals.
Personally, I’d love to replace my aging MacBook with an iPad Pro that I can also use for note taking on the go, but the problem is a complete lack of a (viable) software development IDE, and that’s despite things like VSCode being web-based and with that theoretically capable of running on iOS. I know some of my friends are in the same situation; one of them relies on Blender, the other on Ableton.
The inability of running two instances of Word / Excel etc. may very well be Microsoft’s fault, but that doesn’t change the fact that as a user you can’t do it.
In theory I guess a Surface is exactly what I’m looking for, but switching to Windows would be a bit of a hard pill to swallow. Which is why I’m left wishing that Apple would offer some kind of hybrid tablet / laptop device like the Surface, capable of running full desktop apps and full desktop-style multitasking. I understand that that’s “not the vision” or whatever, but it creates an awkward situation where the hardware of this lineup is more than adequate but the viability of the device as a whole is limited by software.
- Comment on Apple introduces M4 chip 6 months ago:
It’s a really good point though, it is a bit of an odd device with all that power and the significant limitations in software. Yeah it’s marked at artists, but if you’re talking about drawing with pen input, it’s actually pretty overpowered. There’s Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro but they benefit a lot less from a touch screen, and there’s a bunch of workflow issues due to iOS’ lack of a file system.
I really wish Apple would add some kind of “windowed mode” like Samsung Dex or the Surface Tablets. A $2.5k super high-powered device that can’t even open two Excel sheets side by side is quite strange.
- Comment on Now, if it was a Pixel... 6 months ago:
Try selling a locked any phone made in the last 5 years. They’re all a brick if you can’t unlock them.
- Comment on Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain 6 months ago:
I guess I don’t really expect a company to resist pressure from government agencies on my behalf.
Personally, I expect them to resist to the extent possible by law. The cops need to follow a lot of rules to make legally binding requests for data. I understand that if they do, there’s not much a company can do other than hand out the info, but if there’s a legal way to deny such a request, I expect the company to pursue it.
- Comment on 13 Feet Ladder 10 months ago:
Google literally has an official list of IP ranges for their crawlers, complete with an API that returns the current IP ranges that you can use to automate a check. Hardly a moving target, and even if it is, it doesn’t matter if you know exactly where the target is at all times.
- Comment on The EU common charger : USB-C 10 months ago:
Yep. My MacBook pro comes with a magsafe cable and beefy power brick, which is great, but I end up mostly just using a smaller brick and USB-C because I can charge my phone with the same cable. The smaller brick doesn’t hit the max wattage of the thing, but I barely max it out anyway, so it ends up totally fine. Plus all of the MacBook’s USB-C ports accept charge, meaning you can plug it in on either side. This level of flexibility is just amazing, and I dread thinking back to the days when you had to travel with 4 different chargers for all your tech. Now it’s just one!
- Comment on The EU common charger : USB-C 10 months ago:
Right but MicroUSB was not enshrined into law as a standard like this.
Which doesn’t mean that it can’t / won’t be changed. It’s in the EU’s best interest to update the law should the industry push for a new standard, so they will. Of course USB-C can and will be updated to handle newer protocol & charging specs over time, so it’ll be a long time before that’ll be necessary.
but on the other this might very well impede progress
I really don’t see how it realistically could. Look at the history of mobile phones so far. Almost the entire industry standardized around USB on their own rather early, and deviations from this (e.g. Apple) only very briefly provided an actual consumer benefit before they became horrible nuisances and cash grabs. The industry has and will continue to develop improvements to the USB spec, and now thanks to this law no-one is allowed to deviate from the common standard anymore. It’s a win for everyone except companies that want to cash grab on proprietary bullshit.
Also does USBC even provide enough wattage to power a gaming laptop?
It supplies up to 240 watts with USB-PD. The standard just says they need to be power-able via USB C though — it doesn’t forbid additional charging connectors (like Apple’s magsafe or the barrel jacks found often on gaming laptops).
- Comment on GTA 6 is likely to skip PC again and only launching on current gen consoles 11 months ago:
It needs to be “optimized” for controller input in exactly the same way. They could’ve chosen to budget for this “optimization” (whatever that even means) pre-launch.
I think the most likely explanations are 1) larger player base on consoles, 2) Rockstar wants to get the release cash injection ASAP, and 3) staggering platform releases like this prolongs buzz and even leads to a bunch of people buying the game twice.