Soup
@Soup@lemmy.world
- Comment on YouTube secretly tested AI video enhancement without notifying creators 11 hours ago:
Your two braincells are misfiring, bud.
- Comment on YouTube secretly tested AI video enhancement without notifying creators 11 hours ago:
When all the music “radio stations” effectively changed nothing but called their algorithms “AI” to follow the hype.
- Comment on 4 days ago:
Yea it’s wild. Frickin’ love this stuff, especially when it’s all easy enough to learn and explain accurately enough for fun fact time.
- Comment on 4 days ago:
Well, yea that. I know Hank Green likes to bring it up and he’s popular, and it’s come up with a bunch of other content creators, too. It’s fun, technically true, and enough people don’t know it yet so it’s great to bring up in the real world.
Plus it’s super cool to explain how our eyes are built for the ocean and they had to get a special lens on top to fix it. Or how we carry the sea with us in the form of all this salty water. Or the whole swimbladder/lungs/guts thing relationship I mean they’re all quite fun, really.
I also like explaining that octopuses are molluscs and, because we say that molluscs have one “foot”, it’d be more appropriate to say that octopuses are really just going around the world with eight funky toes and not eight arms.
- Comment on SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink 5 days ago:
Conned them and then Nashville, I think it is, is also paying him for it. True stupid, the US isn’t a country of learners, it seems.
- Comment on Silicon Valley Is Panicking About Zohran Mamdani. NYC’s Tech Scene Is Not 6 days ago:
Except I literally already told that being unique is less important than being able to actually do what’s promised. New Yorkers understand the power that a mayor has and know that he can get this shit done for their city. His policies are good and they’re a strong swing away from the center and the right and people are excited about that, and he’s been shown to even explicitly say he won’t make promises he can’t even attempt to keep(price of eggs, anyone?).
The establishment hates this because he’s doing things they know will energize people and show them just how much better things could be. The US has long operated on the bullshit idea that they couldn’t have nice things because “it’s different here!” but that’s always been a lie that was easy to tell because the good shit was happening across an ocean that many US citizens couldn’t even point to on a fucking map. Now it’s going to be right there, in their big New York City, and it’s going to be hard to ignore.
I’ve explained all this in the previous comments, you can re-read them if you need to.
- Comment on UK Official Calls for Age Verification on VPNs to Prevent Porn Loophole 6 days ago:
Just a fun fact about “think tanks”, “institutes”, “foundations” and most of those little groups is that when they appear in the news there’s a solid chance that they’re being propped up by corpo money. Every time they appear you need to go double check their bias and you’ll often find that it will be they themselves saying they’re “a conservative think tank” and, if not that, there will likely be a Wikipedia article and a bunch of other sources confirming it. I’m sure there are good ones, but it’s largely just oil companies and banks and big tech funding some corrupt as hell “academics” in order to buy some credibility.
I loved when I got into with one person over climate change and all they could do was send me articles that use oil-backed think tanks and which quoted a climate scientist who’s such a huge liar that whole webpages exist to organize and debunk all his paid-for bullshit.
- Comment on Silicon Valley Is Panicking About Zohran Mamdani. NYC’s Tech Scene Is Not 1 week ago:
Because I know how cities work, ya dingus.
- Comment on Silicon Valley Is Panicking About Zohran Mamdani. NYC’s Tech Scene Is Not 1 week ago:
That’s your misunderstanding of how cities work, bud. Mayor is a far more powerful position than people believe and municipal elections are crazy important for bringing about real change and bringing it to the people directly.
- Comment on Silicon Valley Is Panicking About Zohran Mamdani. NYC’s Tech Scene Is Not 1 week ago:
Except that what he’s doing he can actually do. Someone who ends up in Washington and gets outvoted by the majority centrists isn’t a bad thing, and actually sorta helps their image without forcing any real change. Mamdani, though, he’s the top dog in a mayoral position and can actually get shit done. They’re scared of him not because his ideas are unique but because they can actually be realized at this scale.
- Comment on We hate AI because it's everything we hate 1 week ago:
Ok, but I did specifically point out that AI is doing a worse job than those people. It’d be like replacing your dishwashing guy with chimp that go to shadow him for a bit before he was fired. Another analogy would be replacing a carpenter with a van full of his tools as if they could do the work on their own.
- Comment on We hate AI because it's everything we hate 1 week ago:
Numver 3 is crazy too because it’s putting people out of work even when it’s worse than them, the bubble bursting will have dire consequences and if it’s held together by corrupt injections of taxpayer money then it’ll still have awful consequences, and the whole point of AI doing our jobs was to free us from labour but instead the lack of jobs is only hurting people.
- Comment on Replace PBS with indoctrination 1 week ago:
He gasp treated black people with respect. He even told people to love themselves and wasn’t pushing down bad feelings in service of toxic masculinity—sorry, “totally normal” masculinity.
- Comment on Meta's flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York. He never made it home. 1 week ago:
I think my main thing with it, because largely I totally get what you’re saying, is that there is nothing that makes it not obvious how fake it all is. Even a mail-order bride is a real person that someone could hope would actually love them given some time.
- Comment on Replace PBS with indoctrination 1 week ago:
“Far left PBS” lol I guess having shows about being kind to eachother and a whole bunch of science programming makes them “far-left”.
- Comment on Meta's flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York. He never made it home. 1 week ago:
Taking out the stupid or mentally ill(who are different, and I do feel a little bad putting them in with “stupid”, but these are the clear primary victims of the current AI lies).
I’m sure we’ll get it way out of hand and the bots will start getting properly clever but right, like, the fuck guys.
- Comment on Meta's flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York. He never made it home. 1 week ago:
Are fucked are we that GenAI chatbots have been around for 15min and we already have WAY too many stories of people falling over themselves to get into bad situations?
Like, they know they’re fake from the outset and then just get so swept up in it that they’ll believe anything. Some are not 100%, mentally, like Bue here but others are seemingly ok and they still fall for it?! What the hell?!
- Comment on Misty Mountains 1 week ago:
Bro goes to the Misty Mountains ONE TIME and suddenly he’s from BC telling everyone “that’s not a real mountain” like get off your shit, Bilbo.
- Comment on Help. 1 week ago:
It’s not loneliness, it’s rugged individualism! It’s not anti-union/anti-community propaganda to keep the masses weak; I mean have you seen union dues?! /s
But don’t worry, those same people who say shit like that are so desperate for community that they’ll never leave their hometown except for when their local far-right militia chapter goes out to harrass a protest or attack their country’s government for having a fair election.
- Comment on Drug Enforcement Administration agent used Illinois cop’s Flock license plate reader password for immigration enforcement searches 1 week ago:
They do feel pretty free to do that, and they also heavily signal that if you’re of a darker complexion, even if they barge in unannounced, that they’re going to fill your house full of holes but if you’re white, even if you knew what was going on, they’ll detain you alive. It happens all the time, and in “unarmed” societies that aren’t massively shit people don’t need to worry about it anyway.
“Greatest country on earth” but everyone needs to be constantly afraid of their neighbours and government.
- Comment on YSK that despite being outside of US jurisdiction, Lego has dropped diversity and inclusion terminology from its annual report 2 weeks ago:
As if I could afford any to begin with.
- Comment on YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus — the internet hasn't noticed yet, but I've found a workaround 2 weeks ago:
Sure, though they also need to pay people, run the platform, run Youtube music, pay for rights to things, and a bunch of other stuff. I’m not about to say that they aren’t another greedy corporation, that would be crazy, but ya’ll expecting to pay nothing are flatout ridiculous and.
- Comment on YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus — the internet hasn't noticed yet, but I've found a workaround 2 weeks ago:
Honestly, I just did that. YouTube has costs, storing and sharing all that data at high resolution and speed, so expecting that service for absolutely nothing is a little weird. We can find reasons that they’re bad, that’s fine, but good or bad they do have to pay for things.
I also pay for the Patreon of one of my favourite mandolin players because I want him to keep making content and I wanted access to backing tracks and the Discord server. He can’t do it at that level for free, and that’s ok.
- Comment on Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery 2 weeks ago:
They offer a fix behind a bunch of barriers? Is it not in settings with an obvious on/off toggle for the thing?
- Comment on Imagine being a billionaire, running one the most powerful, corporations in the United States, and prostrating yourself to Donald Trump in this very public and embarrassing way. 2 weeks ago:
Trump is not a powerful wizard, all his power comes from people who give it to them. Those people have a choice, and this is it.
- Comment on Imagine being a billionaire, running one the most powerful, corporations in the United States, and prostrating yourself to Donald Trump in this very public and embarrassing way. 2 weeks ago:
For most people Apple products are absolutely consumer friendly, what are you talking about? They’re amazingly simple to setup and go, the ecosystem actually works well, and they’re far more reliable than anything Microsoft could dream of putting out. They also don’t go obsolete within in a year, that’s total nonsense, and in fact they have generally had better support than their main competitors as far as I’ve seen. People I know have kept their Apple machines for a very long time without much issue. I myself had my first MacBook for ~11 years, from 2010 to 2021.
For people who to tinker with software there’s still a lot you can do on them but back in the Windows vs. Mac days some ill-informed people decided that because Apple products work well they must be hard to code on, despite the Unix based nature of them. Currently, many people I know in software are issued MacBooks and say they work very well while the Windows machine I got for something as simple as AutoCAD was constantly having issues.
Their consumer unfriendly tactics aren’t directly to connected to the capability of the machines. They 100% do some bad shit on that front, but it’s not enough to push most regular customers away. If you can’t figure out the difference between yourself and a regular customer then this isn’t a conversation you clearly have all the information for. Most of what you’re saying is just the usual parroted garbage that muddies the conversation and frankly makes it harder to deal with the companies actual failings because it just shows a grotesque inability to understand why people like their products.
I will be very clear: This overt move beyond the usual corpo nightmare has soured me a lot on their products, which sucks because they are objectively very good. I also don’t entirely know what to do about it as making a switch to Google products is just as bad a move. I’ve heard of a couple alternatives, we’ll see what the landscape will look like in a couple years when I need a phone and several years after that when a new laptop is required.
- Comment on Trump wanted a US-made iPhone. Apple gave him a gold statue. 2 weeks ago:
This is capitalism. In that system the money is the important part and so how you get it mostly doesn’t matter. Corruption is part of it, and they use the money to make sure the laws that would punish them don’t exist.
- Comment on This boomer couple would be hit with $700,000 tax bill if they sold their mansion 2 weeks ago:
Plenty of folks are relying on the sale of their homes to pay for retirement, this couple in question is even an example of that. The big issue there is that it requires home prices to just climb and climb because they have to outpace each other(a sale of a home for this purpose will also need to buy the next home). The value of the home goes up with inflation but it also gets an additional increase because now it’s expected to help pay for 15-30 years of retirement, and the cheaper houses see the price range vacuum and seek to fill it not only because of greed but also because its sale will probably be used to buy the bigger, now even more expensive home. It’s shelter and we treat it like a luxury good.
Every time the price is referenced it’s used as excuse to raise prices elsewhere. It’s a feedback loop of greed fueled by the lack of a safety net and a lack of protections for both homeowners and renters. In Canada and the US things are extra bad because the demand in good cities is high but a lot of the existing housing, and even the new stuff, is production homes in “neighbourhoods” that are isolated, car-centric deserts and it’s still expensive.
- Comment on This boomer couple would be hit with $700,000 tax bill if they sold their mansion 2 weeks ago:
And how much have wages gone up? $500k is still very expensive, sounds like maybe it should be a little more but it sounds more like a consequence of letting housing prices run away for a few decades.
- Comment on Honda Zonda 2 weeks ago:
The older one or the weird newer one that looked like the affordable sedan of supercars?