utopiah
@utopiah@lemmy.world
- Comment on 'End of 10' to Windows 10 Users: The Environment Wants You to Use Linux 18 hours ago:
Been playing for years on a nearly daily basis, from Baldur’s Gate 3 to Elden Ring to now Clair Obscur… to VR with e.g. Half-life : Alyx. That’s on my desktop and often also on my Steam Deck. So… yes, Proton is very VERY good for games!
- Comment on Lemmy.one will be shutting down 2 days ago:
you cannot transfer is your imaginary internet points
Ironically enough, even though “imaginary” this aspect might be key to moderation. Assuming (and that’s a flawed assumption) that people would upvote/downvote based not on their opinion but rather on how healthy/unhealthy to the discussion a comment is, then those “points” would be useful to see above/below a threshold one would want to interact, e.g. show content or not (or even now show even as to unfold).
- Comment on Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks 2 days ago:
Like I try to highlight, in most cases it’s a shitty tool, doing a bad job, trained on stolen data, requiring a TON of energy and often used to put people out of business.
So… sure, it’s “just” a tool and in theory, it can be made the right way and used in a good context.
It is rarely the case though. Here specifically we are talking about Amazon, a company that has from its inception been built to be a monopoly, relying on AWS a service that is basically destroying the Internet by removing its decentralized nature.
So… again even if the tool would in theory itself be used the right way, build the right way, the company using that tool is problematic.
TL;DR: in theory, yes, in practice here, no.
- Comment on Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks 2 days ago:
- Comment on AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented 2 days ago:
Story of my life, yak shaving to no end.
- Comment on AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented 2 days ago:
That… was my point!
- Comment on Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks 2 days ago:
I’m not an economist but… 1 voice actor can serve 3 million consumers if they listen to the same content.
Anyway that’s not even my point, my point is that it is possible to cover, we as a society, driven both by VC with strategies of capturing markets (so precisely going against “free” market as an ideal) and consumers are making choices (like when one buys from the local farmer market vs Amazon deliveries). If though we, while fully understanding the consequence of such choice (namely how the sausage is made, here how AI models are trained and then run), believe it’s not valuable then sure, we can make that choice.
I’m just warning consumers then that if they don’t pay for quality content made a certain way, they can’t complain that they in turn don’t get the job they wanted because nobody out there is ready to pay for it.
2 sides of the same coin.
- Comment on Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks 2 days ago:
This is me just speculating here but if they follow the path of this CEO who fired his human staff to replace it by AI… then rollback admit it’s shit gizmodo.com/klarna-hiring-back-human-help-after-g… then my bet is that it’s not done to improve quality but rather margins.
If AI is done alongside professionals, and done so ethically (not stolen training data, not ignoring ecological cost by pumping water in dry areas to cool down GPUs, etc) and economically (i.e. not having it “cheap” now but once a monopoly position is obtain, raise prices for a captive set of consumers) then yes it can be potentially empowering. This though is pretty much never the case.
That being said, if one “just” want read aloud, there are plenty of FLOSS alternatives and I believe Mozilla even a TTS/STT system based solely on voluntary voices.
- Comment on Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks 2 days ago:
Enshittification isn’t adding new features that people want, it’s gradually lowering the quality of the product. So here is Audible is solely adding more possibilities, never at the cost of higher quality ones degrading, then indeed I’m wrong.
If though they hire less people to do good voice acting, then it’s really shitty.
I genuinely hope I’m wrong and they are ONLY adding new capabilities… but my entire experience with capitalism is that obtaining a monopolistic position is not done to improve quality but rather to increase margins regardless of how.
We’ll see!
- Comment on Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks 2 days ago:
If the “fix” for an AI implementation in a use case is, again, to manually correct it and find a less demanding audience then… yes, by definition it’s shitty.
The point isn’t that it’s infeasible, just that it will be low quality.
- Comment on Netflix will show generative AI ads midway through streams in 2026 2 days ago:
Hate to see it but… it makes sense.
It’s wrong, sure, in many ways (privacy, ecology, ethically depending on the dataset) but if there is 1 application where generative AI ads would make sense is through a personalized stream. So… yes it’s bad, consumers might reject it, but it’s not the actually dumbest way to use a terrible technology.
To be clear, again, I 100% hate it but if I was a greedy Netflix stakeholder I’d think “Hmmm yes, maybe!”.
- Comment on AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented 2 days ago:
True, and yet a machine gun is a not a stethoscope.
- Comment on Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks 2 days ago:
do a section of your work with and without […t]hen have people listen to both and give feedback.
Yes, that’s the principle of prototyping. De-risk while testing solely the crucial part!
- Comment on Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks 2 days ago:
It’s Amazon, what did you expect? Enshittification and monopoly abuse, no surprise.
- Comment on Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks 2 days ago:
Because… the tool has no understanding of anything? It reads written words, yes, but no intention, no cultural context, no intonation. Unless everything is spelled out like a script, then it will not sound great, would it?
- Comment on Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks 2 days ago:
dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth
I’m pretty sure they’d be a lot more people ready to do that job if there was a good remuneration. Heck that sounds a lot more fun that a LOT of jobs out there!
- Comment on It do be like that sometimes 4 days ago:
… and yet, you fall right into their trap!
It seems like you are talking past each other, thus validating their point. Talking is easy, getting understood seems to be much harder.
- Comment on Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa among artists urging British Prime Minister Starmer to rethink his AI copyright plans 6 days ago:
they didn’t seed any downloads
So Meta, 100% leeching.
- Comment on Prices are out of control 1 week ago:
I’m not a doctor but my understanding of the topic is that it’s pretty clear : any soda is bad.
Sure, a Coke a week, in a cocktail or otherwise, does not matter much but AFAIK people who buy entire packs (as in the photo) drink sodas at every meal and that’s unhealthy over long term, no matter what brand or type of soda it is.
So assuming that’s a well known medical fact and people still do it, then one can say they do NOT care for their health, no?
- Comment on Tesla bait-and-switch: Cybertruck owners won't get Autosteer feature they paid for 1 week ago:
Yes, yes sir, I’ve found the terrorist, right there! /s
- Comment on Tesla confirms it has given up on its Cybertruck range extender to achieve promised range 1 week ago:
up there with the humane pin.
Funny, or sad, how quickly we collective manage to forget bad grifts.
- Comment on Tesla confirms it has given up on its Cybertruck range extender to achieve promised range 1 week ago:
How about giving up
- Comment on i truly believe that there's an open war between Humanity vs. Advertisers and their allies. 1 week ago:
At least you are an adult so you have the tools, cognitive and cultural, helping you see the problem. Imagine a very young kid, say 5 years old, watching exciting video content. They do not yet possess such ways to protect themselves from for-profit manipulation.
Just few days ago I finished the IMHO excellent “Buy The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence” by Henry A Giroux and Grace Pollock so you can already understand where I’m going with this.
Yes, advertisers are terrible, they make money by manipulating our thoughts, probing our deepest desire, toying with our emotions in order to sell us whatever is made by whomever pay them the most. But… you and I are fully formed human beings in the sense that we are adults. We spend years navigating through the world, getting scamming, learning how to spot lies and marketing pitches. The problem is, as showcased by Disney in that example (a very important example!), the process is not random. It is a very thoughtful and strategical one, namely how to transform a human being to a consumer from the youngest age.
Anyway I won’t dig into the obvious but the book ends with a couple of practical links e.g. commercial free childhood (what a name, how can how even imagine that would be needed?) which since then became fairplayforkids.org
If you prefer a video on the topic the 2001 yes still relevant 2001 documentary (52 min) “Mickey Mouse Monopoly - Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power” …mediaed.org/…/f56fd530-8724-460b-b2bc-6eba9868f0…
I personally pulled that thread also thanks to the more recent 2016 article “Teaching Disney Critically in the Age of Perpetual Consumption” www.jstor.org/stable/45157190 but, again, the point is that it’s systemic.
- Comment on i truly believe that there's an open war between Humanity vs. Advertisers and their allies. 1 week ago:
Congrats, you missed the whole point about Amazon.
As others already replied, the business model of Amazon (and any marketplace that sells its own products within it while being part of an oligopoly) is precisely to prevent unbiased comparison. Amazon gets data on all the products being sold on its website, its warehouses occupancy … then make Amazon Basics and replace them. They did that before also with diapers among many other examples e.g. arstechnica.com/…/emails-detail-amazons-plan-to-c… but they also do the same with software products, e.g. AWS.
So no, clearly Amazon is not about having fair comparisons and a shopping cart. Amazon is about being the ONLY shopping cart one can have fill it with Amazon products.
- Comment on Prices are out of control 1 week ago:
Coke zero is worse for your health.
nobody who drinks Coke care for their health.
- Comment on Windows Is Adding AI Agents That Can Change Your Settings 1 week ago:
Same vibe lemmy.world/post/29256164/16922503
- Comment on Windows Is Adding AI Agents That Can Change Your Settings 1 week ago:
Not convinced the number matter as much if settings are indexed and thus searchable.
- Comment on Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump 3 weeks ago:
unaffected by EMP were everywhere.
They called them books.
Out of curiosity what the range and/or power for an EMP pulse to brick my microSD with Zim files on it?
Wondering what’s the actual risk of such a thing happening, what kind of scenarii would this require?
- Comment on Tesla Slumps Below 50% Share of California's Electric Car Market 3 weeks ago:
people on Lemmy could have some empathy and not just assume that everyone driving a Tesla is sanctioning anything that Elon Musk does.
Costs 1 EUR and takes 10sec to put a sticker on a Tesla that says “I bought this before Elon went mad” and plenty of people on Lemmy would understand I bet. It’s more of a gesture to show that one having a Tesla does not support the actions of the its CEO. A Tesla without even a sticker on is assumed to be owned by someone who knows yet either does not care or even supports Musk.
- Comment on Tesla Slumps Below 50% Share of California's Electric Car Market 3 weeks ago:
True, but most CEOs are unknown to consumers, only to employees and share-holders. Usually there is a “culture” of a company that is a blender of PR, advertising, marketing, etc. Here Musk became associated with the brand though. Tesla existed before Musk and worked well… but was nowhere near a popular. I hate Musk yet I feel it’s fair (and please if you have data showing I’m wrong, do share, I’d love to remove any wrongful attributed credit from him) to say he made Tesla enormously more popular than before he invested in it. So… you are right in most cases people buy cars, and other products, without knowing about the CEO but that specifically does not apply to Tesla where the hype precisely came from a self branded as IronMan.