badgermurphy

@badgermurphy@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta found liable in child exploitation case⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Fining companies that commit a crime a small portion of the money they gained by committing that crime is ,not progress, that is the problem here. Meta still made more money, after the fine, than if they had not perpetrated the crime. This is more of the status quo, which is why people are complaining about this the same as they had about the previous million times this same thing happened.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Someone Forked Systemd to Strip Out Its Age Verification Support⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I call BS! I have it on good authority that Bilbo Baggins is at least eleventy-one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The FCC decided that all foreign-made consumer-grade Internet routers are prohibited from receiving FCC authorization and are therefore prohibited from being imported for use or sale in the US.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They still do claim that, but every federal republican administration since I have been born has spent more than it brought in, and has a less fiscally conservative record than every administration from the other major party, whom they tarred as fiscally irresponsible the entire time. I am almost 50.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Our commitment to Windows quality⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Trident was such a cooler name than WebKit, too. A rare instance of Microsoft giving something a name that was neither confusing nor lame.

  I mean, those ActiveX controls were a little… well… Trident was a cool name!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Our commitment to Windows quality⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There is never anything fundamentally bad about more choices, but that doesn’t mean that some of the choices are not fundamentally bad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  While that’s true for some of those, you never know when there will be a paradigm shift, and neither do they. Also, off the top of my head, I know that Yahoo! and IBM caused their own undoing through long periods of mismanagement. The world was in their hands and they couldn’t stay out of their own way. Standard Oil was broken up in direct response to the establishment and enforcement of federal anti-monopoly regulation.

  So, again, don’t give up hope! If the pendulum does not swing back the other way, it will the defy the sum of all human history. If you think about it, believing otherwise doesn’t even make sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Try not to give up hope! People said similar things about IBM, Yahoo!, AltaVista, AOL, Blockbuster Video, Standard Oil, The Dutch East India Company, and more! All of those are either in the dustbin of history or ghosts of their former selves.

  The reckoning will come to these companies that continue to seem successful in spite of providing objectively bad and worsening products; nothing has ever stopped the pendulum from swinging. When you see your chance to help, give it a push.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia "confirms" DLSS 5 relies on 2D frame data as testing reveals hallucinations⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Unlock Pandora’s box, though, a lot of the dumber applications of this stuff will go back in when the VC money dries up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Astral to Join OpenAI⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  When I refer to improvements, I mean fundamental improvements to the underlying technology, which appear to be at a stubborn plateau.

  I below be he improvements you’re referring to are better guardrails. They are still improving the interface with regard to context and scope, as those functionalities are separate from the underlying technology, bolted on top of it to keep it on task and more continually aware of and operating within the defined context.

  Underneath, though, each new model appears to be a refactoring of the previous one to get different sometimes better results, but the methodology is the same, and its strengths and weaknesses remain largely unchanged.

  So, essentially what my objection to this practice is this:

  This technology has led to companies leaning harder on their current people to get more done with the same amount of time with AI tools. That doesn’t seem to be successful at any sort of scale so far, but that’s the plan nonetheless. As a result, new talent is coming into the industry at a much slower rate than before–hiring is on hold while everyone waits to see if these tools really can replace bodies in the workforce in a serious way (again, super inconclusive at this point).

  So, looking forward even one single generation, we will have dramatically fewer experts in the field than before, because so many fewer people were able to start in that field last generation. Since the need for programmers is greater every year, either these tools will be a wild success and meet all these business demands, or there will be a crisis of demand with no easy ways out.

  Since both of the foreseeable outcomes are detrimental to the workers themselves, what and who exactly are we rooting for? I think that most people, given the choice, would choose the existing cycle with a proven track record, rather than gamble on something so uncertain with no clear economic benefit to the workers themselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Astral to Join OpenAI⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Right, but aren’t the interns in training specifically to get better at that than they are today, and eventually surpass the abilities of the AI?

  These LLMs are at best OK at this stuff, and are not improving at any sort of convincing rate. If you don’t train anyone to be better than the LLM, the retirement of your generation will make the whole industry you’re in at best, OK at its job.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We Spoke To Game Devs And All Of Them Hate DLSS 5: 'What The F***, Nvidia?'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You are making that “first reaction is the wrong one” assertion like it is some sort of law of physics. Many people have read all the published materials and are knowledgeable in the field, and come to the sober, measured conclusion that this technology is mostly a turd. To make matters worse, its a $2500 turd that makes the room hot and the electric meter spin real fast.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA Says You're "Completely Wrong" About DLSS 5 Being Slop - Gamers Nexus⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t heard of the term before, but the notion you’re describing is definitely something I’ve thought and read about some before. Thanks for teaching me something new I can go learn more about!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA Says You're "Completely Wrong" About DLSS 5 Being Slop - Gamers Nexus⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this might be a self-solving problem. Because the barriers to publishing software are practically nonexistent anymore, gaming companies cannot corner the market like you see in other industries.

  People that don’t mind cutting corners, and those that have little taste and have seen every Friends episode 20 times, will still pay top dollar for the slop because they are easily marketed to, but there will always be people refusing that path that make things with the intention of the customer liking them instead of the shareholders. The businesses doing things this way will find a lively marketplace untapped by the AAA studios that can’t stay out of their own way.

  If it continues as it has, the gulf between quality and slop will continue to widen, and these slop games will be consumed by the same people that think Arby’s Steak Nuggets are food, while the rest of us enjoy quality content actually made by someone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA Says You're "Completely Wrong" About DLSS 5 Being Slop - Gamers Nexus⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It is not, but prohibitive pricing causes potential customers to be more considered in their buying decisions. If I’m looking at graphics cards, and one costs triple the other for AI reasons, some will have the decision made for them by their wallet, and others will decide the AI stuff is not worth more than the whole rest of the PC, leaving only the whales with more money than sense.

  Catering only to whales may work for businesses making microtransaction games, because there is no limit to how much a whale might spend there, but no matter how rich a customer is, he only wants one graphics card for his PC, maybe 2.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA Says You're "Completely Wrong" About DLSS 5 Being Slop - Gamers Nexus⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  However, they continually lend their money to their biggest customers, none of whom have managed to use that stuff to make a dime yet, so their chances of actually getting their money back, which is rivaling the GDP of many countries at this point, are just about zero.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Booklore is officially dead⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is an appeal to the masses. There is not yet any consensus amongst anyone who has scientifically compiled data that AI use in nearly any application has yielded productivity gains, while ill effects of its use are widely documented with more being discovered often.

  I am not saying that there are no productive applications for AI, but I am saying that of the currently millions of attempted applications for it, maybe a couple dozen will prove effective and truly have a positive cost-benefit ratio.

  “9 out of 10 doctors recommend Camel cigarettes.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Booklore is officially dead⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think there may be some misunderstanding on what constitutes “the community” and what “force applied” mean in this context.

  In any self-governing body, there are written and unwritten rules of conduct. Nobody has any power or ability to force anyone to stay and participate in the community at all, so they literally have no power to force anyone to do anything. The only power they do have is conditional, and boils down to, “Anyone that wants to participate in this project must conduct themselves and their work by the guidelines we dictate.”

  If there is a rift, and there is not consensus on what those guidelines should or should not contain, the smaller or less contributing group is no longer “conducting themselves and their work by the guidelines we dictate”, so their contributions are no longer accepted. The out group has not been forced to do anything at all, and is free to copy the project at the point of contention and take it in the direction of their own vision, setting up their own code of conduct and submission rules.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia's new DLSS 5 Brings Photo-Realistic Lighting To RTX 50-Series⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There is hate because this is business encroaching on art, which is always abrasive to artists and art appreciators. This tool adds content to the art that was not put there by the artist, making it a different derivative work.

  Furthermore, it can be regarded as frivolous waste. Using AI in real-time to add new details to graphics as they are rendered dramatically increases the amount of energy it takes to run that game. If the gamer had to bear the real costs of these technologies, there would be no gamers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Digg’s open beta shuts down after just two months, blaming AI bot spam⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Its good that you have enough self-control to hand over your keys when you’ve had too much to drink.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Its really a shame every desktop distro has that problem, then.

  Sometimes, you install updates, even on your LTS branch distro, and stuff gets really broken. You can roll back, but can sometimes have to fiddle with the computer to get it working enough to where you can do that.

  If you’ve got a mission critical workflow, you essentially need 2 computers, regardless of the OS you’re using.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you may be falling into a false dichotomy. Not only is the choice being presented a bad one, it ignores real solutions to the root problem, leaving us to argue over the crappy “band-aid” solution to it.

  I believe that people needing health care should have no reason to ask a chat bot about their symptoms because they can ask a helpful doctor instead. The fact that they can’t do that is the problem, not their access or lack of it to the chat bot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Day in the Life of an Enshittificator⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think what you are seeing is that these distilled, ideologically pure philosophies don’t seem to be able to exist outside of laboratory conditions. You can tell because none of them have ever been created at any scale or length of time in the real world in anything but name. The real world is too complex for these overly simplified, supposedly self-correcting systems that solve and account for everything, be it capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, whatever. As much as the human mind loves a simple solution, it turns out that really complex problems like getting everyone to get along together often require more complex solutions.

  “In my opinion, isms are not good.” – Ferris Beuller

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your car’s tire sensors could be used to track you⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  People that care about that have already controlled for that to the degree of their concern and/or ability. This is now one more door that needs to be locked.

  Its good to remind people of the various ways they could be tracked as you have done, but I prefer to try to frame these challenges in ways that encourage taking whatever steps we can toward privacy goals, rather than give up and figuratively lay down and die.

  I don’t think its productive to think in terms that diminish people’s efforts to try to maintain their privacy as best they can.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your car’s tire sensors could be used to track you⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So far I have had success in getting my new car unable to blast out all sorts of uniquely identifiable RF except for this TPMS thing. Does anyone have suggestions on how to deal with this one? Is there maybe a specific brand of sensors that doesn’t send out beacons like this once already paired?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Teams’ invasive Wi‑Fi tracking sparks backlash as users say Microsoft crossed a line — “There must be a team at Microsoft tasked with making Teams worse”⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s true. Their mission is not explicitly to make it worse, but to continually maximize value at all costs. Eventually, software usability has to be one of the costs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨(XMPP Setup Guide) Discord Was Never the End Game - TonyBTW⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You could self host it anyway and just wait for the slow boil over at Discord to make the case for you. Surely they have only just begun making it worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LibreOffice blasts 'fake open source' OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft to lock users in⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The Office ribbon is more recent than the previous menu styles, but newer!=better. The ribbon organizes fewer commands into less coherent groups, and replaced the descriptive text menu option for each setting with a tiny glyph instead, creating a modern hieroglyphic system known only to them. It then made sure this less efficient workflow took up more of the already limited vertical monitor real estate. The only benefit I can see would be for the illiterate, but what are they using an office site for if they can’t read?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LibreOffice blasts 'fake open source' OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft to lock users in⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “The end-user” is another way to say “everyone in the developed world”, and nobody is refusing to collaborate with Microsoft here. What has happened that Microsoft then agreed to collaborate, did so in bad faith, and released what they are calling and open standard, but it is neither open nor standard.

  OnlyOffice appears to be trying their best to adhere to this “standard”, but their best efforts are still resulting in substantial rendering differences of the same document in OnlyOffice and Word. That means to me that at least one of the following must be true:

  • every of the many 3rd party attempts to adhere to the standard was done poorly and failed
  • the standard does not work or is not strict enough to be possible to adhere to
  • the standard is intentionally sabotaged so that it cannot work

  The dubious events around the establishment and adoption of this “standard” make me lean strongly toward the 3rd option,which is in keeping with entire documented history of Microsoft’s hostile, aggressive, and bad faith business practices.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EA invents new microtransaction nightmare as it breaks paywall promise on Skate: rent a playable area for 24 hours or buy a premium pass, bucko⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is the gaming industry, though; their primary target market is children. They’re naive because they’re children. Maybe there’s some masochists out there volunteering for the abuse, but this is really adults failing to protect kids, by allowing it to be legal to use psychology tricks and gambling mechanics on minors.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Bro I’m not making a single claim about the merits or flaws of systemd. I’m talking about the huge infighting and strong arming that went on back when it came out. I had an LTS server back then and just had my popcorn out to watch, since I don’t have the programming expertise to weigh the pros and cons of init systems at a philosophical level.