EldritchFeminity

@EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨X adds Twitch to its advertising boycott lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Amazon already has their own pharmacy, btw. They even bought a prescription delivery service a few years back, called PillPack or something. Buying CVS would give them brick and mortar stores for the pharmacy they already run online.

  As much as I hate Amazon and their overreach into every sector of the economy, I’d love to see them bring the full might of their lawyers against Musk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky Social surpasses 19 million users as more celebrities leave X⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  IMO, I think creative people are at the heart of a social media platform. A big part of art is the community aspect of sharing it with others. So they interact with each other as well as create Content ™ for others. This is especially obvious with platforms like YouTube, but even Twitter is like this. If there weren’t people posting photos, drawings, music, game dev posts, and livestreams, Twitter would be a very different place. Creative people are responsible for much of the original content online. Without them, Twitter would basically be news, political rants, and reposted memes.

  Twitter was largely considered the best place for artists by process of elimination, and I know plenty of artists were dying for an alternative but didn’t have one. Places like DeviantArt don’t get traffic from the general populace, and Instagram’s algorithm is horrible for discoverability. With Bluesky getting enough people to make it worth the migration, the creative people are moving over, and their followers will join them.

  I know the only reason I ever made a Twitter account was because 70% of the people I followed on Tumblr left for Twitter after the porn ban. Hell, Tumblr dropped like 99.7% in value after the porn ban because they drove off almost their entire userbase.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky Social surpasses 19 million users as more celebrities leave X⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Nor would they care if they knew about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky Social surpasses 19 million users as more celebrities leave X⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think “leave” is doing some heavy lifting, but I could see plenty of people creating accounts as the site reaches a large enough user base to attract the general public.

  I saw a video recently of somebody talking about how they were posting the same thing on Twitter and Bluesky, and despite having a fraction of the followers on Bluesky, the post there had like 6x the engagement compared to Twitter. As they put it, “The creatives have moved to Bluesky.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There should be a term for people who never really returned from the pandemic's social isolation⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Fun fact(s): The COVID strains that were active at the beginning of last year were actually more infectious and deadlier than the original COVID strains. The only reason we didn’t hear much about them is because, despite RFK Jr’s beliefs, the vaccines work. 443 people died from COVID in the US during the first week of November, even with the vaccines. There were about 15 deaths from the flu in that same week.

  There are plenty of immunocompromised people who can’t get vaccinated who can no longer be in public without risking death now that COVID is endemic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Onion buys rightwing conspiracy theory site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, very stupid’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The hard part would be doing it in a way that pulls in the kind of people who listened to Alex Jones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Onion buys rightwing conspiracy theory site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, very stupid’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The funniest thing to do would be to turn it into either a legitimate leftist new site or a leftist themed nujob conspiracy mill (though I don’t know how that would work).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pretty sound reasoning here.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, the elephant gun bullet would stop because a horse isn’t an elephant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yep, it's me⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Add in a magic trick (experiment) that they can do themselves, and you’ve created a little baby physicist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yep, it's me⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s just Minecraft, bro. I won’t teach them about logic gates again, I swear!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨bitey⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Crocodiles are also one of those rare animals that don’t “age” in the traditional sense. Once they reach adulthood, they continue to get larger and larger until they eventually starve or their organs collapse under their own body weight. They don’t lose muscle mass or bone density or any of the usual issues we attribute to getting older.

  Imagine having the build of a 25 year old at 100 and being 7+ft tall. That’s how crocodiles age.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Map Shows Community Broadband Networks Are Exploding In U.S.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of this started in the US because the big telecom companies were paid a lot of money by the government to roll out broadband in the middle of the country, where customers are spread out enough that they didn’t want to bother building the infrastructure, but they took the money and did none of the work. So, these communities did it themselves. Some of them literally burying fiber optics cables by hand through their farm fields.

  I remember reading somewhere a few years ago about how this is feasible on the neighborhood level now at potentially better speeds and cheaper than the telecom companies with a satellite connection that people can use via a wi-fi network across the neighborhood.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨College students used Meta’s smart glasses to dox people in real time⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve heard of coats with that passively blinding IR effect before, though the active one is basically IRCM or infrared dazzlers. Another option would be asymmetric makeup with sharp geometric shapes - anything that would help break up the normal identifiers of a face. I remember seeing this proposed many years ago as a countermeasure to facial recognition software.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Companies have done this on purpose. They all want you to stay in their walled garden, their “ecosystem” of various products. So they make it easy to get into and get connected to people and things, and then make it hard to leave because you’re “invested.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I really don’t understand how people use Instagram. I’ve tried, but it’s about 45% ads, 10-15% posts by people I don’t follow, it’s not in chronological order (or any sense of order for that matter), and regardless of whether I was on there yesterday or 2 months ago, it’ll show me about 40 posts before saying “You’re all caught up from the past 3 days!” and then refuse to show me any more.

  I guess this is why I’m here on Lemmy and went crawling back to Tumblr, one of the last vestiges of the old internet. At this point, I’d rather watch a platform die than become marketable to advertisers and shareholders.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your stupid decal finally makes sense!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes. That’s the remnants of a massive hurricane that just pushed through Florida. Hurricanes sometimes bring salt water with them in the form of rain many miles away from the coast. When I was very young, there was one time where there was a massive hurricane here that was bad enough that we were evacuated, and when we came back, the glass door at my dad’s office was covered in so much salt that it looked like frosted glass. And that office was miles away from the beaches.

  This is basically the only time those idiots with the “Salt Life” stickers hundreds of miles from the coast will see salt water.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amino acids⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This kind of stuff used to be really funny on old Tumblr because you’d find these hyper-niche arguments between a bunch of drunk biologists in the middle of scrolling through the vast sea of porn. 2 posts down would be furry porn followed by a 1,000 word Obama x Dr. Who fanfic or some shit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Crypto bros have discovered idle games, and the results are incredibly boring⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The only way these “play to earn” games can work is as a pyramid scheme. Everybody wants more money out of the pot than they’re putting in, and the company sure as hell isn’t going to run at a loss. Many of them seem to only deal with currency through their own exchange (for fiat currency directly) or through markets backed by coins that are also backed by fiat currency, like bitcoin, for exactly the reasons that you laid out. Can’t make money if everybody is buying your funny money with other funny money that lost 99% of its value 3 months after it appeared.

  The only other way somebody could make this work is if the players are the product, but at that point, why wouldn’t you just sell ad space on a website.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God of War Ragnarok PC port suffers review bombing on Steam due to PlayStation Network account requirement⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  People have been doing it for years as far as I know. It’s kinda where this whole “review bombing” thing comes from. It seems like Valve’s policy is to label these kinds of mass reviews as “off-topic activity” and remove them from affecting the normal rating for the game. If you see a game with an asterisk next to its score on Steam, hovering over the asterisk will tell you that some reviews have been removed from the score for this reason. They’re still publicly there, and you can go into the details of the score to see those periods highlighted, but they no longer affect the score that you see on the storefront.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God of War Ragnarok PC port suffers review bombing on Steam due to PlayStation Network account requirement⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Steam has a very generous 2 hours played policy where the system will basically refund you no questions asked so long as you have played less than 2 hours of the game (refunds beyond that are totally possible but usually require manual review before approval).

  This means that you can buy the game, open it once, leave a negative review, and get it refunded. Which is more impactful on Sony’s bottom line than leaving a review on Metacritic or something because it directly affects the game’s rating on the largest platform for PC gaming, and is therefore more likely to see action taken to fix the issue. Sony doesn’t care if people make angry social media posts, but they will care if they can directly see it impacting their profit margins.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Another Millennial here, so take that how you will, but I agree. I think that Gen Z is very tech literate, but only in specific areas that may not translate to other areas of competency that are what we think of when we say “tech savvy” - especially when you start talking about job skills.

  I think Boomers especially see anybody who can work a smartphone as some sort of computer wizard, while the truth is that Gen Z grew up with it and were immersed in the tech, so of course they’re good with it. What they didn’t grow up with was having to type on a physical keyboard and monkey around with the finer points of how a computer works just to get it to do the thing, so of course they’re not as skilled at it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because we’re talking pattern recognition levels of learning. At best, they’re the equivalent of parrots mimicking human speech. They take inputs and output data based on the statistical averages from their training sets - collaging pieces of their training into what they think is the right answer. And I use the word think here loosely, as this is the exact same process that the Gaussian blur tool in Photoshop uses.

  This matters in the context of the fact that these companies are trying to profit off of the output of these programs. If somebody with an eidetic memory is trying to sell pieces of works that they’ve consumed as their own - or even somebody copy-pasting bits from Clif Notes - then they should get in trouble; the same as these companies.

  Given A and B, we can understand C. But an LLM will only be able to give you AB, A(b), and B(a). And they’ve even been just spitting out A and B wholesale, proving that they retain their training data and will regurgitate the entirety of copyrighted material.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Reminds me of when I read about a programmer getting turned down for a job because they didn’t have 5 years of experience with a language that they themselves had created 1 to 2 years prior.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The argument that these models learn in a way that’s similar to how humans do is absolutely false, and the idea that they discard their training data and produce new content is demonstrably incorrect. These models can and do regurgitate their training data, including copyrighted characters.

  And these things don’t learn styles, techniques, or concepts. They effectively learn statistical averages and patterns and collage them together. I’ve gotten to the point where I can guess what model of image generator was used based on the same repeated mistakes that they make every time. Take a look at any generated image, and you won’t be able to identify where a light source is because the shadows come from all different directions. These things don’t understand the concept of a shadow or lighting, they just know that statistically lighter pixels are followed by darker pixels of the same hue and that some places have collections of lighter pixels. I recently heard about an ai that scientists had trained to identify pictures of wolves that was working with incredible accuracy. When they went in to figure out how it was identifying wolves from dogs like huskies so well, they found that it wasn’t even looking at the wolves at all. 100% of the images of wolves in its training data had snowy backgrounds, so it was simply searching for concentrations of white pixels (and therefore snow) in the image to determine whether or not a picture was of wolves or not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dollar General warns poorer US consumers are running out of money⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sure Dollar General’s predatory pricing and aggressive business tactics to kill off local competition have nothing to do with it, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tumblr to move its half a billion blogs to WordPress⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So the way Tumblr works is that your account is basically a blog, with your home page on the site being populated with posts from the accounts that you follow. You can reblog posts onto your own account and comment on them to create individual conversation threads like this one. At one point, there was a bug in the edit post system that let you edit the entirety of a post when you reblogged it, including what other people had said previously, and even the original post. This would only affect your specific reblog of it, of course, but you could edit a post to say something completely different from the original and create a completely unrelated comment chain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tumblr to move its half a billion blogs to WordPress⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The question is whether or not Tumblr users would want such a thing.

  I feel like the same thing will happen like when WordPress introduced a (bad) TikTok/streaming clone called Tumblr Live. I think less than 10% of the userbase ever interacted with it, most of the community openly hated it, and the people who did use it largely didn’t use Tumblr themselves.

  I could see Tumblr users actively finding a way to defederate their blogs from everything Fediverse related.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tumblr to move its half a billion blogs to WordPress⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This smells to me like WordPress reducing their workload more than anything since they own Tumblr (unless maybe there’s some sort of financial incentive to increasing the number of WordPress blogs?).

  But also, considering that at one point in Tumblr’s history, you could edit other people’s posts, maybe it is an improvement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Justice Department considering push for historic break up of Google after landmark antitrust ruling: report⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s a combination of the old news, how expensive hosting video is compared to anything else, and how Twitch is basically a boat - a hole in the water that you throw money into.

  People lose the connection that burning money like it’s going out of fashion is only step one in the game. Step two is capitalizing on the market share that you acquired in step one. And, as every social media company has shown, ad revenue and data harvesting are very profitable. Otherwise, every tech giant wouldn’t have pivoted to that years ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sharks⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But do they still roll over white when he bites you?