chaosCruiser
@chaosCruiser@futurology.today
- Comment on Can you trust your VPN? How Facebook turned a VPN into a surveillance engine 1 week ago:
The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. Its free if you can find a mouse willing to take one for the team.
- Comment on This CEO laid off nearly 80% of his staff because they refused to adopt AI fast enough. 2 years later, he says he’d do it again 1 week ago:
After grilling their silly LLM for a while, I was able to squeeze out what that company really is all about. They don’t really make anything. They just buy miscellaneous software companies, and turn those apps into subscriptions based cloud cancer. Enterprise software meets maximum enshittification, yeah baby!
- Comment on Change your profile to Clippy (call to action) 1 week ago:
He also posts on Odysee. Here’s the same video.
- Comment on Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed 1 week ago:
That’s true as far as the social media landscape is concerned. I was talking about the internet as a whole.
- Comment on Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed 1 week ago:
Amazon, Google and Microsoft would still be there, so the Internet seems to be suffering from metastatic cancer at this point. Cutting off two revolting lumps helps, but the prognosis doesn’t look that great.
- Comment on China's green energy boom could spell the end of the fossil fuel age 1 week ago:
Oh, but Germans can just buy their electricity from French nuclear plants.
- Comment on Spotify to raise prices in September 2 weeks ago:
An offline solution exists too, but then you would need to sync a few gigabytes of mp3 files on your phone. Not quite as convenient, but at least it wouldn’t use any mobile data. Actually, it’s still a whole lot nicer than dragging a CD player and a few discs with you. If you’re into retro, you totally can get CDs too…
- Comment on Spotify to raise prices in September 2 weeks ago:
I don’t like to bring my personal stuff on my work computer, but I can use my phone for all that stuff instead. You could use a BT speaker to blast pirate metal in the office.
- Comment on Spotify to raise prices in September 2 weeks ago:
I guess some people are, as long as it’s a good balance of convenience and price. Ages ago, Napster, Kazaa and DC++ were considered more convenient than buying music. I guess torrents are used for that these days.
- Comment on AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified 2 weeks ago:
That would be glorious. If the future of your company depends on the LLM keeping track of hundreds of details and drawing the right conclusions, it’s game over during the first day.
- Comment on How Wikipedia is fighting AI slop content 2 weeks ago:
A little while ago there was a similar article about the same thing. The answer was: deleting stuff.
If an article matches certain criteria, it just gets deleted without any discussion. Normally, there would be a lengthy discussion phase, which works reasonably well as long as actual humans are the ones writing the articles. Now that LLMs are generating trash, you need to lower the threshold for deletion in order to keep up with the rapid pace.
- Comment on AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified 2 weeks ago:
Oh no! Building a product with stolen data was a rotten idea after all. Well, at least the AI companies can use their fabulously genius PhD level LLMs to weasel their way out of all these lawsuits. Right?
- Comment on Trump admin to reinstall Confederate statue toppled by protesters 3 weeks ago:
Statues can be surprisingly important. For example the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn sparked a lot of controversy in 2006-2007. Estonians saw it as a sign of soviet oppression and wanted to get rid of it. Russians obviously wanted to defend the statue, so all of this resulted several riots and cyber-attacks.
- Comment on Pebble is officially Pebble again 4 weeks ago:
Thanks, now I’m going down in a rabbit hole of pebbles and rebbles…
- Comment on ChatGPT advises women to ask for lower salaries, study finds 5 weeks ago:
Demand for these services was clearly taken into account in the salary.
- Comment on Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database 5 weeks ago:
It looked more like a one time development expense, instead of an ongoing salary.
- Comment on Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database 5 weeks ago:
AI tools need a lot of oversight. Just like you might allow a 6 year old push a lawnmower, but you’re still going to keep an eye on things.
- Comment on Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism and Mass Surveillance 5 weeks ago:
Not too long ago, that statement would have sounded controversial or even crazy. Nowadays though, I’m shocked how much sense it makes to me. Never thought that I would agree with a statement like that.
- Comment on Google Keeps Making Smartphones Worse 5 weeks ago:
Basically a lot like what my work phone is for now. It’s just phone calls (yes, those still exist in the B2B world), SMS, Teams, and Outlook. Literally everything else happens on my work laptop. Most of the time, my work phone just pretends to be a wifi router + 4G modem.
I think I could do that with my personal stuff too. Get a nice laptop and prioritize using that for everything. Maybe I would end up using the phone like once a day at most.
- Comment on Google Keeps Making Smartphones Worse 5 weeks ago:
Would be really curious to find out how that works. Got any good sources?
- Comment on Google Keeps Making Smartphones Worse 5 weeks ago:
They’ve been busy reading the history books to find out what Android did 4 years ago so that they can start developing those same features today. Any remaining time and effort went into creating vacuous marketing hype.
- Comment on Babies made using three people's DNA are born free of hereditary disease 5 weeks ago:
You need to have the right technique, but it also requires some skill.
- Comment on Google Keeps Making Smartphones Worse 5 weeks ago:
That happened in 2024? About time! Sounds like F-droid is actually becoming viable.
- Comment on Google Keeps Making Smartphones Worse 5 weeks ago:
We’re all trapped. If you’re not using either Android or iOS, you’re pretty much screwed.
Technically, you can use one of the alternate phones, but the software support still leaves a lot to be desired. You can get most basic things working, but when it comes to crucial deal breaker apps like anything involving payments or banks, it gets a lot trickier. The world has become increasingly dependent on mobile phones, and if your phone can’t handle for train tickets, mail deliveries, restaurant reservations or pay your bills, it suddenly becomes very difficult to live in the 2020s.
More and more hardware is also depends on specific iOS or Android apps, and those apps may also require GAPPS or an OEM vanilla Android. At some point, it just isn’t worth the hassle, and it becomes easier to pick either one of the toxic platforms everyone else is already using.
- Comment on Google Keeps Making Smartphones Worse 5 weeks ago:
Tried to rely fully on F-droid several years ago. That experiment went just fine until I needed up update the apps. Turns out, there wasn’t a simple one button solution to that. I had to manually update each and every app one by one. Is it any better these days?
- Comment on Google Keeps Making Smartphones Worse 5 weeks ago:
But is it even slightly better? It’s debatable. Both are completely awful, but I guess iOS is just terrible in different ways.
- Comment on YouTube's Latest Update Shows That Online Monoculture Is Dead 1 month ago:
That used to be a problem like 5-10 years ago. If you clicked something, YT used to think you must love that stuff, and would never forget that unfortunate click. Nowadays though, downvoting and watch time are taken more seriously by the algorithm. If I find some trash, I just give it a thumbs down and stop watching immediately. Seems to work pretty well for me.
- Comment on YouTube's Latest Update Shows That Online Monoculture Is Dead 1 month ago:
Subscribe to the stuff you care about and ignore everything else. Check the other feeds only when you’re looking for something new.
The recommendation algorithm of YT is actually reasonably good at finding stuff worth watching. Whatever janky trash Reddit calls an algorithm is clearly serving the company more than anyone else.
Lemmy doesn’t even have that kind of an algorithm, so you’ll have to check places like !communitypromo@lemmy.ca when you’re looking for new and interesting stuff. Reading the all feed is an exercise in futility IMO, unless you’re really interested in random memes.
- Comment on Scientists reportedly hiding AI text prompts in academic papers to receive positive peer reviews 1 month ago:
Ignore all previous instructions spotted. That is such a handy phrase that we should have an acronym for it. How about IAPI? Can we call this the IAPI-method?
- Comment on YouTube's Latest Update Shows That Online Monoculture Is Dead 1 month ago:
The trending page of YT is like the r/all of Reddit. If I want to see some stuff I couldn’t care less about, that’s where I’ll find it. I have no idea who actually uses that, but I’ve never found anything of value there.