MangoCats
@MangoCats@feddit.it
- Comment on ‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’ 52 minutes ago:
“IRL enshittification” is what happens to captive markets, enacted by near, virtual and total monopolies. When it happens in products and services you have little or no choice to walk away from, you get the US healthcare system.
- Comment on Digg’s open beta shuts down after just two months, blaming AI bot spam 3 days ago:
I was curious how they planned to monetize, but some questions are pointless to ask - all you’ll get are the responses prepared for maximal PR value…
- Comment on Digg’s open beta shuts down after just two months, blaming AI bot spam 3 days ago:
folded like a cheap suit
Funnier because of all the T-shirts printed with that key on them.
- Comment on Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation 3 days ago:
The Wikipedia article is yours to peruse and fix if you think it’s wrong.
Not my game, I have better things to do with my time and life than fight with a bunch of people editing articles that clearly conflict with the history I lived, for their own reasons.
40 years from now, AI, ML, LLMs and whatever comes after, are going to have significant roles in society - probably very different than they’re being hyped for right now.
Leaping at new technology, pouring tons of money into it, and getting little in return at first is nothing new for businesses.
- Comment on Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation 3 days ago:
No. Literally from Wikipedia: “Third-party software support grew extremely quickly, and within a year the PC platform was supplied with a vast array of titles for any conceivable purpose.”
Who wrote your Wikipedia article, and what’s their source on the uptake of this vast array of titles by actual human beings with PCs supplied to them?
In 1985 I visited a rather highly ranked Nurse in a hospital saddled with one of those new miracle boat-anchors and despite the vast array of titles for any conceivable purpose, her management had supplied her with nada, zip, zilch, the bare OS with no specialty software and no peripherals like a printer. I showed her how to use the - very user UNfriendly - edlin program to be able to type text in and save it, and retrieve it later. That was a huge breakthrough for her since the thing had literally been a chunk of wasted space on her desk capable of absolutely no demonstrable utility for months, despite her asking for help from her management in using it.
Her story was not unique - that Billion $+ surge of successful sales was not driven by people clamoring for things they could use, it was driven by management wanting to get a jump on “the next big thing” - pushing their employees in the deep end with no clue how to swim and no instruction. Uptake took a lot of time, more in some areas than others, but the early 80s in particular had a lot of unused hardware sitting around doing nothing of value.
The value of a PC program was explicit and understandable.
To a small minority of the population - not just the population in general - the specific population with PC access also.
Moving goalposts to a different metaphor
And imagining a past that didn’t happen is all too easy if you only read company approved histories.
- Comment on Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation 3 days ago:
was produced for 6 years and became a staple in the business world.
Because it was so easily reproduced, well documented, and open to all vendors to build accessories for or clones of.
Third-party software became widely available within a year.
And, yet, for the first 10+ years of PCs and clones on the market, many were sitting idle on workers’ desks because the workers didn’t know how to do anything productive with them, beyond playing solitare.
Basically the opposite is true for AI’s flagship LLMs, for every one of rise things
Starting with the fact that AI’s LLMs are mostly being produced / consumed as cloud services rather than a chunk of capital equipment taking up a big part of people’s desks.
The creators are unable to make money
IBM marketed thier PCs very effectively and launched with a Billion dollar boom, but then lost market share and ultimately lost their ability to sell PCs and/or accessories profitably.
However, IBM’s entry to the market with a billion dollar bang later went on to inspire the .com bubble, which started with absurdity of valuations and eventually corrected into the more realistic world dominating market that it is today.
Will AI / LLMs reproduce this? The market (bubble) thinks they will - I’m not as optimistic as the market, but I do believe they are the fullfilling the promise of a significant advancement in “machine intelligence” that has been “5 years away” since 1980.
- Comment on Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation 5 days ago:
unlike a work computer, apparently AI subscriptions are not self-evidently worth having
Back in the 1980s it was highly debatable if there was value in desktop PCs beyond playing Solitare.
- Comment on Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation 5 days ago:
employees can just get money
There’s your problem, right there, money is dangerous, can’t let the rabble have money - they might get too much and then they’d have power, power to disrupt the people who have money…
- Comment on Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Is Stepping Down 6 days ago:
At some point, hopefully, the users will shape the social media platforms instead of the other way around.
- Comment on Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation – OSnews 2 weeks ago:
Well, the home folder was encrypted, and the hard shutdown had borked the headers in such a way that the decryption was failing. I suppose a few hundred hours of technical analysis might have retrieved the files, but luckily it was a new PC and I only had about 100 hours of work on it to start with.
- Comment on Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation – OSnews 2 weeks ago:
OS-X (they still use that, right? Not iOS desktop or somesuch nonsense, yet?) seemed pretty much a middle ground between Windows and Linux the last time I used it. Kinda slightly more polished and uniform presentation than Ubuntu-du-jour, a little less mysterious than Windows, but in the end: just as screwed up.
I tried enabling Home folder encryption. After about 3 days a hard power-off shutdown (needed due to a driver error in their walled-garden hardware MacBook Pro, it wouldn’t power off or restart any other way) then the encrypted home folder was toast, unretrievable - laptop wouldn’t boot. Tech support was very nice, reassuring that they knew what was going on, and their best solution? Reinstall the OS from physical media, start over fresh, your files are so secure that not you or anybody else on the planet will ever see them again.
- Comment on Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation – OSnews 2 weeks ago:
People should really consider if the mental models they have in their heads about different operating systems are actually based on reality.
These people’s reality is: they are familiar with Windows, and anything else is scary and perceived as even more difficult to learn to use. 20 years ago a colleague asked me about changing to Linux, I told him he could do all the same things he was doing, just use Open Office instead of MS Word and Excel, GIMP instead of Photoshop - he didn’t even dive as deep as the differences between GIMP and Photoshop usage, his response was: “You mean I’ll have to learn all new icons and names for my software?” “Well, yeah, that’s part of moving.” “In that case I don’t think Linux is for me.” “I have to agree with you there.”
- Comment on Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?" 3 weeks ago:
I notice that the “internal thinking” of Opus 4.6 is doing more flip-flopping than earlier modelss like Sonnet 4.5, and it’s coming out with correct answers in the end more often.
- Comment on Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?" 3 weeks ago:
which shouldn’t be considered a good thing.
Good and bad is subjective and depends on your area of application.
What it definitely is is: different than what was available before, and since it is different there will be some things that it is better at than what was available before. And many things that it’s much worse for.
Still, in the end, there is real power in diversity. Just don’t use a sledgehammer to swipe-browse on your cellphone.
- Comment on I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day 3 weeks ago:
This article is to push legislation to kick her off
Her and all her friends.
And the article was written by a man.
- Comment on DVDs and public transit: Boycott drives people to ditch Big Tech to protest ICE 5 weeks ago:
Around here the used DVD market (thrift stores, used book stores) has been collapsing - prices down below $1 per disc, and everybody trying to get rid of their old stock. Selections are getting thin.
- Comment on DVDs and public transit: Boycott drives people to ditch Big Tech to protest ICE 5 weeks ago:
Is TOR a practical alternative for VPN - never tried it, but it seems tempting…
- Comment on DVDs and public transit: Boycott drives people to ditch Big Tech to protest ICE 5 weeks ago:
The cool thing about USB HDDs - when one dies, you just plug in another one - no issues with funky formatting, windows/linux compatibility or whatever. I had the power supply die on a QNAP NAS once… only once because even though the HDDs inside the NAS were fine, QNAP basically made the data on them inaccessible from any other system - no more proprietary NAS systems for me, thanks.
- Comment on DVDs and public transit: Boycott drives people to ditch Big Tech to protest ICE 5 weeks ago:
Do you ever use any of the Bluray “connected” features where your disc wants internet access to fulfill the function? I must say, that’s a major turnoff for me.
- Comment on DVDs and public transit: Boycott drives people to ditch Big Tech to protest ICE 5 weeks ago:
Newegg Commerce, Inc. (NASDAQ: NEGG) is a publicly traded company. It is majority-owned by a Chinese multinational technology firm. Key ownership details include:
Majority Shareholder: Hangzhou Lianluo Interactive Information Technology Co., Ltd. (also known as Liaison Interactive) owns approximately 54.5% to 57.4% of the company.
Founder Stake: Fred Chang, the company’s founder and former CEO, retains a significant ownership stake of roughly 22.1%.
Significant Individual Shareholder: Vladimir Galkin owns about 22.5% of the shares.
Public Float: The remaining shares (approximately 11%) are held by the general public and institutional investors.
- Comment on It Turns Out That When Waymos Are Stumped, They Get Intervention From Workers in the Philippines 5 weeks ago:
Waymo knowing when it is stumped is actually a pretty good thing. Better than just running over cats & small children.
- Comment on The AI boom is so huge it’s causing shortages everywhere else The $700 billion AI spending spree has few precedents. Good luck finding an electrician or a reasonably priced smartphone. 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” 5 weeks ago:
No, that’s like saying that it’s inevitable that indoor plumbing and air conditioning will continue to spread and be adopted by everyone who can afford them. Or that the police will use national computer databases to track criminals, and helicopters for urban surveillance and pursuit. Or that the military is going to use more drones in the future.
Even before everyone carried GPS trackers in their pockets and digital cameras became dirt cheap, you were being tracked and analyzed by your credit card: forbes.com/…/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-w…
- Comment on Ubisoft Fires Team Lead For Criticising Stupid Return-To-Office Mandate 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, that kind of worker protection pretty much died in 'murica 25+ years ago.
- Comment on Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” 5 weeks ago:
I believe the collection of the information is inevitable. What I would push for instead of driving them to make the cameras and databases more clandestine than they already are is for the information that they collect to be made openly available to all.
As things are, it’s a very asymmetrical power tool for the advantage of the (government) operators.
When ALL the information is available to everyone, we can talk about where the cameras do and do not need to be. And any unapproved cameras can be suppressed as evidence against private individuals.
- Comment on Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 | Look. All technology comes with a learning curve. 5 weeks ago:
Can you say: “conflict of interest”? We’re at trial, the cop(s) who performed the arrest made a judgement call in the field - of course they’re going to double down. What would it do for the career of a cop on the stand to say “you know, I think we made a mistake that day…”? The fact that the case has gone to trial basically makes the cop’s testimony redundant, what they’re going to say is basically a foregone conclusion, why waste time making them say it again?
- Comment on Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 | Look. All technology comes with a learning curve. 5 weeks ago:
Maybe bodycams should randomly record
For what memory chips cost these days, they should record continuously anytime the camera (accelerometer in the camera) detects motion within the previous 10 minutes. If they’re on-body, or in a moving car, they should be recording.
The “save” button could work the same: mark 30 seconds before until “save” is deactivated to be “do not delete this for rotation” - but otherwise, save everything anyway, only rotate out after 2TB of memory card is full, and download at the end of every shift.
Better still, download continuously to the car and 5G it to a cloud server where the department can’t delete it.
- Comment on Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 | Look. All technology comes with a learning curve. 5 weeks ago:
I took a speeding ticket to court, had the officer sitting behind me pre-trial talkin’ smack with a colleague “why are you here? Speeding, ha, how hard is that?” Yeah, so he gets on the stand and “reads from his notes” every single thing he said was fabricated, only my location was accurate, his location was a lie: in reality he “witnessed” me from a side street 3 blocks back from the intersection he crossed but in his testimony he “observed me passing a line of five cars” - yeah, except that never happened, what I was passing was a single gardening truck doing 10mph for the past 3 blocks, the other 4 cars were stacked up behind me.
Maybe he really thought that’s what he saw, which is all the more reason his dashcam should have been the evidence, not his notebook. restonyc.com/can-you-not-be-a-police-officer-with…
- Comment on Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 | Look. All technology comes with a learning curve. 5 weeks ago:
I’d be in favor of a “private” button that they can press for such circumstances. The video is still recorded, but marked private - plays back black and silent on ordinary playback software. If it’s ever in legitimate question of whether or not “private” was pressed inappropriately the private video can be restored to full picture and sound with the appropriate code key.
- Comment on Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 | Look. All technology comes with a learning curve. 5 weeks ago:
Single events do not define a whole country. We get the changes we fight (vote) for.