orcrist

@orcrist@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whatever happened to cheap eReaders? – Terence Eden’s Blog⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  On a related note, I’ve had trouble finding high quality 8" tablets in the last few years. They used to be easy to find, but maybe with the flagship smartphones getting larger, sales on smaller tablets died off? Unsure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't Look Up⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No. 90% were not scared. It was the corporate media that hyped up every single flimsy lead. The rest of us knew that we would be perfectly fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Colorado’s governor vetoes landmark ban on rent-setting algorithms⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If it already existed, and actually worked, a second law would change nothing … No reason to veto … So your analysis must be wrong. Sorry!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The AI-powered collapse of the American tech workfoce⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If AI is stealing our jobs, can we lock AI up in El Salvador? After all, it’s not paying its fair share of taxes. It’s stealing from us. It’s a danger to women and children. It eats cats and dogs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There is plenty wrong with generative AI as a tool if you think of it in those terms.

  I would say that if the depth of analysis is limited to “AI” or “genAI” then use of it in schools is overwhelmingly bad. If that’s the limit of our ability to frame the issue, then banning AI would appear inevitable, and any graded assignment that might encourage AI use should be banned.

  But if you want to break things down, you can find specific tools (i.e., calculators, grammar checkers) that could be labeled as AI or specific uses of genAI (i.e., brainstorming) that have use. And it is this latter approach – clearly identifying positive uses – that is difficult for students, media writers, and apparently policy makers to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes and no. Remember that rich kids could always hire ghost writers. ChatGPT made that available to the masses, but that particular problem goes back centuries.

  What we have seen is that the curriculum is often decided by a distant committee who actually doesn’t understand life on the ground. In reality, there are easy ways for teachers to undercut the utility of ChatGPT, if they have the freedom to make changes. But that depends on teachers having control and the time to make changes to how they teach.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stack Overflow seeks rebrand as traffic continues to plummet – which is bad news for developers⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The headline is a lie. Developers will be fine. One company will lose users. And rightly so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Feel this⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you always do, then that means it’s normal, by definition.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stack overflow is almost dead⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been in your position and in the other person’s position many times. It can be frustrating but we need to think about the big picture. It’s possible you hadn’t considered a certain approach, and it’s probable that many other future readers will not have considered a certain approach. So even though you might have said that you want to do something specific, it’s often helpful to some people to provide general information of another way to tackle the same issue.

  And of course you know your own situation, so now there are these comments that appear off topic, and they kind of are, for you, and that’s just how it is on forums.

  The other situation that comes up a lot is that people are doing it wrong. They are misusing some piece of technology and while their kluge might kind of work right now, it’s setting themselves up for bigger issues in the future. Of course no one appreciates it when you tell them they’re doing it wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What Happens When AI-Generated Lies Are More Compelling than the Truth?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is 90% hyperbole. As always, believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see. We live most of our lives responding to shit we personally witnessed. Trust your senses. Of course the other part is a matter for concern, but not like the apocalyptic crowd would tell you.

  It is always a safe bet that the snake oil salespeople are, once again, selling snake oil.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We poisoned the whole planet so our eggs wouldn't stick to the pan 🙃⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not “we”. You. Many of us actively campaign against it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A VPN Company Canceled All Lifetime Subscriptions, Claiming It Didn’t Know About Them⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Except what you’re describing doesn’t make sense. If the new owners purchased all of those things, then in reality they purchased the company. Courts are very likely to agree on this. It looks like a company-wide sale, therefore it probably is, even if someone tries to add a line saying “we aren’t liable”.

  But imagine someone could “sell everything other than the liability”. In such a case, the seller would be putting themselves on the hook to pay outstanding debts (i.e., the seller would be liable). And we know they have money – they just sold the thing. So then the seller would pay… But they know that in advance, so they would not agree to such a sale in the first place, unless they were planning to steal that money through creative accounting of some kind… But both parties know all of that that in advance, so they would both be acting fraudulently.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A VPN Company Canceled All Lifetime Subscriptions, Claiming It Didn’t Know About Them⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think a company like this is not planning to linger for years. The owners wanna make a buck for a year or two and then sell it off. If they can stiff their customers in the process, they just don’t care.

  For long-lasting companies the motivation would be different. But this is not a world-famous VPN company, not by a long shot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Things at Tesla are worse than they appear⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You have just argued against the article itself. Should we believe you?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Maybe Trump's Presidency Will Make Everything So Awful It Will Facilitate Actual Positive Change Nationwide⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is overly simple. You can’t legitimately believe that an explanation only focusing on one person is sufficient to predict American politics. Nope, no chance. Meh.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are We All Becoming More Hostile Online?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What a terrible headline. All of us? No. Next.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows Is Adding AI Agents That Can Change Your Settings⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Holy f***, God forbid making settings menus that actually get you to where you want to go, definitely wouldn’t want to do that, much better to AI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not just you. The title gets causation totally wrong. If people made bad assumptions about how technology would change in the future, it’s their assumptions that are the problem, not reality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Board Opened Search for a CEO to Succeed Elon Musk⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree. And there is also a situation like this, where even if the claim is truthful, It doesn’t actually change anything. He could shift from being the CEO to being the number one advisor to the company, and given his ownership, it would still be the same in effect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla odometer uses “predictive algorithms” to void warranty, lawsuit claims⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Right, but Tesla has had time to push new code to their cars. So we could get a negative result now and still have past shadiness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s the entire point, right? Just use an instance that’s in a country that’s not closely allied with Turkey. Everyone knows that, right? Right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You should have known that there was nothing to gain by telling him what you did. Kids that age are smart enough to realize that if they aren’t being selected to the local all-star team, it’s because they’re not an all-star. If they go to football camp and they aren’t one of the best people at the camp, they’ll realize that they’re not very likely to go pro. But you decided to make it your business at a time when you didn’t need to, and that makes you a jerk.

  You said that you’re just being objective and realistic, right, but you decided to tell your son your opinion, and not someone else. If you were actually trying to be objective, you would have told everyone on the team what you thought about their potential. Of course that would be really rude, which is the point.

  What you could have done is what many other people have mentioned in the comments. Something about how there’s no guarantee that anyone can make it pro, or how long they’ll last if they do, because random injuries can end your career, and the median length of a professional footballer isn’t very long anyway, so there’s still the rest of life to live.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never had compatibility issues. Of course many people have, but a lot of the time people are blindly speculating about potential badness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Of course there are alternatives to Excel. Anyone pretending otherwise has only worked at a few places and is generalizing with great but mistaken confidence.

  But even if there weren’t, think about those companies living on the edge of one software breakdown. There’s a word for that: brittle. Meh, YOLO.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Enshittification of 3D Printers – Are We Losing What Made Them Great?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When I’m shopping for cell phones and reading reviews a routinely see comments about the amount of bloatware embedded on various manufacturer’s devices. People actually do care about it, reviewers actually do write about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think postmodernism had much to do with it. Go ask your average MAGA racist if they even know what that term means and they’ll shrug their shoulders. Similarly, the research does not show that your echo chamber theory holds water, and in fact it suggests the opposite. In the days before the world wide web, people were actually stuck in echo chambers, that being the communities where they lived.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Doesn’t that depend on the forums, though? For many organizations, those sites fit the needs perfectly fine. If you don’t care about archiving and you would not be totally screwed if the forum disappeared tomorrow, you’re going to opt for something simple like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How likely is the US government going to identify and arrest every online user who have disagreed with the current administration?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  First of all, they won’t arrest everyone. Even extreme governments on the tail end of their horrible leadership don’t arrest everyone. They need some citizens to be there working jobs. Rather, they would aim to arrest enough people to scare everyone else and then some other people randomly just for the hell of it.

  But if you think staying under the radar is going to make your life better, maybe you should read some history books. Who do you think is coming to save you? Who do you think is coming to make your community better? When do you think they’re going to arrive? Outside forces will not fix contemporary US political problems. It doesn’t work that way, not when everyone has armies and nuclear weapons.

  Sadly, quite possibly things could get far worse before they get better, so if you want to plan for some unfortunate eventualities, that might be a reasonable decision. But don’t think for a second you can run from them. And even if you could, what kind of human would that make you? What kind of person do you want to be?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: That nazis Don't Actually Believe in Free Speech⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are no absolutists, my friend. Everyone has limits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: That nazis Don't Actually Believe in Free Speech⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, it doesn’t mean that. Think about what you are suggesting.