pup_atlas
@pup_atlas@pawb.social
- Comment on Court Orders Google (a Monopolist) To Knock It Off With the Monopoly Stuff. 3 weeks ago:
The answer to this question is quite simple, because Google (excluding the Pixel line) isn’t making the actual phones, just the software. The actual manufacturers (Samsung, Motorola, Huawei, etc) are taking Google’s OS and putting it on their phones. This case mostly hinges on Googles behavior being monopolistic to them, not to the end consumer.
On the other hand, Apple make both the OS and the Hardware, there’s no manufacturer they’re forcing the app store on, so the same rules don’t apply here.
- Comment on The Tech Coup: A New Book Shows How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governance 4 weeks ago:
As far as I’m aware, all donors are public, and have been for quite some time. Anyone can get exact numbers down to the dollar of each contributor a major politician took money from.
- Comment on Baidu CEO warns AI is just an inevitable bubble — 99% of AI companies are at risk of failing when the bubble bursts 4 weeks ago:
Sure, but the difference here was that all those companies were offering something different. Some had better results than others, a better ui, more accuracy in certain niches, etc. But 99% of AI companies now are all effectively reselling the OpenAI API. They aren’t making an effort to differentiate themselves at all. It’s as if Google was the only shop in town, and everyone bought all their search data an algorithms to slap their logo on. That’s just simply not sustainable at anywhere near the scale it is now. This won’t be a 3-5 year decline, it’ll be a 2 month crash.
- Comment on OpenAI has built a text watermarking method to detect chatgpt written content 3 months ago:
I van totally believe that it detects AI generated content 99% of the time, that’s trivial. What I really wanna know is the false positive rate. If I write a program that flags everything, it’d have a 100% hit rate. It’d also however have a crazy high false positive rate.
- Comment on Tesla is being investigated by the DOJ for securities and wire fraud by making misleading self-driving claims 6 months ago:
Autopilot maintains altitude and bearing between waypoints in the sky, and in some (ideal) situations can automatically land the aircraft. In terms of piloting an aircraft, it can handle the middle of the journey entirely autonomously, and even sometimes the end (landing).
Autopilot (the Telsa feature) is not rated to drive the car autonomously, requires constant human supervision, and can automatically disengage at any time. Despite being sold as an “autonomous driver”, it cannot function as one, like autopilot on a plane can. It is clearly using the autopilot feature of an aircraft to imply that the car can pilot itself through at least the middle of the journey without direct supervision (which it can’t). That is misrepresentation.
- Comment on Tesla is being investigated by the DOJ for securities and wire fraud by making misleading self-driving claims 6 months ago:
Investigate it? The dude literally named it “autopilot”, what is there to investigate, they market this explicitly in their advertising.
- Comment on iFixit hails replaceable LPCAMM2 laptop memory as a 'big deal' 6 months ago:
I could 100% see them offering user replaceable memory, but with a slower max speed than factory installed. Gotta have something to point to when the regulators come a-knockin.
- Comment on Somebody managed to coax the Gab AI chatbot to reveal its prompt 7 months ago:
proceeds to explicitly name 10 different biases back to back, requiring that the agent adheres to them
“We just want an unbiased AI guys!”
- Comment on Experimental Video Game Made Purely With AI Failed Because Tech Was 'Unable to Replace Talent' 8 months ago:
No, he’s right.
- Comment on Vision Pro EyeSight feature doesn't really work, argues Macworld 9 months ago:
Everyone seems to be missing the point of the external display. It’s to keep you somewhat tethered to the real world, not to look super impressive. It gives people around you enough information to know if they can see you, and if they are looking at you, that’s it’s purpose. And it does that really well from what I’ve seen. Does it look a little weird? Sure, but it’s doing what it was designed to do.
- Comment on Meet generation stay-at-home: ‘You don’t need to pay to go clubbing: you can sit at home and watch it on your phone’ 9 months ago:
Or go club anyway, for free. Just went to one with no cover, and didn’t drink anything. They actually had a raffle I did pay for, but I ended up winning. So technically, I profited 🤔
- Comment on Texas firm allegedly behind fake Biden robocall that told people not to vote 9 months ago:
They stormed the most secure building in our country with the express purpose of stealing control of our government while openly shouting they wanted to hang the VP and members of congress, with the gallows they brought.
If that isn’t the textbook example of seditious treason, what is? They should have the book thrown at them. To do any less is to endorse and encourage this behavior.
- Comment on To Stop AI Killing Us All, First Regulate Deepfakes, Says Researcher Connor Leahy 9 months ago:
Regulate does not equal stop, or even really slow for that manner. There are a number of measures we can mandate that wouldn’t slow any real research, but that would curtail malicious activity, like mandating some form of detection research to go alongside models, or pushing for better watermarking technology for genuine content.
- Comment on Computer chip maker announces furloughs at Oregon factory days after landing $72M from feds 10 months ago:
The feds should claw that money back. I’m sure they intended for this money to go back into the community, and this is borderline fraud.
- Comment on Discord lays off 170 people, blames growing too quickly | TechCrunch 10 months ago:
No, they messed up. Regardless of user count, and economic context, there is a limit to how fast you can grow a company. Going beyond that limit means that you’re diluting internal company knowledge so much that everyone just ends up doing their own thing— it’s chaos. Quality control, standards, procedures, etc go out the window. You also loose your ability to create accurate, data-backed plans with a high degree of confidence the farther you get from where you are now. You can predict the impact of a few new hires pretty easily, but hundreds, when your current team is only a couple hundred? You simply can’t forecast what holes you are creating, and challenges you will encounter with that many new people (specifically, that high of a growth percentage) in that short a time period. Growing that fast is incredibly risky, and in almost all cases, a terrible business decision. I’ve worked for SEVERAL companies that have worked this way, and it always destroys the company from the inside out.
- Comment on X removes support for NFT profile pictures 10 months ago:
It was never a scam, it was always a successful money laundering operation for the rich while covid had all the real galleries closed. It did exactly what it said on the tin. It’s just unfortunate that some people thought it was a real economy to begin with. Either way, good riddance.
- Comment on 2023 in the smart home: Matter’s broken promises 11 months ago:
Is it really tin foil at this point? Their core business model is hoovering up data to serve advertisements.
- Comment on GM dealer chatbot agrees to sell 2024 Chevrolet Tahoe for $1 11 months ago:
The GM software will ALWAYS be better than Carplay/Andriod Auto, because the metric they are optimizing for is being able to add microtransactions to your car after you’ve bought it, not optimizing for the user experience.
They can be far more predatory on their own you see.
- Comment on Spotify doesn't make profit from music streaming, despite having over 400M monthly active users, because it pays two-thirds of all its revenue to the rights holders. 11 months ago:
If someone thinks AirPods Max sound amazing, they’re agreeing how good compressed audio can sound, whether they realize it or not.
Yes! (Kinda) I’m not saying lossless music is the end all be all, and honestly in normal life I prefer non-lossless, because its SOO much less data, and you can hardly tell the difference in normal listening anyway. What I was trying to express was how bad badly done compression can sound. Good compression exists, and it can sound nearly identical anecdotally, but there is a limit to how low you can go before you start hearing it, and I’m trying to say that I think Spotify has chosen a rate below that level by default. I switched to a higher profile and the problem is mostly gone.
- Comment on Spotify doesn't make profit from music streaming, despite having over 400M monthly active users, because it pays two-thirds of all its revenue to the rights holders. 11 months ago:
There may be other factors at play, Apple quite likes to compress stream data between their own devices, even on “standard” protocols (just look at their monitor collaboration with LG where they did the same thing to exceed the max resolution of an existing display signal). Regardless, there is a difference, and it is not a small one. It was immediately obvious to me after listening to a single song. Something about the pipeline is crunching audio to the level where it’s obviously degraded. This isn’t audiophile grade splitting hairs and “I think it sounds ever so slightly better with these gold cables” it was like the difference between 480p and 1080p video to me, enough to be actually annoying during normal listening, even if I was actively trying to forget about it.
- Comment on Spotify doesn't make profit from music streaming, despite having over 400M monthly active users, because it pays two-thirds of all its revenue to the rights holders. 11 months ago:
I wholeheartedly disagree. I have more trained ears then most (worked in video production), but not by much, and when i got my AirPods Max, I thought they sounded awful at first. They were crunchy and dithered sounding in this weird way. I was gonna return them, but I did some testing, and discovered that I was hearing Spotify compression. I turned up the quality as high as it would go in the settings, and that made it a little bit better, but I could still hear it, and can to this day. I did some further testing by signing up for a tidal free trial, in addition to Apple Music. Listening in lossless was an entirely different experience, I could definitely tell the two apart blindly, without even specifically looking for sound quality. There were like 2 to 3 instruments in a given song that I wouldn’t be able to pick out in the lower quality audio, that I could easily pick out in the lossless audio. You have to have a pretty decent pair of headphones to be able to hear it, but some of the higher and consumer stuff can definitely hit that level, and when you do, it’s not something you have to go looking for, it sounds very obvious.
- Comment on Apple Makes It Harder for Police to Access Your Push Notifications 11 months ago:
By doing it that way, you are all the sudden generating tens, if not hundreds of requests per minute to grab notifications for every platform and service, rather than just the one. With a unified approach, the phone can wake up in the background every 5 minutes and ping Google to ask for notifications. If everyone did it individually, your phone would never be able to go to sleep, and would CONSTANTLY be sending out requests to random servers. That also brings up security concerns, since you can get a vague idea of location data from a request, any app that can send notifs can soft track users. They would also open the door for one to be compromised, and send malicious info much easier than it would be to do thru Google. All around, its just a worse solution to the problem with one very small benefit.
- Comment on Apple Makes It Harder for Police to Access Your Push Notifications 11 months ago:
Rooted, degoogled AOSP is definitively not “mainstream”. Mainstream to me means something you can but off the shelf and start using without having to modify it.
- Comment on NY bill would require a criminal history background check for the purchase of a 3D printer 1 year ago:
Oh, did we start requiring criminal background checks for pipes and metal stock too? This is the same problem we’re facing in the rest of the country, everything can be used as a weapon, and requiring background checks on all of them is gonna do nothing to stop gun crime. Regulate the damn guns, that is the only thing that will help.
- Comment on T-Mobile switches users to pricier plans and tells them it’s not a price hike 1 year ago:
I had a call last week where T Mobile SWORE to me up and down that I ran out of data on my 5 GB of LTE, then unlimited 3G speed plan. Which went down like this:
“right, and I’m out of LTE speed data, that’s fine, but you’ve throttled me to UNDER 10 Kbps, that’s emphatically not 3G speeds, I can’t even complete a speedtest”
“Sir it’s showing me that you’re out of data”
“Out of LTE data, but I still have unlimited 3G, thats the plan I bought”
“Sir you’ve hit the limit on your unlimited plan”
“If you are ceasing usable service at a certain limit, what part of this plan is unlimited?”
“Your data is unlimited sir, but you’ve hit your data limit for the month”
This kinda shit is straight up fraud, and clearly designed to con people who don’t know any better out of their money. I read the fine print, all of it, and their full corporate policy. I’m also technical, and I can see I have an RSSI to the tower of higher than -40, my signal is great. They advertised, and I paid for far more. The government needs to get off their ass and prosecute these motherfuckers.
- Comment on An emergency FEMA alert test will sound Oct. 4 on all U.S. TVs, radios and cellphones 1 year ago:
The US is indeed part of the world. I would be fine with similar coverage if this were to happen somewhere else like Germany or Turkey.
- Comment on An emergency FEMA alert test will sound Oct. 4 on all U.S. TVs, radios and cellphones 1 year ago:
My understanding is that this alert is mandatory, and will sound no matter what unless the phone is fully off. You can turn off things like Amber and Weather alerts, but my understanding is that this one (by design) cannot be disabled.
- Comment on Pixel 8 leak promises 7 years of OS updates—even more than an iPhone 1 year ago:
Respectfully, I disagree. I see far more people using older iPhones than using older Andriods. Personally I’ve never gotten a flagship Andriod to last more than a year without serious usability issues, like Google Maps running at 2 frames per second. I tried all the popular brands, Samsung, LG, Motorola, etc, and they all consistently ended up unusable after just a year of use, even if I factory reset them, they’d be right back to where they were in a month or two. I even took great care to leave them as factory as possible, installing only basic apps like gmail, Discord, Telegram, Chrome, etc. No power user stuff like Tasker or customization.
I got so fed up I switched to iPhone in 2020, and I’m still rocking the same 12 Pro Max I bought back then. My usage hasn’t changed from Andriod, but I feel like my phone is reliable again. I don’t have to worry about my phone crashing, and loosing Google Maps mid-merge, or not being able to call people if I’m in need. This three-going-on-four year old phone just got the latest iOS upgrade, and you could still go back a few gens if you wanted. Hell, my partner just found one of the first few iPod touches at a thrift store the other day, and even that still works just fine, you can install and use apps like normal.
- Comment on Pixel 8 leak promises 7 years of OS updates—even more than an iPhone 1 year ago:
The promises they’ve made previous have been FAR less than their competitors. Previous pixel phones have only enjoyed 3 years of updates according to my research (Pixel 4, 4A, 5, and 5A), where as Apple devices (a clear competitor in their space) will still let you load the latest version of iOS (17) on the iPhone XR, a phone released in 2018, 5 years ago. The iPhone 8 is still receiving security updates, which was release in 2017, a full 6 years ago. I would be happy to see some competition in the space, but Googles promises fly in the face of their reputation here, and actions speak louder than words. I hope they do live up to their promises, but I simply won’t believe it until I see it for myself.
- Comment on Pixel 8 leak promises 7 years of OS updates—even more than an iPhone 1 year ago:
I’ll believe it when I see it. Apple has a demonstrated track record of supporting their phones for years, Google has a demonstrated track record of killing anything that isn’t an immediate run-away success. So sorry Google, but I can’t just take your word for it.