It doesn’t need to be good to replace jobs, as long as there are no consequences for the people making those decisions.

I’ve lost count of how many “oops, it was AI’s fault, not my fault!” stories I’ve heard, even within highly regulated fields. Like, lawyers submitting documents with completely fake citations, and then…no real consequences. Seems to me like that should be cause for immediate disbarment, but no, apparently not.

I almost started a little rant about Ignaz Semmelweis before I got the joke. :P

Everything bad people said about web apps 20+ years ago has proved true.

It’s like, great, now we have consistent cross-platform software. But it’s all bloated, slow, and only “consistent” with itself (if even). The world raced to the bottom, and here we are. Everything is bound to lowest-common-denominator tech. Everything has all the disadvantages of client-server architecture even when it all runs (or should run) locally.

It is completely fucking insane how long I have to wait for lists to populate with data that could already be in memory.

But at least we’re not stuck with Windows-only admin consoles anymore, so that’s nice.

All the advances in hardware performance have been used to make it faster (more to the point, “cheaper”) to develop software, not faster to run it.

For instance, a leaked 2009 Pepsi marketing presentation with language such as “The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations…our proposition is the establishment of a gravitational pull to shift from a transactional experience to an invitational expression …”

uhhh okay this is tough. how about:

Pepsi is known for waves (maybe lmao? i genuinely don’t know what perimeter oscillations is trying to say). We want to make people feel like buying Pepsi isn’t just buying something but is an invitation.

LOL that one’s a mess.

“Perimeter oscillations” sounds to me like a way to describe shifts in consumer opinions and preferences. A really dumb way. But who knows? Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of marketing execs?

I get the same feeling from corpo-speak as I get from bad poetry. Like the author runs all their ideas through a few rounds of mutations, out of fear of being seen as simple. The goal is not to be understood, but to make yourself harder to criticize.

I see a lot of “expletive deleted” and… “big pussy”. The first was used as a joke in futurama. The second doesn’t ring a bell.

Same experience here. Swype was the original and somehow after all these years still the best?! Or maybe I’m misremembering because my standards were lower back then.

GBoard is noticeably better then Heliboard. I still use Heliboard but it is frustrating sometimes, to the point where I wonder if I should just start typing with my thumbs instead. Might be faster on the whole, since I sometimes lose 5-10 seconds correcting the swipos.

I will start submitting gesture data ASAP. The keyboard world needs this.

Wrong about…what? The direct quote from GrapheneOS? It is a direct quote.

Blocked.

“It will initially be flagships similar to the current generation Motorola Signature, Motorola razr fold and Motorola razr ultra since those will be the 2027 devices meeting our requirements including the expected updates and hardware memory tagging but it can expand over time,”

This is great news in general, but it’s also a bit of a bummer that it will (at least initially) be limited to extremely expensive phones. The recently-announced Moto Signature has “a starting MSRP of €999”.

But MSRP is a joke so I really have no idea what the street price will be in practice.

What fresh hell is this?

Yes. Even the more reputable VPNs make ridiculous claims in their marketing.

Like, if you’re worried about hackers stealing your credit card, you don’t need a VPN. You need a chill pill.

Sort of. But the sorting algorithm is not so simple that you can call it neutral or natural.

I don’t think the details of Reddit’s ranking algorithm are public. Even within a single sub, it’s not as simple as counting user votes. That’s weighed against age, and all sorts of fuzzy bot/fraud detection mechanisms. I think Reddit intentionally injects noise into the system. You’ll see phantom votes all the time to keep things “balanced”.

And then in /all, I believe some subreddits are banned entirely, and again it’s not as simple as “most votes” or “most votes weighed against age”.

Here’s a Chicago Tribune article from 2016 that mentions the change I mentioned before: https://www.chicagotribune.com/2016/12/01/reddit-to-crack-down-on-most-toxic-users-of-pro-trump-forum/

Reddit had to change one of its algorithms over the summer to try to stop r/the_Donald from dominating the board that displays all of Reddit’s content, known as r/all.

It’s light on details and again, I don’t think details were ever published. Reddit is closed-source so really it’s anybody’s guess how they’re really ranking posts.

/r/all was also algorithmically curated. Not to mention easily and heavily gamed by bots, trolls, and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.

That’s how we got Trump in the first place. /r/the_donald was constantly shoved in everyone’s face, and even Reddit had to eventually admit the system was compromised. IIRC they adjusted the algorithm in an attempt to counterbalance it sometime around…2017? I forget exactly but it was definitely too late.

Lemmy’s not structurally better in that regard, unfortunately. If we’re not already inundated with bots and other malefactors (big if tbh), it’s just because we’re not big enough to attract them yet.

You’ll think I’m crazy, and you’re not wrong, but: sneakernet.

Every time I run the numbers on cloud providers, I’m stuck with one conclusion: shit’s expensive. Way more expensive than the cost of a few hard drives when calculated over the life expectancy of those drives.

So I use hard drives. I periodically copy everything to external, encrypted drives. Then I put those drives in a safe place off-site.

On top of that, I run much leaner and more frequent backups of more dynamic and important data. I offload those smaller backups to cloud services. Over the years I’ve picked up a number of lifetime cloud storage subscriptions from not-too-shady companies, mostly from Black Friday sales. I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of most of them and it doesn’t look like they’re going to fold anytime soon. There are a lot of shady companies out there so you should be skeptical when you see “lifetime” sales, but every now and then a legit deal pops up.

I will also confess that a lot of my data is not truly backed up at all. If it’s something I could realistically recreate or redownload, I don’t bother spending much of my own time and money backing it up unless it’s, like, really really important to me. Yes, it will be a pain in the ass when shit eventually hits the fan. It’s a calculated risk.

I am watching this thread with great interest, hoping to be swayed into something more modern and robust.

I love Debian. I’ve bounced around distros a lot, for various reasons, but I’ll always have a soft spot for Debian.

The problem with reputations — both in terms of Linux distros and just in general — is that they tend to reflect conventional wisdom from 10-20 years ago. Sometimes that conventional wisdom was off-base from the start, and sometimes it’s just outdated.

Like, “Debian is hard” and “Ubuntu is great for beginners”. That was true enough 20 years ago. But today, not really.

My last distro-hop was to Bazzite because Debian didn’t have the latest GPU drivers that I needed (Debian 13 “Trixie” does now, btw). It was just bad timing that I upgraded to a brand-new GPU toward the end of Debian 12’s life cycle. If I’d waited another 6 months (or if I didn’t need good OpenCL/ROCm/Vulkan performance) I probably would’ve stuck with Debian.

I’m fine on Bazzite, but I feel like if I ever hop again, it’ll be back to Debian. Now that I am comfortable with DistroBox, I won’t worry so much about older application packages in Debian repos; if push comes to shove I’ll just run it in a Fedora box or something like that. Drivers are the only thing to worry about, and I’m not likely to upgrade my GPU again for 5+ years so I should be fine.

There are a million of these out there. Most of them suck. Many are, at best, ethically gray. Even the better ones spy on you in a hundred different ways.

I’d love something that actually didn’t suck, but “185 million dollar AI startup” doesn’t sound promising to me.

The big problem with the concept is that there’s money to be made by gaming the system and nobody is good at that cat and mouse game. AI could theoretically help, but let’s be real: it’s just going to scrape the same 100 identical Amazon referral listicles you’d get in a Google search, with an extra sprinkling of ads.

They could also just quit the yearly refresh cycle. Apple went several years between SE updates. Google could do the same. With changes this minor, why bother? It’s just a marketing gimmick to trick uninformed consumers.

Buy a 9a for cheaper. You can probably even get a regular Pixel 9 for cheaper.

I agree with what you’re saying; I just don’t see it in Ake’s behavior (perhaps because I am a few episodes behind).

I haven’t seen her behave irresponsibly or take the safety of her students lightly. Lounging and going barefoot are not safety issues, unless you consider all forms of unconventionality to be unprofessional, and all forms of unprofessionalism to be irresponsible.

What I see in Ake is someone who takes her job seriously, and is conscientious about what deserves her care and attention – and what doesn’t.

Posts on Twitter can get flagged with “Community Notes”, generally to advise readers about inaccuracies and lies.

Apparently “Community Note” has been verbed, without so much as a hyphen.

Yuck.

“Gets Community Noted” is such an awkward turn of phrase.

Do you think she’s acting like a teenager in a substantive way, or just in her style?

I like her irreverent attitude and I don’t consider that childish. She doesn’t act impulsively, thoughtlessly, or disrespectfully. She takes her job seriously. She intentionally goes against the grain of traditional military stuffiness because she is decidedly not trying to train a military.

The underlying military culture of classic Trek made sense at the time, but we can do better. I’m actually optimistic about SFA and that’s almost entirely thanks to Hunter’s portrayal of Ake.