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Liome , in Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app
@Liome@pawb.social avatar

DoorDash is backed by investment giant Softbank, which this week posted a record-breaking loss of nearly $13bn.

Defending the loss, chief executive Masayoshi Son reportedly compared himself to Jesus.

Holy fuck, imagine the ego.

stealth_cookies ,

Masayoshi Son's business acumen is only matched by Elon Musk.

derbis ,

That's funny but I think Son is easily the dumbest billionaire. He's also the bag-holder for the whole WeWork grift. Got more dollars than brain cells.

rwhitisissle ,

I mean, Jesus famously overcharged on delivery and transaction fees when feeding the masses with all that miraculously created bread and fish while also losing 13 billion dollars in the process, somehow, right?

No, wait, I'm thinking of a different guy...

Jessica ,
cygnus , in The problem with GIMP
@cygnus@lemmy.ca avatar

I think the UI and lack of non-destructive editing is holding it back more than the name, but IDK

corbin OP ,

Yeah, the destructive editing and lack of a content aware fill is made me stop using it and go back to Photoshop. Krita also seems more usable these days in the FOSS world. The name is a lot easier to fix than those missing features, though.

christophski ,
bastion ,

Near death experience?

Martineski ,

Ima skip this update and go straight to the next one when it releases.

Kissaki ,
@Kissaki@beehaw.org avatar

for ADE - the actual death experience?

christophski ,

Yeah, every install comes with a hit of DMT

pixel , (edited )
@pixel@pawb.social avatar

the UI for GIMP is so horrifically bad that I basically refuse to use it. Not like, on principal or anything, if it improves i'd be happy to give it a shot, but because every experience I've had with it has been pretty immediately negative, and finding solutions to problems I have seems more effort than its worth. I want gimp to be good, it's a mature piece of software with a lot going for it, but it also feels like its design is kind of up its own ass, in a sense? It's weird.

cygnus ,
@cygnus@lemmy.ca avatar

I know what you mean — it's like a 90s design paradigm that doesn't take current conventions or best practices into account at all.

westyvw ,

Thank goodness. I hate most current UI.

It's funny that one thing I really liked about it was the floating windows and toolbar. Then everyone complained and they brought it all together. But now people I work with using software that we pay nearly a million dollars to license are getting all excited becuase they introduced.... floating windows.

DdCno1 ,

The thing is, floating windows were absolutely useless in the age of 13 - 17" CRTs. On modern ultrawide or even just conventional widescreen displays, they make far more sense.

ultratiem ,
@ultratiem@lemmy.ca avatar

Normally I wouldn’t take comments like this to heart. But I tried the latest beta recently after maybe 15y and wow. You’re totally bang on. I was stunned how bad the UI was. How bad the app was. Upon reading this, it all just sort of makes sense.

I’m sad things are so bad on the Linux front that this is the most highly rated design tool. Linux community deserves better.

pixel , (edited )
@pixel@pawb.social avatar

The sad thing is like, it's an INCREDIBLY mature piece of software. It's well regarded for a reason. But if a piece of software requires that I fight with it to get it to behave how I want, that maturity has zero value at all. It kind of feels like a microcosm of Linux itself like 10-15 years ago, when I was tinkering with it in middle and high school. It's functional, but it asks you as a user to change how you think about using something like it in the first place while also forcing you to make concessions that seldom seem worthwhile.

And if Linux at large can get there, with things like proton and flatpak and Wayland and mature desktop environments and whatever else, gimp can too. But it seems like it's got a contributor base of people that like it's weird eccentricities, and take the UX development companies like Adobe and affinity (now canva) have invested and just shirked it on principal. And like, I get having an aversion to those sorts of companies/projects/developments, there's a lot of dark patterns there that are concerning. But I also feel like the kind of Linux user that defends and possibly enjoys GIMP in its current state is content fighting with their machine and the software on it, and forgets that there's value in taking joy in interacting with your computer. Good UI and good UX are implicitly valuable (not to mention the accessibility benefits, but that's a whole different conversation), and I feel the FOSS space forgets all of that completely. It's a shame.

ultratiem ,
@ultratiem@lemmy.ca avatar

Yeah spot on. It’s pushing 30. And what’s even more wild is that a road to good UX has already been mapped out. By Sketch. By Figma. By Photoshop. By Pixelmator. By Infinity Design. The list is endless. I haven’t seen anything stay so bad. In fact when I used it some 15y ago, I felt it to have been better than it currently is. The UI was at least close to Ps, which is actually quite intuitive (or used to be around 2019).

UX is gold. I used Sketch for work (we have Macs at the studio) and then were forced to switch to Figma. Since Figma is electron, it can’t hook into the OS like Sketch can. That meant the loss of edge snapping, specifically the handles on the vector lines. I felt that tiny itty bitty little loss in my bones. It made using Figma as a whole belaboured in comparison to Sletch (which I feel is near the pinnacle of UX).

Adobe Ai is also a good example of bad UX. That app is so backwards in the way it works and so eclectic in its feature deployment that you can’t just jump into it like you can say Ps. It feels like say Blender without any 3D knowledge.

reka ,

There's always been a real stick in the mud attitude with GIMP. No matter how many people cry out about it's confusing UX it's always tried to serve the existing userbase rather than design to expand its usefulness to more people. I think this is a shame and is why GIMP never achieved what Blender has.

I remember trying to use it the best part of 20 years ago when I wanted to make animated gifs. It was so hard to use it was easier to pirate photoshop/imageready. Then a year or so back I tried to use it as I had moved to being a Linux user and was kind of astonished that the UX was still so bloody hostile.

I don't think I'm a moron (though how many morons do... so take this with a pinch of salt) but trying to figure out how to do basic things like cut and paste, cropping etc. without reading documentation just goes hellishly wrong. Any time I take the time to follow a guide on how to use it I'm taken aback by how unintuitive it is and once I'm done I forget it's idiosyncrasies immediately.

I remember "gimpshop" being a thing at one point, which I never got to use but heard it used the processing of GIMP with a more photoshop like UX. Though I believe that project lapsed.

Anyway, yeah it'd be nice in a world where things like GNOME have become such beautiful UXes that projects like GIMP have the courage to revolutionise themselves.

livus ,

Having spent ages trying to adopt it and failing like 20+ years ago it's just crazy to me that every time I give it another chance, it still doesn't have non destructive editing and is still a non-intuitive UI from hell. It feels like they want it to be like this.

Vitaly ,
@Vitaly@feddit.uk avatar

Have you tried to use Photogimp?

cygnus ,
@cygnus@lemmy.ca avatar

Yes and it does help tremendously, but I much prefer Krita. What I'd really like is Affinity Photo on Linux, even if it isn't FOSS...

Muscar ,

You might have missed the news, Affinity sold out to Canva. Really sucks, Affinity was the only truly good alternative but I put it in the mental "never touch" category immediately when that happened.

cygnus ,
@cygnus@lemmy.ca avatar

You might have missed the news, Affinity sold out to Canva.

Oh FFS, I had no idea... Can something not be turned to shit by big tech for once?

millie ,

I absolutely love the UI. It's literally a major part of why I prefer it.

reka ,

which is great for you, but not for anyone who has even briefly used more mainstream options

clmbmb , in The Paradox of Blackmarket Wired Bluetooth Apple Headphones

I don't understand why you don't blame Apple first of all for their methods of locking up open standards and/or modifying them just enough that non-apple products won't work.

I don't support Chinese companies for doing shitty products, but fuck Apple for everything they do to lock you in their "ecosystem."

hernanca ,

Yeah, I feel like oop reached the wrong conclusion after this. Apple treats its consumers as if they were mindless children and they (for some reason) love it. Just look at the whole "green texts" issue, for example.

Some manufacturers found a smart workaround but the apple brainrot is stronger, I guess.

ImADifferentBird ,
@ImADifferentBird@midwest.social avatar

I wouldn't call this a "smart workaround". I mean, I can hardly blame the opportunistic fucks for doing it this way, and certainly the original sin in Apple's licensing/certification bullshit, but it's just an amazingly stupid way of doing this all around, brought about by both Apple's and the earbud manufacturers' greed.

fmstrat ,

I think they thought they were in r/apple

dactylotheca , in don't use ladybird browser lol
@dactylotheca@suppo.fi avatar

Ah the two genders, male and political

kibiz0r ,

As an able-bodied neurotypical 30-something straight white cis male with a suburban middle class upbringing and an office job, I don’t participate in identity politics.

Butterbee ,
@Butterbee@beehaw.org avatar

Must be nice!

dactylotheca ,
@dactylotheca@suppo.fi avatar

I've had a conservative say essentially that to me but with a straight face. He was also convinced that white, cishet meat eater men are the most oppressed minority (literally what he said).

Parodying conservative opinions is completely impossible nowadays; any quip anybody can come up with will be an actual conservative opinion, pretty much no matter how ridiculously stupid it is.

papaya ,

My sibling's delightful ex-roommate--a conservative, 20something, middle-class, cishet white man--said that he feels very oppressed in their college town! He's always scared of saying what he thinks bc then everyone will think of him badly! Literally the most oppressed! (His actual words)

Thevenin , in New breakthrough may let us charge smartphones in 60 seconds

Yeah, no. This is not about chargers or batteries or phones or cars. This study is about improved charge/discharge rates for supercapacitors.

Supercaps have very high flow rate, but extremely low capacity. Put them in a phone or a car and it would run very fast for five minutes. Supercaps are useful, don't get me wrong, but they're not batteries.

Very cool research from UC Boulder, but the journalism leans way too far into clickbait.

cygnus ,
@cygnus@lemmy.ca avatar

Could you have a bunch of them and draw from them in sequence?

brie ,

Increasing capacitance (how much charge is stored to reach a certain voltage) or the voltage it is charged to would indeed increase the capacity. Putting several in parallel would work, as would making a bigger capacitor. The main problem as far as I can tell is that the energy density of even supercapacitors is low, so you'd need a much larger volume to have the same capacity (and thus a much thicker phone).

cygnus ,
@cygnus@lemmy.ca avatar

Thanks for this - I was doing some reading in the meantime which confirms what you're saying about power capacity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_electric_vehicle

As of 2010, the best ultracapacitors can only store about 5% of the energy that lithium-ion rechargeable batteries can, limiting them to a couple of miles per charge.

Thevenin ,

Yeah, this matches my experience.

A supercapacitor buffer will cost around twice as much and deliver around 1/10th the watt-hours of a similarly-sized lead acid battery. And lead acid isn't exactly great to begin with.

Capacitors are useful, but only in applications where the total amount of energy stored is more-or-less unimportant.

TonyTonyChopper ,
@TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz avatar

The bigger issue I would see is the heat created from dumping all that energy in at once. And can a US outlet even provide that much power?

Thevenin ,

Solid point. A laptop battery is around 60Wh, and charging that in 1 minute would pull 3.6kW from the outlet, or roughly double what a US residential outlet can deliver.

Supercaps stay pretty cool under high current charging/discharging, but your laptop would have to be the size of a mini fridge.

The research paper itself was only talking about using the tech for wearable electronics, which tend to be tiny. The article probably made the cars-and-phones connection for SEO. Good tech, bad journalism.

brie , in Windows 11 is now automatically enabling OneDrive folder backup without asking permission

As a reminder, you can always just uninstall OneDrive and call it a day.

Until Microsoft takes that option away as well....

NaibofTabr ,

Or just reinstalls it in the next update.

Moonrise2473 ,

They never reinstalled OneDrive after an update... yet

(I hate how I have to uninstall useless shit after updates)

narc0tic_bird ,
@narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee avatar

Yeah, it's also not "just" if it's one of what feels like hundreds of steps now to make the OS somewhat usable.

wagoner ,

I did that and it was a mess, with warnings about being unable to backup that I couldn't get rid of. I had to reinstall to try to turn off syncing, then remove again. But it's so integrated that my desktop is still under a OneDrive subfolder and it's still referenced in various places.

Is there a guide to completely removing this from Windows 11 cleanly?

derbis ,

It's ltsc an option for 11 like it was for 10?

wagoner ,

No idea but, after a quick search to learn what this is, I'm not sure how it would help were it to be an option.

derbis ,

You can disable so-called essential components and I believe it ships without almost any of the bloat. So essentially you could just take one drive out, or not have it in the first place. Or at least that's my hope

scrubbles , in Self-balancing commuter pods ride old railway lines on demand
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

Great, now we can have traffic but on these old rails.

How about, and I know this is a radical idea, actually fixing up the old rail lines and putting trains on them instead of this gimmick?

tonyn ,

This wouldnwork better on smaller scale, less traveled rural routes. Maintaining a whole ass train for a few dozen people is overkill. I kinda like this.

scrubbles ,
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

Depends on what you call a "whole ass train". Many of these routes could be easily service by a 1 or 2 car DMU like the rural routes in Scotland and Wales.

MadBob ,

There are stations on Anglesey where you have to stick your arm out to hail the train, and the only two routes they lie on are served by the kind of 1970s DMU like you mentioned on its way to Chester or a Pendelino on its way to London or something.

scrubbles ,
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

I've used those request stops! Those sort of rural lines are exactly what we're missing here in the states, just bouncing back and forth on the line. You can see here Americans don't even know what they are, but they're the perfect solution for these lines going between little towns

abbadon420 ,

That sounds more like a tram than a train

frog ,

They're definitely trains. I live next to a similar one. It is physically a train, with exactly the same hardware as trains on busier lines (though typically only hauling 1-2 carriages instead of 4+). It's just more fuel-efficient for a train to keep going through a station if nobody is getting on or off, so when passenger numbers are low, the practice is to let the driver know if you need on or off.

MadBob ,
frog ,

I live next to a railway line in the south west that is similar. A single train runs up and down the line. If you're on one of the stations, you wave to the train so it'll stop for you. If you're on the train and want to get off, you ask the driver to stop.

teawrecks ,

Seems like a train that uses both sides of the track fulfills different requirements. A train can only be made to go one way at a time, but can hold more people (increased bandwidth), but these smaller half-cars can be moving people in both directions at the same time (lower latency). Seems quite clever if it works out.

Alto ,
@Alto@kbin.social avatar

I know it's kinda cheating to bring them up in this context, but the Swiss manage to run trains to very small towns just fine

i_am_not_a_robot ,

Would it though? It's just vans on tracks instead of roads.

It's not going to be more energy efficient with individually powered cabs. It's not going to be more convenient unless your origin and destination are near a station. It's not going to be more time efficient because of the extra distance getting to and from tracks and because you aren't going to drive highway speeds in tiny self-balancing cars on old rails, especially when passing cars going the opposite direction. It's not going to be more cost efficient because it's more total moving parts requiring maintenance per person per trip.

It sounds like they are solving the problem of turning around only for terminal stations. This might make sense for trains that carry many people, but if you're making cars on tracks there is no good solution. If you need to spend money on a system that turns the cabs around, then you either spend more money installing those systems at most stations or you spend money maintaining cabs that are driving around empty. Either way, cars on roads are cheaper.

They say it's good for people who don't want to wait for public transit, but they don't say how this solves that problem. With public transit, you know when the train will be there. With this, unless they have a way for the cabs to wait at the station without blocking other cabs going the same direction, you have to wait for a cab to come and you can't time your trip to the station around when the cab will be there. Maybe they have one? It would be a disaster if you wanted to get on from near the middle and needed to wait for either a cab that has already been vacated to come or for a cab to come all the way from the start of the track.

erwan ,

OK, it's 2pm. With this system, you call a pod and ride it. With a rural train, you check the schedule and see that the next train is at 5pm. And you have to plan your trip back as well. Great, time to take your car.

And you might say "let's have trains run at least once per hour then". That means running empty trains all day, not sure it's the best way to spend public money.

i_am_not_a_robot ,

If your options are waiting at the station up to 2 hours for a pod or waiting anywhere else 3 hours for a train, are the pods better?

erwan ,

Obviously if the pods take 2h to arrive it's not worth it

Hawk ,

Old railway lines in Europe often aren't complete anymore and only cover relatively small distances.

There simply isn't enough infrastructure to handle a full train network and fixing them up would probably require existing infrastructure and buildings to be disowned and destroyed.

sabreW4K3 , in Google Search adds a “web” filter, because it is no longer focused on web results
@sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al avatar

Google under Sundar Pichai is a terrible company that only succeeds based on its size and monopoly. Let's be honest, they're saying that search results will become secondary as they push their service. How do you, as a CEO and board, sign off on an idea that kills most of your (ad) revenue pursuing something that you haven't even figured out how to monetize? Make it make sense.

doleo ,

Because these mutherfuckers don’t get seats on the hype train, they buy the entire carriage.

Hypx ,
@Hypx@fedia.io avatar

Google is basically ran like Boeing. Their goal is to maximum the stock price regardless of long-term consequences.

UnityDevice ,

All public companies are, it's just what Boeing makes things that fall out of the sky if they mess up, so it's more obvious.

master5o1 ,

I read this a few weeks ago about it.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

TachyonTele ,

Great read, thank you.

Sabata11792 ,

Green line go up today, get bonus. Red line tomorrow next guys problem.

petrescatraian ,
@petrescatraian@libranet.de avatar

search results will become secondary as they push their service

Oh, so they're gonna emphasize less on search results and more onto their half-arsed services that they're axing from time to time? This is so Google of them.

scrubbles , in New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

This is just a fucking privacy nightmare. We like to laugh and play here about Linux quite a bit, but holy shit this is the actual "If you're using Windows and expect privacy at all, this is it, you should throw that notion out the window."

I don't care how much encryption there is, or the assurance that it's only on your hard drive, I've sat in too many corporate meetings in my career to trust that. There is no way Microsoft is just letting you have that data and they're not reporting it out. Very least? They're using ML on it to aggregate what it sees in the screenshot, and then saving that. Worst case, they're saving it to an encrypted blob storage, calling that encrypted, and hiding deep in the ToS that you actually agreed to that (even though it said in the big letters it was local only, sorry woopsie in the small letters it said it's also stored there.)

Fuck, ignoring the obvious pron implications that I assume everyone here is immediately thinking of, think of HIPAA, think of the private communications with therapists that people have, think of all of the financial documents you've opened, think about bank accounts, chats, fucking everything.

ptz , (edited )
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

Worst case, they're saving it to an encrypted blob storage, calling that encrypted, and hiding deep in the ToS that you actually agreed to that

And then it's discovered that bucket was accidentally set to public for over 8 months. Oopsie daisy! But you can't sue us because also deep in the ToS was a forced arbitration clause.

Also, if you don't agree to the whole ToS, you can't use the computer you just paid for.

scrubbles ,
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

don't forget shared with our "Trusted 3rd party partners"

orca ,
@orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts avatar

Looks at the list of partners
762 partners total
🤯

Bishma ,
@Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

But they specifically said in their blog post that it has "privacy you can trust." Just imagine all the trust you have in Microsoft plus all the trust you have in the accuracy of AI and rest easy. Plus the AI runs locally so they can trust you to pay the power bill.

Don't think about how much money they could make with their business customers, based on telemetry alone.

applepie ,

Yeah at this point you must assume that they are mining that data one way or another. Paying for windows license has no meaning practically speaking. And yet we pay and they mine...

BCsven ,

I am so glad I switched to Linux 7 years ago. What an absolute shitshow Windows OS has become

applepie ,

Yeah having made the switch a while back and really happy about it. Mega corps are deff tightening the screws and this is just the start.

At this rate any self respecting adult will need to learn Linux lol

Every other month microshit creates a batch of Linux enjoyers.

ulkesh ,
@ulkesh@beehaw.org avatar

We like to laugh and play here about Linux quite a bit

We do? Aside from the "I use Arch, btw" memes, I must not have got that memo :) And, uhh...I use Arch, btw.

Fuck, ignoring the obvious pron implications that I assume everyone here is immediately thinking of, think of HIPAA, think of the private communications with therapists that people have, think of all of the financial documents you’ve opened, think about bank accounts, chats, fucking everything.

So much this. I'm glad I dumped Windows and this just guarantees that I'll never return.

ugo ,

if you’re using windows and expect any privacy at all […] throw that notion out the window

Correct. And the same is true even if you are using linux, macOS, android, or a butterfly to manipulate bits to send a message through the internet.

Because if your message ends up on the screen of a windows user, it’s also going to be eaten by AI.

And forget the notion of “anything you post on the internet is forever”, this is also true for private and encrypted comms now. At least as long as they can be decrypted by your recipient, if they use windows.

You want privacy and use linux? Well, that’s no longer enough. You now also need to make sure that none of your communications include a (current or future) windows user as they get spyware by default in their system.

Well maybe not quite by default, yet

EFrances ,

Meanwhile in the EU

Europe sets benchmark for rest of the world with landmark AI laws

""With the AI Act, Europe emphasizes the importance of trust, transparency and accountability when dealing with new technologies while at the same time ensuring this fast-changing technology can flourish and boost European innovation," he said.

The AI Act imposes strict transparency obligations on high-risk AI systems while such requirements for general-purpose AI models will be lighter.

It restricts governments' use of real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces to cases of certain crimes, prevention of terrorist attacks and searches for people suspected of the most serious crimes."

<snip>

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-countries-back-landmark-artificial-intelligence-rules-2024-05-21/

hydroptic , in The inside story of Elon Musk’s mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff

Musk, the employees said, was not pleased with Tinucci’s presentation and wanted more layoffs. When she balked, saying deeper cuts would undermine charging-business fundamentals, he responded by firing her and her entire 500-member team.

The dude's a petulant child. No wonder conservatives fawn over him.

bradorsomething ,

He’s Zorg from the 5th Element.

goferking0 ,

That's an insult to zorg

renard_roux ,

Zorg ZF-1s fired!

Mycatiskai ,

Zorg did mass layoffs to hurt the economy but help himself and his bottom line. Musk will likely hurt his company since he fired a whole team that was overseeing construction, purchasing, real estate agreements. Now no one is left who knows what is going on.

itsonlygeorge ,

Stable genius at work.

thevoiceofra , in Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training

>put messages into someone else's system
>don't read privacy policy
>someone else uses your messages
surprisedpikatchu.jpg

octopus_ink ,

Seriously. What would be surprising is if they were not. Proprietary System gonna Proprietary System.

sabreW4K3 OP ,
@sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al avatar

Just the other day, me and @rottingleaf "designed" a new messenger to combat things like this: https://lazysoci.al/comment/9619656

r4venw ,
@r4venw@kbin.social avatar

Your idea doesn't sound too difficult to implement but I don't know if people would want to store all these messages locally when the vast majority of people are used to having their shit be stored elsewhere. Additionally, if you wanted to target enterprise users, they would want to likely have all their messages centralised for auditing purposes

Other than that, I think its a pretty neat idea

sabreW4K3 OP ,
@sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al avatar

I think that's the issue. We're all so used to the idea of free storage and we're not cognizant of the consequences. If we start holding some of our chips in our own hands, all these corporations won't be able to sell us out and abuse us so easily.

Also thank you!

ptz , in Google is redesigning its search engine — and it’s AI all the way down
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

Sigh. AI has basically added a rocket booster to the enshittification train.

Hopefully this doesn't impact DDG.

godzilla_lives ,
@godzilla_lives@beehaw.org avatar

Hopefully it doesn't impact them too much. So tired of this AI train man.

ptz ,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

Same. I don't mind it as an option if that's what some people want, but stop "enhancing" the default experience with it and shoving it down my throat. No lo quiero.

Bishma ,
@Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I mentioned this in another thread, but I do worry that google is eventually going infect the APIs that metasearch engines like DDG, Kagi, searchxng, etc depend on.

In my experience, a lot of the sysadmins who run high traffic sites will treat all bots as scrapers that have to be blocked or slowed to a crawl. Then they make special allowances for googlebot, bing/msnbot, and a few others. That means there is a massive uphill climb (beyond the technical one) to making a new search engine from scratch. With Google and MS both betting the farm on LLMs I fear we're going to lose access to two of the most valuable web reverse indexes out there.

ptz ,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

I fear that as well. I use Searx-NG at home, so am expecting that to start dying a death of a thousand cuts soon.

Was thinking about standing up (or contributing to) either YaCY or Stract, but you made a good point about the bot allowances for the Googlebot et al crawler UAs. Wonder how frowned upon it would be to spoof the crawler UA in a self-hosted one?

Butterbee ,
@Butterbee@beehaw.org avatar

I've just started using Searxng.. you expect it to die soon? Is it because you expect other search engines to follow suit until there are no search engines anymore, only hallucination machines?

ptz ,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

s it because you expect other search engines to follow suit until there are no search engines anymore, only hallucination machines?

Basically, yeah.

Butterbee ,
@Butterbee@beehaw.org avatar

I hope there's enough of a market for non-ai content that it doesn't come to that. I think we already reached the pushback stage with image generation.

Bishma ,
@Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

When I was running a site, I had special rules in my firewall to look for things that said they were googlebot but which didn't come from one of googles published public IPs.

ptz ,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

......yeah.

I had that thought after I replied when I realized that most of the reputable search crawlers will publish the IPs/ranges they use in addition to the UA. The disreputable ones (cough Bytedance cough Xiaomi cough) will just spoof Chrome on Windows 10 and flood you with requests from AWS datacenters in Shanghai or Singapore.

That said, I may still continue looking into working with one of the actual self-hosted search engines (vs meta search) and see how well that works.

MajorHavoc , (edited )

Yeah. This is going to suck worse before it gets any better. The good news is that all the useful content (outside of sales gardens) is going to be here in the Fediverse.

The other good news is that the state of Cybersecurity investment is abysmal, and the walled garden content is going to get breached/leaked/pirated a lot, for a long time to come.

Ilandar ,

Oh, it will impact a lot more than one private search engine. Watch The AI Dilemma presentation given by Asa Razkin and Tristan Harris last year if you want an idea of what could be coming.

jarfil ,
@jarfil@beehaw.org avatar

Is coming, and more.
Very good video, with good points. Slightly outdated already, with AutGPT being a thing.
What's coming, is going to be orders of magnitude more than what they predicted in that video.

Ilandar ,

Slightly outdated already, with AutGPT being a thing.

That's the really disturbing thing and what makes this challenge so different to all others humanity has faced to date. I think Asa even referenced in the presentation that some of his slides were going out of date on a daily basis, that's how fast the technology was moving.

jarfil ,
@jarfil@beehaw.org avatar

Yup.

They also correctly identify the function of LLMs as a glue between siloed AIs. We have barely seen the beginning of that, but as the AI race continues, it seems likely that some LLM models will be created that will have less human language, and more "interop language". Where nowadays LLMs can be somewhat probed for words and relationships, we'll have zero chance to probe an LLM using tokens that are part of some made up (by the AIs) interop language. Black boxes inside black boxes.

A naive approach will be to "democratize AI", and that will surely be better than centralized AIs responding to every query... but won't solve the deepening of inscrutability.

One point made me chuckle: when they showed the graphs for cualitative jumps above certain network size. Recently someone commented about the "diminishing returns" and "asymptotic growth" of making a LLM larger and larger... but also so it was in these models: diminishing returns all the way up to a point... followed by a sudden exponential jump until the next asymptote. The truth is we don't know where the asymptotes and exponential jumps lie, we don't even have a remote hypothesis about it.

Bartsbigbugbag , in Gabe Newell, the Man Behind Steam, Is Working on a Brain-Computer Interface

This is rather old news, predating Neuralink entirely even. There used to be an unlisted YouTube video by Gray(Grey?) Newell that showed off what they were working on back a few years ago, too.

mozz OP ,
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev avatar

Yeah. I've been out of the loop apparently, because today was the first that I heard of it.

averyminya ,

Haha glad that I brought it up on your radar! I like this one cause it seems much more medically oriented, vs. Neurolink existing "just because it can".

Which normally, I don't really have an issue with. I think it's great to do things just because we can (within reason ofc!), but I am definitely more skeptical of the fraud-Hyperloop flamethrower space-car man.

mozz OP ,
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev avatar

Yeah. Gaben has a strong track record of bringing technology to the market that works, from a company that wasn't already around and doing things better overall before he got involved with it.

firecat ,

Not the strongest because Steam Machines with Alienware had problems and way too early during development of Proton that games couldn’t handle well. The controller was stolen IP and is still currently fighting the lawsuit. VR games are not great as people expected and rarely do new VR games arrived. Leaving the VR headset in storage for mostly the owners life. Lastly, the Steam Deck original has problems and announced updates or free ifix fixes just to not have drifting problems. Still the Steam Deck after the original has some issues with compatibility and deleting their data every update.

The company has poor track records for hardware. Valve is like the Sony of gaming, they lie about stuff and make you sign up to download the game in their closed ecosystem.

mozz OP ,
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev avatar

I hadn't heard of most of this, and it's sort of an avalanche, so I picked out one particular part to check out in a lot of detail and see if it held up.

The controller was stolen IP

Looks to me like they had buttons on the back of the controller in some way which infringed on one of 105 patents that SCUF holds on specific parts of controller design, and they sued Valve a year after Valve had stopped using the design anyway.

I'm not qualified to say whether SCUF actually invented something no one else would have thought of, and then Valve deliberately copied them on it, but I'm skeptical. I lean a little more towards the side of "SCUF patented something somewhat obvious, and then wanted Valve to pay them rent in order to set their buttons up in a sensible fashion."

But at the very least, saying that it's demonstrated that it was "stolen" is, to me, not accurate.

and is still currently fighting the lawsuit

This part is objectively not true, unless there's some glacially slow appeals process I'm not aware of. It looks like the whole thing finished in 2021. Am I wrong?

averyminya ,

I've had conversations with this person before, in my opinion many of the things they fault Valve for are... extreme nitpicking.

Also, IMO Corsair's patents are BS and are drastically inhibiting accessibility controller availability. Their stranglehold on something as simple as buttons on the backside of a controller shouldn't be lauded.

mozz OP ,
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev avatar

Yeah. I was around in the games industry way back when the big publishers had a total stranglehold on the whole arena, and Steam was this magic thing that enabled non-AAA games to actually break in in a big way and achieve sales above the double digits, and on top of that I generally like Valve's games. I was sort of wondering if this is a "live long enough to see yourself become the villain" type of thing, where my good feelings towards Valve aren't warranted anymore in the present day.

But, judging by what I saw when I grabbed one of this person's assertions at random and held it up to the light to examine in it detail for objective truth, I don't think it's based on a reasoned and objective basis. What it is based on, I have no idea.

bolexforsoup , (edited )
spoiler

sdfsaf

jarfil ,
@jarfil@beehaw.org avatar

Neuralink has a technology that specifically addresses two of the main issues with BCI: data density, and implant effective duration.

There are more issues, but it addresses those two in particular, which is something quite interesting to see, and can be turned into patents that can be sold to other BCI initiatives.

The rest of Musk is... well, he's kind of an "unstable genius", with enough money to blow on random moonshots, marketing stunts, and random publicity. Honestly, if I had his money, I'd probably do the same: build a few core businesses, then go on tangents to see what sticks to the wall. It can all still be seen under the general theme of "colonizing Mars" though, which is a guiding starshot as good as any, with Hyperloop and Boring company having kind of exhausted what can be done on Earth, Tesla being a borderline failure, SpaceX, StarLink, or indoor farming working pretty well, and X being an experiment at social manipulation.

averyminya ,

Taking his ethics and actions out of the equation for a second -- I would have no issues with his businesses weren't scamming states out of legitimate transportation and fucking with people just because he could.

While dangerous, I'm not really against the idea of selling flamethrowers, kind of. It is kind of the American right, which may be dumb, but fuck if I have anything to say about it. And while it produces a lot of space junk, I'm not against Starlink or SpaceX. especially the former since it does do a lot of good. Coverage in the middle of the U.S. is not good, and anything more is good.

Ultimately what it comes down to is the fact that the more money tends to side on less regulation, and reintroducing ethics and actions into the mix he is abusing that. The flamethrower ploy could have been snark against the United States for not having regulation on that (if it were something that were actually important, that may have mattered...), and similarly the Hyperloop scheme could have been some form of commentary on how easy it is for a billionaire to manipulate voters with obvious pipe-dreams, then gone ahead with the high speed train plan.

Instead, he gets butthurt and lashes out. I know we're on the same page, if anything I'm disappointed specifically because he is in a position to be doing a lot of good, has convinced some people that he is.

Annoyed_Crabby ,

Neurolink existing "just because it can".

"Aperture Science, we do what we must because we can"

You guys seeing this shit?

Joke aside, iirc Neurolink already been used on disabled people, allowing them to use a computer easily. Whether it will have any use case on healthy people it's still not clear so far.

DarkSirrush ,

Neurolink has been used on 1 disabled person, and it was "working" for about 2 weeks before it was announced there are "problems" with the connection to the brain.

Oh, and it has killed a bunch of monkeys.

Plume , in Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training
@Plume@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar
  1. "Alright guys, it's time to leave Slack for a better alternative!"
  2. Proceeds to migrate to yet another proprietary and centralized piece of software.
  3. It happens again.
  4. "Alright guys, it's time to leave [insert software name here] for a better alternative!"
  5. Proceeds to migrate to yet another proprietary and centralized piece of software, again.
  6. It happens again, again.
  7. Clown moment.

It's what's going to happen. It's what always happens. And on a side note, by the way, I guaran-fucking-tee you that it's what's going to eventually happen with Discord as well. I have zero doubt about it.

sabreW4K3 OP ,
@sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al avatar

I'm surprised that Slack beat Discord to it.

But yeah, you're right. We need to invest our time, energy and support into self hosted solutions.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I mean, if the Threadiverse has enough volume to be useful, someone -- probably many people -- are going to be logging and training things off it too.

applepie ,

That's the nature of public shit posting.

The real issue is that tech creeps and other pests think they own my shit posting.

SineSwiper ,
@SineSwiper@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Do you know how to break the cycle? Use open-source software. Use standard protocols that aren't locked behind some greedy corporation.

Why not take the features from Discord/Slack and integrate it into a new IRC or Jabber protocol?

Thann ,
@Thann@lemmy.ml avatar

Mumble hasn't fed any of my data to a megacorp!

Plume ,
@Plume@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Has anybody tried Revolt? It looks really cool. Like a proper open source alternative to Discord. But I never had the opportunity to try it with anyone, so I don't know.

jlow ,
@jlow@beehaw.org avatar

Interesting, the name sounds familiar, it's not based on Matrix and they're planning encrypted messages. Oh, you can self-host it!

eveninghere ,

Technically, being open source or free ala GPL isn't enough. Protocols aren't enough.

You need a guarantee that you own your data.

Megaman_EXE ,

At this point, I think the genie is out of the bottle. I feel like unless you're on some p2p encrypted chat, anything typed into the internet is getting scraped. I'm sure everyone at this point has had at least one comment scraped and used for language model stuff.

I don't like it. But it seems like corporations will always find ways to make money off of other people no matter what

B0rax ,

To be honest, if someone thought that public things on the internet are not getting scraped, I am not sure what to tell them…
Search engines have been doing it since the beginning of search engines, it is no wonder that the same would be done to train AI.

eveninghere ,

Corporations are bad and yet still follow laws (in the west). The bigger issue is state actors. Especially the non-democratic ones.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

I honestly don't get the outage over that. I feel like I'm in the minority on that, though. I don't care if linguistic statics are gathered from my public comments. Knock yourself out.

This story is about "private" messages on a free hosted service, and I think their users are just being naive if they think this is beyond the pale. But I get the feeling of violation at least a little.

Bartsbigbugbag ,

It’s not no matter what. It’s under the system we have they are not only not punished for doing so, they are heavily incentivized to do so. There are ways to punish bad actors that de-incentivize other potential bad actors, our politicians actively choose to prioritize these bad actors ability to do harm over the well being of the population.

scrubbles , in Tesla is already pulling back Supercharger plans after firing team
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

Jesus when are stockholders going to realize what he's like at the helm and kick him out of CEO? This is the first thing I've heard about Musk doing anything with Tesla since Twitter happened. How do stockholders trust this man. Throwing away everything about him, this is an absent CEO who learned about one project that everyone was watching, he comes in, kicks down the door, and first response is to fire the whole team. To me, that says "this company is a shitshow"

Vodulas OP ,

There is one stockholder that has tried multiple times. The issue is the whole Tesla board are all his cronies, and a large portion of stockholders have bought into the cult of personality

drdiddlybadger ,
@drdiddlybadger@pawb.social avatar

It's amazing that someone with such a garbage personality has a cult of personality.

Bitrot ,
@Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Before his Twitter addiction it was much easier to think of him as a rich genius like you see in comic books, mostly since nobody knew what he was thinking. He’s also managed a celebrity-like persona that someone like robot Mark Zuckerberg could never pull off. That and money will always get hangers on.

4th_Times_A_Charm ,

It is not uncommon

intensely_human ,

It’s the weird magic of leftist reality: Elon Musk of all people has a cult of personality. The man is the most boring person I’ve ever heard speak, ever, and yet somehow he’s just coasting on this “cult of personality”.

Either he’s breaking all the molds, or there was no mold to begin with.

Vodulas OP ,

Musk isn't left though? He is very far right. He gained popularity by keeping quiet (at first) and doing stuff like promising not to sue companies that use their patents, and developing a ton of EV infrastructure. Turns out he couldn't keep his mouth shut and is also just a rich asshole. But a lot of people bought in early and made loving Elon a personality trait. So here we are

anlumo ,

It’s the confidence with which he sprouts his nonsense. People flock to confident personalities, because they must know a lot of things (presumably).

Moonrise2473 ,

not only the board won't fire him, but probably would even vote towards approving that bonus he's craving

KingThrillgore ,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

I have no doubt he will get his blasted pay raise, but it went from being a "surefire bet" to a "bet" in the past few weeks. Collapses usually start slow and then they pick up speed

teawrecks ,

Maybe he's looking to retire and the board wants to make whoever follows him look like a godsend.

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