TheGrandNagus

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TheGrandNagus ,

The fact that the US allows companies to flat out steal your device during a repair process is insane. This is theft. Actual straight up theft.

Surely this doesn't even need any new laws - I'm pretty sure theft is already illegal

TheGrandNagus ,

Funny thing is, I find myself forced to use the command prompt more in Windows than I do the terminal in Linux. And don't get me started on the absolute nightmare that the windows registry is.

TheGrandNagus ,

if you live on an island for generations with limited new genetic input...well, thats where you end up.

Literally the most diverse country in Europe lol

TheGrandNagus ,

Man if this is effective in both cost and a high efficacy rate, then I'm so down, assuming I don't experience awful side effects.

I had the unfortunate experience of a manipulative woman lying about using protection, and it led to me developing a fear of others doing the same. It severely effected my dating/sex life all through my 20s.

If either party (or both!) can take easily-attainable birth control, it'd be so much better than we have it now.

It's a shame that male birth control has been so much more difficult to develop, probably due to the male reproductive system not relying on a cycle that can be quite easily interrupted.

TheGrandNagus ,

Yes, we all know condoms exist, thank you for your input.

TheGrandNagus , (edited )

Exactly. I know it's easy to automatically froth at the mouth with rage when seeing "AI", and here anything mentioning it gets automatically rejected, but there are genuinely good usecases.

Amazing speech synthesis and recognition is useful for anybody, but especially people with certain disabilities.

Much better translation, spell checking, help with writing. Helping people understand texts that are written in a complicated way (legalese, technical jargon, condensing EULA's, etc)

Infrastructure planning and traffic control.

Grid energy usage and distribution.

Image recognition, useful for anybody for things like searching a photo library for a specific thing, but also for people with visual issues who previously had to rely on awful screen reader software.

Spotting fake reviews, a massive issue online. Flagging bot accounts.

The potential for them to take over some jobs and free up people to pursue other things in life.

This technology, if trained ethically, and not used to siphon more data from people, is amazing. It's how megacorps are using it that's the problem.

TheGrandNagus , (edited )

To be fair, that did improve things for the average person, and by a staggering amount.

The vast majority of people working before the industrial revolution were lowly paid agricultural workers who had enormous instability in employment. Employment was also typically very seasonal, and very hard work.

That's before we even get into things like stuff being made cheaper, books being widely available, transport being opened up, medical knowledge skyrocketing, famines going from regular occurrence to rare occurrence, etc as a result of the industrial revolution.

We had been on a constant trajectory of everyone getting wealthier up until the late 1970s where afterwards we saw a sharp rise in inequality, a trend that hasn't stopped. (Thatcher and her other shithead twin Reagan?)

In the mid 70s, the top 1% owned 19.9% of wealth. Now that figure is around 53%.

TheGrandNagus ,

Marketing terms mean nothing. SMIC's nodes are nowhere near the real transistor density of TSMC's or even Intel's.

But what's worse than that are the yields. I don't believe we have public numbers on their newest node yet, but their self-reported yields on their "7nm" process as of late 2022 was a pathetic 10-15%. TSMC's 7nm yield (and you should remember that TSMC's 7nm is vastly superior to SMIC's) was getting over 70% yield when it was in pre-production trialing.

TheGrandNagus ,

Not what I said, but thank you for contributing that strawman to the conversation.

TheGrandNagus ,

Relies on people actually using Signal, which is an immediate non-starter unfortunately.

TheGrandNagus , (edited )

Americans on Lemmy/Reddit always say this, but it's not easy.

WhatsApp is essentially SMS. If you don't use WhatsApp, you're gonna have a bad time. You won't be contacted by friends or family, you'll struggle to make friends or get dates, you won't receive 2FA codes for a load of services, in some places even government stuff is done via WhatsApp.

WhatsApp is about as optional as having an email address. You basically need it unless you want to live as a hermit.

TheGrandNagus , (edited )

And yet it's out there in droves on mainstream sites, completely without issue. Drawings and animations are pretty unpoliced.

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the moderator]

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    TheGrandNagus ,

    ???

    An abortion is an induced termination of a pregnancy.

    HRT pills are not that.

    TheGrandNagus , (edited )

    Not really. "Take your card out of your wallet, and instead of putting it in the machine and typing your pin, you just tap it against the screen"

    Vs "well, ok. I set up a wallet for you. No it's not a real wallet, it's on your computer. Anyway, your wallet has this huge long code that you can't remember, so keep it safe, because if you lose it you lose all your money, ok? Right, well before you buy anything, you'll need to register with an exchange, there are a number of exchanges, like XYZ, so sign up with one of those, then — wait what do you mean you don't know how? Just give them your email and whatever else they need.... you don't know your email address? Christ on a bike. Ok we'll sort that out soon — anyway, back to the exchange... go onto their site and trade your cryptocurrency (the weird money in your wallet... no not your real wallet, grandad, your computer wallet), now you need to wait a while for the transaction to happen and you to receive your money. Now you can go to the shop and pay by card. Amazing, isn't it? And it'll only get better when everywhere accepts [coin], I'm sure that'll happen any day now!"

    TheGrandNagus , (edited )

    generally

    I don't think that's how the typical guy/gal you'd bump into on the street uses their bank balance.

    TheGrandNagus , (edited )

    I have no like of transaction fees but... you know they exist in the cryptocurrency world right? And that they're generally higher? Those transactions take work and aren't done out of charity.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    Translation: actual currencies can be used to purchase energy, but cryptocurrency cannot.

    What you're saying is precisely like saying "I know a guy that trades turnips for money. Therefore turnips are a great currency that you can buy anything with."

    TheGrandNagus ,

    I get you're desperately trying to sound smart, but in this context, "energy" meant electricity. Because that's what it takes to produce cryptocurrency. Not the general definition in the realm of physics study. And electricity can most certainly be created and destroyed.

    When you buy gold, you have the gold. It's backed by the thing you have.

    When you buy cryptocurrency, you don't have the electricity that was spent in fabricating those numbers. You don't get sent a battery in the post. You have nothing.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    Any day now bruh, trust me

    TheGrandNagus ,

    If it made sense they'd be doing it, no?

    TheGrandNagus ,

    Where are these laws that state energy companies cannot accept crypto as payment?

    TheGrandNagus ,

    Again trying to sound smart. You have nothing tangible. You have numbers on a screen, and for some people that's enough to throw money at.

    Nice attempt at moving the goalposts, btw.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    The only currency I give a damn about is gold-pressed latinum, damn it!

    TheGrandNagus , (edited )

    Exactly. If dumbphones made a comeback, companies would simply achieve it by presenting the user with a dumb UI while the data harvesting would still go on in the background.

    I guess there's the valid argument that you'd be doing less on your phone so there'd be less to spy on, but there'd still be spying, and much of it would simply be shifted to the user's PC instead of a smartphone. Guess what, spying is rife there too.

    The answer to stopping the spying is privacy laws that put people, and their privacy, above tax-dodging multinationals.

    TheGrandNagus , (edited )

    I don't think that's true at all.

    When the UK was in the EU, UKIP was their largest party. For France, Le Pen's National Front party was the largest. And they aren't alone. There's a number of right wing EU parties.

    And it's due to get worse, if we bring data into it. Many countries in the EU are swinging to the right. Polling is indicating right wing parties will have a solid majority in the EU parliament this year.

    TheGrandNagus , (edited )

    Tbf if you actually look into Mozilla's "AI" plans, it's for stuff like better offline translation, better screen reader and image description functionality for disabled users, finding alternate sources for articles, and so on.

    It all runs locally, is trained on open source models with ethically sourced training data, and doesn't send your personal information to Mozilla.

    I don't think it should be treated in the same way as Google or Microsoft's AI implementations. People should actually look into things before they assume they know everything.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    Yeah. He explicitly stated that the only thing stopping them flipping the switch were those damn pesky road laws

    Google's call-scanning AI could dial up censorship by default, privacy experts warn ( techcrunch.com )

    A feature Google demoed at its I/O confab yesterday, using its generative AI technology to scan voice calls in real time for conversational patterns associated with financial scams, has sent a collective shiver down the spines of privacy and security experts who are warning the feature represents the thin end of the wedge. They...

    TheGrandNagus ,

    IIRC it was, then the EU stopped it. I don't know if they still do it outside of the EU.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    Newer ones don't. They're usually dead in 2-4 years.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    Loads of young people use Instagram. And Messenger. And WhatsApp. Some have Threads. They own a few shitty mobile games companies.

    Then on top of that Facebook collects data for third parties too via their ad network.

    Going after Meta for this is 100% justified.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    Of course it would've been better if it were present from the beginning. But I'm not going to complain about them doing the right thing now.

    And EU fines so far have proven to be quite the motivator. These aren't the baby fines the US hands out.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    Company tries to cut costs by outsourcing to another company with lowly paid employees in another country, often India or Pakistan, where the outsourced labour (that all too frequently hasn't been properly trained in the company's procedures) often doesn't share the same first language leading to misunderstandings, made worse by the difference in office hours meaning the teams often can't communicate with eachother in real time (the timezone factor is a big one IMO).

    It's an issue affecting a lot of tech companies right now, including where I work (HPE). But I guess it must work out as being cheaper despite the issues, otherwise it wouldn't be happening.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    Nobody said it wasn't.

    TheGrandNagus , (edited )

    Yes. Some people will come out and say that no they used to be good, but it's not really true, they've always been iffy.

    It's just that ATI's used to be even worse until AMD bought them up and moved Radeon to being much more FOSS-friendly.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    I don't understand what your point is here? Fossil fuels were instrumental in the industrial revolution so we have to stick by them forever, planet and people's health benefits damned?

    Nah. Use the most appropriate tech available. Which is now renewables, electric motors, etc.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    The Dash to Plank dev doesn't want to support Wayland. You could use Dash to Panel instead, that's been the community favourite for years now.

    Or of course you could use the standard Gnome workflow.

    EA wants to place in-game ads in its full-price AAA games, again ( www.techspot.com )

    EA has tried this before, with predictable results. In 2020, EA Sports UFC 4 included full-screen ads for the Amazon Prime series The Boys that would appear during 'Replay' moments. These were absent from the game when it launched, with EA introducing the ads about a month later, thereby preventing them from being highlighted in...

    TheGrandNagus , (edited )

    This is an argument publishers love to make, but it's bullshit. Yes, games (assuming you ignore in game purchases/DLC, which you obviously shouldn't but I digress) have got cheaper in real terms due to inflation lowering how much $60 is really worth, while games have stayed at that price tag.

    It's also true that development costs have went up.

    Now, here's the part that game publishers conveniently never talk about: distributing games is far cheaper now. We're usually not shipping pallets of discs that take up loads of space and cost money to physically create and transport, while also having to build in a profit margin for all the middlemen along the way, including for the retailer. We predominantly buy games digitally.

    On top of that, gaming used to be niche, now everybody does it. The market is far larger, so they don't need to charge a lot to still make bank.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    It gets worse. Not only did they remove the the cluster and shifted everything to the infotainment a-la Tesla, but their system for detecting if you're looking at the road (for alertness/safety reasons) immediately starts screaming at you when you glance over at the speedometer on your infotainment screen. Who tf designed that system?

    TheGrandNagus ,

    Read the article.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    I dislike Hawaiian pizza, but pineapple with spicy pepperoni, chilli flakes, and jalapenos? It's amazing.

    The acidity cuts through the grease really well, and pineapple just works with spice in general. Just look at the multiple curry dishes that use pineapple.

    People only circlejerk about pineapple on pizza to fit in. There's nothing wrong with it.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    The earliest record is flatbread with cheese and dates. But there has been all sorts. For a while, a common base layer was lard topped with herbs, then the cheese on top of that.

    Even now not all pizzas use a tomato base. And I'm not just talking about American pizzas that use barbeque sauce or something, pizza bianca ("white pizza") is a style that will forgo tomato sauce for olive oil, lard, or bechamel sauce.

    If you think pineapple on pizza is controversial, I had a bechamel sauce and pear pizza in Naples. Kinda unusual.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    I got banned anyway lol. Reddit made it easy.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    Shit, look at VAG if you want to see an extreme example.

    They have the likes of Jetta (chinese-only, not to be confused with the VW Jetta car model), Skoda, Seat/Cupra, leading up to Volkswagen, then to Audi, then the likes of Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini, and finally to Bugatti and now Rimac (sort of... there's a weird and complex ownership structure going on there).

    TheGrandNagus ,

    Yeah, I know. But expecting smartphone users to be versed in one product range of your company's camera division is kinda crazy

    TheGrandNagus , (edited )

    In the universe in which we exist. Gnome is very, very, very stable.

    TheGrandNagus , (edited )

    Yeah, it's amazing. Best DE for sure. I'm sorry that it hurts your feelings or whatever, that's unfortunate.

    TheGrandNagus ,

    Lmao

    TheGrandNagus ,

    No they didn't.

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