Joined the Mayqueeze.

  • 0 Posts
  • 283 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle


  • In terms of how this is reported, at what point does this become streisanding by proxy? I think anything from the Melon deserves to be scrutinized and called out for missteps and mistakes. At this point, I personally don’t mind if the media is overly critical about any of that because of his behavior. And what I’m reading about Grok is terrible and makes me glad I left Twitter after he bought it. At the same time, these “put X in a bikini” headlines must be drawing creeps towards Grok in droves. It’s ideal marketing to get them interested. Maybe there isn’t a way to shine the necessary light on this that doesn’t also attract the moths. I just think in about ten years’ time we will get a lot of “I started undressing people against their will on Grok and then got hooked” defenses in court rooms. And I wonder if there would’ve been a way to report on it without causing more harm at the same time.


  • The problem with the VPN solution is that the BBC has gotten smart about that. It’s a game of whack a mole. Every time a service has installed a new server with new IPs, iPlayer finds out about it and blocks it. So you don’t even get to the part where you could fraudulently claim to be paying for the license.

    Where in France are you? In Calais you might still get terrestrial signal (although I don’t know if the signal standards differ) or it could be available on cable.

    A third option is not perfectly legal but more so than torrenting. There are online services that record the terrestrial signal and allow you to download the recordings after the fact. Google BBC online HDR or DVR and see if one of these services might be for you.







  • I would say it shows signs of both. It’s a financial bubble built on top of at least a partial scam. And what will be left behind after a possible crash will be more useful than Theranos. Some of this LLM stuff is really useful, e.g. if you’re blind or dyslexic or need Alexa to understand you. The image and video generators less so but we will get to use of the stuff that takes advantage of those as well. I think the comparison with the railway pioneers of old is more apt. They built up the network that others profited of and got rich. Until they were blasted out of the sky by airplanes.





  • The Anerican political theater has twice as many viable parties as North Korea. Contrast that with virtually any other democracy where there are at least a handful of parties fighting to be in charge. That doesn’t mean though that you don’t have enough different opinions to fill a party-political spectrum like that in the US. The dominance of the two parties just forces most people under one of the big tent roofs. So you have more conservative Democrats (and there used to be more liberal Republicans) in the party that are bigger in relative numbers compared to what you’ll find in the social democrats in Germany (or among the conservatives in France). The Democrats are nominally the more left leaning party. But if you compared the party programs they would align more with the conservative parties of Scandinavia. Everything is further to the right in the US thanks largely to gun laws and lack of social security. And that explains why you have non-lefty people in the nominally lefty party. And while bigotry and hatred are certainly not a new thing, there is a culture that permeates down from the political leadership. And if name calling and pouring oil into the fire of social issues are the new MO, and admissions and convictions respectively of sexual assault don’t keep candidates out of office, many people feel they are now also allowed to say the quiet part out loud.


  • You are applying the thinking of wholly owned platforms and how to judge their success. They have to grab a sizable and hopefully growing number of users who keep coming back to be successful. Because they need the data from their users and/or their eyeballs on ads for commercial success. None of that applies to the fediverse really. It can grow as slowly as it wants to or not grow at all. As long as there is a small percentage of people who spend time and money to keep the instances going. This laced corsage of economical necessities is much tighter for a centrally hosted platform which will have a thirsty boardroom to answer to. Popularity isn’t so much the factor why reddit is/was more of a success, it is/was the quality of information others got from it and it definitely used to be the ease of getting to it. People who got pissed off at reddit will slowly add to our numbers here (or another iteration of a service like Lemmy) as the idea of becoming your own algorithm becomes more normal for the non-techy minded users as well. We’re playing a long game that we don’t even want to win.


  • Let’s be realistic and not console ourselves with rosy fantasies.

    Let’s take the most pessimistic view instead and project we’ll all get plugged into the Matrix.

    It’s not a foregone conclusion that so-called AI and automation will replace all of those jobs. It’s also not a foregone conclusion that all these people will be destitute because they cannot be put in other positions. This is not the first time we as humanity have faced this big a structural change. We have largely gotten pretty good and are not dealing with a lot of bloodshed and poverty in the wake of such a big change. This transition will probably not be great for everybody but it won’t be a big human tragedy of the proportions you imagined. Worry more about our climate. The bigger threat of mass destitution will come from that clusterfuck.



  • You should try harder. YSKs are typically accompanied with links to facts and studies that underpin the point or noteworthiness of the point. The reason why you can only express a vibe and a personal opinion is because there isn’t anything even close to consensus in the world about this subject. The chances of you being right are 50/50 at best. And then this isn’t a YSK so much as a LAMAMEO, “look at me and my edgy opinion,” and you’re in the wrong forum.