JasSmith

@JasSmith@sh.itjust.works
0 Post – 188 Comments
Joined 9 months ago

Apparently Google is paying Apple upwards of $20B per year now for search default, so it’s not hard to see why they’re sticking with Google. It does highlight one of many potential anti-trust violations.

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It's like Google back in 2010. You find stuff you are looking for without pages and pages of ads, spam, and clickbait.

If you hit a domain which is obviously spam, you can block it forever. If you find a domain you really like, you can promote it for future results.

It's clear that Google's motivation is no longer to offer good results. It's to maximise the time you're on the site, and the number of ads and spam sites you click. Their goal is now, literally, to feed you bad results.

Good to see them walk the talk. Zoom, on the other hand, has an identity crisis it needs to reconcile. It’s hard to convince companies they can rely on remote work with video conferencing software if Zoom won’t do it themselves.

The responses have classic “I run Arch” energy. It’s never the fault of the software. It’s always the fault of the user. Ignore them. This is terrible UX and should be criticised. She did absolutely nothing wrong.

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I don’t agree. They can reasonably argue that advertising is a requirement of their business model, so it is necessary to advertise. Therefore it is necessary for them to block access to those blocking advertising. The directive cited isn’t intended to make advertiser supported services effectively illegal in the EU. That would be a massive own goal. It’s intended to make deceptive and unnecessary data collection illegal. Nothing YouTube is doing is deceptive. They’re being very clear about their intention to advertise to non-subscribers.

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I think many of us anticipated Apple’s malicious compliance. Now we see if the EU really will hold them to account. I’m tentatively optimistic but I admit I’ll be very disappointed if Apple wins this. It will cement their position of power globally as untouchable, and that’s a terrible outcome for the whole world. I am very disappointed that the EU permitted Apple to declare iOS as distinct from all other mobile operating systems. They even permitted them to exclude iPadOS as a Core Platform Service. Just that decision alone now excludes all Apple TVs, iPads, the Vision, and Watch. I hope that decision is also revisited.

This doesn’t solve anything. The White House will only authenticate videos which make the President look good. Curated and carefully edited PR. Maybe the occasional press conference. The vast majority of content will not be authenticated. If anything this makes the problem worse, as it will give the President remit to claim videos which make them look bad are not authenticated and should therefore be distrusted.

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What would you do?

I would not beat, rape, and murder innocent people. That seems like a low bar to clear, right? Attacking military targets and personnel might be morally justified, but certainly not what they did over the weekend.

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Shorting a stock in effect means selling a stock you don’t own. The stock market derives price based on supply and demand. When more people are selling than people are buying, the stock price goes down. There are many more dynamics at play than this though. Often there are investment firms which will identify a price mismatch and attempt to price out the short sellers by buying and pushing the price up. This can trigger a short squeeze which makes the price suddenly pop.

IPOs are exciting times to be a trader, but individuals are largely in for the ride. They can’t move the market. If they identify one of these larger plays they can join the fun. Game Stop was one of the first examples of a consumer-driven play, and it scared the shit out of institutions because it upended their risk models.

Also Palestinians have a history of carrying out terrorism in Egypt and all other neighbouring countries, so Egyptians do not want them.

Last time I checked, the third highest voted feature request in the built-in feedback tool is to take the recommended section out of the start menu. A couple years after launch the best we got is the product manager saying “we added an option to reduce the size :)” So it’s definitely intended for advertising, and I don’t do advertising. The professional version used to allow people to customise away that kind of bullshit, but not on W11.

It’s been great watching the world re-learn why unions are important.

Google is on a tear. First Bard, then Gemini, now snippets injected into search results. All spectacular failures.

Is that really why they don’t sell in Australia? I don’t believe your consumer protections laws are tougher than Europe. I can’t find any stated reason for not selling in AU. I suspect it’s just down to market size. They only recently started selling in Japan and they have 5x as many people.

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No, because businesses have multiple revenue streams. YouTube has a subscription offering, and a free, advertiser-supported offering. Both are part of their business model.

About 60 percent of the eggs sold in the United States come from processors who participate in USDA’s grading service, voluntarily paying to have their eggs graded so the eggs can display a “USDA Grade A” or “AA” shield on their cartons. The grade is based on qualities that can be observed in the shell, yolk, and egg white when the egg is inspected with lights and other specialized equipment. Specifics on egg-grading criteria can be found here.

Egg processors who participate are required to spray-wash their eggs with warm water and use a sanitizing rinse and air-drying techniques specified by USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS).

https://tellus.ars.usda.gov/stories/articles/how-we-store-our-eggs-and-why

FYI multiple studies have found that there is no safety benefit to washing. It just looks nicer, and people think it's safer.

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They were so close to implementing on-device scanning last year it’s scary. The number of people who supported it because Apple promised to only use it for child sexual exploitation material really shocked me. “Think of the children” really does have a way of making people’s brains short circuit.

This is of course the problem with regulations on free speech. Any measures designed with the best of intentions are inevitably abused by future leaders. People need to imagine what Trump would do with this power.

Reddit has been aggressively banning people for many years. People used to cheer it on because it was mostly aimed at conservatives, but they've expanded and created what appears to be a first-strike policy with no appeal. Now it's affecting everyone. I support consistent application of the rules, but their rules are petty, arbitrary, and broad. A famous example is how they ban people for racism, unless it's racism towards white people. That was literally written into the site rules until recently.

I think Reddit is a lost cause. They peaked long ago and now they're coasting on their moat. As other services like Lemmy gain traction, Reddit will continue to decline, and they will continue to aggressively monetise the remaining users. The only thing to lament is the information already stored on the site.

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Just send an email afterwards with the meeting notes. CC all participants and/or relevant people. They almost never contend the notes, and if they do, I invite more people to the meeting next time so they can’t pull that again.

I am VERY close to giving up Premium. In-content sponsorship is becoming so bad I can’t watch it without SponsorBlock. Since I need third party apps to achieve a reasonable experience anyway, I’m not really sure what I’m paying for. Once the EU forces Apple to allow installing apps outside the App Store, I might cancel.

I welcome it. These companies have overstayed their welcome. Let them die so that something better can take their place. I haven’t logged into Facebook in a year and it’s wonderful.

Since you've admitted you accept discrimination on the basis of race, that makes you, quite literally, a racist. I'm sure you think your racism is justified and righteous and good, but all racists think that. You're not special. You're just racist.

Your recount of history is wild. There were absolutely black slaves, but did you know that there have been millions of white slaves too? Slave markets flourished on the Barbary Coast of North Africa, in what is modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and western Libya, between the 15th and middle of the 19th century. The North African slave markets traded in European slaves which were acquired by Barbary pirates in slave raids on ships and by raids on coastal towns from Italy to Spain, Portugal, France, England, the Netherlands, and as far afield as the Turkish Abductions in Iceland. Men, women, and children were captured to such a devastating extent that vast numbers of sea coast towns were abandoned. According to Robert Davis, between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa and Ottoman Empire between the 15th and 19th centuries.

My own Irish ancestors were also the victims of genocide in the Potato Famine. No one has a hereditary claim on suffering. If you go far enough back in anyone's past you'll find cruelty and subjugation, no matter their skin colour. That you'd try to make it a competition to justify your racism is, I think, quite awful.

The EU is a huge market. Microsoft, for example, is already building their own app store to take advantage of the DMA. Let’s hope that the change puts pressure on regulators in other regions.

This would also mean they can put more invasive features in their app.

iOS apps will still be sandboxed. You have nothing to fear except whatever data you yourself enter into the app.

The DMA requires Apple to provide access to all hardware and software features required to serve competing apps and services. Browser engines are explicitly mentioned several times, and these require JIT access. It’s going to be interesting to see how they implement that.

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They do a great job of integrating devices. As for the App Store, us in the EU will soon be allowed to install alternatives. I think the deadline is the end of March.

There hasn’t been the same purge here in Europe. I think the US tech industry is very large, and covid saw demand surge, resulting in a lot of hiring. Demand slumped which led to this. We’re not seeing the same purge in other industries. Headcount just needs to normalise again, which I think won’t take much longer. Unfortunately there is a compounding factor: interest rates. Tech was propped up by free money. Without that, we might see larger structural issues in the industry. If companies start failing then we enter a new phase in the layoffs.

I'd be okay with your rationalisation if you followed similar logic for "blackness." Do you? Is it okay for me to attack blackness, and call it dirty and bad?

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Have you seen recent benchmarks? Windows games actually run faster on Linux at this point.

On some games. This channel tested 20 of the most popular games last year. Several of the titles didn't run on Linux at all. Windows had an average win on 4K, and Linux had an average win on 1080p. This is much closer than it has been in years, but it's definitely not a clean sweep. As you explain, Linux also have major issues with anti-cheat which is used on some of the most popular games today. From experience, I also can't use my very expensive wheel and peddles because of a lack of drivers. So I can't make the move to Linux completely.

They're finding the optimal price point. Each time they raise they lose some customers, but their increased revenue leads them to being more profitable afterwards. Eventually the price increases will result in so many people leaving that they'll have to stop.

Problem is, this strategy has exactly one direction: irrelevance. It can take a very long time to get there, but eventually you lose so many subscribers that your competitors have begun eating your lunch. The profits were solid so you didn't care. It's the normal business life cycle, and Netflix is well into the mature phase. We have worse quality and higher prices to look forward to.

You have been banned from r/DataHoarder.

I agree. On Lemmy, saying the wrong thing on the wrong community is like stepping on a landmine. The ideological differences are wild. Maybe I just need to get used to this and block the worse communities. It certainly feels very hostile. Especially from leftwing users and communities.

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There is no excuse for murdering innocent people. Not when Israel does it, and not when Palestine does it.

To be fair we’ve never had more choice, and music has almost never been more affordable. We used to buy singles for like $10+. Albums for $20+. Now there are several competing streaming services where we can listen to almost unlimited music each month for less than the cost of one album. Hell, YouTube Premium includes unlimited music steaming for free. Being an independent artist has never been easier, and you can find and pay for any music you like directly with millions of your favourite artists all over the world. The industry used to be entirely controlled by large labels. Honestly, I consider the industry far healthier than it used to be.

I pirate movies and shows because they refuse to create a Spotify-like service. Content is fragmented across a dozen services, they’re infested with ads, content quality keeps declining, the interfaces suck, and prices are outpacing inflation. I pay for Spotify because it’s still a good service for a reasonable price.

It depends on the nation. The UN collects data. Afghanistan is 62.7% illiterate, for example. Further, Almost all refugees to Denmark have zero Danish language reading and writing skills. They must learn all of these. Slightly more (but shockingly few) have any English reading and writing skills.

Surely it isn't surprising to you that refugees have limited European language skills?

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Lots of surveys show one of the primary barriers to EV adoption is range anxiety. I’ve seen people trying to “educate” potential customers out of this anxiety, but it’s pissing into the wind. You’re not going to convince most people to downgrade their current ICE experience while paying the same or usually even more. I think the inflection point is above real world range for ICE. For example my 2016 Honda Civic can get about 7-800km of range on a single tank, and stops are as quick as a few minutes. This provides a lot of flexibility about where and when one stops. The range needs to account for:

  • The 20-40 minute charge vs five minutes for gas.

  • The lack of chargers relative to gas stations.

  • The 30% drop in range in the cold.

Our annual Austria ski trip takes about 30% longer in our Model Y than the Civic. That’s hours extra on an already very long drive, and the Y costs a lot more. That’s a big downgrade in experience. An appalling experience with a family. We won’t be buying another EV until affordable range is above 1,000km (620 miles). I know many current, former, and non-EV owners who feel the same.

There is a market for commuter cars with poor range, but primarily in rich places where owning 2-3 cars is common. These rich places have already bought EVs as they are. Most of the world relies on just one car, if they own one at all. That one car needs to perform well in all conditions.

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Extroverts are disproportionately in places of power and authority and CANNOT understand people who don’t like being in the office. So if they don’t want to be in the office it’s because they’re lazy/anti-social/working multiple jobs. These extroverts are convinced that their preferences are the BEST way, because hey, they’re successful and that’s how they became successful.