glockenspiel

I don't think it does. I doubt it is purely a cost issue. Microsoft is going to throw billions at OpenAI, no problem.

What has happened, based on the info we get from the company, is that they keep tweaking their algorithms in response to how people use them. ChatGPT was amazing at first. But it would also easily tell you how to murder someone and get away with it, create a plausible sounding weapon of mass destruction, coerce you into weird relationships, and basically anything else it wasn't supposed to do.

I've noticed it has become worse at rubber ducking non-trivial coding prompts. I've noticed that my juniors have a hell of a time functioning without access to it, and they'd rather ask questions of seniors rather than try to find information our solutions themselves, replacing chatbots with Sr devs essentially.

A good tool for getting people on ramped if they've never coded before, and maybe for rubber ducking in my experience. But far too volatile for consistent work. Especially with a Blackbox of a company constantly hampering its outputs.

Man who signed NDA with Meta is suddenly gushing about Threads. I know, I know, this isn’t just anybody.

He addressed a few issues very topically but side stepped a major one. What happens if Threads takes off and Meta decides to enforce a trusted partner network by defederating all but a handful of instances unless they conform to Meta’s demands?

After all, if we allow Threads to grow to a successful size, that is where almost everybody will be. It is why Lemmy was a tiny project for a long time until Reddit and Twitter fucked up too badly and for too long. Twitter sucked all the air out of the room for Mastodon. Arguably still does despite itself. And Reddit did the same with Lemmy by simply existing.

Now imagine if Reddit made a Lemmy instance, kept policies around to make it grow large, then cracked down with an iron fist once they had the dominant position?

Eugen considers what would happen if Meta abandoned ActivityPub. But I don’t think would need to happen. They just need to wall off. They can keep the standard.

Another example: Google and RCS. The RCS Android users have isn’t the open standard. Google built a layer of proprietary middleware around it. They fiercely guard API access, which is why only a few “trusted partners” get to use it. And now Google is RCS. There are no more competitors even though it is open.

Because Google sucked all the air out of the room and became the dominant player able to dictate to the rest.

And so, too, will happen with ActivityPub and this whole shebang unless we stop them from being interoperable first. I get Eugen wants this tech to grow and prosper. But you don’t do it by making deals with the devil.

It is always Senator Blumethal. He is always the sponsor and usually originator of these repeat bills to destroy the internet.

Look at his bribes on Open Secrets and it makes more sense. His top contributors are: 1.) The legal industry 2.) individuals donating large amounts who just so happen to be associated with legal entities which make money by consulting large organizations on internet regulation compliance and also criminal defense.

We need to ban bribery, but since that won’t happen we need people to get the ball rolling by leaking all the private internet data for these bad actors like Blumenthal. Do what John Oliver threatened to do and release all the legal-yet-semi-obscure information that they refuse to codify legal protections for. I’m sure this hit dog is hollering for a reason.

There are lots of reasons:

Naked corruption, be it financial or (more like since this is state level), nepotism.

When many of these laws were instituted, it was generally illegal for producers to own their own means of distribution. Movie studios couldn’t own movie theaters for example. That’s why streaming went from a small collection of collaborative entities with most things you’d want to watch, to four (or more) dozen, all price fixing and moving in unison just like the cell industry does.

Theoretically, tax money is more likely to remain in a state if a car dealership is local to that state. Ford selling vehicles in Georgia, for example, would almost surely send all their profits back to Michigan or whatever tax haven is cool these days (which wasn’t as much of a problem when these laws were made).

I’m not defending dealers, though. They are rent-seeking parasites that grossly underpay the people in the garage who keep things humming along. There is a very real dealership-owner (or children) to state politician pipeline in my state and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Microsoft has been slowly building toward requiring these subscriptions for enterprise for some time now. That is where Windows365 is ultimately going at an enterprise level, management just doesn’t realize it yet or are aware of how powerless they are to stop it.

Because Microsoft should’ve been broken up in the 90s. They definitely need to be broken up now. Same with a number of companies really, but Microsoft has a unique position to really hold enterprise and government by the balls.

Those companies aren’t supplying telecom kit.

I don’t know what you mean by R&D “taxes.” Do you mean profits that go into R&D? Tax breaks which Microsoft and others exploit to the maximum under the guise of “R&D” to lower their burden to negotiable (for them) amounts?

Regardless, there’s a huge difference between a bad company like Microsoft and one like Huawei. China is absolutely notorious for modern day industrial espionage. Anyone who denies it has to be delusional. And they lose their shit when their own tactics, like forced technology transfers and requirements to partner with domestic firms, are applied to them in equal measure.

Let’s look at Huawei for example. They straight up plagiarized a huge amount of code from Cisco. This includes esoteric bugs and their error messages. This isn’t a Oracle vs Google “same name of API” thing.

Europe should really subsidize their own tech sector so they don’t have to rely on China or the US for vital infrastructure.

I hear what you’re saying, but Lemmy was created to oppose the capitalist exploitation cycle. With Lemmy, we aren’t consumers or a product. Lemmy is actually firmly rooted in anti-capitalism and arose because capitalism destroys choice.

Capitalism isn’t necessary for innovation. It is just the private ownership of things. Spez didn’t make Reddit great, for example. Other people did. Spez is just a do-nothing owner who is now the mouth piece for bigger do-nothing owners looking to wring out maximum profit from unpaid laborers.

I’d argue that capitalism stifles innovation, which is why everyone agrees that you need competition. A market economy. And broad anti-trust regulations, since capitalism is inherently authoritarian since it is a top-down hierarchical structure. A free-ish market is what allowed us to innovate so quickly.

But Lemmy is outside of that since it isn’t driven by profit.

I agree about the bubble effect. I feel it, too, even though I don’t consider myself in a bubble. I truly am enjoying Lemmy and the conversations more than anything else even somewhat similar to it. The smallish nature of the community probably combined with the slightly elevated bar for joining means the riff raff isn’t here in large numbers yet.

Lemmy, today, honestly reminds me of Reddit 15 years ago.

Perhaps this is the bubble effect, but I have a high confidence level in the major third party devs being able to streamline the sign up process. It is already happening in some apps.

The stability problems are another story. I encourage people to go to the front page of their respective communities and look for donation links. Even $1/mo on Patreon can snowball into large sums as Lemmy.World shows.

People deserve to be paid for their labor. This is Lemmy; that's the default position given our history. There are plenty of free as in beer and speech apps out there if someone doesn't or can't pay the price. But software development is hard work, especially if it isn't a hobby. And a lot of Lemmy apps are hobbyists. That's the communtiy phase we are in right now. And we are a smaller community, which means fewer paying customers, which means a higher overall cost. LJ can't throw out an app for $5 and expect a hundred thousand to convert into paying customers off the backs of over a million downloads.

I'll never understand this criticism of Sync. I hate subscriptions as much as most people, but with software it sort of makes sense because the work never ends. It isn't like buying a bookcase or any other static item. And Sync, in this case, isn't like what companies such as LG are doing where they are intoducing forced subscriptions into static firmware to extract maximum wealth from customers.

Now it's more like "upgrade to maintain your level of performance, because our patched CPUs take a 50% performance hit" (per the article).

That is quite convenient for them. I'm sure not a conspiracy given depth of the issue, just very convenient if people heed the call.

Which most won't. Enterprise is likely already on the newer gens aa part of normal refresh cycles. Maybe this just accelerates that a bit.

I think people are justified in having strong emotions on this topic. A good amount of us just came from Reddit, only to waltz right into what feels like another corporate power play. You install smoke detectors before you have a house fire, not during it.

Many of us have been burned by Meta and purposefully choose these more obscure communities, like Lemmy, to stay far away from them. Meta, after all, has waged a worldwide assault on democracy. Meta has aided literal genocide in at least one country. Meta has run undisclosed psychological experiments to see if it could alter the mood of its users and make them depressed, without regard for if children were among the swath of people.

A lot of people are old enough to remember similar takeovers of standards and open protocols, which is why XMPP comes up so often in these discussions. All it takes is one big player with God-levels of money in order to usurp a standard. Google’s done it twice now, for instance. First with XMPP and again with RCS.

Meta deserves zero benefit of doubt. They’ve always been a bad actor and parasite. I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that admins are being paid by Meta. That does seem hysterical.

The most likely reason I’ve heard for Threads embracing ActivityPub (eventually) is to circumvent EU regulations. In which case we shouldn’t be fine with being a pawn and should resist aiding an objectively harmful company from avoiding due regulation.

Want to buy a house? Or make most major life financial decisions involving loans? You’ll pay it off to the best of your ability. Even if your student loan payment is a couple hundred bucks a month, lenders look at the entire principal and weight it heavily against you—even with 7 years of perfect payments.

But the real question you should ask is: why do we want normal people to pay these particular loans back when it is a fact that the government crafts policies to force people into higher education in order to secure our economy? For all the bluster with Gen Z somewhat dodging degrees, the fact remains that higher education remains a requirement for the future strength of all of us.

It should be gratis just like primary education is. It’s a public good. Cut the cost of getting these degrees and suddenly you don’t have people requiring incredibly high salaries in order to just pay the interest.

I’d argue that it is a Samsung thing. They let carriers do this. Just like they host ads in the notification shade and first party apps in some markets.

To Samsung. One of the largest companies in the world. Samsung chooses to allow this because they get money for it from the carriers.

It isn’t about ChatGPT. That’s just the consumer side of things people know.

These strikes are about industry exploitation. For example, the actors are striking for, among other reasons, forced acceptance of deep fakes being created in their likenesses without payment, for unlimited use, in perpetuity.

The writers wants actual residuals, as do actors, for streaming views. And directors and writers want performance information that they have traditionally been given so they can 1.) fact checking what they are being paid, and 2.) cater their content.

Also, humans should never side with AI when it comes to a job. If and when it comes for them, it will also come for you. Google right now has successful pilots of their transformer models being used to train physical robots operating in meat space.

It’s only a matter of time. Humanity needs to put a collar on this shit before it collars us. These “AI” should be tools we used not full blown replacements.

Well, Threads has an estimated 30+ million users already. Threads will easily have more daily active users than the entirety of the Fediverse if even just 1% stick around.

Threads would have 150% the number of users in that case, and that’s assuming the app stops growing.

I’ve gotten a good amount of pushback (well reasoned, but pushback nonetheless) about my position on how we need to think of where we fit into all of this. But realistically we are tiny. ActivityPub—if it ever comes to Threads—can be easily bastardized and made proprietary by Meta unilaterally.

We’ve seen it more times than we can even remember. Microsoft did it with IE, Google is doing it with Chrome and RCS (for those who haven’t seen my other comments: no, Android RCS is not an open standard. Google closed it with proprietary layers which is why no other messaging apps are allowed to access Google’s RCS save for a few like Samsung), and even Mastodon.

That’s right: Mastodon has not adapted ActivityPub fully to standard and instead opts to go it’s own way. And now other projects are hiving off and—you guessed it—implemented Mastodon’s approach rather than the official ActivityPub standard.

At least according to ActivityPub co-creator Evan Prodromou (on the Changelog podcast episode “Into the Fediverse” on 2023-02-24 around the 10 minute mark). He isn’t putting down Mastodon at all; but it stands to show just how easily a single big player can hijack things. We got lucky that Mastodon didn’t radically pivot and integrate hostile practices.

But Meta will. We all know this. This is what capitalists do. They gain nothing by allowing competition, even if minor.

Edit: in case I wasn’t clear, I’m not attacking Mastodon. I love Mastodon. I don’t love the NDA that the creator signed with Meta. I don’t like his stances regarding Meta. I understand things do need to deviate at points, as is the nature of all software. I’m a software engineer myself (albeit not for anything related to ActivityPub or social media). It is more an example of how quickly things can go sideways with just one big player willing it into existence.

I don’t think it’s millions of bots, unless you are using that term derogatorily like some use “NPC.”

The media are pushing Threads with every fiber of their being. Tech-adjacent sites like TheVerge are absolutely unuseable right now because like 9/10 stories on their page are about how great Threads is and everyone should go to Threads and “hey, follow me on Threads.”

People need to acknowledge modern journalists/reporters/staff writers for what they are: influencers. That’s why they love Twitter. That’s why they love Threads. That’s why they demand corpo algorithms to boost their content and force it upon other people.

And that’s why they repeat a lie about the fediverse so insistently: that it is hard to get into. It is so hard to pick one of the top 2 largest sites and give them a username, password, and sometimes an email address. Journalists/writers generally don’t like Mastodon because it doesn’t force anything onto users. That means they have to organically earn a following.

But Meta will just give it to them by forcing users to see their posts.

It is always Blumenthal behind these anti-internet and anti-free speech bills. Always. He was behind the last few attempts under other names as well.

Well one thing we can all agree on: it is a blessing to non-working capitalists who own huge stakes of Microsoft.

Because this will require expensive per-seat subscriptions to their Power Platform or Azure Services. And if Power Platform is any indication, likely some features of Python will be gated behind per-use models on top of that.

That's not accurate. The article is about Australia. Netflix Australia had a net loss of 200K subscribers specifically due to the anti-consumer moves they've made which affects a lot more than just sharing a password with a family member. That's a 3% decline in a major country. Meanwhile, Netflix rivals had subscriptions increase overall and several saw huge surges. Netflix remains #1 by total subscribers in Australia, but that shouldn't shock anyone given the inherit momentum they possess.

The article was never about Netflix globally. It was always about Australia. Companies operate business units in regions, and each region must perform.

Poor example, because the Luddites were correct.

They weren’t anti-technology, they were anti-capitalist/proto-capitalist workforce reduction and replacement to make the do-nothing owners richer.

They obviously lost their fight, but they get smeared as anti-intellectual morons in capitalist education systems for a very propagandistic reason.

Exactly. And let’s not forget that the rich have stronger class solidarity. Bezos got a lot more than a $300k loan; he got the experience of a wealthy education which is primarily for the networking. He got access to his parents’ network as well.

See also Bill Gates, who, in a bout of nepotism, used his mommy’s rich connections with IBM to secure Microsoft. People don’t understand that Microsoft made nothing of actual worth in their early days. They were middlemen, buying DOS from someone else and claiming it as their own.

Like, oh, Tesla.

I agree in spirit, but Meta is a known bad actor and wrecking ball that ran actual psyops against its own users and their networks just to see if they could make people depressed. They also engage in extensive, worldwide election interference to upend democracies. They don’t get the benefit of the doubt anymore.

This article lays out all the problems with the wait and see approach. We’ve been here before, unfortunately, and it only has a happy ending for the huge corporations looking to end us.

Edit: for those looking to get away from Mastodon’s main instances, give Fosstodon a look. Meta approached its admin with NDAs just like they did with Ruud, but refused it and published the email for openness. Here it is, by the way.

He definitely would have been all about ActivityPub, if not involved with bringing it about. Still amazes me that he was one of the inventors of RSS, arguably a proto-ActivityPub.

It all depends on your tolerance.

FireSticks are inherently easier to tinker with. But Amazon bends you over with shoving ads and spyware up your ass at every opportunity. It is baked into the UI design itself. It is very advertising-forward, with everything else designed around ads. And even the 4K max lags at times.

AppleTV really requires an iPhone to set up optimally. And it is locked down with no clear jail break at this time for most people unless you’re willing to solder (or if I’ve missed a new flaw in an update which opened the door programmatically). But Apple TV is fast and smooth, with no inherent ads of its own. It is honestly over powered for its purpose, probably because it can also play a fair number of iOS games.

Chrome Cast with Google TV is a fucking mess. It is severely under powered to the point of lagging. It has half baked ideas like profiles which don’t change anything. And it has ads as the focus of the design just like FireStick.

But you’re going to pay a subscription if you go with Apple TV and want something like Infuse. Jellyfin and Plex, of course, don’t require it.

And despite what people say, Stremio is absolute dogshit on a FireStick because of its mobile-centric UI.

If you plan to use a server like Plex and Jellyfin, all of them work—but Apple TV works best. If you need anything else out of it, probably the fire stick if you use a pihole to stop it from phoning home for more ads constantly.

It isn’t even that. America, Germany, and the UK are all very similar. And those numbers are only becoming more similar over time.

Europeans need to remember that American states are often larger than European countries.

And that generations of neglect or intentional sabotage has rendered public transport completely useless outside of outlier scenarios.

People want to handwave it away, but there are legitimate safety concerns with driving smaller vehicles in the US. Not only are they less comfortable (in a country where you have to drive everywhere, for long periods of time, even for incidental items). They will get destroyed by our obnoxiously huge SUVs and trucks. Happens all the time.

Same thing needs to be remembered when people who don’t live here insist everyone should just be biking everywhere. I agree in spirit, but the reality is that biking in the US is a gamble every time someone does it. And you can’t convince a populace to do it when a normal American is 10+ miles away from a grocery store, and when most of our states experience both extreme heat and extreme cold.

The problem is truly systemic. We have a majority of civil planning intentionally implementing hostile engineering to incentivize vehicles.

The good news is that I think Gavin may have already fixed it. I’m using the latest TestFlight build. Gavin said he submitted it to the AppStore just maybe 20 minutes ago, so fingers crossed.

There’s also a new neat app icon.

Extras are part of the union (SGA-AFTRA). This is why SGA is striking (well one major reason). This is why all major statements from SGA have been that they are starting with extras but will continue on to marginalize and exploit others in the union. Because that’s what capitalism does. It is how it functions if left unchecked.

The unions know that do-nothing parasites that own the studios and other businesses want to get labor cost down to essentially nothing. And they will do everything possible to get it there including openly stating they have more money than god and will simply wait out every single writer and actor until they go bankrupt on strike.

Surely the rampant server issues are a big part of that.

OpenAI have been shitting the bed over the last 2 weeks with constant technical issues during the workday for the web front end.

Considering they are probably on the side of iMessage, I’m going to venture a guess and say the company size has nothing to do with it.

Meta is deeply unethical, even for a giant company.

I agree, and those routers can be extremely cheap. I recommend people plug them directly into ethernet whenever possible otherwise speeds basically get cut in half when operating as extenders (just like at home, excepting backhaul).

And in hotels without an obvious ethernet port: check behind the TV. There is usually a less metered port on the wall back there for use by the TV. Sometimes it is restricted, but I've been pleased to find that enough hotels don't have the foresight to do more than simply obscure things a bit.

Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do

Temu is legitimately malware. The company had their source dumped and they obfuscated their malware-like practices to avoid Google's automatic detection. I presume they did the same with their iOS client. It is very telling that they have been extremely successful despite the same exact company and team doing this before with another app, Pinduoduo. That's right; same dev team and everything. Temu goes above and beyond the normal surveillance capitalism stuff we are used to and circumvents system security in order to sell your raw data on the market. The entire scheme isn't to build a retail space (although it is doing that as well); it is to get as many people to download the app so they can steal an absurd amount of data which is normally protected.

Here's the post from the official Calckey account. Mali is, indeed, seizing domain names. Makes me wonder what is happening with Lemmy.ml. I really don’t want to get involved with Matrix just to find out.

LemmyGrad.ml is still up, though. For now.

I have the South Park bundle from Steam. The Ubisoft launcher wasn’t an issue, more of a minor annoyance because you need to log into it every so often.

A bigger issue is that both Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole suffer from random freezes that require killing the game from the Steam Deck menu. It doesn’t appear to be universal, but other folks have said the same thing on ProtonDB. Tinkering with proton versions hasn’t fixed it for me yet.

It makes me sick to see all the FediEvangelist influencers embracing Meta’s play. Some are out there making content about it in a positive way after having “seen” it. Let’s recall that Meta previously required some people involved with Lemmy to sign NDAs. So how are these folks talking about it in a positive light?

Let me spoil Meta’s plan here. They know their market is dying. They are going to launch on Fediverse and move big names to Threads in order to draw others in.

But do you really think Meta is going to federate with most of the community? Fuck no. They are going to form some weird trusted partner platform thing just like they do elsewhere. If Threads takes off I definitely see them walling that garden off. Sure, they will suck up all that public user data from you and I. They will federate their ads disguised as posts, and allow the deep reach of psy op and bot networks into the fediverse just like they do in traditional social media.

But that’s the end game. People drawing comparisons to Embrace Extend Extinguish are correct. It doesn’t matter if Fediverse/ActivityPub is open. Microsoft used it against open source software as well. It is about the larger coordinated vision that a million tiny independent groups can’t effectively fight.

It won’t matter if you can move your account to a different platform or defederate from Threads after it grows. They will lock all the main draws into their walled garden and adopt the buzz words. Meta will become ActivityPub as it were, as they will have the largest reach. If we allow Threads to be successful.

I implore everyone: do not federate with bad faith actors like Meta or other traditional social media platforms. As Fediverse thrives we will increasingly come under attack just like years past via subversion campaigns.

And they will use trusted people in our community to deceive us. Like they always do.

Edit: not to mention the detrimental knock on effects Threads could have with communities in other ways. For example, do people earnestly believe that these independent communities will be widely funded by users to keep them independent and ad free? Meta is going to suck all the air out of the room. If we let them.

We just came off the significant bad aspects of private capital owning and operating our social media. And people seriously want to run back into those arms? Hello, this is Meta: they ran psy ops to depress children just to see if they could do it without regard for self harm, suicide rates, or other long term effects.

I’m positive that most of that reporting is outrage farming and anecdotes. Take the really famous example—people not dating people if they use an Android device. It originated with the NYPost. The NYPost is a rightwing gossip and conspiracy rag that makes its money with outrage farming.

And other outlets just uncritically picked it up and went with it. Now it is part of the assumed zeitgeist.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure it happens. My Android-using family needles me constantly for using an iPhone and Macs. It is very annoying. But it isn’t exclusionary.

What’s exclusionary are what Apple and Meta do with iMessage and Whatsapp, respectively, and what Google does with what they call “RCS,” which is actually a proprietary fork of RCS entirely reliant on their proprietary middleware such that Google can gate keep (which is why there aren’t a slew of RCS apps out there; Google doesn’t allow access just like Apple doesn’t). These companies need to be broken up and whatever remains should be forced to create/adopt a standard and stick to it.

A huge component of the fear that I’ve seen is how one large player can usurp standards. It keeps happening. Why do you think Meta reached out to some of the largest people in the Fediverse and tried (pretty successfully) to get them to sign NDAs? Only one stood their ground and went transparent about it, and that was Kev at Fossotodn.

I don’t think valid opposition needs to assume some grand evil plan to destroy the Fediverse from Meta. Meta’s mere presence is enough to threaten the standard and our communities, good intentions or otherwise.

Apple already shipped attestation. It's in Safari in both desktop and mobile. Unfortunately. It's just going to take a couple big players to make this a blight everywhere. Netflix implementing this might do it. Google's main sites would work.

They are definitely turning on Jesus and have been for quite some time now. There is an interesting statement from the former head of SBC wherein he states churchgoers are finding Jesus' supposed teachings as being too woke and part of a liberal agenda. Can't make this up. It was only a matter of time.

But Jesus also didn't like mixing. That is why he instructed the apostles and other adherents to never teach gentiles and Samaritans. That was retconned years later by the church because they said people had visions of a resurrected jesus commanding them to mix with gentiles. But for a while there it was very much a racial/ethno in-group only. That is why Jesus supposedly stated he taught in parables; so gentiles wouldnt understand what he was talking about and find salvation. That is what Matthew 13:11-17 is about.

People need to stop characterizing Jesus as some socialists woke advocate like I see in this thread. His character wasn't. He didn't preach universal love and compassion, and he taught contradictory messages about pacifism probably because dozens of people created this character over centuries.

I honestly think people want to think the religion can't be that bad and that the adherents are just awful.

There are already some bots that essentially do that (perhaps not with that particular approach). Unfortunately, I think it has the opposite intended effect: organic growth doesn't seem to take all that well.

Seems like arguing semantics. "Low" is relative. There are people who argue that living in minimum wage is 100% possible by oneself. People perform truly shit jobs that greatly endanger their lives simply because the pay is right.

Capitalists want a market economy right until the moment labor is treated the same way.