I wonder who made the list of “don’t touch these repos, they’re propping up our proprietary software sans attribution” for the LLM injectabots to avoid.

I realize that the end game here is SUPPOSED to be “erode all trust in free software” but the ineptitude of those profiting off of proprietary software is such that they WILL fuck this up in such a way that it hurts themselves too, it’s just a matter of when.

That wouldn‘t be very democratic now, would it?

I TOLD you, we’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune! We take it in turns, to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decisions OF that officer must be ratified at a special biweekly meeting, by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, or by a TWO-THIRDS MAJORITY in the case of more immediate…

I’m curious. Economically speaking, what would happen if Nvidia pulled a “Steam” and had a “February sale” where some models of video card were discounted enough to lead to a massive spike in sales numbers? A big enough discount to generate a greater total net return on sales for the quarter despite the fact that they were sold at a lower profit margin per individual sale? Assuming limitations like “you must create an account with a residential shipping address that can receive no more than x cards at the discounted price per street address” or some such to limit scalping, would simply showing increased profits do them any good?

Or is the problem due to a lack of product quantity?

If nobody can afford anything with more than 8 gigs of ram for their office workers, they’ll all just pay for more AI tokens because otherwise the 900ms keystroke latency in MS Word would make it impossible to work, right?

I would be shocked if that wasn’t on some AI company’s brainstorm board as a positive side effect (for them) of all of this.

Oh good. /s

Let’s push the idea that “good people are tired of being filmed by creeps”.

Start the narrative out nice and soft.

Countdown to "it’s okay to smash the phones of people filming ICE agents doing their jobs"or whatever agenda is most on the radar of people who are against video accountability when they’re in the wrong.

I don’t particularly like the concept of these glasses or the fact that creeps will use them, but this is not how we tackle a problem we already have with creeps being able to use cell phones and easy-to-hide body cams.

Puff pieces like this are how narratives get used to put bad things into law.

Remember Cambridge Analytica and note the current state of xitter.

terraria for minecraft + metroidvania

This…shines a totally new light on a bunch of decisions that originally made me fairly upset and caused me to quit playing the game.

I played the game with nearly every free moment I had between the time I bought it in 2012 and the 1.2 release in October of 2013. Multiple worlds. Multiplayer sessions with players in several countries possibly requiring port forwarding and VPN tunnels if I remember correctly, and all of it stopped dead for me when I had to quit focusing on creating and exploring and was instead spending most of my time struggling to survive.

There were enemies before, and you could find one of the three bosses and just… Not go there, but 1.2 really made combat the forefront of the game and killed it for me entirely.

In the intervening 12 years. I’d be surprised if had more than a couple of hours into the game.

Viewing it through the lens of a metroidvania where you craft your own progression is not something I’d considered before.

I might actually go back to the game on the rare occasion I’m in the mood for something like that.

Thank you for the insight, while it probably sounds silly, it gives me some perspective into something that was so jarring it still causes me to panic when a game announces combat where combat was not previously the focus (I’m looking at you, Dyson Sphere Program 😄) and I really appreciate that.

New kinds of water, you say? The marketing department is already on it and boy have I got news for you!

Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?

Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.

Original pre-microsoft Skype was not AS bloaty. It ran on my underpowered PC at the time with no issues.

Several patches/versions/whatever after Ms gutted the p2p aspect and centralized the servers, it slowed waaaaaay the hell down.

Make of that anecdotal evidence what you will.

More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”

I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.

Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.

When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.

Some of it is about the "Why"s.

Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.

The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)

Why is it the opposite with AI?

Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.

And that’s just for one side of the debate.

Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?

The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.

Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.

That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.

WTF were they thinking?

Huh.

Maybe it’s just the games I play, but I mostly hear people in MMO’s ranting about steam and swearing they’ll never use it (or never use it again). At least some of these people have seemingly zero personal issues with Amazon gaming, arc, epic, gog, and a few other steam clones.

I realize that by the numbers, steam is probably still the biggest, but unlike that early half-life debacle, most games are on multiple platforms now. Steam being bigger isn’t what I’d call monopolistic anymore, it’s just good sales on games and inertia.

Given epic’s often BETTER sales, despite the fact that I really dislike the layout and functionality of the epic client, most of what steam has going for it is the deck and inertia.

For those wondering about the upswing here:

If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.

“This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

Corporate culture is a malicious bad actor.

Corporate culture, from management books to magazine ads to magic quadrants is all about profits over people, short term over stability, and massaging statistics over building a trustworthy reputation.

All of it is fully orchestrated from the top down to make the richest folks richer right now at the expense of everything else. All of it. From open floor plans to unlimited PTO to perverting every decent plan whether it be agile or ITIL or whatever, every idea it lays its hands on turns into a shell of itself with only one goal.

Until we fix that problem, the enshittification, the golden parachutes, and the passing around of horrible execs who prove time and time again they should not be in charge of anything will continue as part of the game where we sacrifice human beings on the Altar of Record Quarterly Profits.

Aside from one (seemingly very out of place at the time) early mention that the author used Bitcoin, there was no hint of it being pro-bitcoin until the very, very end.

I found it to be a very worthwhile article right up until that point and even slightly intriguing from an academic perspective after that point.

I despise the endless blind parroting of the typical cryptobro refrains elsewhere on the Internet when crypto is brought up and I still liked the article, so I wouldn’t write it off just because one guy with a cryptohammer inevitably sees the very real SMTP problem as a cryptonail in the end. It’s natural when you have a “solution in search of a problem” situation like we do with crypto (and block chain, and for that matter SharePoint. People with knowledge of a thing often try to use it to solve problems it probably wasn’t meant for.)

Safe deposit box?

Everyone who has one, I hope.

It’s called a Bitcoin “wallet”, too. If someone else is holding yours, it’s not your money.

But they’re almost all using it STUPIDLY, aren’t they?

How many people who purport to have Bitcoin actually hold their own private key?

(strike)Frank from IT(/strike)the cleaning crew

I jest, but I’ve seen more facilities maintenance teams cause power issues than IT teams.

It’s aready possible to flash a phone ROM in two clicks

That’s precisely the kind of access that a web browser should NEVER, EVER have.

If you think 2 stage download keylogger apps getting into app stores is bad, wait until it can be done with a banner ad. Or by viewing a comment on a post.