some are talking about this like it’s going to be the straw that breaks the camels back and suddenly everyone will flock to a Linux distro, but, realistically, most market share is based on what companies use for work stations, and companies ain’t gonna change unless it starts to seriously impact productivity or it cost them more.
For personal/freelance-work computers, some people will just suck it up because of inertia. Of those who just can’t stand it… most will probably buy a mac next time they get a computer. There will probably be an increase in Linux usership, but it’s probably gonna be a 5-1% change in market share, depending on how fucked 11 ends up being as time goes on.
Probably the biggest increase in market share will be from schools adopting chrome books or the like.
Now I’m wondering if the point of the ads is not to make revenue, but to get people used to paying a subscription fee for their OS by way of a “removing ads” fee, maybe they start bundling other things into the subscription version like game pass or office to sweeten the deal, then slowly transition to a purely subscription model.
The website formally known as twitter runs face first in to the results of chasing another tech hype train built on sound technology being applied way too broadly, and operating in unsustainable and dubiously legal ways.
The most space efficient parking space is one outside the urban center at a bus stop or train station. Having parking inside urban areas just creates more traffic by making it possible for more personal cars to enter the city. The issue of parking and traffic in cities can only be solved by a paradigm shift away from trying to accommodate cars in dense urban environments.
the problem with flying cars is that most people can barely be trusted to operate a 60MPH vehicle in 2 dimensions, 100MPH vehicles in 3 dimensions is a recipe for a disaster. Pilots licenses are difficult to get for a very good reason.
We should be trying to get large personal vehicles out of cities and towns as much as practical, not introducing new types that are even more dangerous.
People who make the information fed in to the automatic plagiarism machine suing the automatic plagiarism machine company.
Wild to me how far this has gotten before some institutional actors realized that this “amazing new technology” is only financially viable if they don’t have to pay a fair price for the training data.
I mean, maybe not the mini disk specifically, but yah, a cartridge system for CDs would have been better.
Mini disks are super cool but they’re a lot more materially demanding than a CD, CDs being just aluminum and plastic, where as a minidisc has some truly wacky elements in it’s make up to get the magneto optical and curie point to work.
The mini disk was a truly weird system. Half way between a cassette and a CD. CD used a laser to to reflect off bumps(or dyes in some varieties) on the disk to get a signal, and a cassette would use a metal head to detect magnetization along the tape to get a signal.
The mini disk used a laser to read the magnetization around the disk. Essentially the magnetism would change the polarity of the light as it bounced off, and by measuring what the polarity of the reflected light is, the device got the signal.
Writing to the disk was also wild, as unlike the cassette, the magnetic field of the disk couldn’t just be changed by putting it next to a strong magnet like. Instead, it had to be heated up before the magnetism could be changed, this heating was done with the laser, and was very precise compared to a cassette’s method. This meaning way more information could be squeezed on to the disk than on a cassette.
Reddit has had an issue with being a platform of public manipulation for a while. This is not new, it’s just much more noticeable now, and thus a lot less effective.
Reddit was always full of reposts and content yoinked from other sites, it’s just that the content taken from other sites was curated. There was also a fair amount of original content mixed in. The people who bothered to do the free labor of curating content from other sites or creating original content, have largely left or retreated to smaller subreddits.
Where as before the influence and marketing campaigns were mixed in with genuine/well curated content, now they are 90% of what is left. Even their content is worse than it used to be since it’s largely just LLM generated slop now.
Almost 90 per cent of the global supply for polysilicon, a common raw material in electronic devices and solar panels, comes from China, and about half of that comes from Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the Uyghurs, says Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free, a charity dedicating to fight forced labour....
It’s wild because we don’t need to. We can use extant technologies with established supply chains, it just requires us to move past minor hang ups.
Battery electric cars/trains/buses are unnecessary. Trains and busses can use overhead/3rd rail electrification, most personal trips can be done safely and easily using an E-bike (much smaller batteries that can be produced en mass with existing supply chains) and cars should be reduced in usage outside of particularly rural areas where they truly are a necessity (which is a tiny portion of the overall population).
For the power grid… WE HAVE NUCLEAR POWER! IT IS SAFER, CHEAPER, AND LESS POLLUTING THAN LITERALLY ANY OTHER OPTION! The only thing holding it back is massive amounts of red tape put in place due to fear mongering funded by the gas and coal industries.
It is cheaper when you’re just talking about the actual construction, operation, and externalized elements of the fuel cycle. The reason they are so expensive is the massive difficulties and delays that come from getting the projects approved and the constant legal challenges to shut down construction once approved. If construction is delayed by an injunction, you still have to pay all the specialist until construction starts again.
Solar is only particularly cheap if the power goes directly in to the grid and doesn’t need to stored. Including the cost of grid scale storage bloats the price to be uncompetitive with natural gas.
It’s worse now than ever though, many managers have been steeped in tech optimism their whole working careers. The failures of “revolutionary new systems” have been forgotten about while the success of other things are lauded.
They’ve been primed to jump on any new “innovation” and at the same time B2B marketing has started adopting some of the most manipulative practices that used to be only used on consumers. They’ve crafted a narrative that shapes discourse so the main objections that appear are irrelevant to the actual issues managers might run in to.
Stuff like “but what if it is TOO good?!” and “what if the wrong people get their hands on this AMAZINGLY POWERFUL new tech?!”
Instead of “but does this actually understand anything or is it just giving output that looks correct?” or “ Wait, so, how was this training data obtained? Will there be legal issues from deliverables made with this?”
The average manager has been primed by the zeitgeist to ask the sales rep the kinds of questions they want to answer.
It’s probably not a data mining machine for china, they’ve done a fair bit to divest them selves from china at this point. If the CCP wanted to data mine Americans they can just buy that information from data brokers.
I suspect the main reason so many establishment politicians are terrified of it is because of how it suggest content.
Because there is very little direct user input on what it shows, It tends to spin people off in to communities and places people wouldn’t normally end up in. Trends there also tend to spread fast and unpredictably, most people won’t know about a trend until it shows up in their feed, making it difficult to monitor by a third party.
It can really throw a wrench in political messaging when you can’t be sure what narratives and ideas your constituents have been exposed to. These issues come from social media generally, but most big social media platforms are a lot less volatile in the trends, are easier to monitor, and are less likely to send people off in to spaces that they wouldn’t normally be exposed to.
I mean, this will probably kill the platform long term. Not the stock its self, but what’s going to happen when they need to start answering to an outside pool of share holders.
The website became popular because of its user curation and moderation. That meant it was showing people what they wanted to see and allowed them to self select into communities that facilitated that.
They’ll be forced to bring in smooth brained business types that will focus on putting ads and “native content” in people’s faces as much as possible. At the same time cracking down on “not advertiser friendly” content and mod teams that don’t play ball.
All of this has kind of happened already to some extent, but it’ll get a lot worse when shareholders demand they bring in consultants or new leadership who think they know better than the team that’s been struggling with this for over a decade. Even if the average user won’t understand what is wrong, they’ll spend less time there as it starts to fail to show them what they want. But hey, the share holders might make their money back before the platform dies.
I wanna get into 2d games a bit more. Mainly things like RPGs or metroidvanias (or just single palywr games in general) For devices I can emulate older systems and I also have a switch. Any recommendations?
Signalis is a 2.5d top down 3rd person single player survival horror title available for switch, it is probably one of the best modern examples of the genera taking clear inspiration from older titles like silent hill and resident evil 2. It’s very story based and currently on sale for the switch, I would highly recommend it.
It is a new game, but it very much has an old school vibe and is clearly leaning strongly on what made older titles great.
I played Signalis and really enjoyed it, I actually found it a bit inspiring, if a truly tragic game. The core gameplay was fun and engaging, the puzzles never felt grating or frustrating and completing them or figuring them out was quite rewarding. Although never obvious and requiring some thinking, they never felt like total moon logic like so many puzzle or adventure games. The combat was a good mix of resource management and brought just enough tension without interfering with puzzles.
The story and aesthetic was probably the highlight though, it wears its cultural influences on its sleeves, classic cosmic horror, evangelion, ghost in the shell, 2001 a space odyssey. It brings some new elements to the mix as well, notably an East German aesthetic and the existential personal dread of living in a totalitarian surveillance state. At once dread inducing and tragic, but also beautiful. I’m very curious to see more from the duo who made it, and am curious if they’ll do more in the setting or move on to something else.
gasp you mean, industry is lying to investors about a new technology to get more investment and creating a false narrative for the public to undermine criticism? Who could have seen this coming!
I think there is just too much faith from the current crop of investors in tech start ups, many got hurt in the past by not investing in things after not getting good answers to “ok but how does this make money” or “can this actually do what you’re claiming”.
And larger more established companies like Google and Amazon are happy to feed the hype for a lot of these trends, particularly when all the new start ups are going to be buying stuff from them, so even if the start ups fail because they can’t make money or don’t do what they claim, the big companies still made money selling them server space, computing time, or huge amounts of data. I think investors who hold stakes in the big companies also lean in to the hype for this reason.
Everyone has a pretty good incentive to lean in to the hype, so they do.
if I need to go in to a command line and make a custom boot of the OS. I might as well be using a Linux distribution and not have the system reset my work every time it updates.
Retirement rates are up and new workers in the work force are down. (Look at a demographic pyramid for more details)
Instead of “saving for retirement” by giving money to investors to invest in growth opportunities, now retirees are taking money out of the system to live on. Suddenly the pressure Is no longer on growth for companies, it’s on generating revenue that can be passed on to share holders, ether by stock buy backs or dividends. And there are not nearly enough new young workers coming to the work force and putting away savings in investments to make up the difference.
Capital is getting rarer now, if companies want it, they need to prove they can generate revenue, no more blitz scaling, no more “we’ll figure out how to monetize later”. Suddenly the free services need to make money, enshittification is the inevitable result.
What I meant by stock buy backs as a way of generating revanue was more that it’s a way to take revanue and pass it on the shareholder without using dividends, which are what the corporate tax is on. The way I worded it was really poor.
I don’t think the current generation of retirees are screwing over younger generations maliciously, they just haven’t critically examined the whole economic system and don’t seem to get that the current system is incredibly unsustainable, they just want the money they were promised. They are so insulated from the decision making process that they don’t understand the reality of what they’re demanding.
I totally agree, systemic problems require systemic solutions. If a system is failing “just being better” is never a solution.
My point is that failure here is in the economic system that encourages this kind of detachment. That the retirement system is built around accumulating value and investing into capital to pay for retirement later, makes these kinds of situations inevitable.
I can kind of get why the standardization sucks. Everything is so packed together in most designs, having standardized elements might limit a companies options for building something compact.
I do wonder how much extra bulk a bunch of standardized elements would actually add though. Like would the average person really mind the laptop body being half cm thicker?
Yah, that’s where I kind of started from in thinking about this, but then I started looking in to getting off the shelf components and ran in to the reality that short of cramming a desktop motherboard in to a laptop shaped box, there was just no way to make it work. The cooling alone was a no go, so it was a matter of using SBCs or ripping something out of an existing laptop, which kind of defeats the point unless something else is broken in it.
It’s a common issue in a lot of industries, where internal priorities and concerns end up having more influence on a companies decision making than actual consumer wants and needs. Why the idea of “the free market will optimize for the best products” kind of falls apart in reality so often.
See, I knew about PCB way and was wondering if their products would even really work. Or if the sockets for the chips would be available for small batch stuff.
I was interested in using older cheaper CPUs but they only have relatively modern stuff, which makes sense, but isn’t what I was looking for, and I’m looking at the SBC stuff now because that seems like the best option.
The fact that such services exists drives me up a wall, that thoughtless and careless business like facebook, Amazon and Google have worked so hard to collect/sell people’s data, and now we have to pay third parties to hunt it down and get rid of it.
From the (middle of the) story: The reason CES was so packed with random “AI”-branded products was that sticking those two letters to a new company is seen as something of a talisman, a ritual to bring back the (VC) rainy season.
I mean, they’re not going to succeed, like they can’t even get it to come up with new stuff.
They built an ouija board and have decided to worship it. Can’t wait till it tells them to start paying tithes and indulgences to the people who are totally not moving the view piece.
Last week, I turned on my PC, installed a Windows update, and rebooted to find Microsoft Edge automatically open with the Chrome tabs I was working on before the update. I don’t use Microsoft Edge regularly, and I have Google Chrome set as my default browser. Bleary-eyed at 9AM, it took me a moment to realize that Microsoft...
I’m slowly just migrating away from windows as much as I can because Microsoft is being so pushy with this nonsense. Like, they keep trying to get me to log in to a Microsoft account that doesn’t exist, they keep changing settings and asking for more permissions, they keep reinstalling stuff I’ve ripped out purposefully, and from the way they’re talking it seems like it’s just going to get worse. Stuff like putting cloud run python functions in to Excel just sounds like they’re testing tech to push more and more functions off the device and in to their centralized processing centers.
I’d consider apple but I don’t have “spend 3x as much money on the same hardware” money TBH, and really I don’t have any guarantees they won’t do the same thing Microsoft is doing.
I’ve got an older laptop that I’m slowly rebuilding my work flow in mint Linux and once I’ve got that working I’ll set it up on my main computer and be done with windows for the foreseeable future.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) company Anthropic has claimed to a US court that using copyrighted content in large language model (LLM) training data counts as “fair use”, however....
“Ai” as it is being marketed is less about new technical developments being utilized and more about a fait accompli.
They want mass adoption of the automated plagiarism machine learning programs by users and companies, hoping that by the time the people being plagiarized notice, it’s too late to rip it all out.
That and otherwise devalue and anonymize work done by people to reduce the bargaining power of workers.
What they have, is miles from artificial general intelligence, it is not AI in even a limited sense. It is AI in the same way a mob in a video game is AI.
Their claims to be approaching it are marketing fluff at best, and abject lies at worst.
I do not think it is ok when a large company throws a bunch of other people’s data and content in to a wood chipper and then gives away the wood chips to get more people using their services.
Gee golly, why would the GOP want poor people in rural areas to not have internet? Isn’t that their largest constituency? Almost like those people having access to information other than through “local” news channels owned by Sinclair, Fox News, and their local church scares them or something.
Thing is, people don’t pay attention to it, that’s how it works. If they really dig in to it, they notice the contradictions. It just plays in the background and they pick up the bits that speak to them in some way, they internalize those bits and ignore the rest, then they might repeat those bits, adding to the background noise.
You just learn to ignore basically all of it and don’t challenge it because everyone been fed rhetoric to support the bits that speak to them, and you don’t have any other place to draw a coherent counter narrative from.
Now with the internet, there’s spaces that give other narratives and rhetoric, ones that don’t feel weird, alienating, pompous, and aren’t constantly speaking down to you.
It’s starting to fail as a system of manufacturing consensus. largely because of the internet, people who get access to the internet run head first in to stuff that contradicts fundamental assumptions that have been drilled in to them. Go to these areas and you’ll see a lot more dissent than you used to.
It’s really hurt a lot of people’s willingness to trust any “authoritative source”. It’s these sources fault for creating these absurd echo chambers and not questioning what would happen when they inevitably failed.
See it’s actually fine because computer power is just always going to get better and the next gen will handle it all fine.
Oh and there is definitely no reason to try and reduces electricity usage. See cause we’re totally going to run everything on solar panels any day now and we can just scale that up forever to meet demand without any problems.
Obviously, sarcasm. It is kind of infuriating how little a lot of companies care about keeping stuff lightweight.
Personally I’m very interested in projects to build functional lightweight systems and architecture, particularly stuff that could run on older process node chips. Like stuff that could be made without colossally complex supply chains.
New Mexico’s Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Facebook and Instagram owner Meta in December, saying the company failed to protect young users from exposure to child sexual abuse material and allowed adults to solicit explicit imagery from them....
Facebook has done so much terrible shit by refusing to moderate properly, multiple fucking genocides are on their hands, and yet this is what gets them in court? Fucking… this?
Nah, kids shouldn’t be on these platforms nearly as young as they are, kids being on these platforms are not the reason these sights need to moderate better, adults being jackasses are the reason these sites need to be moderated better.
I think this is likely the first in a lot more cuts to come. Google probably does not want to do it all at once though, potentially because that would be a huge red flag for the whole industry and hurt the confidence of investors in the industry as a whole.
Given that Google makes most of their money by selling services to other parts of the industry, and a lot of the industry runs solely on the confidence of investors, doing a bunch of big cuts all at once would harm them. But they do need to cut back a lot more long term, because investor money is drying up to feed the companies that buy services from Google.
The funny thing is, that most of the one who do make a profit, do so by selling goods and services to those not making a profit, and if all the unprofitable ones disappeared the “profitable” ones would suddenly be unprofitable as well.
Windows 11 is now an ad platform--this is why we're here ( www.ghacks.net )
The writing is on the wall--I suspect the next Windows OS will be a subscription service. Gather your ISOs while ye may.
Elon Musk’s X can’t invent its own copyright law, judge says ( arstechnica.com )
Vertical Parking Systems: An Historical Perspective and Urban Innovation ( www.infoterkiniviral.com )
The storied annals of city development chronicle the evolution of parking systems as a hallmark of human creativity
Here's what one of the first flying cars looked like and what the modern version has become ( www.infoterkiniviral.com )
When it comes to new transportation ideas, the thought of flying cars is one of the most interesting
Major U.S. newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft for copyright infringement ( www.axios.com )
It’s the End of the Web as We Know It ( www.theatlantic.com )
AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO' ( www.404media.co )
The race to decarbonise the world’s economy risks repeating the mistakes of the colonial era by building industries on forced and child labour, rights advocate warns ( www.smh.com.au )
Almost 90 per cent of the global supply for polysilicon, a common raw material in electronic devices and solar panels, comes from China, and about half of that comes from Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the Uyghurs, says Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free, a charity dedicating to fight forced labour....
But Claude said tumor! ( jlai.lu )
House likely to pass a bill that could ban TikTok, sending it to the Senate ( www.nbcnews.com )
Reddit gets ready for IPO, setting a top valuation of $6.4 billion ( www.axios.com )
Need game recommendations
I wanna get into 2d games a bit more. Mainly things like RPGs or metroidvanias (or just single palywr games in general) For devices I can emulate older systems and I also have a switch. Any recommendations?
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of March 3rd
What have you all been playing! Still on my helldivers and binding of Isaac grinds. Spreading managed democracy through the galaxy 💪
Large Language Models Are Drunk at the Wheel ( matt.si )
Windows-as-a-nuisance: How I clean up a “clean install” of Windows 11 and Edge ( arstechnica.com )
Enshittification is coming for absolutely everything ( archive.is )
I’m curious about building a laptop but am getting hung up on motherboards
I’m aware of things like framework and they’re a cool system, but they’re limited in what chipsets can be used by the mother boards they offer....
What do you think about privacy services like Incogni?
I'd like to purge some of my info from the interwebs, and was considering trying one of these services. Does anyone have any experience with them?
The Cult of AI: How one writer's trip to an annual tech conference left him with a sinking feeling about the future ( www.rollingstone.com )
From the (middle of the) story: The reason CES was so packed with random “AI”-branded products was that sticking those two letters to a new company is seen as something of a talisman, a ritual to bring back the (VC) rainy season.
Microsoft stole my Chrome tabs, and it wants yours, too ( www.theverge.com )
Last week, I turned on my PC, installed a Windows update, and rebooted to find Microsoft Edge automatically open with the Chrome tabs I was working on before the update. I don’t use Microsoft Edge regularly, and I have Google Chrome set as my default browser. Bleary-eyed at 9AM, it took me a moment to realize that Microsoft...
Amazon- and Google-backed AI firm Anthropic says “general-purpose AI tools simply could not exist” if AI companies had to pay licences for the training material ( www.computerweekly.com )
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) company Anthropic has claimed to a US court that using copyrighted content in large language model (LLM) training data counts as “fair use”, however....
Google's monopoly in the ad industry lets them profit off allowing scam ads to flourish, with no consequences ( checkmyads.org )
Google is spoon-feeding fake “Shark Tank approved” weight loss gummy candies to innocent people — and making money doing it.
FCC plans shutdown of Affordable Connectivity Program as GOP withholds funding ( arstechnica.com )
HP CEO: Blocking third-party ink from printers fights viruses ( arstechnica.com )
His claims are quickly debunked in the article, as the true reason is, obviously, protecting their IP and subscription model
A 2024 Plea for Lean Software (with running code) ( berthub.eu )
Court documents underscore Meta's 'historical reluctance' to protect children on Instagram ( apnews.com )
New Mexico’s Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Facebook and Instagram owner Meta in December, saying the company failed to protect young users from exposure to child sexual abuse material and allowed adults to solicit explicit imagery from them....
Google confirms it just laid off around a thousand employees ( www.theverge.com )
But there may be more, and it’s possible that Google is attempting to spread out the bad news instead of having it hit all at once.