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BarbecueCowboy

@BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world

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BarbecueCowboy ,

There's a lot of books out there that I think are famous because they're exceptionally shitty just in a different way than is typical. Same way I personally feel about Ulysses, It's not a literary puzzle, it's just a shitty book where the author tried something stupid and then just kinda kept going. I think Nabokov is a bit more effective, but it's along the same vein.

BarbecueCowboy ,

If your net worth is negative, in 9 years it's only half as negative.

BarbecueCowboy ,

The 'But, everyone is a bit evil' argument is such bullshit, the concern here is obviously the extent of the surveillance, but no one can say you're entirely wrong because the definition of that is so broad.

It's kind of technical, but there are comparisons on the report itself, even a fancy table, to other popular shopping apps and there are some legitimately troubling items. For anyone else, I'd recommend skipping direct to the source:

https://grizzlyreports.com/we-believe-pdd-is-a-dying-fraudulent-company-and-its-shopping-app-temu-is-cleverly-hidden-spyware-that-poses-an-urgent-security-threat-to-u-s-national-interests/

BarbecueCowboy ,

You might be overestimating how much content that was. Streaming services try to maintain an illusion of neverending content but last I saw except for prime, the amount of content they offer has been trending down.

Those numbers are fairly accessible for an average person with 3 or 4 large hard drives.

BarbecueCowboy ,

There are resellers in the US who will set you up with the infrastructure to do it yourself. You don't need much and it's less expensive than you'd think, almost turnkey.

Demand is more than high enough in poor areas too, they probably made a really good return before it shut down.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Plex operates a service on their end that mostly covers you if you fuck up the network routing. It's probably the least user friendly part of the setup, so kind of a big deal.

Amazon Mulls $5 to $10 monthly price tag for unprofitable Alexa service, AI revamp (www.reuters.com)

Amazon (AMZN.O) is planning a major revamp of its decade-old money-losing Alexa service to include a conversational generative AI with two tiers of service and has considered a monthly fee of around $5 to access the superior version, according to people with direct knowledge of the company's plans.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Alexa has a tendency to give you the 'featured' product no matter how precisely and specifically you ask her for something. Even if you don't have to research and know exactly what you want, it's almost always easier to just go find your phone.

The real game changer for Alexa was always having a voice assistant that you can integrate with just about whatever you want that isn't tied to someone's phone. The idea of going into someone's house and just saying 'Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights' or 'Alexa, is it cold outside?' is where the Alexa magic lies, but Amazon never could figure out how to make that profitable on it's own, just doesn't contribute to the business case.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Google has these phases for the products they develop, right now they're in the phase where they've functionally abandoned home and are giving it just enough support to try to get some other company to manage/fix it and let them profit off of it.

I'm not usually a fan of Apple, but they're probably going to be the ones defining where things go. If they want the market, it's basically up for grabs right now.

BarbecueCowboy ,

You're right that is a real loss. Really, an Alexa that didn't require a personalized amazon account could still be huge if they could figure out how not to have to justify the costs of running the servers. I think that unwillingness to let Alexa be just a voice assistant is the key roadblock. In a similar vein, Alexa for business could have been a really big deal too if they could have worked it out a bit faster but now I think interest has mostly died out before it had a chance to be adopted.

I'm not a huge fan of the company and I think it's a coin flip as to whether they would just completely screw it up, but I wonder what would have happened if someone like Crestron had taken a real interest instead of just half-assing an integration.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Anything reaching those kind of numbers is probably a music video or some sort of nursery rhyme set to music. Youtube is mostly a music service.

Beyond that, there's a grammarly ad that hit over 500 million views, wonder how much they spent on that and a lot of random memes. It's real difficult to find the most viewed real non-music, non-kids, non-ad video. Probably still Charlie Bit my Finger (again). Except Mr Beast, not many others regularly topping 100M.

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity (ludic.mataroa.blog)

How stupid do you have to be to believe that only 8% of companies have seen failed AI projects? We can't manage this consistently with CRUD apps and people think that this number isn't laughable? Some companies have seen benefits during the LLM craze, but not 92% of them. 34% of companies report that generative AI specifically...

BarbecueCowboy ,

It's consistently pretty good for writing items with low technical importance and minimal need for accuracy.

I'll never write a job description myself again and my need for getting with communications for mass correspondence is almost gone.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Honestly, I use it because it does a better job than who we usually use, the items it adds to the Job descriptions usually actually exist.

BarbecueCowboy ,

The transience and non-indexability is a feature, it's easier to manage a community if any problem can be solved by just ignoring it for a few days. Just have to hope the issue stays within Discord, sure you could search within discord, but no one is going to and on any large discord the results are likely to be so numerous that it's worthless. Worst case you lock down a chat channel, mark it as private due to 'spam' and create a new one to serve the same purpose as the old to cover it up the rest of the way.

BarbecueCowboy ,

If you search back far enough on some lemmy instances that have defederated others, you'll find ghosts of old content from those defederated servers, but it's all local to whatever instance you're viewing it on. A large amount of the content from the server that went down should also exist on the servers that server was federated with.

These lemmy instances have got to start running out of storage though, I haven't heard of any kind of automated purging. I'd bet someone somewhere is already working on an archive lemmy.

BarbecueCowboy ,

A lot of the time it was technically 'up', but just non-functional/unusable.

Most common for me was just not being able to do anything but look at the front page, couldn't click on anything without errors.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Those are all legitimate concerns, but I'm not sure the effort required to fix real estate prices, crime, and income equality is comparable to the amount of effort required to ban a social media site and some drones from a country that might not have our best interests in mind.

I'm trying to be optimistic about the ban, I'd love to see the drone industry take off in the us and I'd love to see what we could accomplish. It's not a huge industry and I honestly can't name a single US drone manufacturer, but I really hope that won't be the case in a year or two.

BarbecueCowboy ,

The general idea is that it's a potential cybersecurity concern, it's along the same lines as the Huawei ban from a few years back. Not entirely without merit, there have been vulnerabilities found in DJI hardware/software that could be used maliciously and some of them were fairly serious. I don't think anyone has ever found any proof those vulnerabilities were intentional, but I also think that would be super difficult to prove one way or the other.

BarbecueCowboy ,

To be fair, it's super rare to see a Libertarian Politician gain any following without a platform that isn't textbook conservative but with more weed or absolutely batshit insane.

BarbecueCowboy ,

I get where you're coming from, but I also feel like I might get kind of bored and I wonder how I'm going to get that hot sauce from Alabama that I like. I'll give up on a lot of my ideals and trade a LOT of frustration for artisanal hot sauces.

Spotify is raising the cost of Premium subscriptions, again (www.engadget.com)

Spotify is officially raising its Premium subscription rates in the US come July, following reports of the move in April. The platform is increasing its Individual plan from $11 to $12 monthly and its Duo plan from $15 to $17 monthly — the same jump as last year's $1 and $2 price hikes, respectively. However, its Family plan...

BarbecueCowboy ,

I'm all for going sailing but if there are features you want that that can't quite replicate, it's also a great time to look at a VPN service with a server in Turkey... Sign up on a Turkish IP and the exchange rate puts you under $2/month USD. This works for a lot of other things too.

BarbecueCowboy ,

I know.

BarbecueCowboy ,

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks

I wish firefox was faster but benchmarks are pretty common, it's not hard to test. It's kind of an unfair fight at this point honestly, large swaths of the web are just built for chrome. There are other benchmark options out there, but even using Mozilla's own kraken benchmarking solution, it loses tremendously more than it wins. I honestly really respect them for not building their benchmarking system to make their solutions come out on top.

In some benchmarks the lag from firefox is very significant and then on the other hand, when firefox does win, chrome is usually right behind it. It's not ideal.

BarbecueCowboy ,

A lot is kind of an understatement:

"In 2022, 81% of Mozilla's revenues were derived from Google"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#:~:text=In%202022%2C%2081%25%20of%20Mozilla's,twice%20hourly%20from%20Google's%20servers.

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf

With that level of support, I don't think an ultimatum would be required.

Google's "Manifest V2" Chrome extension phaseout next month is expected to impact the original uBlock Origin extension, which still uses the V2 framework and has 37 million users (www.theregister.com)

The new MV3 architecture reflects Google's avowed desire to make browser extensions more performant, private, and secure. But the internet giant's attempt to do so has been bitterly contested by makers of privacy-protecting and content-blocking extensions, who have argued that the Chocolate Factory's new software architecture...

BarbecueCowboy ,

They're not wrong, benchmarks have been done on mobile firefox.

https://www.androidauthority.com/best-fastest-android-browsers-337802/

Firefox doesn't lose every test, it even won one in the linked article, but chrome at least beats it in every other one and firefox comes in last several times.

BarbecueCowboy ,

You're not wrong, but it should be noted that 'at worst 1 second slower' means a lot more when the fastest time is under 2 seconds. Saving 1 second is kind of a big deal when you only have 3 to work with. Closing that much of a gap would be a huge win for Firefox.

Also worth noting that many of the linked tests are also not directly based on time, and the difference in benchmarking is still fairly substantial. With the exception of the singular test that it came out on top on, the best case among these benchmarks is that firefox mobile is 15-20% slower than Chrome. These benchmarks even include Mozilla's own Kraken benchmark (where it still comes in last among these results).

Lastly, do want to say that I hope mobile firefox can catch up on these, but they've got a lot of work to do and the odds are stacked against them.

BarbecueCowboy ,

I think this is likely going to be true unfortunately, but I also feel like the title is more than a bit misleading. (The title at Ars is identical to the title of the thread here)

I didn't see anything in this article indicating that Spotify has made any direct comments on whether they were going to open source it or not. From the article, it also sounds like refunds haven't been publicly stated as the official solution from spotify, but instead just something some people have managed to get spotify support personnel to approve. In fact, it's stated that Spotify specifically 'declined to confirm' that refunds were the official solution.

BarbecueCowboy ,

There were rumors of that and a lot of other complications in the animal trials. I don't think we ever got proof, but a lot of irregularities that were explained away. Could be a lot more problems coming.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Here's your source my friend. Sorry, original post only showed up on twitter:

Original Post: https://x.com/tehmondspartan/status/1787508561087693204

Does have a few other socials though:

https://bsky.app/profile/mondyspartan.bsky.social

https://www.deviantart.com/mondyspartan/gallery

BarbecueCowboy ,

I do feel like the former or something close to it should be our goal as a society.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Lol, I did mean the former, but yes, I was imagining automation/etc taking over the role of most jobs.

BarbecueCowboy ,

This does bring up kind of an interesting question for me at least.

I would expect that a significant contributor to the surge prices is from HVAC units and similar needing to work harder/etc. My brain also feels like solar panels are likely to work better when it's warmer, but I realize that I don't have any proof of that or know how that would work beyond 'when hot, feels like more sun rays, more sun rays good for solar?'.

On to the question, do solar panels work better in warmer temperatures and does output of solar panels scale anywhere close to comparatively with ambient temperature and/or need for HVAC and similar systems?

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