BarbecueCowboy

BarbecueCowboy , 4 days ago to 196 in yikes rule

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 , 7 days ago to 196 in Inflation rule

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

BarbecueCowboy , 8 days ago to Technology in Shopping app Temu is “dangerous malware,” spying on your texts, lawsuit claims

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 , 13 days ago to Technology in Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined

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.

BarbecueCowboy , 13 days ago to Technology in Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined

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 , 13 days ago to Technology in Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined

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 , 14 days ago to 196 in 4 year ruled Lemmy meme to put things into perspective

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.

BarbecueCowboy , 14 days ago to Technology in I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity

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 , 14 days ago to Technology in Amazon Mulls $5 to $10 monthly price tag for unprofitable Alexa service, AI revamp

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 , 14 days ago to Technology in Amazon Mulls $5 to $10 monthly price tag for unprofitable Alexa service, AI revamp

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 , 14 days ago to Technology in Amazon Mulls $5 to $10 monthly price tag for unprofitable Alexa service, AI revamp

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 , 14 days ago to Technology in I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity

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 , 17 days ago to Technology in Internet forums are disappearing because now it's all Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.

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 , 17 days ago to Technology in Internet forums are disappearing because now it's all Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.

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 , 17 days ago to Fediverse in Kbin.social down again? Are people moving to mbin instances (kbin.run, fedia.io)?

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.