Buttons

Buttons , 7 days ago

There was a time I wanted a Tesla, but I don't anymore. This is just another reason why.

Does Tesla care about making a "neat thing" or do they care about making "a car that can drive me places". The doors clearly show they prioritize making a "neat thing", but I want a reliable car.

Opening and closing doors was a solved problem. Somehow Tesla made it worse.

Buttons , 9 days ago

🎵 Don't wanna close my eyes 🎵

Buttons , 12 days ago

There's also websites hosted in countries that don't care about US law. We can access those even without a VPN, for now...

Buttons , 13 days ago

It's like if a bunch of people were gathered in person talking about something, with many of the same pros and cons.

Buttons , 13 days ago

Google doesn't index Discord, which means the billion dollar ad industry makes little effort to push their ads on Discord.

Buttons , 17 days ago

I was thinking about why a small landlord might be better, and I know there are exceptions, but usually a small landlord is is not going to squeeze every penny out of their rentals, sometimes out of the goodness of their heart, but most importantly, a small landlord has other ways to be productive.

A small landlord who has a normal job, if they want to improve the world, they do it through their job or personal projects, they build something or create something or whatever.

A big landlord who does nothing else, they aren't actually creating anything, they're just rent seeking and the most creative way they can imagine to improve the world is to rent seek even harder.

Our economic system gives greater rewards to those who move money around than to those who create things or cure cancer or anything else. The ways of turning a lot of money into even more money are taxed less (usually not at all) than more common ways of earning money like working a job or creating physical goods. The richest people didn't get rich by creating something that improves everyone's lives, they got rich by moving money around.

Buttons , 18 days ago

Yep, can I play it at 2x speed or skip ahead? If not, then it's the ad. At the very least blank the video and mute the sound. I'll enjoy a moment to breath and consider if there's something better I should be doing.

Buttons , 21 days ago

Surely the free market and competition will deliver what customers want, right? ... Right?!?

Buttons , 26 days ago

The market is filled with products people hate.

Explain to me again how free markets and competition are supposed to work?

Buttons , 28 days ago

LLMs have a high coolness-to-code ratio; very cool and not a lot of code. This is the type of thing open source developer are more interested in, so I hope Linux will have some good AI built-in and running locally.

Half of Linux usage is on the text-based command line anyway, just what LLMs are good at.

Buttons , 28 days ago

Maybe.

Like, if I could type "extract the audio of this video and re-encode it as a medium quality MP3, break up the audio into 30 consecutive tracks" in a shell, and the next line was populated with the appropriate ffmpeg command, but not yet executed, I could quickly look over the command, nothing looks fishy, so I go ahead and run the command.

Buttons , 28 days ago

It's no different than what the internet has been doing for us for decades. People tell us commands to run, we use our best judgement, maybe check a couple things, and then run the commands. If the internet suggests a command or a LLM suggests a command, what's the difference?

Buttons , 27 days ago

It helps make things more self-contained. If a Linux distribution comes with an LLM that knows how to use and tweak the OS and also knows a lot about various programming languages and lots of things in general, that's a big step towards having an OS that can be operated locally without using the internet.

I wouldn't like it if Linux required an internet connection to function, and yet... I've never been able to configure or do much of anything in Linux without referring to the internet.

Buttons , 29 days ago

That kid is superior

Buttons , 1 month ago

We often make laws without a way to enforce them 100% effectively. For example, my road has a 25 MPH speed limit even though we haven't yet installed speed limiting chips on every single car in the nation, we still went ahead and put a speed limit on our road though, and it mostly works, but sometimes someone drives 30 MPH.

Buttons , 1 month ago

It seems the people who are the most staunch defenders of capitalism and free markets are the most resistant to the capitalist and free market solution.

Clean air (or rather, air with normal levels of carbon) belongs to the public, and anyone who wants to take it away should pay the public.

Buttons , 1 month ago

Two-chubby-chubby

Buttons , 1 month ago

They are doing extra work to change the product in ways that customers don't want.

Can someone explain to me again how "free markets" and "competition" are supposed to work?

Buttons , 1 month ago

Yes, because Americans would never consider electing a President with health issues.

Buttons , 1 month ago

Maybe he was speaking morally rather than legally.

For example, if I said "I believe people have a right to healthcare", you might correctly respond "people do not have a legal right to healthcare" (in America at least). But you'd be missing the point, because I'm speaking morally, not legally.

I believe, morally, that people have a right to be heard.

Buttons , 1 month ago

A problem is that social media websites are simultaneously open platforms with Section 230 protections, and also publishers who have free speech rights. Those are contradictory, so which is it?

Perhaps @rottingleaf was speaking morally rather than legally. For example, I might say "I believe everyone in America should have access to healthcare"; if you respond "no, there is no right to healthcare" you would be right, but you missed my point. I was expressing an moral aspiration.

I think shadowbans are a bad mix of censorship and hard to detect. Morally, I believe they should be illegal. If a company wants to ban someone, they can be up front about it with a regular ban; make it clear what they are doing. To implement this legally, we could alter Section 230 protections so that they don't apply to companies performing shadowbans.

Buttons , 1 month ago

Yet another tool that uses “freedom of speech” incorrectly

Often freedom of speech is a moral ideal, a moral aspiration, and dismissing it on legal grounds is missing the point.

If I say "people should have a right to healthcare", and you respond "people do not have a legal right to healthcare", you are correct, but you have missed the point. If I say people should have freedom of speech and you respond that the first amendment doesn't apply to Facebook, you are right, but have again missed the point.

In general, when people advocate for any change, they can be countered with "well, the law doesn't require that". Yes, society currently works the way the law says it should. But what we're talking about is how society should work and how the law should change.

Buttons , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I'm okay with algorithms not recommending certain posts. I just don't like shadowbans because the platform is lying to the user, the user interface is essentially telling the user "your post is available for viewing and is being treated like any other post" when it really isn't.

There's a balance between the free speech of individuals and the free speech of the company. I think a fair balance between the two is, once a company is big enough to control a significant percentage of the entire nation's discourse, the company at least has to be up front and avoid deceptive practices like shadow-banning. (This should only apply to large companies, once a company is large enough it has a responsibility to society.)

Buttons , 1 month ago

Somehow Trump returned... 🫠

Buttons , 1 month ago

US auto makers were like "we love the free market", then people bought cheaper cars from China and they said "wait, not that free!"

Buttons , 1 month ago

You can tell how important working from the office is by the fact that they can't tell whether or not people are working from the office.

Maybe people need to start talking about unionizing while in the office.

Buttons , 1 month ago

I've always felt the nation of Israel is squatting on the name. Like, aren't there people outside of Israel-the-nation that also claim to be Israel (in the Biblical sense)?

Buttons , 1 month ago

The government certainly does have the right to protect citizens and make whatever laws are necessary. In this case, the government can do so by amending the constitution. Until then, the 1st Amendment applies to all citizens, non-citizens, and business entities operating in the United States.

Buttons , 1 month ago

Criticizing the Israel government is okay (until our government outlaws it at least). Suggesting the people of Israel are some special kind of corrupt is not okay. Our corruption is our own.

Buttons , 1 month ago

I once thought of a movie while coughing into a microphone. I opened the recorded cough with VLC and it played the movie.

Buttons , 2 months ago

IP law is all about telling people what they can't create.

Buttons , 2 months ago

And blackjack?

Buttons , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Not always. As John Carmack said:

The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.

Many people have created things entirely from their own mind, and then find that they're violating IP law.

Even things like Calculus were invented simultaneously in different parts of the world. I mean, think about it, Calculus allows us to solve all kinds of problem that humankind had spent thousands of years thinking about and being unable to solve. Then, independently, in separate parts of the world 2 people invent / discover Calculus around the same time. If world wide IP law had existed, it might swoop in and tell one of them their thoughts were not legal.

Buttons , 2 months ago

Birds aren't real according to sources that make claims that birds aren't real.

Buttons , 2 months ago

Karma.

The young treat the old however they do. But then the young grow old and get treated the same.

Buttons , 2 months ago

Yeah, parents are getting ruined by social media algorithms too.

Our government seems to be moving towards an "we only care about the children, but everyone, including adults, upload your government papers" approach.

Y'all got any of those protections for adults? I remember reading regulations that companies couldn't show children advertisements. Can I have some of that regulation too?

I just can't stop being cynical that there is little focus on homeless or underpaid adults, or other adult issues, but the one problem we're focused on just so happens to include everyone giving up anonymity on the Internet.

We do need to help kids with social media, but there's a lot of other challenges they will soon face as adults that were ignoring.

Buttons , 2 months ago

It's been a couple decades since I worked in a call center (tech support).

Are they still dominated by shitty ticketing systems that employees are expected to fill out while being on the call? I don't know if that was just an oddity of the call center I worked for or not. If I didn't fill out a ticket correctly we wouldn't get paid for the tech support, so management would get real upset if you didn't fill out a ticket correctly. There were like 400 fields to fill out in a ticket and you had to fill out about 15 of them just right; fill out one too many, or one too few, or the wrong one and management is upset.

Honestly, language models would do better filling out those tickets than they would handling the call. If an AI can't fill out the ticket, how can it solve an actual problem? It would sure make life for the call center employees better if all they had to do was talk instead of managing a bunch of tickets and paperwork using shitty internal apps. But who am I kidding. They'll probably find a way to make life worse for the customers and the call center employees and they'll make a profit, because that's how free markets work, right? Whoever makes life worse for everyone prospers.

Buttons , 2 months ago

Am.... Am I pasta?

Buttons , 2 months ago

It lists the foreign adversaries, they aren't just made up on a whim. Iran, N. Korea, China, Russia.

Where is WhatsApp based?

Buttons , 2 months ago

My Grandma uses Arch by the way

Buttons , 2 months ago

A neat programming project would be to migrate YouTube videos to PeerTube for content creators. If a YouTuber decides to put their videos on PeerTube as well, it should be as easy as possible.

Buttons , 2 months ago

If ByteDance is a normal company they will seek profits and sell for as much as they can.

But if TikTok is a Chinese psyop, they'll just use any of the many legal tricks we allow to change the "owner" while China still retains control. Companies do this all the time, look at shell companies and such. It's super easy for China to mask the true owner if they decide to.

This is why we should make broadly applicable regulations instead of picking on one specific company.

Buttons , 2 months ago

They can't actually ban TikTok by name, it's unconstitutional to make laws targeted at individuals.

The current law actually says "no company can operate in the US with over 20% owned by China, Iran, N. Korea, or Russia", or something like that.

There's a lot of people in the US and at least of few of them would be willing to run TikTok the same way, same algorithms, same content, and sell the users data on shadowy data markets (which China can surely get their hands on), etc. I'm repeating myself now.

Again, my point is there are a lot of people in the US and surely some of them can form a company willing to do what China wants, and isn't that their right by our laws and morals of free speech? I know if things get heated enough laws and morals will be ignored (see Japanese internment camps).

And my even broader point is that this move against TikTok has ulterior motives. We should have created regulations that apply to all companies instead of targeting TikTok specifically. Even though we didn't technically target TikTok specifically, we effectively did.

Buttons , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I see. You're right about the text of the law. Thanks for taking the time to post that.

I would say it violates the 1st Amendment then. US Citizens have a right to say what they want, which includes saying what China wants if that is what the person wants.

The courts will have to decide.

Buttons , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I've also heard the data is physically stored and hosted by Oracle. So maybe China just copies it? The primary copy is in the US currently. Which doesn't really mean much.

I wouldn't be surprised if Meta's data ended up in China too. But Congress isn't targeting them.

Buttons , 2 months ago

They could even own a President. Unheard of! /s

Buttons , 2 months ago

You've made the most substantive comments in this post. Especially quoting the law and this information about Facebook.

For context, Facebook's revenue in 2019 was 70 billions dollars. So a 5 billion dollar fine isn't nothing. Everyone can judge these bans and fines for themselves and judge whether there's a double standard though.

You seem upset because I said TikTok stores their data in Oracle, but that's what they said in 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/17/tech/tiktok-user-data-oracle/index.html But, as you say, it appears in 2018 they were storing their data in China, and presumably that continued up until mid-2022.

I'm not a shill, but I am a cynic who believes the government is acting on behalf of their corporate friends (US media companies) rather than on general principles. I have no love for China. I wanted regulation that applied equally to all US companies. If you don't want to talk to me, fine, I'll discuss my opinion with others; even so, you've shared a lot of important and concrete information here, so thanks again.

Buttons , 2 months ago

It wont work either, there's so many legal tricks that can change the owner of a company without actually changing who controls the company.

"TikTok was evil and controlled by China, so we banned it. Oh look, here's a totally new website called TokTik owned by a US Citizen named Mr. ILoveChina who built a TikTok replacement in 15 minutes by hiring foreign consultants for 2 cents an hour."