SnotFlickerman

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Trump is a difficult one because he's honestly in a lot of ways a complete fucking idiot and would be flailing and failing if it wasn't for an obscene number of people in his orbit who enable him.

Trump is just a narcissist high on his own grandiose supply. I'm not sure that counts as evil moreso than "stupid."

Literally all the plans he floats are absolutely fucking idiotic shit that will send this country spinning down the toilet faster than you can say "Make America Great Again."

So while I get that Trump is a spearhead behind some of the worst things, the reality is he is just a racist who wants other people to like him, and he's figured out how to pander to racists to get what he wants. He's not a calculating supervillain, he's just an ugly rich chode who thinks he's the main character.

He's not pursuing Dictatorship because he understands it. Hell, he didn't even want to do the job of the Presidency, do you think he actually wants to be in charge and responsible for anything? During COVID he famously said "I don't take any responsibility at all."

Save it, Trump is a fucking idiot through and through who is well on his way to join Reagan in Dementia City, but he's enabled by some far more seriously dangerous people.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

In my life I have seen ignorant people have just as much capcity for empathy as the educated. This is kind of a grossly elitist attitude.

Education/high intelligence isn't a requirement for empathy. Plenty of non-book-smart people have excellent emotional intelligence.

Plenty of highly intelligent people have high capacity for malice and evil.

Henry Kissinger comes to mind when it comes to people who are highly intelligent and have deep capacity for malice and evil.

This is a gross, classist opinion.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Going out on a limb here: Is AI really an efficiency and productivity increasing device if we have to *checks notes... have an energy breakthrough to be able to functionally use it?

It sounds to me like rich people are admitting it actually takes more resources to support AI than it does fucking workers who already exist and don't need a fucking energy breakthrough to function.

"There's no way to get there without a breakthrough," he said. "It motivates us to go invest more in fusion."

Seriously.

https://media1.tenor.com/m/fLZZnyr8J6kAAAAC/nandor-fucking-guy.gif

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

You give them too much fucking credit. The rich are an entire class of people who don't know how to take "No" for an answer, they'll just burn every last drop of fossil fuel in pursuit of... something? and then say "oopsie doodles" when it's all gone and they still haven't gotten fusion off the ground.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Patchy the Pirate is the Classicest of Philosophers.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

A bit of the old Ultraviolence, eh?

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Honestly its just a symptom of a bigger problem with the justice system entirely.

It has always completely favored those with the most money and lawyers.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

So when the living fuck are judges going to start punishing companies for breaking the Spirit of the Law instead of the Letter of the Law?

This is something that absolutely infuriates me about American law. A law can be perfectly fucking clear about what it means but as long as you wiggle around specific wording, then you're not "breaking" it.

It's absolute fucking bullshit, and every company does this with every fucking law.

Why do discrimination laws mean jack shit? At Will Employment, where they can fire you for a bunch of indiscretions they made up and documented, and definitely not because they hate the fact that you're gay or brown or old.

The US is just an endless fucking end-run around every fucking law because not a single fucking judge has the balls to hand down judgment based on breaking the spirit of the law as opposed to the letter of the law.

This "letter of the law" bullshit is literally why we're even having to have a conversation about whether or not Trump is eligible for Presidency. He clearly fucking is not, but because the US needs to have us quibble over every single fucking word of every law every time a rich person gets their fucking fee-fees hurt, we're having a conversation about whether he should be allowed instead of just fucking barring him from it and being god damned done with it.

So sick of this shit, it's so fucking easy to not let these companies get away with this shit and it's absolutely dropping this letter of the law bullshit that allows every law to be re-interpreted literally fucking endlessly.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

The Best Choice: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean

The Choice If You Absolutely Have To Keep Using the Spyware/Adware that is Chrome: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Apple is one of the most valuable companies on the planet.

Why are they just outright stripping this feature instead of just paying the patent fee? (As in literally removing the chips, actually stripping it.)

Are the patent fees so astronomical that it would put even Apple Computer, one of the most highly valued companies in existence, in line for bankruptcy? Or am I missing something and this wasn't an option, that the patent owners don't want to be paid, but just to be in control?

If Apple can afford the patent fees, it shows how ridiculously wasteful and petty corporations can choose to be.

If Apple can't afford the patent fees, it's more of an indictment of the patent system itself, if the largest and most valuable company on the planet can be dismantled via patent fees.

Either way, this is a bad fucking look.

a victory for the integrity of the American patent system and the safety of people relying on pulse oximetry.

It's always interesting how patent holders act like this protects people ("safety") when arguably it just denies people access to their functioning patented device, instead possibly relying on devices that don't function as well or no devices at all. Isn't it less safe to not be using an industry-standard?

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

I wasn't even sure that was possible? I guess it just seems a little antithetical to the idea of patents to just be able to wholesale ban another party from even using it at all.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Founded in 2005 by web developer Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, Reddit became best known for its niche discussion groups and its users voting "up" or "down" on the content posted by other members.

I appreciate this extremely sly shade at Steve Huffman.

He's not an entreprenuer because he didn't do dick between leaving Reddit and coming back to Reddit whereas Ohanian had a few other companies in his back pocket.

I mean, Ohanian sucks, too, but this sentence is just Reuters kicking dirt in Steve Huffman's smarmy little bitch face and I'm fucking here for it.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Hmmm, let's see.

---

• Failing company rooted in a more traditional framework they're trying to break out of

• Said company has no idea what they're doing and keep doing ridiculous things to "break out of" traditional framework

• Keeps doing things no user/customer asked for

• Said company has no real effective long-term game-plan and keeps changing tack because of bad previous choices

• There's a good chance the company could go completely bust because of lack of good business plan and solid leadership

---

Redditors: Reddit is the new GameStop!! DRS!! MOASS!!!

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Huffman is ostensibly following Elon Musk's lead, and last I checked, Musk had pretty effectively chased away a massive amount of what one might call "rational" advertisers. Reddit is absolutely following a similar path, and soon enough there will be advertisers who no longer want to be associated with a toxic brand.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

I fucking love dumbshit comments like these!

"I'm going to say this comment is totally wrong, but I don't actually care enough about the issue to explain it or use more than *checks notes... two words to justify my position."

Fucking hilarious, every time.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

The only question I have is how do they expect to attract sufficient moderators

I mean YouTube comment sections were known for years to be an unmoderated nightmare of just people saying the absolute dumbest shit.

YouTube was and still is the most popular video site.

I think reddit has just stopped caring about the real content of the comments since, like you said, they've pretty much pivoted to images and video. Expect the comments section to be further eroded as well, in the name of needing less moderation. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see Reddit do an "AI" push where the "AI" is mostly just replacing moderators with what amounts to a more advanced automod.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

I think you might just straight say "management skills" because that's bare minimum part of their fucking job to organize a schedule well enough so they don't have to have people running into overtime to get the job done. That is time management, too, because you're supposed to know how long it takes each employee to do shit, and you should be fucking organizing based on that.

I'm so fucking sick of skeleton crews. I'm pushing 50 and the last 25 fucking years has been nothing but skeleton crews where if one person calls out sick everything falls apart. Sorry, that's inefficient as hell. If one person calling out wrecks everything, then that means you're doing it fucking wrong and maybe you need one or two more people to help cover the gaps. I'm sure it makes them beaucoup bucks in the short term, but the profits from ruining your relationship with your customer base won't last. Eventually customers do get sick of being treated like shit. (Corporations are banking on all of them similarly treating you like shit so you won't have any real options that are better.)

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

I had to look it up to make sure I was spelling it right!

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

See: Labyrinthian phone systems where it's nearly impossible to talk to a human.

Don't fret, this year, they're fully removing the humans from the equation.

Literally, customer service is where I expect this to hit first.

Corporations have made clear they've cornered all the markets, and they're not concerned with serving the customer or fixing mistakes anymore. This will absolutely the first rug-pull. Expect to be flung into digital "black holes" when you have an issue because there no longer is a human in the chain to resolve it.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

completely liquidate billionaires

I'm imagining a new series of "Will it blend?"

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

I can't put the blame on underpaid people in other countries as much as I can't put it on the AI itself. It's the shitty business management practices. I doubt the foreigners doing customer service for the Yanks are happy about being browbeaten and spoken to abusively simply because they don't speak English as a first language. On top of the abuse, they're getting paid pennies compared to US/European customer service agents! They're human, they deserve the same pay, it's disgusting.

It's not the individual laborers fault that the corporate Suits make the rules and make them follow a script and don't allow them to actually help you. They can get fired for deviating from the script or actually helping you.

Corporations are really banking on how an AI will never, ever help you if they don't want it to. They don't have to worry about coaching it or firing it. They can just keep changing the code to fit new scenarios.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

That's so two-thousand-and-late.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

I mean, yes and no. If your company is constantly fucking up and constantly having to fix things for customers yeah, but if you're actually providing good service and products to begin with, customer service is more about retaining your existing customer set by keeping them so happy with how you've treated them that they wouldn't consider an alternative. I know we're well beyond the era in history where companies are worried about pesky things like "customer satisfaction" or "long-term profits" but it doesn't mean that classic principles don't apply: companies just stopped giving a shit about them.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I think Baldur's Gate III Director/Dev Swen Vincke's comments on Ubisoft+ asking gamers to get used to "not owning games" is exactly about this.

Whatever the future of games looks like, content will always be king. But it’s going to be a lot harder to get good content if subscription becomes the dominant model and a select group gets to decide what goes to market and what not. Direct from developer to players is the way.

Getting a board to ok a project fueled by idealism is almost impossible and idealism needs room to exist, even if it can lead to disaster. Subscription models will always end up being cost/benefit analysis exercises intended to maximize profit.

There is nothing wrong with that but it may not become a monopoly of subscription services. We are already all dependent on a select group of digital distribution platforms and discoverability is brutal. Should those platforms all switch to subscription, it’ll become savage.

In such a world by definition the preference of the subscription service will determine what games get made.

Trust me - you really don’t want that.

TLDR ; you won’t find our games on a subscription service even if I respect that for many developers it presents an opportunity to make their game. I don’t have an issue with that. I just want to make sure the other ecosystem doesn’t die because it’s valuable.

To me his thoughts are interesting, because he's basically describing what already happened to the music industry with Spotify. As he pointed out, discoverability on digital distribution platforms was already brutal. Even if you were buying music from iTunes Store or Bandcamp, you're still deeply limited on discoverability. That was kicked into overdrive in the music industry with Spotify.

Spotify's catalogue is anodyne and too heavily curated. It means the popular artists will basically always get paid, while the unique and different artists will suffer and fail and probably stop making art entirely because it has become unsustainable for them.

It's like how the story of Taylor Swift being a "real indie" is such a joke, especially with the leaked emails from her dad being angry about how he doesn't get enough credit for basically buying her her music career. Basically it took a massive amount of money and propaganda ("advertising") to get her career off the ground at all.

Any artist without a daddy with lots of Big Banker Money is basically twisting in the fucking wind at this point. Don't even get me started on how AI art and music is further dropping the bottom out of the artistic industry.

Art is quickly becoming ("always has been") something only available to the idle rich. Only the idle rich can afford to piss away all their time on something that could be completely unprofitable. While I'm sure some of it is good art, do we really think that art is deserving of only the ideas of the idle rich?

Further, Vincke is exactly right about the subscription service dictating what makes it to air. When banning an episode of Hasan Minaj's Patriot Act, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was quoted as "We’re not in the truth-to-power business. We’re in the entertainment business." They absolutely can and will dictate what makes it to their streams.

It's a complication of the nature of the art market, how we've hollowed out pay for artists over two decades (executives love to blame it on "piracy" but the real blame is "executives who are greedy fucks who want to keep all the money the artists made for themselves"), and the boom in generative AI "art."

I, sadly, don't see a good way out, but listening to people like Swen Vincke is a good start.

EDIT: One final thing. The "algorithm" is just something that The Suits rely on to justify any and all decisions. The "algorithm" isn't making the decisions, The Suits are, just like always. The "algorithm" didn't pull episodes of shows that were politically unpalatable to a certain nation, CEO Reed Hastings did. It's just one more way to obfuscate corporate decision making, so they can always point to data. Surprise: you can prove/justify anything with statistics (data).

EDIT II: In respect to this statement from the OP: "which is less about the design of physical spaces and more about The Algorithm" I think perhaps it would be cool to get a reading group together for Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media. Not discussed often enough in the modern era, "the medium is the message" still resounds, and considering McLuhan argued a physical space could be a medium for communication (the advent of bright lights allowing night-time baseball games, where previously no one would have been at a dark stadium trying to talk or watch a game, for example), I think it's really time to be having more interesting conversations about digital spaces, their "shapes," how they function as a medium, and their impact on human communication.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Example: Tim Pool got his start as a livestreamer at the Occupy Wall Street protests. In 2018, he would say he was never politically aligned with OWS. Yes, that giant piece of shit Tim Pool was instrumental in livestreamed coverage of OWS.

The world got wild here for a minute.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

TL;DR: Adorno really hated Jazz.

😜

EDIT: More seriously, Debord and Society of the Spectacle come to mind as well.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

That's well documented already. The near-instant proliferation of AI generated content on the internet means that in short order, AI's are ingesting data from earlier, more crude implementations of AI. The AI doesn't know that one source is better than another, so as it scrapes the internet, and the internet becomes more full of AI content, the content produced begins to slowly become useless as more and more AI-generated content becomes the source for the AI to generate content.

AI is an ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Don't ask questions you don't want to know the answers to.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

I think the bigger news here is that Pebble Founder Eric Migicovsky has once again bitten off more than he can chew.

I personally was already skeptical of Beeper based on Migicovsky's terrible treatment of the Pebble devs on the way out (they were supposed to be sold with the company, that ended up not being the case and they were left jobless), and personal experiences when on the original Beeper waitlist (was not notified our onboarding session would be recorded until joining the session, follow up questions ignored), but this really seems to reveal that he never had a real solid plan to deal with this potential outcome (that most saw coming from a mile away).

Beeper was originally supposed to be a "universal chat app" in the vein of classic apps like Trillian, Adium or Pidgin, but they paid particular attention to trying to get iMessage into the game from early on. It's genuinely odd to think that they've been persuing iMessage compatability for this long to not have considered this as an outcome, especially after the release of Beeper Cloud, which was an actual reverse engineer of the iMessage protocol.

The classic Beeper app (I forget the name for it now) could have kept flying under the radar and being ignored by Apple, despite the fact that it required an intermediary iOS device to be able to work as it was. They originally were going to send out refurbished iPhone 4s to customers, but as iOS updates quickly made the iPhone 4 too far behind to still be functional in this way, they rolled out their own fleet of macOS servers as an intermediary.

It really seems like an ill-considered plan, and it really makes me glad I never dumped any money into the product, because this has kind of become a complete shitshow. We shouldn't be celebrating Apple's decision to do this, but Migicovsky never even had more than a few moves planned before he gave up on Beeper cloud, so it's not like we can count on him to be the one trying to mount a legal battle to change things and allow others access to iMessage through a legal framework.

Migicovsky bailed on Pebble pretty quickly when it became unprofitable. Will he do the same again? Seems likely to me, imho.

Anyway, TL;DR: I don't think this guy actually has a real business plan with any of this and I'm kind of surprised no devs involved had brought it up, considering it's been being developed for three years now.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Yarr Harr Fiddle Dee Dee!!

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/2e24d5b5-3e47-4cba-bf7d-798a3f81c73b.jpeg

Here's your Gold Blahaj for free!!

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

You're giving the likes of Kimball Musk and James Murdoch way too much fucking credit here.

His board is filled with fucking sycophants. They won't go against him, especially his fucking brother.

It's hardly a board that is looking to control you when you've filled it with Yes Men.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

You could always trade it in.

I hate to be that guy, but no one is forcing you to keep owning it and keep dumping money in Musk's pockets every time you need it serviced.

You want him to go away but you keep handing him money. Curious.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

I'm being realistic. You're embarrassed by it and association with Musk.

Musk is genuinely a bad person who is pushing bogus race science and other horrible unequivocal bullshit.

It's great that it hasn't needed service, but my point stands: once it needs service, you will be handing money to Elon Musk.

If you want him to go away that badly, there are things you could do. Like trading in your vehicle for another EV. There's other brands, who are not run by a racist, misogynist, ableist, megalomaniacs.

You can complain on the internet all you want, but if you're unwilling to find a way to not give him money, you're just one more person with Elon's foot stuck up your ass.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

*leans hard on cane:

Ya got a problem with crusty old memes, kid?

The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Oh no, did your attempt to cut labor costs and make shoppers do more of the labor that checkers used to do end up increasing shrink?

Oh no, how awful for you that you aren't able to properly afford more *checks notes... Stock Buybacks.

https://media1.tenor.com/m/_BIfNDiEmNQAAAAd/crying-wiping-tears-with-money.gif

This is how I imagine retailers complaining about this.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

When self-checkouts were first rolled out, my friends and I loved them.

As twenty-something introverted nerds, it helped a lot when buying "embarrassing" things like condoms.

You didn't have to have the checkout person giving you the stink-eye because they're ultra religious or something.

Now, twenty-some years on, they've been abused to the point that some places they're all that's ever open, Target and Walmart seem to be the biggest offenders there. When there's a line down three different aisles because the self-checked is so backed up, it's defeated the purpose of creating "efficiency."

However, I've noticed that about a lot of business practices lately. We've rounded the bend and they're still doing things that aren't actually producing efficiency anymore. Like staffing with nothing but a skeleton crew, so anytime someone calls out sick, everything falls apart because you're short a person. Personal opinion, but if one person missing work wrecks everything, that's not an efficient way to schedule people.

It's proof that these MBA business school chucklefucks are just repeating the shit they tell each other ad nauseum, because when it comes to real-world results the results are abysmal and inefficient.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

I would assume they meant something like a CostCo proof of membership ID.

This is how self checkouts at CostCo work in the US, however they are pretty good about having plenty of regular cashiers available as well.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I mean to be fair, everyone pulled that shit.

The jobs numbers tanking during COVID because everyone had to be let go or furloughed apparently has nothing to do with Biden "bringing America more jobs faster than any previous President" bullshit.

Nah dude, the jobs that left just came back, you didn't do shit to make that happen, Biden.

As a Democrat voter, makes me sick how hard they are back to pushing "The economy is doing great, you whiners need to just fucking vote for us already, all right!" while holding Trump and Fascism over our heads like a veritable Sword of Damocles. They don't feel the need to do more because it's easier to sit on their haunches and yell "But if you don't vote for us, Trump will turn the US into a fascist state" as if that isn't an implicit admission that they won't do anything to stop Trump if he wins (even illegitimately!!!) and will let him run roughshod over US citizens as punishment for not voting Democrat sufficiently enough.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Louder for the people in the back: CONSTRUCTIVE DISCHARGE.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean#android

Apple has reportedly told 121 employees in San Diego to relocate to Austin or face being laid off.

120 is divisible by 12, so realistically "dozens" is pretty accurate.

The group of employees, part of the Data Operations Annotations team that works on Siri, were informed of the news Wednesday, the report said. Upon relocation they will merge with their Texas counterpart of the group, it added.

Definitely not executives.

But you do you and keep being angry about shitty AI summaries and shitty paywalls instead of doing something about it so you can just read the article and stop whinging.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Why not post the non-paywalled version so people can be actually informed by a post instead of hoping to be informed?

Because I already did you one better, I gave you an option that will get you past (nearly) all paywalls, indefinitely.

Also, I've had inconsistent and spotty results with archive sites, and to top it off, archive.is and it's many offshoots poison DNS requests to CloudFlare in response to their privacy-respecting network framework.

https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Look, I'm addicted to sugar fat and salt okay.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/beec2659-383a-4e54-8a40-acab05b2516d.jpeg

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

I only regret, that I have but one upvote to give this post.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

The reality is that each time a business buys an efficiency-and-productivity-improving device, they were able to afford that device by exploiting the labor of their workers.

They will use the device they paid for to lay off some of their workers to reduce overhead costs. These workers essentially worked to have their jobs taken away as a reward.

In the 1970's, people were worried about a future where people had too much leisure time. In the cartoon The Jetsons George Jetson worked a grueling two hours a week at The Button which he was tasked to press once in a while. People assumed the fruits of automation would go to everyone.

Not so, business owners use the fruits of your labor to put you out of a job to be replaced with a machine.

When they buy an AI to replace you, they did it with the labor you provided your employer. This honestly should not be allowed, legally the benefits of such devices should be experienced by all, not just the boss.

That's why it exacerbates social tensions, because we all know the score: The ownership class will take and take and take and take and never give an inch unless you break out the gui--- oh wait.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Who'd have guessed when the board ousted the CEO for being duplicitous!

Only for him to use his duplicitous advantage to have the people who removed him ousted, had himself re-instated, got married, and then decided the important thing was allowing his AI to be used as a weapon. So fucking wholesome.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Ah Jeff. Handsome for a man.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

Until they can make their drivers as reliable as Amazon drivers, they will lose. (I know Amazon delivery has a lot of problems, I'm not going to be talking about those in this post)

While it sucks that Amazon drivers are endlessly surveilled, it's a huge boon to people recieving packages to know when their package is coming and to not miss it.

To my knowledge, FedEx and UPS still just give you a delivery window of a whole ass day, and then if they just decide delivering to you is too hard, they just won't.

Seriously just the other day, we were home all day, even had a note on the door to call us, saying we're home, and we'll be out in a moment to sign for it. Nobody rang the bell or called and no note that they ever even came to our doorstep was left. Nope, just got an email notification that they missed us and that now we can pick up our package four days later at an Access Point. Kinda had hoped to get that package on the day it was meant to be delivered for a reason, you know. Kind of fucks up plans when they pull that shit.

They're only just beginning to roll out a competing system. It will be a joke for a long time yet.

Until UPS/FedEx/whoever else fix that aspect of their delivery services, no one will want to fucking use them. The inconvenience factor with those companies is way higher than with Amazon deliveries.

SnotFlickerman , 4 months ago

I mean honestly dressing as a meme always does well, and this is a classic meme format that is well known, so it could work well as a costume.

Sweating over what to wear to a Halloween party is an excellent choice for a meme costume, imho.