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athos77

@athos77@kbin.social

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athos77 ,

I wanna build a tree house and live symbiotically.

Best Buy Membership "discount" (lemmy.world)

So I was shopping with my wife today and I said "oh let's see if my membership helps out." So we went and added the same item to each of our carts, and to our surprise, the total was the same! So what is it exactly that I'm paying for in this membership if the items "original price" is higher for me than it is for regular...

athos77 ,

Were you doing this from the same IP address? Cause some places check for that kind of thing.

athos77 ,

I'm afraid that that information has had to be [redacted]. Choose another path.

athos77 ,

Oh, they're being cute with this. You need to pay money to get what reddit is calling "gold" (formerly known as coins), which you can use to give awards with. But one of the old awards you still can't give is the old-style reddit "gold" (premium). So they want ever more money without even giving the minor account boost you used to get, just for some skin for a comment. Fuck those guys.

athos77 ,

For years, the site had a standing policy that prevented the use of generative AI in writing or rewording any questions or answers posted. Moderators were allowed and encouraged to use AI-detection software when reviewing posts. Beginning last week, however, the company began a rapid about-face in its public policy towards AI.

I listened to an episode of The Daily on AI, and the stuff they fed into to engines included the entire Internet. They literally ran out of things to feed it. That's why YouTube created their auto-generated subtitles - literally, so that they would have more material to feed into their LLMs. I fully expect reddit to be bought out/merged within the next six months or so. They are desperate for more material to feed the machine. Everything is going to end up going to an LLM somewhere.

athos77 ,

We could stop sending arms to Israel, that would be a start.

athos77 ,

Even during the height of the pandemic, a friend of mine found a 'reason' that they had to be in the office one day each week (usually Friday, because almost no one else was there on Fridays). Their reasoning was, "If I can do my job entirely from the comfort of my own living room, there's nothing that would prevent the company from hiring someone to do my job from the comfort of their own living room, in India or the Philippines."

athos77 ,

Clever human!

athos77 ,

Well, this can only end well ...

athos77 ,

They're not "getting revenge" for him leaving California, they've stopped buying cars of dubious quality from an immature, arrogant, and very literal white nationalist.

athos77 ,

It's UniLad, what were you expecting?

athos77 ,

Yay!!!!!

athos77 ,

Funny how much support these companies need: waivers for environmental and zoning issues, noise and use variances, incentives and tax breaks, special protections, benefits, or exceptions their lobbiests arranged, artificially low minimum wages, artificially high prices, bailouts, special bankruptcy protections, tax laws written just for them, tariffs on international competition, etc etc etc etc etc.

On top of which, various forms of wage theft cost more than all robberies, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts combined, and it's almost never prosecuted (or only in a superficial fines-only way, with no admission of guilt and no jail time). And the exact same thing happens with undocumented labor.

And on top of that is the rollback of hard-won worker protections: states rolling back child labor laws, states saying kids don't need meal breaks, states saying people working outdoors in extreme heat don't need water breaks, etc etc etc etc.

Of course, if you ask the owner, or the CEO, or other people who are benefiting from this system, they'll tell you all about how "they built it with their own hands, from the ground up, with no help from anyone else" ....

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

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    athos77 ,

    spez doesn't care, be just wanted the money for his doomsday bunker.

    athos77 ,

    I agree with you, but ... I was on reddit since the Digg exodus. It always had it's bad side (violentacrez, jailbait, etc), but it got so much worse after GamerGate/Ellen Pao - the misogyny became weaponized. And then the alt-right moved in, deliberately trying to radicalize people, and we worked so. fucking. hard to keep their voices out of our subreddits. And we kept reporting users and other subreddits that were breaking rules, promoting violence and hatred, and all fucking spez would do is shrug and say, "hey it's a free speech issue", which was somewhere between "hey, I agree with those guys" and "nah, I can't be bothered".

    So it's not like this was something reddit wasn't aware of (I'm not on Facebook or YouTube). They were warned, repeatedly, vehemently, starting all the way back in 2014, that something was going wrong with their platform and they need to do something. And they deliberately and repeatedly choose to ignore it, all the way up to the summer of 2021. Seven fucking years of warnings they ignored, from a massive range of users and moderators, including some of the top moderators on the site. And all reddit would do is shrug it's shoulders and say, "hey, free speech!" like it was a magic wand, and very occasionally try to defend itself by quoting it's 'hate speech policy', which they invoke with the same regular repetitiveness and 'thoughts and prayers' inaction as a school shooting brings. In fact, they did it in this very article:

    In a statement to CNN, Reddit said, “Hate and violence have no place on Reddit. Our sitewide policies explicitly prohibit content that promotes hate based on identity or vulnerability, as well as content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or group of people. We are constantly evaluating ways to improve our detection and removal of this content, including through enhanced image-hashing systems, and we will continue to review the communities on our platform to ensure they are upholding our rules.”

    As someone who modded for a number of years, that's just bullshit.

    Edit: fuck spez.

    athos77 ,

    “I know there’s a ton of skepticism about Meta entering the fediverse — it’s completely understandable,” Cottle says. “I do want to kind of make a plea that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is.”

    If I wanted Facebook shitposts and forwards from KlanMa, I'd've joined Facebook. And I don't believe Meta has good intentions, I believe they want to overwhelm the fediverse, and I believe they want to make money. Middle-manager Cottle and their team may have good intentions, but corporate certainly doesn't, and I certainly don't trust their users.

    athos77 ,

    I feel like something changed

    He grew up a rich white boy in full-Apartheid South Africa. He's never grown up (Tesla models S,3,X,Y! Tesla fart noises! 42069 amirite!).

    Nothing changed, he just got bored and started interacting with the poor's and people noticed the person he really was.

    athos77 ,

    Adulterated honey is a massive issue around the world; at least these people are being honest about it.

    athos77 ,

    It was pretty obvious that Trump would try to scam Musk. Fortunately, given his own difficulties, Musk was unlikely to agree - we're just fortunate these bills are coming due so far in advance of the election. And also that, given Musk's foreign birth, he'll never be eligible to be president or vice president (something that I'm sure sticks in his craw).

    athos77 ,

    I think the company may never monetize its platform without angering its users and the entire premise of Reddit is user-generated content.

    Yep.

    Also - reddit spends 55% of it's budget on R&D?! WTAF!?!

    athos77 ,

    I see five packets of cheese

    athos77 ,

    I was wondering if maybe OP has kids.

    athos77 ,

    Also, you don't have to make fresh sauce everytime. You can make a large batch, then freeze it in ice cube trays, then move the cubes into ziplock.

    athos77 ,

    users could become unruly if Reddit stock falls below the IPO price.

    Lmao, dude doesn't know redditors at all, do they?

    athos77 ,

    Lmao, I was thinking more about how fractious reddit is even without provocation, but you're right, too!

    athos77 , (edited )

    So, three of my old accounts apparently qualified for the buy-shares offer. Two of them were over the 200k karma threshold to get the offer. Interestingly, the third account had only 191k karma and got the message a day or two later.

    Even more interestingly, yesterday a fourth account that I haven't posted to in over a decade received the offer, and this one only had 50k karma. Admittedly, several accounts were mods, but they were mods of extremely small, very inactive subs, and I had de-modded myself after deleting my data. They also sent an email to the my registered email address for the fourth account (but I don't know if that's relevant because none of my other accounts had emails registered).

    I'm not sure what's going on. Did they get so little response from the early offers that they're going to the accounts of former mods or lowering the karma requirements? I know a couple of my accounts ended up connected by IP information; did they try to contact my old fourth account by PM and email because it was somehow connected to the higher-level accounts, or because they're getting desperate? Maybe they're just trying to get lots of numbers to show that redditors are eager to participate, to gin up an ignorant public's enthusiasm prior to the IPO?

    I have to think that, at some level, they're getting desperate, because it seems so much effort to go to, to dig up an account that hasn't posted in a decade and then send PMs and emails to it.

    athos77 , (edited )

    Because spez insists on chasing the newest tech shiny - but only after it's peaked - NFTs, crypto, RPAN, etc. And although it may yet turn around for him and for reddit, notice that he only jumped onto the AI boom three months after last spring's series of AI announcements, showing that he's once again way behind the times.

    Edit: one thing has always struck me since his interview last summer. spez said something like "reddit will continue to be profit-driven until the profits arrive". Like the arrival of profits was inevitable. Like he didn't need to do anything except wait. Just be patient and the profits will arrive in their own time, not like things have to be envisioned and planned and put in place to get profits, just ... they'll arrive. Some day.

    It seems a remarkably lackadaisical attitude for a CEO to have.

    athos77 ,

    I made a comment below about which of my old accounts were receiving the buy-shares offer. I don't know if what they're doing raises any speculation to someone with your background, but I'd be interested in hearing if it does.

    athos77 ,

    Oh, lmao!

    athos77 ,

    I'd be really interested to see their R&D costs for 2022. I'm wondering how much of 2023's R&D was spurred by restricting the API code, and then allowing certain applications access; having to finally take seriously their decade-old promise to develop mod tools with no planning or preparation; their total surprise at having to provide access to disabled people; and having to update their app. Those are all areas where they were extremely happy to let languish, and which they suddenly had to provide expedited support for after the protests.

    athos77 ,

    Oh, ouch! If this is similar, it's a bit ironic that they've pissed off the people who would've been most likely to invest in the IPO.

    athos77 ,

    some other article these days said they’re going to sell everything to AI services that are going to train themselves on Reddit for a lot of dollars. Would this be enough to keep them afloat?

    That's an interesting question. It was some deal with Google, to help train Google's AI. Honestly, Google probably grabbed much of what they needed for their AI while the APIs were still open, but I can still see things Google should want from reddit. First off, just on the "helping with AI" front, they'd be interested in ongoing data for Google's AI; more importantly, some kind of exclusivity to limit the amount of data other AI companies can get from reddit.

    Other data they'd want: given the noticable-even-to-muggles decline in search results during the APIcalypse, I'm certain that Google wants continued access to reddit's data for their search engine (and again, some manner of limiting other companies access to that data).

    As a final, admittedly paranoid thought: I'm sure Google would love access to reddit's non-public data: the IP addresses of various accounts could be used to flesh out consumer profiles, comments you made could narrow down your actual identity, upvotes and downvotes reveal your opinions, what you clicked through to reveals things of interest, etc. Yeah, they probably have a bunch of that already, but this would strengthen and increase the quality of the data that they have.

    But I don't see Google really making a huge investment into reddit, either. Reddit is too toxic for a corporate giant, and their corporate cultures are almost literally polar opposites. They'll buy the data, but they're not going to fairy-godmother reddit, or give it anything except the minimum number of dollars to get the data that they want.

    athos77 ,

    Nah, he wants the money for his doomsday bunker. I'm sure he considers the $93m for the COO to be fair game, though ...

    athos77 ,

    They had a bad update: https://abcnews.go.com/US/att-outage-impacting-us-customers-company/story?id=107440297

    athos77 ,

    Spez is trying to outfit his doomsday bunker and wants the cash.

    athos77 , (edited )

    uBlacklist add-on, block yelp, quora, pinterest.

    Reddit: 'We Are in the Early Stages of Monetizing Our User Base' (www.404media.co)

    Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early...

    athos77 ,

    You know how spez was bitching about how reddit never made a profit? Yeah, now we know why. You know what his compensation was last year? $193,000,000. Fuck that arrogant prick.

    athos77 ,

    Yeah, and they gave the COO like another 93 million. Yet somehow we're the "landed gentry".

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/reddit-files-to-go-public-reveals-that-it-paid-ceo-dollar193-million-last-year

    athos77 ,

    It's why they released news of the actual IPO on the same day they released the news of Google buying our data: they want to tie reddit and Google together in the public's mine, make reddit seem better than it is.

    athos77 ,

    In other news, spez's compensation from reddit last year was $193 million, and it's COO got a cool $93 million.

    C'mon, spez, tell us again how horrible it's been that reddit's never made a profit.

    athos77 ,

    sigh. Of course they are ...

    athos77 ,

    Gray sent this story to Instagram after it aired and they removed the account for violating the app’s terms of service.

    Well, thank goodness making a second account is so hard ...

    athos77 ,

    Fuck spez.

    athos77 ,

    I haven't watched the video. In another thread, someone pointed out that this is generally something they do after they've agreed to ship out a free replacement tv.

    athos77 ,

    New Mexico State University (NMSU) recently announced the impending closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024.

    athos77 ,

    Clickbait. The FAA lists the plane number as N672DL and a quick flight registry check says that plane was made in 1992. This is a maintenance issue with Delta.

    athos77 ,

    The only reason it's being reported is because of the other Boeing incident. And if they were trying to be accurate, the headline would've read "Nose wheel falls off Delta airplane waiting for takeoff". It's clickbait.

    athos77 ,

    Why would they?

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