dantheclamman

dantheclamman OP , 15 days ago

It's an example of why monopolies are harmful. They create distorted economies that don't serve consumers. Like ecosystems overcome by a monoculture, monopolies are inherently less resilient, less functional and prone to sudden disruption.

dantheclamman OP , 15 days ago

If there were multiple sources of traffic, the pressure to optimize to one source would be lower, and the disruption caused by algorithm changes would be muted. Which would mean more interesting content less driven by a narrow set of metrics

dantheclamman OP , 14 days ago

That's the rationale Google uses. "We're the best, that's why users pick us." They built a moat of investment in search and the browser that other companies can't compete with. But as a consumer, I am not willing to accept that argument. Ma Bell claimed the same thing. We're a lot better off economically in a world where Ma Bell was broken up, and Microsoft was forced to stop their anticompetitive activities. Google will be better off as separate companies, worth more than the sum of its parts

dantheclamman , 28 days ago

The first time I did it, it was a shitshow. Then I started over and it worked fantastically. YMMV

dantheclamman , 1 month ago

I have stopped using it to read news. I still use it to keep touch with my professional community (scientists who haven't moved to Bluesky or Mastodon), but that's it. I wish it would just die. Until then I've scripted it and blocked lots of elements to make it look exactly like old Twitter

dantheclamman , 1 month ago

Still waiting for the mobile app. Maybe the firefox addon would work, but would prefer the app

dantheclamman OP , 1 month ago

Yes, I still love my Shield, but there's no doubt it's getting long in the tooth, and there aren't any true replacements on the horizon. The Shield has also lost some features through time, like Nvidia's local game streaming, though Moonlight and Steam have helped fill that gap.

dantheclamman OP , 1 month ago

I am a fan of Flauncher

dantheclamman OP , 1 month ago

They aren't talking about an investment for a financial return. They're talking about investing their time and energy in a platform that then gets enshittified

dantheclamman OP , 1 month ago

Like them, I had the same lesson after changes to Google Home, Smartthings and have moved entirely to cheap stuff that works with Home Assistant and allows me total control

dantheclamman OP , 1 month ago

Apparently CDs are trending up as a nostalgia format in some demographics! https://www.axios.com/2024/01/06/gen-z-cds-buying-collection

dantheclamman OP , 1 month ago

I'm glad I saved my CDs, as I was able to rerip them to FLAC and undo the mistake my juvenile self made of ripping to WMA. I still keep the CDs to play in my car from time to time

dantheclamman OP , 1 month ago

I like to buy older albums that were mastered for vinyl, like Steely Dan, some prog rock like Yes or Pink Floyd. It gets a lot closer to listening to how the artists would have been hearing their product

dantheclamman OP , 1 month ago

CDs are already showing signs of a comeback! https://www.axios.com/2024/01/06/gen-z-cds-buying-collection

dantheclamman OP , 1 month ago

I do, from bandcamp (flac, not mp3)

dantheclamman , 2 months ago

Some portions of the far right are allergic to being called "political". Even outright Nazis often claim to be moderate. Part of the reason they end up having those beliefs is from a profound lack of awareness of self and others. They thus can convince themselves that they are the moderates, and everyone else is extreme

dantheclamman , 2 months ago

I feel conflicted about the whole thing. Technically it's a model. I don't feel that people should be able to sue me as a scientist for making a model based on publicly available data. I myself am merely trying to use the model itself to explain stuff about the world. But OpenAI are also selling access to the outputs of the model, that can very closely approximate the intellectual property of people. Also, most of the training data was accessed via scraping and other gray market methods that were often explicitly violating the TOU of the various places they scraped from. So it all is very difficult to sort through ethically.

dantheclamman , 2 months ago

it will be the start of the age of the insecure Windows 10 desktop

dantheclamman , 2 months ago

Frankly he looks like he's thriving. I'm happy for him

dantheclamman , 2 months ago

I think this company is deeply and uniquely incompetent and will never deliver on its objectives.

dantheclamman , 2 months ago

This might be the first stock I ever short.

dantheclamman OP , 3 months ago

Wow, I had no idea of that feature!

dantheclamman OP , 3 months ago

Yes, privacy and encryption are always the enemy of authoritarians. They enable dissent

dantheclamman , 3 months ago

Was it It Takes A Thief? I remember that show; it was actually pretty interesting

dantheclamman OP , 3 months ago

Well people who make content are already suffering for a collapse of ad prices. News sites are shutting down left and right. Not everything is about money, but they need revenue or external support to continue operating.

dantheclamman OP , 3 months ago

We are barreling towards this issue. StackOverflow for example has crashing viewer numbers. But an AI isn't going to help users navigate and figure out a new python library for example, without data to train on. I've already had AIs straight up hallucinate about functions in R that actually don't exist. It seems to happen primarily in the newer libraries, probably with fewer posts on stackexchange about them

dantheclamman OP , 3 months ago

I have a long-running blog for fun, so you're preaching to the choir. But some things can't replace a dedicated journalist, particularly at local level, sitting in city council meetings, chasing leads, and interviewing people.

dantheclamman OP , 3 months ago

It's not about profit. It's about being compensated for one's hard work which was appropriated without permission by giant corporations

dantheclamman , 3 months ago

I've been using flauncher for a long time and have never had it revert. I had to do some adb commands to set it as default, but was pretty simple to do. https://gitlab.com/flauncher/flauncher#:~:text=FLauncher%20is%20an%20open%2Dsource,on%20Chromecast%20with%20Google%20TV

dantheclamman OP , 3 months ago

Edge is branding itself "The AI Browser". Chrome has plans to embed LLMs for text input. Opera, the browser which was commandeered from the original Vivaldi team and turned into a crypto/VPN gimmick browser, is of course among the hardest leaning into the LLM trend.

dantheclamman OP , 3 months ago

Another cue is that the numbers aren't gobbledigook

dantheclamman OP , 3 months ago

That's not what they said at all.

dantheclamman OP , 3 months ago

Blocked for poor reading comprehension

dantheclamman , 3 months ago

I was hoping it would help me save on international transfer fees when I was an overseas postdoc, but it would have actually cost more between the exchange fees and my time setting up all the exchanges in various countries, meanwhile also introducing risk in me being robbed of said money and screwing something up and introducing myself to some sort of tax liability. Needless to say, I continued to just pay for the bank transfers

dantheclamman OP , 3 months ago

They keep you regular. Specifically your fps

dantheclamman OP , 3 months ago

Any proof of work coin is a no go for me

dantheclamman OP , 3 months ago

That is interesting and seems much less wasteful! I have thought often of my time in the 2000s using my PS3 for Folding@Home. So many processor cycles being wasted on nonsense right now