flop_leash_973

flop_leash_973 , 1 day ago to Technology in Google AI making up recalls that didn’t happen

The most damning thing to call it is “inaccurate”. Nothing will drive the average person away from a companies information gathering products faster than associating it with being inaccurate more times than not. That is why they are inventing different things to call it. It sounds less bad to say “my LLM hallucinates sometimes” than it does to say “my LLM is inaccurate sometimes“.

flop_leash_973 , 2 days ago to Selfhosted in Why You Should Self-Host Everything

All of these types are articles always leave out the calculations of what your time is worth to you and the maintenance costs of spare hard drives and other equipment. The TCO is not just the initial investment in hardware/software alone. Unless you plan to host something unreliably and value your time at nothing. In which case I hope you don't get friends or family hooked on your stuff or everyone will have a bad time and be back to Google Drive/Docs and Netflix within 5 years.

The reason they leave it out I feel is because once you factor all of that stuff in the $10/month your paying for Google Drive storage or the ~$25 your paying Netflix starts to make a lot more sense when pared with a decent local backup from a Synology NAS for the "I can't lose this" stuff like baby pictures of your kids. Which blows their entire premise out of the water.

flop_leash_973 , 4 days ago to Technology in Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation

More likely they will just slowly rebrand search to more AI type things. Then slowly retire the non-AI parts in the background.

flop_leash_973 , 6 days ago to Technology in CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information

Then it sounds like the "web" tab should be the default and the AI Overview should be the optional tab the user has to choose to go click on.

flop_leash_973 , 7 days ago to Technology in Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

If you have to constantly manually intervene in what your automated solutions are doing, then it is probably not doing a very good job and it might be a good idea to go back to the drawing board.

flop_leash_973 , 12 days ago (edited 12 days ago) to Technology in People want 'dumbphones'. Will companies make them?

Disclaimer: The below rant does not include things like healthcare where choice in the market is either not a thing or not possible. Lest someone think I am being absolutist. It is purely railing against the average consumer widget, not grandmas oxygen tank refills.

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That depends on how many people want them.

Companies will make, or stop making/doing, nearly anything if the money for doing it goes away. But not enough people want "dumbphones" bad enough to stop buying "smartphones".

Just like not enough people want small phones to stop buying the big ones. Or not enough people want the price of Netflix to go down to stop paying for Netflix, etc. Consumers in general need to learn the power of and build up the mental discipline to do without when the available options aren't what they want. Apple, Google, etc can't force you to buy it from them after all.

Companies prey on the inability of the consumer to go without when they find the terms of the deal distasteful to great success. Large chunks of every companies marketing department think about nothing else.

The real "sin" in all of this is there not being enough smaller players around to fill those smaller segments, because we kept buying from the company that bought up all of the competition years ago despite finding those practices distasteful.

Companies, and politicians, have figured out that the average majority is all bark and no bite. And the average majority would be wise to start to figure that out.

flop_leash_973 , 12 days ago to Technology in Linux Inventor Says He Doesn’t Believe in Crypto

Crypto is a textbook example of why we as a society can't have nice things. To many people are selfish and self serving, and not enough people are willing to ostracize those types of people from society for such actions.

flop_leash_973 , 20 days ago to linuxmemes in Operating Systems for Different Life Stages

Haha, it amuses me to no end that ever since I watched a "Down the Rabbit Hole" video on Youtube about TempleOS a few years back I have seen it crop up in varies places from time to time as I don't remember ever seeing anything about it before.

Makes me wonder if it was always there and I just didn't notice it until I was familiar with it.

flop_leash_973 , 22 days ago to Technology in Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’

I use AWS to host a far amount of servers and some micro services and for them if you don't build the backup into your architecture design and the live data gets corrupted, etc you are screwed.

They give you the tools to built it all, but it is up to you as the sysadmin/engineer/ dev to actually use those tools.

flop_leash_973 , 22 days ago to Technology in EA wants to place in-game ads in its full-price AAA games, again

Good thing seeing that a game is published or developed by EA, or one of its subsidiaries, is 9 times out of 10 enough for me to not bother with the game to begin with. They don't make a thing that is worth dealing with them to get to play.

That company burned all of its good will and trust with me years ago. So sure go ahead and put as many ads as you want EA. I know for sure I won't be seeing them.

flop_leash_973 , 23 days ago to Technology in Tech workers should shine a light on the industry’s secretive work with the military

No way in hell would I do that if I had that kind of knowledge. Look what happened to Snowden for doing something like that.

He would still spend the remainder of his life in federal prison or be executed if he ever steps back on US soil or the soil of someone with an extradition treaty that is looking to get some brownie points.

That wouldn't happen to all of them, but I bet you there are some working on some classified mess that would be found and made an example of in short order to shut the others up.

flop_leash_973 , 26 days ago to Technology in Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain

As much as some of us may dislike it when a company does these kinds of things. You can't really blame them for following the laws of the country that they are headquartered in.

You can blame them for operating there to begin with in cases like Apple in China, but you could hardly blame them for following the laws of the US where they are headquartered for example.

If the law of the land where the headquarters is requires them to give up the data they do have to partner nations then they don't really have much choice in the long run if they want to continue to exist.

flop_leash_973 OP , 1 month ago to Technology in Roku OS home screen is getting video ads for the first time

Last time I had a Roku you could block the static home screen ads with PiHole. So as long as they don't start serving these from the same domain as something you need for the box to work right or start hard coding a different DNS server into the OS that won't respect your local network settings it will probably keep working.

But if they are not doing one of the above to get around DNS adblockers yet, they will eventually in the name of those sweet sweet ad dollars. Best to just start planning an exit from Roku products if you care about such things.

flop_leash_973 , 1 month ago to Technology in How working for Big Tech lost 'dream job' status

That is a lot of words to say "they found out that the big tech executives had been lying to them about being family, changing the world. etc" just as much as their last employer was.

News flash, working in big tech is every bit as soul sucking for the rank and file as it is working in big healthcare, or big law firm, or <insert large industry here>. Nothing special about it, they are large publicly traded companies that have shareholders and investors to answer to as the number 1 priority.

flop_leash_973 , 1 month ago to linuxmemes in Dual booters be like

Yep, while this meme is funny and in jest. If someone actually seriously gave me shit for saying "folder" or "directory" I would have to ask them what Stallman's toe nails actually taste like. Because that is up there with his level of being rigid about something that I just can't stand.