linearchaos

linearchaos , 1 day ago

There's not enough guaranteed margin in a single combined streaming and production house to feed the employees, investors, and media moguls.

None of these companies are being outright assholes (well not more than normal). The business model is simply not sustainable and they're doing whatever they can to slow the inevitable collapse. We're producing 10 times the content we used to produce, and the revenue from the streamers is nowhere near enough to cover the bills.

linearchaos , 1 day ago

Why would you use the gross numbers that don't include the price of making the movies?

Netflix is in reasonably green but it's the only one

Disney Plus is still in the red if you include their ESPN streaming.

Warner/discovery/max is barely in the green at 100 million.

linearchaos , 1 day ago

I'll give you the silver star for participation award. Now you want to talk about how they're the only truly profitable company or does that straight too far from your agenda?

linearchaos , 1 day ago

There's no money in giving them what they want. The money is in giving them what you can give them cheaply that others can't. If part of that is gaslighting....

linearchaos , 1 day ago

That sounds like a pretty trashy backup scheme. I don't care what your subscription status is I'm keeping those backups until retension's over.

linearchaos , 2 days ago

Quiet falls around the boardroom table. One analyst breaks the silence. "Well, you see, you have investors now. And, well, they've kind of noticed that quality of your content is contrastically downhill over the past couple of years". An unnamed C staffer blurts out "I told you getting rid of reddit gold was a bad idea, let's just break it back and everyone will come back and contribute again!"

linearchaos , 1 day ago

A lot of companies are starting to do this most people are referring to it as source available rather than open source. I'm kind of surprised I don't just turn it into an electron app and get it over with.

linearchaos , 1 day ago

Even back then the real power of winamp was in plugins. You can't get away with the truly hacky crap and windows anymore.

The only thing I really cared for back in the day was visualization and the aggressive crossfade plugin.

linearchaos , 4 days ago

This is the moment the trolls have been training us for.

linearchaos , 4 days ago

I've never had a problem remembering tar, but properly using PV, somehow I'm just not able to store that information in my brain.

linearchaos , 4 days ago

Really, it depends on your definition of best.

linearchaos , 4 days ago

I think tech would be a better place if it did actually go away when you deleted things. If something's not explicitly backed up people really should have no hope of bringing it back.

linearchaos , 11 days ago

confirm the generated one worked. I think I’ll pass on tha

LLM wasn't the right tool for the job, so search engine companies made their search engines suck so bad that it was an acceptable replacement.

linearchaos , 11 days ago

We needed it a few years ago.

linearchaos , 11 days ago

Honestly? I'm down with that. And when the LLM's end up pricing themselves out of usefulness, we'll still have the fediverse version. Having free sites on the net with solid crowd-sourced information is never a bad thing even if other people pick up the data and use it.

It's when private sites like Duolingo and Reddit crowd source the information and then slowly crank down the free aspect that we have the problems.

The Ad sponsored web model is not viable forever.

linearchaos , 11 days ago

Smells too much like duo-lingo. Here, everyone jump in and answers all the questions. 5 years later, ohh look at this gold mine of community data we own....

linearchaos , 9 days ago

Duolingo has been systematically enshittifying the free/ad supported service. Now every time you fart, you get a big unskippable ad trying to get you to subscribe to their service for free for 14 days without telling you the price. They took all that crowdsourced data that weren't going to profit off of and are making the app a miserable experience without it.

linearchaos , 9 days ago

They are VERY VERY good at search engine work with a few caveats that we'll eventually nail. The problem is, they're WAY to expensive for that purpose. Single queries take tons of compute and power. Constant training on new data takes boatloads of power.

They're the opposite of efficient; eventually, they'll have to start charging you a subscription to search with them to stay in business.

linearchaos , 12 days ago

I swear the defense against the dark arts teacher just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

linearchaos , 13 days ago

I think the real meat here would be the work from home crowd. If you can find a hole in there router, you can inject routing tables and defeat VPN.

But the VPN client doesn't have to be stupid. You could certainly detect rogue routes and shut down the network.

linearchaos , 13 days ago

I don't know, if you've already have full control over routing and have some form of local presence, seems to me you could do something interesting with a proxy, maybe even route the traffic back to the tunnel adapter.

linearchaos , 12 days ago

We're already assuming you have something that can compromise DHCP. Once you make that assumption who's to say you don't have a VM hanging out.

linearchaos , 19 days ago

Yeah, it sounds real high to me. Perhaps the criteria is have ever seen a tt video.

Now yt, easily > 50%. It's practically a babysitter. Putting cocomellon in front of your 3yo to get 30 minutes of peace is a parental guilty pleasure.

Tweens, sure. IG, TT, whatever.

linearchaos , 19 days ago

Brief is the ticket. The more you hot ot not it, the better it gets at matching you. After a couple days of swipes, you'll get a constant stream of stuff you'll actually want to see. IG and TT are good at this, yt shorts are pretty bad at it.

I've been trying to stay out of the algorithms. I watch YT by channels only, left Reddit for Lemmy, listed fb to friends walls. TT and IG only make it to me if friends or family share it. I'll go watch it then GTFO.

linearchaos , 19 days ago

It's three times the marketing data. And then if you're watching 2 22nd videos and 122nd ad that's a full third of your watch time as ads.

linearchaos , 21 days ago

Latest Debian has all the ease and little of the worry.

linearchaos , 26 days ago

I think the real danger here is subtlety. What happens when somebody asks for recommendations on a printer, or complains about their printer being bad, and all of a sudden some long established account recommends a product they've been happy with for years. And it turns out it's just an AI bot shilling for brother.

linearchaos , 26 days ago

I mean, it doesn't have to be expensive. And also doesn't have to be particularly cutting edge. Start throwing some credits into an LLM API, haven't randomly read and help people out in different groups. Once it reaches some amount of reputation have it quietly shill for them. Pull out posts that contain keywords. Have the AI consume the posts and figure out if they have to do with what they sound like they do. Have it subtly do product placement. None of this is particularly difficult or groundbreaking. But it could help shape our buying habits.

linearchaos , 25 days ago

I replaced the batteries in my Samsung earbuds. It wasn't super easy but it was tool-less.

linearchaos , 25 days ago

There was no reason to get rid of the headphone jack. Funny enough, the microSD cards are designed to fail. When you're using them in dash cams, cameras and drones they know they have to reach a certain bit rate and when they see that not happening they tell you that it's time to format and/or replace. But using them as a supplemental file system in the phone is dicey. The difference between underperforming and being a problem is a line in the sand that Android has a mastered. Google even tried a series of tactics to make them less dodgy. They tried to make it where you can't install apps out there. But even just putting media and other stuff out there when the operating system goes to check the storage driver can cause hiccups and lags and weird problems.

If SD cards weren't almost all disposable trash we might be able to use them in our phones without creating any performance or support nightmares.

linearchaos , 24 days ago

The vast majority of SD cards are made in the same factory and just branded differently.

Switch and steam deck Don't constantly try to enumerate/scan the entire file system. Putting game binaries is a one and done. Writing save files is a trickle every couple of minutes.

Android really does abuse the hell out of those cards.

linearchaos , 28 days ago

Npm isnt horrible for that.

linearchaos , 28 days ago

Then post about how horribly complicated Linux is.

linearchaos , 1 month ago

Proxmox is extremely straightforward. The updates are timely, maybe a little too timely. We've had zero issues out of it. I left VMware for proxmox about a year ago.

linearchaos , 1 month ago

Now now, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence...

linearchaos , 1 month ago

I mean, give it a dirt bike mode. Plenty of e-bikes out there can go over 42 km. Nothing says it has to do it like a human to exceed human capability.

linearchaos , 1 month ago

After watching the creepy as fuck way it got up off the floor I think it's safe to say there's not a human in it.

linearchaos , 1 month ago

We are slowly, step-by-step heading toward visble androids.

Other people have mentioned flexibility in maneuvering around humanoid spaces, but there's also something to be said about bipedal balance. I can pick up a pack of shingles throw it on my shoulder climb up a ladder and put the shingles on a roof without having to be half of the size of a cherry picker lift. Nothing says they have to be exactly humanoid or even necessarily bipedal. For some jobs I could see something more tri-pedal, insectoid or even spider-based would be useful

linearchaos , 1 month ago

Docker is awesome for a lot of things. But it's not particularly good for RAM.

linearchaos , 1 month ago

I think the concept is if you own enough exit nodes and you have monitors at the backbone level you can correlate traffic with time-based attacks.

The current number of people using tor in a given time isn't so insurmountable that you can't throw a couple of data centers worth of VMs at The problem and they've had backbone monitoring for decades.

The thing is, the feds aren't going to come knocking at your door because you are downloading movies. The MPAA figured out a long time ago that it's a losing battle going after individual people downloading/uploading. If you were trying to use tor to hide behind doing things to harm other people, running terrorist networks and the like, there's a reasonably good chance they could track you down if you were just using tour but they'd have to really want to do it, and that's not going to happen for Steve's half terabyte of CSI.

linearchaos , 1 month ago

It comes with a working config.

Adding applications and rebuilding is generally trivial.

The problem becomes if you want to use flakes or home manager, which you probably should. The config for those is complicated and poorly documented.

I don't know the programming language. I've been running it for about a month now. If you're not doing anything complicated or doing any crazy conditionals or running one config for 27 boxes it's no different than editing a yaml.

It took me about 2 days to get Nvidia working properly with offloading that was my hardest task so far.

linearchaos , 1 month ago

I'm pretty sure everybody knows it's not just a couple of developers by themselves churning out windows. Even the project managers are just following orders. Marketing sets the tone upper management picks the path.

linearchaos , 1 month ago

Yeah, this is a really good call. I'm a fan of what we can do with AI, when you start looking at those upskilled videos with a magnifying glass... It's just making s*** up that looks good.

linearchaos , 1 month ago

The automated walk out service wasn't a con. It was a shortsighted, honestly s***** idea, that was never able to be brought past the human oversight stage.

Con requires intent. I'm absolutely certain they fully intended to make it a completely humanless system. They failed and drug their feet trying and now they've shut it down.

If it's a con, what's their long game? What are they gain from having humans watch the store remotely? Is it tech just so neat that they'll have a lot more shoppers than a regular store? Do they save so much in on-site staff that it's cheaper to run than a conventional store? There's no advantage here that would make it a worthwhile con. It's a failed moonshot that they ended up manning with people to see if they could make it work that's all.

linearchaos , 1 month ago

It's a give and take honestly.

System-d has better logging. Until you have something that needs to really really log. You can argue that if you have something that's that dependent on logging it shouldn't be logging through the console but it's worked fine for decades. Auto pruning of logs isn't necessarily ideal. Getting console logs and assist logs as a pain in the ass.

Same goes for service dependencies we had this sorted it was answered via run levels and naming. It wasn't necessarily the most elegant solution but it was simple and there was very little to go wrong.

The tools to manage the services and logs are needlessly complicated. Service start, service stop, service status, service log, service enable, service disable. And I shouldn't have to reload the Daemon every time I make a change.

This isn't to say that it's all bad. It's flexible, and for most workflows, it's very automated and very light touch. The other pruning on the log file says probably saved a lot of downtime, a whole lot of downtime.

It's really well suited to desktop.

Service creation is somewhat easier.

Dependencies are more flexible than run levels.

To be honest I wouldn't go out of my way to run in a non-system distro but I would feel a little sigh of relief if something I was screwing with was still init.d

linearchaos , 1 month ago

Talking about freezing credit checks, not card usage.

linearchaos , 1 month ago

With your social security number first and last name and some public record information you can apply for credit cards, loans, you name it. For the process to kick off a credit check is performed. The company that is offering to give you the money Will check one or all of the major credit bureaus to get your credit worthiness.

You can write a letter to the three credit bureaus and ask them to lock your credit status so if anyone checks them they will get nothing back. This is a free service as long as you've got plenty of time to wait. You can sign up for any one of a dozen different "credit monitoring" services for the rate of about $30 a month they'll let you turn your credit check on or off at will.

I think the credit bureau should be forced to provide you a portal to authenticate and turn your credit status on and off at will.

linearchaos , 1 month ago

Yeah, we're heavily leaning toward making borrowing easy to the point that any security breach puts us at risk. It's trivial with just a little private data to take out a loan or buy a car in someone else's name. It really sucks.