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namingthingsiseasy

@namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev

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namingthingsiseasy ,

Your Steam games will go to the grave with you

Great, then I'll finally have some time to play them....

namingthingsiseasy ,

That's what heathens like yourselves deserve for living lives full of sin. True servants of God like myself have been rewarded with the almighty TempleOS

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)

You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)...

namingthingsiseasy ,

An AI has a much better chance of actually providing some sort of vision for the company. Unlike its current CEO.

namingthingsiseasy ,

The best part of all of this is that now Pichai is going to really feel the heat of all of his layoffs and other anti-worker policies. Google was once a respected company and place where people wanted to work. Now they're just some generic employer with no real lure to bring people in. It worked fine when all he had to do was increase the prices on all their current offerings and stuff more ads, but when it comes to actual product development, they are hopelessly adrift that it's pretty hilarious watching them flail.

You can really see that consulting background of his doing its work. It's actually kinda poetic because now he'll get a chance to see what actually happens to companies that do business with McKinsey.

namingthingsiseasy ,

Your comment explains exactly what happens when post-expiration companies like Google try to innovate:

Let’s be realistic here, google still pays out fat salaries. That would be more than enough incentive for me. I’d take the job and ride the wave until the inevitable lay offs.

This is why it takes a lot more than fat salaries to bring a project to life. Google's culture of innovation has been thoroughly gutted, and if they try to throw money at the problem, they'll just attract people who are exactly like what you described: money chasers with no real product dreams.

The people who built Google actually cared about their products. They were real, true technologists who were legitimately trying to actually build something. Over time, the company became infested with incentive chasers, as exhibited by how broken their promotion ladder was for ages, and yet nothing was done about it. And with the terrible years Google has had post-COVID, all the people who really wanted to build a real company are gone. They can throw all the money they want at the problem, but chances are slim that they'll actually be able to attract, nurture and retain the real talent that's needed to build something real like this.

namingthingsiseasy ,

why is it a bad idea that studenst get some tools, free of charge, that they are free to use

I can't find it right now, but there was a quote from a long time ago by Bill Gates where he basically said that it was fine if people were using Microsoft's products for free because it would get them "addicted". They would rather have people use Microsoft products even for free if it would prevent them from using alternatives.

That's why it's harmful. It's free for students in the short term, but it prevents them from learning how to use an alternative product that will most certainly be free for them to use forever. Students waste those years when they have a chance to learn something useful, and instead get hooked on proprietary tools that will most certainly fuck them over at some point in the future.

namingthingsiseasy ,

Two simple words: digital sovereignty.

Hopefully this serves as another case in the push for the EU[0] using native alternatives instead.

[0]: Not just the EU of course. Any non-American company should see dependency on Microsoft as a liability. I hope all countries around the world see this as a warning of things that could happen to them.

namingthingsiseasy ,

Everyone in this thread is saying that this comes as no surprise, and that is certainly true. But the thing is, a lot of management types do know this already but they simply don't care for two reasons:

  1. They care more about leverage/control over employees than they do about actual good work being done. You cannot understate at all how important employee control can be for managers and how seriously they're willing to destroy their own business to keep this kind of power.

  2. RTO is basically a layoff program. As much as I love working remotely, it's very important to keep in mind that remote workers are the first ones that will get laid off when the business wants to cut back - purely because of how easy it is to do. They can just mandate RTO without actually calling it a layoff and know many workers will outright quit, and the business won't have to comply with whatever local regulations are in place around layoffs. Still, this shouldn't sound like comfort for employees that do work in the office - there's a good chance that once RTO is in place, another round of layoffs will strike when the company doesn't meet its cut targets. So any time a business announces return to office, it means that there's a good chance that layoffs will follow too.

tl;dr: Managers knew this would happen all along too - it was just a trade they were very willing to make.

namingthingsiseasy ,

Nothing matters more than the quarterly earnings report. If that's what it takes, so be it!

namingthingsiseasy ,

Sure, fair points. We should distinguish good and bad managers here before we get too specific. The bad managers will do whatever they're told to do by upper management. Upper management just says "cut down to this number" and they do it because they only care about their own incentives and don't care about the consequences. The good managers will probably realize the downsides of these decisions and will try their best to blunt the impact of these decisions. But in the end, they still have to report to higher levels of management, so there's little that they can ultimately do. So they're probably going to end up doing the same thing anyway.

This is why management is such a hard position, especially in the lower levels. You're basically at the end of the chain and usually have little power to get what you want. At the same time, you still have to make lots of different groups happy - upper management, your workers and whoever you're delivering your product for. All the things that you listed are things that I'm sure they would like to have, but probably end up having to get sacrificed anyway. If there's only one group of people that you're going to please, chances are that it's going to be the people you report to.

namingthingsiseasy ,

Agreed. It's really hard to understate how ineffective "voting with your wallet" can be. The fact is simply that nobody honestly cares. Even if you get 100 people to boycott a company, would 100 out of millions of consumers really make a difference? Of course not.

And of course, you always have cases like this where everybody does it. Same thing goes for TVs - if everyone spies on you, the only real solution is to not have a TV. Yes, I know there are exceptions here and there, but bad practices like these force buyers into making compromises that they shouldn't have to. Capitalism should be predicated on companies offering the best product to earn their income. It should not be about companies having the least bad product and trying every terrible thing that they can get away with.

(Of course, we all know that capitalism is a farce.)

namingthingsiseasy ,

Honest question here: what would stop me from starting a video, then pausing it and walking away from my computer for several hours so youtube plays ads to no one?

Now repeat but with several tabs.

And bonus points if the videos simply happen to be mine and I were to enable monetization on them.

Hmmm....

namingthingsiseasy ,

Sounds to me like these tech workers could really use a good union to protect them.....

namingthingsiseasy ,

Agreed. Objects are nice and a great way to program. Composition is great. Traits/interfaces are great. Namespaces are great. Objects are a really nice way to reap the benefits of principles like these.

But then there are aspects of OOP that absolutely suck, like inheritance. I hate inheritance. The rules get very confusing very quickly. For example, try understanding overriding of methods. Do I need to call the superclass method or not? If not, does it get called automatically? If so, in what order? How do these rules change for the constructor? Now repeat this exercise for every OOP language you use and try not to mix them up... Java, C++, Python, etc.

Fortunately, it feels like we rely on inheritance less and less these days. As an example, I really like how Java allows you to implement Runnable these days. Before, if you wanted to run a thread, you needed a separate object that inherited Thread. And what if that object needs to inherit from another one too? Things would get out of hand quickly. (This is a very old example, but with lambdas and other new features, things are getting even better now.)

Anyway, long story short, I think OOP is a complicated way to achieve good principles, and there are simpler ways to achieve those principles than a full OOP implementation.

US sues Apple for illegal monopoly over smartphones (www.theverge.com)

The US Department of Justice and 16 state and district attorneys general accused Apple of operating an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market in a new antitrust lawsuit. The DOJ and states are accusing Apple of driving up prices for consumers and developers at the expense of making users more reliant on its iPhones.

namingthingsiseasy ,

Even without the DMA, the EU and US have very different judicial systems. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't really understand the specifics, but if I had to describe it in a very hand-wavy fashion from my anecdotal, non-scientific experiences, US courts are more likely to favor preserving individual/personal freedoms over the common public good, and vice versa in the European system.

namingthingsiseasy ,

There's room for both in my opinion. Keyboards are good for accuracy. Touchscreens are good for custom inputs and slightly faster to type on. In an ideal world, we'd have both.

To be frank, I find touchscreens so abhorrently useless that I just use my phone less than I'd like to - for example, I'm much more likely to just flat out ignore messages because of how tedious input is on phones. I don't know if a keyboard would make a huge difference for me since I think mobile devices are garbage in more ways than one, but the lack of a keyboard is by far the biggest issue.

Google Allows Creditors to Brick Your Phone (lemmy.world)

I installed NetGuard about a month ago and blocked all internet to apps, unless they're on a whitelist. No notifications from this particular system app (that can't be disabled) until recently when it started making internet connection requests to google servers. Does anyone know when this became a thing?...

namingthingsiseasy ,

All your points are sound. The issue that I have with this is that remote disable functionality is not necessary to achieve any of these aims. Before they were connected to the internet, people were still able to rent/lease autos and the world managed to survive just fine. There were other ways for lenders to get remunerated for breaking lease terms - they could issue an additional charge, get a court order for repossession, etc. Remote disable was never needed or warranted.

So let's start by considering the due process here. Before, there was some sort of process involved in the repossession act. With remote disable however, the lender can act as judge, jury and executioner so to speak - that party can unilaterally disable the device with no oversight. And if the lender is in the wrong, there is likely no recourse. Another potential issue here is that the lender can change the terms at any time - it can arbitrarily decide that it doesn't like what you're doing with the device, decide you're in breach, and hit that remote kill switch. A lot of these things could technically happen before too, but the barriers have been dramatically lowered now.

On top of this, there are great privacy concerns as well. What kinds of additional information does the lender have? What right do they have to things like our location, our habits, when we use it, and all of the other personal details that they can infer from programs like this?

There are probably lots of other issues here, but another part of the problem is that we can't even start to imagine what kinds of nefarious behaviors they can execute with this new information and power. We are well into the age where our devices are becoming our enemies instead of our advocates. I shudder to think what the world would look like 20 years from now if this kind of behavior isn't stopped.

namingthingsiseasy ,

Of course! I hope you didn't read my comment as hostile. I read yours as sort of a devil's advocate type of argument and was just trying to point out the logical flaws in it. I'm glad that you didn't hesitate to voice a contrary opinion. The points that you raise are interesting... and it's always good to consider both sides of the argument, even because it just helps us hone our own arguments. You could certainly argue that this is just another enforcement mechanism. It's just that it comes with a lot of unintended consequences, which most people will overlook, and they'll inevitably be used in ways that we didn't anticipate, long after the fact that these kinds of mechanisms become commonplace.

Regarding the reduced cost of lending: sure, in theory they could lower the prices. In practicality, will it? Any time we see cost-reducing developments, it usually ends up resulting in higher profits for the vendors moreso than better competition and lower prices for consumers. Look at how car manufacturers are just letting electric vehicles sit in their lots because they refuse to accept what buyers are willing to pay. The corporate types really, really hate to lower prices on anything for any reason. So I would be surprised to see something like that happen, even though it's still theoretically possible....

namingthingsiseasy ,

Right - they say that they're just going to use it to defend their "property rights". In practice, they're going to use it for a whole lot more than just that....

namingthingsiseasy ,

He's right. These people are so fantastically wealthy, but it's not enough. They still need more, more more. And meanwhile, actual people, real human beings are going hungry, without heat, without a home. Not only do laid off employees suffer, but their families and their children too. All so that millionaires can continue promoting themselves to being billionaires and even more.

I don't know of anything realistically that can be done about it (in the short term at least). But it just needs to be shouted louder and louder until there's enough public sentiment that real change can start to happen. Greed needs to be shamed louder and louder. We know all the institutional power that the wealthiest people in the world have to suppress economic equality in every country and throughout the globe, but if our voices grow loud enough, eventually it will be too loud to ignore.

Excessive wealth and greed is a mark of shame. Let's just keep repeating it and hopefully we'll eventually have enough power to reverse it.

EU Commission fines Apple over €1.8 billion over abusive App store rules for music streaming providers (ec.europa.eu)

The European Commission has fined Apple over €1.8 billion for abusing its dominant position on the market for the distribution of music streaming apps to iPhone and iPad users (‘iOS users') through its App Store. In particular, the Commission found that Apple applied restrictions on app developers preventing them from...

namingthingsiseasy ,

According to this, the fine includes a punitive damage:

Vestager said that the lump sum of €1.8 billion had been added as a deterrent since the basic amount of the fine, which she compared to a "parking ticket," would have been quite small.

The total fine of €1.84 billion amounts to 0.5% of Apple's worldwide turnover, according to Vestager.

Still not enough in my opinion, but hopefully if this sticks, future damage awards will be even higher. In any case, there will be a lot more fines and regulations coming down on Apple into the future (thanks in large part to the DMA), so even though this is just a single instance, they will hopefully add up pretty significantly in the coming years.

namingthingsiseasy ,

Despite that success, and the App Store’s role in making it possible, Spotify pays Apple nothing.

That's because Spotify doesn't owe you anything. If I release a piece of software for Apple, Android, Linux, Windows, etc., I don't owe these OSes anything for that. Apple makes plenty of money selling hardware, that's good enough for them.

These delusional bastards really need a few slaps around their heads to get this concept to sink in.

namingthingsiseasy ,

Perhaps! But only if they allowed third party app stores. Because as it stands right now, they're basically inventing a cost that they pass on to developers, and then rewarding themselves handsomely for the cost that they would have never needed to pay if they allowed others to compete in this area. It's still a tactic they could not get away with if they were not a monopoly.

namingthingsiseasy ,

It's not wrong, but it's just terribly short-sighted. You're giving greed-crazed companies total control over a device that you own and nobody else should be able to touch.

Shiny things come at a cost. Sure, it may look convenient and super cool to have all these features, but it's important to understand the trade-offs. And this is just the tip of the iceberg - we don't even know what kinds of malice these companies will think of 5-10 years from now when these machines are even more widespread and probably come with even more invasive anti-user hardware capabilities.

It's not wrong... it's just very very naïve.

namingthingsiseasy ,

These EULAs are often just corporate wishlists

Then I really wish there were regulations over what kinds of things you're allowed to put in a contract. If there were punitive measures for putting things in contracts that anyone should know is not enforceable, then maybe companies would think twice before putting language like this in.

namingthingsiseasy ,

Yeah, that second paragraph is more what I was thinking (terrible phrasing on my part). The issue is that fighting these contracts in court is risky - you might lose, and even if you don't, it's a big commitment to fight a legal case against a large company no matter which jurisdiction you're in.

To put it another way, look at it from a game theory perspective - there's plenty of benefit from putting these terms in, and no downside whatsoever. So the optimal move for vendors is to put garbage like this into the contact.

namingthingsiseasy , (edited )

Oh goody. I've been wanting to use this since my slashdot days... today is my first chance!

Your post advocates a

[x] technical
[ ] legislative
[ ] market-based
[ ] vigilante

approach to fighting (ML-generated) spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why
it won't work. [One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea,
and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad
federal law was passed.]

[ ] Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
[ ] Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
[ ] No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
[ ] It is defenseless against brute force attacks
[ ] It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
[ ] Users of email will not put up with it
[x] Microsoft will not put up with it
[ ] The police will not put up with it
[x] Requires too much cooperation from spammers
[x] Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
[ ] Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
[ ] Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
[ ] Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

[ ] Laws expressly prohibiting it
[x] Lack of centrally controlling authority for email^W ML algorithms
[ ] Open relays in foreign countries
[ ] Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
[x] Asshats
[ ] Jurisdictional problems
[ ] Unpopularity of weird new taxes
[ ] Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
[ ] Huge existing software investment in SMTP
[ ] Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
[ ] Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
[ ] Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
[x] Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
[x] Extreme profitability of spam
[ ] Joe jobs and/or identity theft
[ ] Technically illiterate politicians
[ ] Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
[x] Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
[ ] Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
[x] Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

[x] Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
[ ] Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
[ ] SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
[ ] Blacklists suck
[ ] Whitelists suck
[ ] We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
[ ] Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
[ ] Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
[ ] Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
[ ] Sending email should be free
[x] Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
[ ] Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
[x] Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
[ ] Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
[ ] I don't want the government reading my email
[ ] Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

[x] Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
[ ] This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
[ ] Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Reddit has never turned a profit in nearly 20 years, but filed to go public anyway (www.cnn.com)

Reddit has never turned a profit in nearly 20 years, but filed to go public anyway::Reddit, the message board site known for its chronically online userbase and for originating much internet discourse, filed for its long-anticipated initial public offering on Thursday.

namingthingsiseasy ,

And yet, many (maybe even most) countries in Europe operate on a pension system for retirement. That would include tech workers in said countries as well.

But American companies (and Canadian too?) have mostly done away with them by now

namingthingsiseasy ,

GDPR desperately needed on the other side of the pond...

namingthingsiseasy ,

There was a quaint old time, shortly after Google was founded, where people mused about privacy over the internet. It was forgotten about as the profits started rolling in and pretty much all other companies started following along. That was the time when we started transitioning into a period of massive data surveillance. Glad to see that the conversation is starting to pick up again in some areas, though it's definitely being actively suppressed in many others.

namingthingsiseasy ,

Well, there's one good thing that will come out of this: these kinds of idiotic moves will help us figure out which companies have the right kinds of management at the top, and which ones don't have any clue whatsoever.

Of course, it will come with the working class bearing the brunt of their bad decisions, but that has always been the case unfortunately. Business as usual...

namingthingsiseasy ,

when it means they will not sell my data and will allow me control over my algorithm to prevent it from playing to my vulerabilities

The problem is that this will never happen. That boat has sailed - companies will never give up on their existing revenue streams. They may say that paying today will exempt you from the ads, but it's only a matter of time before they ramp up the cost and start showing ads anyway. That's how cable television started, and it's how internet streaming will end as well. And as for the not selling data/controlling the algorithm, well you have no way of proving that they don't do that so they'll do it no matter what they say.

There's no reason for google to do this whatsoever. They have their business model - any new revenue streams will 100% definitely not reduce the other ones at all. It's just gonna be another giant dump into the pile of enshittification.

namingthingsiseasy ,

You say that today. Give it a couple years. I'm pretty sure that by 2030, the cost will be ~100 dollars/euros/whatever per month and you'll see 2 minutes of ads for every single minute of content you watch. (Okay, maybe the number of ads is an exaggeration, but I don't think the monthly cost is.)

Don't pay the Danegeld. It never makes them go away.

namingthingsiseasy ,

Why is it your responsibility to pay the creators? Google is a trillion dollar company and makes billions off of what people post on youtube. Shouldn't they be paying them instead and not you?

Besides, it's only a matter of time before Google takes more and more of the cut that you think you're paying them.

namingthingsiseasy ,

Speaking of labour protections, is this even legal? Or is it a case of illegal, but good luck with the courts? I would think that at least California would have protections against something like this.

For example, let's just consider housing: imagine you bought a house when interest rates were 3% - now they can just force you to sell it and buy a new one with a 9% rate (or force you to rent)?

But I guess they can just call it a layoff instead so they can get away with it or something

namingthingsiseasy ,

The reason why American tech workers haven't unionized is because when times are good, they think they don't need a union, and when times are bad, it's far too late.

Source: reading too many of hopeless comments like this on hacker news

namingthingsiseasy ,

Thanks for explaining. That's insane. I guess the only real solution is to unionize. If there's no legal protection, then I suppose a union is the only thing you can rely on to prevent yourself from getting fucked over like this.

I sincerely hope people take their experiences from this dark period of history and learn from them.

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