Welcome to Incremental Social! Learn more about this project here!
Check out lemmyverse to find more communities to join from here!

psivchaz

@psivchaz@reddthat.com

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

psivchaz ,

I think the problem is that search does not make money. Ads make money, and subscriptions make money. Convincing people to switch from Google ads to New Google ads would involve dumping tons of money into becoming popular enough to attract advertisers. Convincing people to pay for search, like Kagi is doing, is probably even harder.

psivchaz ,

SyncThing has been great for me. I tried NextCloud and OwnCloud first, granted years ago, and they were not great. So I've been using SyncThing at least 5 years now.

psivchaz ,

There's some inherent risk in the ad blocker as well, though. If it's an extension, you're trusting that this thing you installed, that can read and modify every website you visit, isn't going to do anything sneaky. Yes, maybe it's open source, but every once in a while something sneaks into open source projects, too. It will get caught, but it could be after the damage is done.

I mean, I use an ad blocker. But I don't think it's unreasonable to value security and not use one.

psivchaz ,

To be fair, I bet some percentage of those that don't use an ad blocker ARE using something like no script and just don't need one as a result.

psivchaz ,

I don't need it or support it personally, especially the really loud noises. But I don't think it's as simple as you say.

A car without noise is like the acceleration version of a touchscreen. Perfectly fine and serviceable and probably works for most people. But I'm not going to automatically look down on people who prefer buttons. Having that extra feedback to tell you you've pushed the button, or how hard you've hit the accelerator, can be useful.

That said, I'd much prefer they stick to internal speakers for such feedback. It can be useful letting others know that you're about to haul ass, but the people who do it outside my neighborhood at 1 AM in the most obnoxious way possible can right to hell.

psivchaz ,

It's not entirely unlike my plan: No more externalities. That's the big problem with the environment and with a bunch of other things. Economists call it an "externality" when the things you're doing have side effects that you don't have to account for, such as pollution.

The thing is, we let industry and capital get away with it for a long time. And there's no doubt that fixing it would also impact people. If the cost of properly disposing of a tire was built into the price of the tire, it would be passed along to customers. But it's the only way to rehabilitate ANY system that uses currency.

psivchaz ,

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it."

psivchaz ,

And that's becoming it's own problem with search, especially with technical questions. The good answer is also old and out of date.

psivchaz ,

A compiler that uses an LLM to function mostly off of vibes. That's... An idea you've had, for sure.

psivchaz ,

I just switched my gaming PC to Linux yesterday. Well, switch is strong, I still have Windows in case I need to go back.

It's come a long way, though. I started using Linux desktop around 2000, and it was not a fun experience. I tried again in 2019 with a System76 laptop, and it's been just fine. My home theater/gaming PC was the last holdout.

So far, it works great. Steam Link works, my games all seem to work, RetroArch is going strong. The only downside is Oculus support doesn't seem to exist at all, so I might need to keep my Windows drive a bit longer just for VR.

psivchaz ,

I think the difference is that generative AI is allowing the spammy bullshit to outpace the anti-bullshit measures faster than before. I don't think it's demonization to point out that it's a problem.

psivchaz ,

I feel like we always do things exactly the opposite of whatever rational would be.

"These people aren't using the land to it's full potential so we're justified in murdering them and taking the land." - About the people living half naked off the land.

"You can't just make people move, even if you compensate them and are doing it for the greater good." - About the people who drive a pickup truck to Walmart.

I know there's more nuance, it's just funny to me.

psivchaz ,

The true mildly infuriating is the comments. Whether this is rage bait or not, we should all be about to agree on some basic things:

  • Domestic violence sucks regardless of who the victim is and who the perpetrator is.

  • Helping one group of victims, like males, does not have to and should not take away from helping another group.

  • The number of victims should not be the deciding factor on whether victims deserve empathy and support.

People in here are going out of their way to defend what is clearly a biased oversight, treating women like an automatic victim and treating men like an automatic perpetrator. Why? Just acknowledge that it's dumb, shows bias, and move on.

psivchaz ,

I'm not sure what you're talking about. One result affirms that you should feel safe and provides a hotline, the other starts with outright victim-blaming. The second result under "Maybe it's your fault for not listening?" is not a hotline, at least for me.

My point is that if they just made the result the same then it would not detract from women, nor would it hurt the men who don't need the advice. You're going out of your way to defend an unnecessary bias by claiming it's more relevant, but that's not the point. They could choose to just not have the bias, and it would be a win while hurting no one.

psivchaz ,

I tried it, then uninstalled pretty quickly. If I say, "Play music" then 10% of the time it would play music, and the other 90% it would tell me it can't. Same with many other assistant commands like controlling lights.

What even is the option here? When Google got rid of adding things to lists, I started my official transition away from them by moving to Proton, self hosting more stuff, etc. But for a voice assistant it seems like open source just isn't there yet, it doesn't have the hardware, and my only remaining option is to switch to Amazon (no.) Or Apple.

psivchaz ,

I'm more conservative than my teenage self, in that I believe now that people, as a whole, are much shittier than I suspected before. This has failed to translate into voting for conservatives because:

  • Conservative politicians and voters have played a big part in that realization
  • Even shitty people still should get medical care and such
  • Even if you don't care from a moral perspective, it's a net good for society if people have housing and healthcare and are able to contribute, rather than being forced out into the streets to die.
psivchaz ,

The truly wild thing about subscription pricing to me is how viscerally I'm against it. I'm not shitting on this business model, I think it makes perfect sense and is probably the only logical way to run a business like this. I'm just saying that everything in our lives is trying so hard to turn everything into a recurring fee that my first reaction to every recurring fee is pure hatred.

Alright, so the amount of data I'd need for pictures is probably the 500GB tier, so $9.99/mo. My first thought is that's way too expensive, my second thought is that I'm not doing another subscription. My subscription-trauma addled brain will happily justify buying a little server, and a 1TB hard drive, and spending hours configuring them. By the time I'm done, I'll have spent the equivalent of at least 3 years of the cost of this service, plus tons of my free time, and it will never work exactly right because there's always going to need to be updates, and sometimes those will break something, and I'll need to fix it myself.

Anyway, it looks cool though.

psivchaz ,

I use Photoprism. It is sufficient, amazing even for what it is, but there's a definite curve to getting it set up properly and there's some babysitting involved to make sure everything keeps working.

Google tests a feature that calls businesses on your behalf and holds until an agent is available | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

Google tests a feature that calls businesses on your behalf and holds until an agent is available | TechCrunch::Google is testing a feature that places a call to a business , waits on hold and then give you a call once a representative is available.

psivchaz ,

This seems like an overly complicated explanation when the alternative explanation is so simple: More call center employees can answer more phones, but call center employees cost money to hire, and businesses do not like spending money.

psivchaz ,

It's unfair to discount Google's early days. They DID have technical excellence. Search was leagues better than the competition. Gmail was an amazing leap from other providers. Android started as trash but improved rapidly. The Nexus line of phones was amazing. Google Maps was a huge improvement over what else existed. They did a lot right.

I can't pinpoint exactly when the fall started. Was it when Pichai became CEO? When they removed "don't be evil?" I remember a speech Pichai gave where he talked about "more wood behind fewer arrows" as why they were getting rid of employee child projects, so maybe it was that.

psivchaz ,

TBH I don't get why people criticize selling out as if they wouldn't do it, too. I don't want to sit and amass wealth indefinitely, if I have a company and someone comes along and offers "retire rich forever" money, I'm taking it and fucking off to somewhere fun. Especially if we're talking billions, no one will ever hear my name again.

psivchaz ,

I don't quite understand. Are you saying it's immoral to sell a business? Is it retiring that's immoral? I didn't say that everyone secretly anything, I just don't understand why the hate.

Look, there's no such thing as an ethical billionaire. I get that, and fully believe it. But I don't get why people think "selling out" is a thing when it's often basically short hand for "retiring and letting someone else make the money."

psivchaz ,

It's a bit of both! Certain commands to the car can be done locally via Bluetooth OR via Tesla servers. The tricky bit is that status always comes from the server. If you are on a VPN that is blocked (like I use NordVPN and it is often blocked) then the app can't get status and as long as it can't get status it may not even try a local command. It's unclear to me under what circumstances it does local vs cloud commands, and it may have to do with a Bluetooth LE connection that you can't really control.

When you don't have service, or you're on VPN, it may be worthwhile to try disabling and reenabling Bluetooth. I have had success with this before. If you're using android, it seems like the widget also uses Bluetooth, so you could try adding the widget to your home screen and using that. You can also try setting the Tesla app to not be power controlled, so it never gets closed.

Either way, there's a definite engineering problem here that feels like it should be fixed by Tesla. But I can at least confirm that, even in situations with zero connectivity, you should be able to perform basic commands like unlock and open trunk without data service.

psivchaz ,

I agree but I think it needs to be slightly more practical. Sometimes a line of business just dries up and it would damage the company to try and keep that service going. It wouldn't make sense to force a company into bankruptcy to keep one line going that few people use anymore.

Earlier today, though, I was thinking about sunsetting guarantees. Companies can and should decommission things when it makes business sense, but the user generated content it has gathered shouldn't just disappear, and they shouldn't be allowed to destroy the user experience of things people have bought.

So I would propose rules like:

  • If a service is being decomissioned or an entry point to that service being shut down, the content available on that service must be made available as a bulk export. Personal data, such as account data, messages, etc should be made available to users individually, while publicly accessible content should be made available publicly.

  • If a public service is being taken down completely, source code should be made available publicly.

  • If the service for a device which was physically purchased by consumers is being taken down, an update must be provided to allow users to use a local or alternative backend service. The source code for the service must be released publicly.

  • If features are being removed from a service which backed a physically purchased device, an update must be offered which allows users to point to a local or alternative service for either all functionality or, at minimum, the removed functionality. Looking at you, Google, keep removing features...

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • incremental_games
  • meta
  • All magazines
    •