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stellargmite

@stellargmite@lemmy.world

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‘A fine line between humor and flopping’: tech summit’s rap battle is the height of corporate cringe (www.theguardian.com)

The next time you’re sitting through a company-wide meeting, half-listening to a leader drone on about updates or product launches (and hoping they don’t announce layoffs or budget cuts), remember this: at least they’re not rapping....

stellargmite ,

Tone deaf mega cringe, or savy meme generation ? Not mutually exclusive I guess, but I’ll keep steering clear of Canva.

stellargmite ,

Then Hire cheap human intelligence to correct the AIs hallucinatory trash, trained from actual human generated content in the first place which the original intended audience did understand the nuanced context and meaning of in the first place. Wow more like theyve shovelled a bucket of horse manure on the pizza as well as the glue. Added value to the advertisers. AI my arse. I think calling these things language models is being generous. More like energy and data hungry vomitrons.

stellargmite ,

As a long time google despiser and someone who almost puked when I was involuntarily subjected to the trailer for that terrible looking movie, this is fantastic.

Edit: forgot to mention a further box is ticked as someone fascinated but horrified with the corporate failures of Boeing.

stellargmite ,

They fooled me into thinking it was likely to be terrible with their ad / trailer in that case. I’ll give it a go sometime when time. Or were you sent by google to make up for their bad AI ? ;) are you good AI guy ?

stellargmite ,

Why would we believe the promises of the ones who ruined the primary utility of their core product in the first place, and convinced or blackmailed the rest of the internet to take part in the ruination ? An advertising corporation will tell us to put cyanide on our pizza if it makes them an extra buck this quarter, and google is worse than that. Profit despite the social costs is doing no evil /s

stellargmite ,

Legally maybe its fine, I’m not sure. But because they tried to license or get permission and involvement officially from her, but she declined, then they asked again , she declined again and two days later they released it with (possibly) her voice anyway. At best it displays them to be bad faith plundering abusers including of individuals’ likenesses. We in this type of forum are not surprised of course - its par for the course with these tech bros who’ve made a business out of other peoples content largely without consent. Respect to Johansonn for making this known publicly though. But even weirder that they then took it down when they saw the reaction. Highlighting themselves as Sociopaths. Plenty of those around, but with this much power and access to data? Creepy.

stellargmite ,

Yeh she effectively chose an ethical position with no downside I can think of. Unless they made her sign an NDA / MOU which they clearly didn’t. Their sketchiness is enhanced if anything. Makes me wonder if they made some low level threat at that last minute approach. e.g we are using your voice anyway, now’s your chance to get onboard the gravy train or look bad. Just speculation of course. She wasnt aware apparently. Also the fact they want to mimic the “her” ai is just weird. They are worse than the cautionary fiction.

stellargmite ,

What does maximalist design mean in the mac world ? Is this regarding UI and/or industrial design ? I was teaching design back when we were transitioning from OS9 to OSx early or mid 2000s I guess . We had to switch between them for a good couple years I think as various packages became available or affordable on osx. Never owned one in the early days but study and work from mid 90s onward was generally on them. I can’t relate to them ever being maximalist really but I guess they gradually did get more minimalist very gradually as far as UI. Throughout this time I was almost always using windows at home so my super basic summary of 90s, 2000s mac vs pc argument would be that the mac rarely interefered with workflow in the sense that win98,2000,xp etc were requiring a large percent of maintenance time. To me thats the minimalism mac were always about and for me still holds to a degree - though far more retail/consumer and far less industry/pro focussed despite FCP, Logic, and fast apple silicone etc.

Dont necessarily disagree though, just curious what it means. Now also using kubuntu or similar around 9 years (I’m jumping between 3 OSs these days) it often feels like the os9 days as far as community vibe and support - smooth and low stress though the ui approach is sometimes an afterthought rather than the end goal perhaps. Completely capable though. Mac feels more consumer and indeed less concerned with service feeling direct or individualised . So agree with you there. Maximalist service, or is it minimalist :)

stellargmite ,

So you sign up to confirm that your IP is yours, while simultaneously agreeing to sell it off , but the source will be anonymous other than to who it’s sold to or anyone else Slack decides they want to know. These tech contracts and TOS should just say “we will (try) not do bad, but you agree to let us do bad, and if bad happens its your fault”.

stellargmite ,

Info enshittification can mean only one thing: full scale invasion. Apparently

stellargmite ,

I can hear it braying from way down the road, dropping steaming loads of marketing as it comes to stink up the place kicking children in their teeth, all while making billions from it in the process. Heee hawwww .

stellargmite ,

mbp = macbook pro , unless you forgot the /s

Can we all agree that whatever version of predictive text we have nowadays is crap, and has been for a long time?

I'm sick of random capitalisations mid sentence. I'm sick of common words being replaced by less common ones or even downright nonsense. I'm sick of it taking three attempts to successfully get the word I want. I swear it's been like this for five years or more. Can we have a better version yet, or at least the old one back?

stellargmite ,

Yep swype around 2010-12 was the golden age of this stuff. I distinctly remember being on a bus commute being amazed how quickly I could pump out work emails, and documents on way to work on maybe an LG android smartphone with no manual invention required on spelling or grammar. Ancient times. Just typing out this comment on mobile in 2024 I’ve had to recorrect every 4th to 5th word , either I mistyped and it doesnt autocorrect correctly , or its autochanging correct words to wrong ones. I have big fingers but the phone is the higgest I’ve had. Clearly these enshittertech corporations dont make money from making better or more useful products .

stellargmite ,

There is a time and place for nonsense, and this isn't it. I guess it being plausible sounding is the issue.

stellargmite ,

Yeh generally it’s about reach.
In the case of NWS Technically its not exclusive as their data and messaging is distributed by other channels, including traditional, and their own site(s). But for ticking the social media box they're likely to select the platforms with the most reach. Dissappointing that its only the one if that is the case, but the US is the land of officiated orthodoxy I’ve found. There are advantages sometimes - less triplication of labour in the case of humans needing to curate social media output for example. Bring on interoperability of platforms, please.

stellargmite ,

Have you thought of going into journalism yourself ? Proper research sorely missed in this underfunded , but crucial field. And in Mental health itself. There are proper studies being conducted on this topic for sure, so this piss poor article perhaps serves to encourage better research on the part of disgruntled readers lol. Even established media orgs seem to resort to alot of opinion pieces, which I guess means they can pay anyone less to spout their anecdotal opinion on a matter without the time (money) required to do the research. Sometimes this is fine - if the individual is an experienced expert on the matter. But much of the time its barely an extension of social media itself which I also generally avoid. Reading someone’s opinion about someone else's opinion isn’t my idea of a good time. My problem recently is choosing which journalistic outfit(s) to pay.

stellargmite ,

As someone who lives on an island, lol. But still a good point assuming a North American car centric viewpoint. I’ll be resorting to wind power, jetski, breath stroke, or airbus. Perhaps other options including rail ( yes we have it on Islands too ) may look competitive again.

stellargmite ,

Politicising climate change was yet another distraction from dealing with it in a cohesive and unified manner. Divide and conquer.

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

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    stellargmite ,

    Never looked into this. Do VSTs not work on Linux ? Not withstanding the host ( ableton) of course . What about bitwig ?

    X automatically changed 'Twitter' to 'X' in domain names, breaking legit URLs (mashable.com)

    On Monday, it appears X attempted to encourage users to cease referring to it as Twitter and instead adopt the name X. Some users began noticing that posts viewed via X for iOS were changing any references of "Twitter.com" to "X.com" automatically....

    stellargmite ,

    News sites also need to stop going on about it. Its like feeding the troll. I’ve never used the thing other than looking at it briefly in its early days, and yet I’m constantly hearing about it. And here I am commenting about this apparently (Western) globally important website which has served no purpose in my life. What a waste of energy all around. Self perpetuating negative feedback loop tech wank. Digital town square my arse. The little I know about it is from bad headlines which I wish I could unsee as its of zero consequence.

    stellargmite ,

    You are complimenting them on their humanism, not their adherence to their religion. Which is fine. It’s the religion which has had to adjust itself to remain acceptable to its fee paying subscribers. As a lapsed Catholic myself , the theme of conversion, and evangelism was a fairly regular one at the weekly groaningly boring sermon. If your friends weren’t attempting to convert you I credit their social awareness, and again general humanism considering that at the back of their heads they have to agree , lest burn themselves, that you are going to burn in hell for eternity for not being a member of the same club. That trusted functional adults told me that repeatedly through my childhood while living in an otherwise decent, civil society is a credit to the social education my family and community gave me and each other otherwise. We cherry pick from the brutal bronze age texts but the pickings get slimmer and slimmer and the choices we make are filtered based on our actual humanity and ethical social standard of our time. Perhaps the official doctrine has since shifted - I grew up in the 70s/80s - but I don't really care. Crediting people for their actual actions despite their environment is where I’ve ended up. I do disagree though with you saying their religion doesn't spoil them. Being told by the apparently literal mouthpiece of God on earth that the universe was created for you and that (s)he keeps a constant tab on you and your prayers because you are a member of the club? Doesn't get much more earthly and spoilt . Like being quietly and modestly told by your parents that you are really better than all other kid on earth. If the parents choose not to spoil their kids materialistically or otherwise, thats the work and choice of the parents, not their religion, let alone the work of the imaginary cloud man.

    stellargmite ,

    Yeh. Never truely completely captive, but the potential shaftings they give us are hard to take. Full on denial can set in, I’ve noticed with some I know, the more we have invested into the given shittersphere. Understandable and sad. We are also talking about a relatively niche area here unfortunately. Obviously for the likes of google, amazon et al., we aren't the customer. Our relative loyalty to their walled shitterspheres are unlikely even a metric to them other than as ad / clicks/ conversion, as they'll just replace this week’s initiative with a shinier (to the masses) gadget next week. I really hope that whole industry’s days are numbered, but unfortunately all of it is a feature of consumer capitalism and not a bug. Competition, regulation , and DIY are our only defences. The fact that to varying degrees these big tech players are in control of information itself ( to anyone silly enough to consider using the yellowpages/google a fair and factual info source ) , helps them no end with whatever strategy they're onto this week.

    Regarding not getting what you pay for. Ive often thought that having to pay the nominal cost price for say the firestick is merely to obfiscate what it really is. ”They should pay me for embedding this spy stick in my house” is the natural feeling, so paying some arbitrary amount to ‘purchase’ immediately elicits some sort of entitlement ( which should totally be the case ! ) in the consumer. The psychology behind such corporate behaviour is fascinating but it’s probably as much to do with regulation, ironically.

    stellargmite ,

    For sure. When they had our livelihood by the balls because ‘industry staaaandaaaard’ then they stick it in a perpetually cranking vice called subscription model, we reach for any cope available. Its been decent cope and now we need a new cope.

    stellargmite ,

    I’ve used Designer for several years now in combination with inkscape very heavily for work having bashed my head against a wall called Adobe Illustrator for years - all the obvious reasons including terrible svg support. Inkscape should be supported for sure , but Designer has sped up workflow no end with what I use it for. It’s a shame that everything must enshittify.

    stellargmite ,

    Yeh. And Adobe were trying to compete with ImageReady. What a cluster that workflow was. Fireworks was great.

    stellargmite ,

    Looks promising. Their website had me thinking I smashed my mobile glass. Nice troll

    stellargmite ,

    This is reporting on a local issue . Unless there are cases where oil and gas are deforesting for new infrastructure in the same area then surely both would be targets.

    Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, as internal dissent mounts (www.cnbc.com)

    During a keynote speech in New York on Monday from the managing director of Google’s Israel business, an employee in the company’s cloud division protested publicly, proclaiming “I refuse to build technology that powers genocide.”...

    stellargmite ,

    Protesting a particular issue that riles him, is completely his right and should be applauded. It’s an especially brave thing to do from within the sacred corporate halls of his holy employer, when most people value their income and reputation over life itself (of others)- a common method of control. The idea that you're not allowed to say a word in opposition unless you target every single possible google indiscretion, at apparently the exact same moment (max 30seconds as captured here possibly?) is ridiculous and pathetic. If he had stood up with a list 2000 matters to raise, would it have made it to your highly critical radar? The contractual, and geopolitical timing is kind of relevant also.

    And besides , I wouldn't be surprised if this person has been dissentful in other cases in other ways internally on smaller matters that didn't make news. He appears to have a moral compass after all. If you dont have the guts to cause your superiors trouble when you know they're doing wrong then atleast offer some kind of support to those who do. Not discourage with this kind of ridiculous dissent smothering attempt.

    Any effort to expose groogle’s evil on any single matter is valid.

    stellargmite ,

    Yeh that was one of the most shocking aspects of Boeing behaviour post the first Max crash. But it was the attitude from the top. Blaming the victims, on effectively racial or cultural grounds. An incredibly cynical and disgusting tactic, to deflect from their own abject failure of a business model resulting in death. The whole corporation showed how it values its passengers in those moments for me, ( and as a non American). They have no interest in our safety and due to this I haven't stepped on a Boeing plane since the Lion air incident. Not that they care. It also made me wonder to what extent Boeing are responsible for the poor air transport safety history of Indonesia and elsewhere. I would bet they haven't put a cent into atleast helping to improve it, considering how much money they have probably made there - it being an archipelago and the 4th most populated country globally. Several hundred people were sacrificed in order to expose these criminals for what they are. Profit making is too often a conflict of interest when lives are at stake.

    stellargmite ,

    In IT the failures are the reason there is an industry - to some degree - and a feature of systems, so they require large numbers of staff to deploy and maintain. Quite similar to the ICE automobile historically in that regard. So the cars impact is now not just manufacture of parts , local mechanics for repair, but also buildings of software engineers, IT professionals, the cloud engineers, the cloud infrastructure itself and so on. Of course that isn't necessarily exclusive to EVs, or even to just the auto industry.

    Roku TV bricked until agreeing to new terms of service

    See title - very frustrating. There is no way to continue to use the TV without agreeing to the terms. I couldn't use different inputs, or even go to settings from the home screen and disconnect from the internet to disable their services. If I don't agree to their terms, then I don't get access to their new products. That...

    stellargmite ,

    Non American here, and also not a lawyer, but I’m curious what the correlation is between consumer rights (or lack of) and the relative cost of the product. This is somewhat different to buying a cheaply manufactured product and it unsurprisingly falling to bits - though in many jurisdictions there are even basic rights for that situation, the price is irrelevent. Someone elsewhere in chat has suggested suing in small claims for the cost of the product, due to Roku intentionally bricking their own product unless the rightful owner (is the purchaser even the owner?) agrees to certain terms, even though OP purchased it in good faith. If a straight up refund is not available during a straight forward opt OUT option, we have a very unfair situation for the rightful owner of this product. Needless to say opting out should be as straight forward as opting in. Your suggestions is that if a product is of or below a certain price you must bend over and gratefully accept the corporation you paid money to, then inserting anything they like up your rear end. In my opinion your thesis is not price based as this is a common practice unfortunately in the consumer (and enterprise for that matter) tech industry where we have had shiny brand even expensive products initially sensitively torpedoed up our various orifices, only for brand HQ weeks later to press a button which flicks open hidden blades in the torpedo. No one wants or deserves this.
    The question is what recourse is there in OP’s jurisdiction.

    I may be misunderstanding you if actually you mean that any tech corp can do such a thing at any time that you have paid for. In which case we agree. But it’s far from ideal and shouldn't be accepted.

    stellargmite ,

    Thanks for clarifying. Yeah none of this is ideal for consumers.

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