I’d argue that SEO was one of the biggests causes of search result degradation and consider any complaints coming from them as highly suspect due to conflicting interests. Eg, a change that makes it harder to game the search engine algorithms is good for searchers but bad for SEOs.

I hope the whole industry dies (or already is? I don’t hear much about it these days lol). They are just marketers whose whole job is to get you to look at their shit instead of the most relevant results.

Why do you think the encryption capabilities on your PC are there for your sake? They might have sold them to you on that, but they are really there to protect copyright data because TPM allows encryption/decryption that is completely hidden from the rest of your system. Like an encrypted handshake that then transfers an encrypted key to decrypt the video stream. But it doesn’t save the decrypted data, it immediately re-encrypts it using your display’s private key (or whatever device is next in the chain, maybe your GPU). They can make it so that the unencrypted stream never touches your RAM or travels on any wire, which means you can’t pirate shows as you watch them unless you point a camera at your screen.

Obviously if they just said that was one of the main points, no one would want it and media companies couldn’t benefit from it because they’d have to compromise to sell content.

The other point was so that they could build a system where they hold the encryption keys and get to choose whose data is actually private. Obviously that’s an even harder sell.

So they did what marketers always do and lied by omission about what it was for and just outright lied if they ever said they’d never give the keys to law enforcement (did they ever even say that?).

Let go of the idea that someone selling something to you implies any kind of loyalty, especially when either party is a large corporation.

If that happened to you, what would you do the next time you saw a silica gel packet?

Though, on the other hand, having the video saved offsite is useful because then anyone with physical access to your home can’t get rid of the video showing they’re there.

This is not an argument in favour of using cloud services, because that gives access to your video to anyone the company deems should have access (or sometimes individual workers who either have access as part of their job or gain access because businesses suck at security). It’s in response to you saying isolate the cameras from the internet entirely; there is a good reason to have them connected (though you could have a PC handle that with a connection to two networks and no physical or software bridge between the two, just take video from one, upload (encrypted) to server on other).

Funny story, though I do question the study they referred to, because there’s different flavours of counter-culture that look pretty different from each other. Hipster is one, but there’s also goth, emo, trench coat aesthetic, people who chase outdated trends, punk, metal, those who don’t dress up any differently if they are going out or staying in, otaku (like the ones that wear clothes with hentai on them, I wouldn’t call cosplaying a counter culture so much as a costume hobby unless cosplay wear is their default)…

All of those looks are very different from each other while not wanting to follow the main culture’s trends and flaunting its definition of beauty.

And tbh, I’m not sure I’d even call hipsters a counter-culture. There was a desire to rebel, but looking at the aesthetic, I can’t tell what they were really trying to rebel against. Looking sloppy? Business casual? Maybe it’s because the aesthetic has been absorbed into the culture itself or maybe it was an advertiser-led “rebellion” in the first place? Or trying to be ahead of the curve means eventually the mainstream “catches up” and the look just looks normal now?

Also, thinking about it more, I wonder if the hilariously apt story was genuine or if someone there realized how they could really push their story by inventing an angry reader to prove their point.

Shareholder call:

While we did see a record low revenue on Jan 25th, we made up for it with record high revenue on Jan 26th. Not only was makeup buying more intense than normal activity, numbers were greatly helped by adding popular product links from the “thank you for your feedback” page, which also gives the executive team things to laugh about.

But the adults have the power to tell the kids to go to their room so the adults can play. Also, up to a certain age, you can just let them hold a controller and they think they are playing (or don’t even understand that anyone is playing and just think holding controllers is something fun to do while watching some things).

You could have it write unit tests as black box tests, where you only give it access to the function signature. Though even then, it still needs to understand what the test results should be, which will vary from case to case.

Funny thing about “AI skills” that I’ve noticed so far is that they are actually just skills in the thing you’re trying to get AI to help with. If you’re good at that, you can often (though not always) get an effective result. Mostly because you can talk about it at a deeper level and catch mistakes the AI makes.

If you have no idea about the thing, it might look competent to you, but you just won’t be catching the mistakes.

In that context, I would call them thought amplifiers and pretty effective at the whole “talking about something can help debug the problem, even if the other person doesn’t contribute anything of value because you have to look at the problem differently to explain it and that different perspective might make the solution more visible”, while also being able to contribute some valueable pieces.

Oh come on, I see right through your posturing to be allowed to open an all-dolphin game dev sweat shop. Stop it, it’s a waste of money because the whales always interfere and get the dolphins to unionize after the dolphins earn their programming degrees and then they go out and write emulators (because obviously we just close the shop). One of these days they’ll get in contract with the penguins and might start pumping out Linux distros!

Yeah, the Linux community has done a shitload of work to bring Linux up to as good as windows (in the technical sense) and better than windows (regarding the often hostile user experience).

Microsoft is now helping with the marketing by making the windows experience even worse, driving more people to “take the plunge” only for them to realize there isn’t a place where the floor suddenly drops away and you’re left helpless, and that that actually is a better description for using windows outside of the rails MS wants.

If you use an AMD gpu, there’s actually fewer steps to go from empty disk to playing a game, assuming that game isn’t trying to do things with the kernel or is one of the rare games that aren’t compatible for reasons other than anti-cheat (I’ve seen one game like that so far, forget the name of it but a logistics game that needed some dotnet library or something and I ended up giving up and refunding it rather than troubleshooting it until it worked, though others on protondb did say they got it working).

The days where windows gives an easier or better experience are gone, even ignoring all the next level enshitification of win 11. I’ve been on Linux for about a year now but wish I had switched sooner.

Goo goo ga chu?

Seems to me like the bubble is getting even worse because of efforts to deny that it is a bubble in the first place.

Oh yeah, I understand the sentiment entirely. With so many dark patterns dominating the world we live in because we live in a society that decided to embrace greed instead of seeing it as a primary motivator of evil, I can’t blame anyone that looks at the state of things with suspicion anytime there are downsides. And while it isn’t realistic to expect as good audio from a built-in system as a separate dedicated audio system, I do think it’s ridiculous that the standard is so dysfunctional that you either can’t understand what people are saying or explosions are way too loud. Especially in this digital world where mixing separate audio channels isn’t a difficult task. Streaming services should just have a stereo and mono version of the audio that is mixed well for that format if it is actually a harder problem than I think it is.

Some of it is practicality, but I don’t doubt that greed also plays into it. I mean, even on the modularity side, I don’t have the option of easily finding a TV without any speakers at all, or a TV without smart features that a) aren’t as good as other options I have to access those features and b) were actually thrown in to spy on data, as your previous comment mentioned.

So yeah, I don’t blame you at all for being suspicious of the companies that absolutely are trying to fuck their users because their real customers are data buyers, even if I do prefer my soundbar.

Can you do the Jackie Chan style “pull the slide off someone’s pistol so they only have gun parts instead of a functional gun in their hand?”

I appreciate TVs not wasting resources on putting decent speakers in it that I’ll never use because I did buy a soundbar over a decade ago that has decent sound and has outlasted the TV I bought it for. Plus TVs are so thin these days that they probably can’t even drive decent bass, and the speakers they do have are rear facing, so they don’t even drive the sound towards you.

Modularity isn’t a bad thing IMO.

They tried to jump right into the “popular thing drives high demand for popular spaces in popular thing” and skip the whole “make thing popular” step, banking on their name and people thinking it’ll make them a ton of money.

Though tbh I can’t say that was necessarily the wrong move (at least not if their entire goal is maximizing gains), since it wasn’t going to get popular like they wanted in the first place, so skipping that step and going straight to fleecing those dumb enough to throw money at it might have made the most sense.

That said, I think they put more money into it than they got out of it, so I doubt that it was deliberate. Zuck probably just thought if he paid people to make it, users would just flock to it and it would be as popular as fictional VR worlds are, despite missing the tactile VR system they tend to use or the whole “VR world is popular (or the focus of everyone’s life)” being a plot point rather than the consequence of someone building the world and people choosing to spend their time and money there.

Also, I’m in the demographic that probably would have been the most interested (like as a user of VR, not someone looking to just make money from it), but their offering didn’t even raise enough curiosity for me to check out what they made. There is an anti-meta bias in play, but even if it had been offered by a separate entity, I still wouldn’t have been interested because it sounded enshitified from the moment of concept.

Lol I wonder if they’ll rename the company again to try to make it look like AI in general is them.

Other than the ones that were bred to the point where their bodies barely work anymore.

Did this meme evolve from it being about Jesse saying stupid shit and Walter being the smart one for not following to Jesse saying smart shit and Walter being a closed-minded idiot about it, like he was in the actual scene from the meme? Or was there ever a period where the meme treated White like the hero?