Legit thought Lemmy was serving me an advert for a moment there…!
But yeah, the official R*ddit app is Garbo, they even bought Alien Blue years ago and have just failed to keep pace with Apollo, RIF or BaconReader. This API move is just a monopolisation of their content stream, hugely anti-competition.
Even if they sorted out their app, rolled back API to free, I’d never go back. Fuck Spez.
While spez is indeed a truly horrible piece of work, we should also keep in mind that he wouldn’t be doing this without having some serious backing from shareholders. CEOs are the public figure presented to us for the 2 minutes’ hate but let’s not forget that these decisions are taken in huge boardrooms. So maybe we should say ‘fuck spez et al’ instead of just ‘fuck spez’.
isnt that what happened to Ellen Pao and how we got Spez? they promoted Pao, she took heat for firing Victoria, then Spez stepped in and “saved the day”?
I will be real with you here Spider - if you follow anything objectionable up stream you’ll always end up with a handful of ethically and morally bankrupt capitalists. My emphatic “fuck Spez” isn’t just groupthink on this occasion. I appreciate that CEO is a job, and ultimately there’s a level of corporate responsibility - but Spez lied to us, ignored us (the AmA was laughably bad, answered 6 comments disingenuously and then dipped), attempted to defame or gaslight 3rd party Devs, violated data protection laws to preserve the sinking ship and has directed the entire company to basically dig in and starve us out. Users are the only thing bringing value to the platform - and this change is only harming the most productive users.
He might have the faith of the greed council backing his idiotic decision - but they weren’t the ones pissing off of the top diving board into our swimming pool.
He could have stood with us, we could have had transparent communication and even if we didn’t get compromise we could have had at least a conversation about why this is happening. but instead of any good faith engagement he decided to tell a bunch of transparent lies and throw a tantrum and then change the rules of moderation to reduce our power to fight for what we wanted.
If you knew there was a dead person next door you might be a little uncomfortable, but could go about your day. If you knew there were 50 dead people next door you would need to get out of there.
The number is relevant, not just the proximity to the closest one.
People are often uncomfortable in graveyards and, for example, would not want to walk through one at night when they would be willing to walk through a field.
The dirt does provide a sort of insulation however, as people would be more willing to walk through a graveyard than through a house that had the same density of corpses in the basement. It’s the theoretical accessibility to the corpse that plays a factor here.
I think it would depend more on how easy it is to open the coffin. If the lead lined coffin has well maintained hinges that allow it to open with little effort, that’s less acceptable than a wooden coffin that is nailed shut.
Corpse acceptability is inversely proportional to corpse accessibility.
I’ve never felt any feeling about being at a cemetery. I performed hundreds of funeral services and it never came up with any of us doing them and we talked about so much shit being stuck together for over a year more or less with exception to a few rotations. I’m unreasonably curious how common/uncommon to feel uncomfortable in graveyards now.
Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell you that, like, you’ll walk through a graveyard, or a morgue, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan”. But when I bring ONE corpse to a job interview, well then everyone loses their minds!
Some people don’t miss a day of work in 27 years, specifically to avoid those milestones and their family. Who’s to say this guy hasn’t been playing the long game? LOL
You know how when you’re studying literature you’re generally supposed to assume that everything is intenional and there’s nothing just thrown in for no reason … Well when you read Joyce, it’s really really hard not to feel like he’s just doing things for the sake of being pretentious and obtuse.
… But not when Joyce writes them. Don’t worry he’ll reference it again in 200 pages and if you haven’t figured out what theme they represent you’ll miss the fifth layer of context that actually inverts the meaning of the current paragraph.
(Ok he’s not that obtuse but I wouldn’t ever use death of the author/blue curtains on Joyce)
never found Joyce to be pretentious (the man knew what he was doing, and definitely succeeded in doing so) or obtuse (I mean, how many writers you can think of that could pull out the mastery of language and human sensibility out of nowhere like he does). I might be biased because I believe Ulysses saved my life: it’s definitely one of the funniest, most touching, humane books I have ever had the pleasure to read. I’d push Ogre to keep up with the good work.
The thing i always think about is that qoute from Virginia Wolfe where she likens the writing to a schoolboy doing stunts for the sake of getting attention. I remember thinking that was exactly how it felt while I was reading Ulysses, it felt like a highschool creative writer mashing things together without considering whether it was actually good or not.
However im not going to sit here and pretend im an objective critic. The book is obviously famous and important for a reason. I’m interested to know how it saved your life, if you feel like sharing
taught me once and for all that while death might be always near, a fear that’s constantly devouring our lives and paralysing them to the point where it feels like our deepest, inner self is a husk shell of what we once were, we can still find the reason of our existence in the joys of living a life that’s devoted in equal part to mystery, sensuality, knowledge and wonder. And it says this in the most democratic way you could think: everyone is entitled and deserving of the complexity of life. Oh, and also: it’s an absolutely hilarious book to read through.
I thought so too at first, but it sort of released in a window between the previous gen and these. They marketed it as “next gen” like they were beating the newer gen to market, but it was just terrible timing.
That’s the best time to market. They simply didn’t have the big IP that Nintendo and Sony had been marketing at the time. Sega at that time led with Sonic - as they always do - and then a few properties that were really fun and original, but required an expensive console to even try and get aquatinted with.
This is not even bringing up the prior hardware failures they had launched. They just miscalculated on the popularity of Sonic globally. It’s not enough to get people with consoles that are working just fine and still have years of games to come to switch.
I don’t remember what Sonic game came out for the DC. I’m sure they ran ads, but the DC game that I remember above all is Ecco the Dolphin. Never got to play the game.
Yep. That was a property from the Master System and Game Gear that got a 3D revamp for DC, but don’t think it was really very popular to begin with, so naturally wasn’t a huge selling point.
If they had released later it would have been worse. Sega’s downfall was the Saturn which was just garbage compared to the N64 and PS1. Dreamcast was their last ditch effort to release a truly next-gen system before the big boys rocked up with all their cash.
Yeah, I’m of the opinion the Saturn was the real problem. It was not a bad step forward compared to the Megadrive, but compared to the PS1 it was nowhere near as good.
Dreamcast was a great console. It was really ahead of it’s time with a bunch of things, the VMUs, the internet connectivity, the range of peripherals and keyboard/mouse integration. It was the first console I ever got relatively near release and never regretted it.
Compounding this was the Sega CD and 32X addons for the Genesis. Both were projects the scale of a new console, but they were built as addons to the Genesis so they limited their audience to people who already had a Genesis. Neither really brought much to the table in terms of software libraries; lots of Sega CD games were Genesis titles with red book CD audio instead of FM synth chip tunes, or the occasional FMV title.
Then they brought out the Saturn, which some people even bought. It was a Sega console that had no Sonic game.
So going into the Dreamcast, Sega had three poorly performing consoles in their back catalog. I don’t think the Dreamcast could have been a big enough success to save Sega’s console division, and especially not with Sony about to dominate the 6th AND 7th generations with the PS2.
I’d say the 32X didn’t just compound the problems; it was the problem.
The 32X only existed because of infighting between Sega of America and Sega Japan, and accomplished fuck-all except to almost directly compete against Saturn, cannibalizing sales, causing consumer confusion, serving as a distraction that caused Saturn to come out six months late in NA, etc. If 32x hadn’t existed, Sega could’ve just released Saturn worldwide that same day instead ('cause that’s when it came out in Japan). And, for all we know, Saturn itself might have turned out technologically better if Sega had devoted all of its engineering resources to it instead of splitting them with the 32X.
It was also just a dumb unforced error that 32X and Saturn used almost the same hardware but weren’t mutually compatible. If 32X had been “a Saturn, but slightly cheaper because it’s piggybacking off a Genesis and MegaCD” instead of its own oddball platform, it might have been a raging success instead of a raging failure.
There was a project where the next console would have been the Genesis, 32X, and CD in one box with a new name. I don’t know if that would work, or if it’d be viewed as something of an in-between generation, like the Turbografx, and people ignore it.
It’s probably be easier to develop games for, unlike the Saturn. It’s not the only thing that held the Saturn back, but it didn’t help.
They also had a gargantuan library of games for every single console they had produced that just didn’t work. Everyone likes to rag on Nintendo for Silver Surfer, or that one Superman game for being unplayable, but Sega had so many of those unplayable games that no one remembers their names. Sega wasn’t known for quality after the console wars. They were known for having much cheaper games than Nintendo. I remember looking at the cartridges in the store, and Sega had a huge selection compared to Nintendo, and those cartridges were in the $45-$50 range brand new. Nintendo had about ½ to ⅓ the selection of titles, and they ran $50-$70 per game, but you knew you were getting good games 99% of the time, especially if you had a subscription to one of the various gaming magazines. PlayStation was Nintendo’s first real competition, and the PS1 was just eating Nintendo for breakfast.
You could say the same thing of the NES. The crash of '83 had as much to do with the mountains of shovelware on the market for the early consoles and microcomputers that might not even load and run. You got a lot of knockoffs, branded merchandise, and other low effort crap the programmer didn’t actually give a shit about flooding the market, which inflated the bubble, then it burst.
A large part of Nintendo’s strategy for entering a crashed market was to address this with their Seal Of Quality. Using anything from the design patent of the cartridge shell to security chips, they enforced a monopoly on manufacturing cartridges for their systems; Nintendo was the only manufacturer of Nintendo cartridges. And their Seal Of Quality meant they had inspected the game and made sure it is functional software, that it loads and runs without crashing. They don’t guarantee the game is fun, which is why Superman 64 was allowed to be published. It’s a garbage game but it doesn’t crash an N64.
Other platforms aren’t as strict with their libraries, which means there’s more and cheaper games out there for it. The extreme example is Steam on PC, where their algorithm is “publish whatever is submitted and pull it down if someone raises a legitimate complaint.” There’s a lot of great games on Steam, there’s a lot of Unity tutorial projects on Steam. Their excellent refund policies make this acceptable.
They’re actually all considered 6th gen consoles. There’s only a 3 year gap between the Dreamcast and the Xbox.
Dreamcast was 98
PS2 was 2000
GameCube and Xbox were both 01, the year Dreamcast was discontinued.
Dreamcast could have been a wild success, probably would have been, too. The major issue was that the Playstation was still totally dominating the market. 98 and 99 were both ridiculously strong years for PSX title releases. Then the PS2 released and totally overshadowed it. Sega just couldn’t keep up… Nobody could. Not until the market kinda leveled out in 05-06.
Yeah I understand they were all 6th gen. My point was just that it doesn’t really make sense to blame the Dreamcast failure on its timing. Dates also matter:
Late 98 was release in Japan
Late 99 was release worldwide
Early 2000 was PS2 in Japan
Late 2000 was PS2 worldwide
Early 2001 Dreamcast was killed
Late 2001/Early 2002 Gamecube and Xbox
The meme makes it look like the Dreamcast popped up late, but timing was not the reason for it’s demise at all. PlayStation dominating the market, as you mentioned, was probably the biggest one. People knew the PS2 was around the corner and the Dreamcast had barely been out in the EU by the time the PS2 was strutting it’s stuff on the Japanese market.
Don’t forget DVD playback. Most people by the year 2000 still only had VHS. DVD players were prohibitively expensive at the time so a lot of people were holding out. PS2 had DVD and cost about half the price of dedicated players. I know a lot of homes bought them purely as a movie machine.
I bet if Dreamcast had DVD playback the history of the Dreamcast would’ve been very different.
Absolutely, getting a PS2 was a game changer for me. DVD playback AND backward compatability. You had PS2, PSX, CD, and DVD all in one. I dumped my VCR shortly after getting it and mothballed my PSX. My 5 disc stereo collected dust until I sold it. Rigged it to my 5.1 speaker system to run on the same line as my computer. Between the PS2 and a properly equipped gaming PC, my bedroom was practically a movie theater, albeit with a tiny ass 22" crt.
Nobody talks about this! There is approximately 34 TONS of gold hidden within the wreck of the Titanic. If I could afford such a cool car as the Cybertruck, I’d drive it into the nearest harbor and set sail for the 2024 gold rush that is the Titanic’s final resting place!
Just be aware it’s not a boat. You need to drive it DOWN into the water to reach it’s full potential.
Hi German here, we say fuck ICE a lot because it’s a fast Train who always comes late. But to make a long story short, I am missing something here, what does ICE stand for?
And don’t forget about separating parents from children, holding illegal immigrants in overcrowded cells made from chain link fences inside buildings… They are America’s version of the Show me your papers patrol.
Blame the parents for not immigrating legally. ICE is there to protect our borders. Want open borders? You can donate your house first. Oh not your house? Then fuck off.
Millions live here legally. “It’s hard!” is not an excuse.
Blame the fact that it’s so difficult to immigrate legally yet an overwhelming number of businesses rely on cheap immigrant labor. This is a feature, not a bug, because they can pay the illegal immigrants less and abuse them without fear of reprisal because if the employer gets any attitude about it, they call ICE and have the worker deported and replaced with the next struggling desperate immigrant.
There is no illegal worker in the US that would rather be an illegal worker than a legal carded one. The system is stacked against them because it saves businesses money to do so.
Don’t forget to save some blame for the CIA destabilizing South American governments and terrible living conditions for a huge percentage of the population.
South American governments should get their shit together. But they can’t and we all know why. Importing that here is like shitting in your pool then wondering why no one want to swim at your pool party.
It’s pretty hard to “get your shit together” when a hegemonic for profits from you not having your shit together.
In the mean time, what should the regular people do? Just keep suffering through society in a chokehold from drug cartels? Keep raising their kids there?
Yes, because naturally no other country in the world enjoys a similar level of prosperity without creating an underclass that they abuse for their profit.
We don’t need to print more money, we have more than enough money. We just need to recirculate the money we do have. There is plenty of money in the USA for most citizens to live a comfortable life without exploitation, but 80% of that money is buried in the pockets of corporations and 15% of the remaining 20% is buried in the pockets of billionaires.
Remember, if you want to let other people move, it also automatically gives them the legal right to steal your house and leave you homeless. That’s why I’m living under a bridge while a family from Mississippi has taken my house. Its okay though. They were born on the plot of dirt between Canada and Mexico, so really that means they’re defending my freedom by stealing my house.
Who said anything about giving things away? You just made that up. What, you think immigrants are stealing your jobs and also not paying rent? That’s not how thing work in the real world. The only people getting your stuff are the prisons full of innocent people who just wanted a chance at a better life.
"The city is launching a pilot program that will provide migrants with prepaid debit cards to buy only food and baby supplies, "
But the Democrats are losing voters in record numbers, they had to do something to make the election rigging in 2025 look plausible. Solution: import millions of ‘voters’ and give them free shit.
We dont need open borders, we need a immigration system that can deal with the number of people seeking asylum.
You want a steady stream not a flood.
But I get why people risk it to come here. You can walk down the street without worrying about getting killed, kidnapped, tortured, raped… How about we send some of that 895 billion of pentagon dollars to Mexico for law enforcement instead. Like 10 billion, 1 jet fighter. Make Mexico safe for civilians, create job opportunities, and illegal immigration will slow.
United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, border patrol. They’re notorious for the abuse of immigrants(even legal ones) trying to cross over from Mexico.
For real, fuck ICE. My fully booked evening train got cancelled after we had already boarded, the next two that day were fully booked as well, I had to find an airbnb with a toddler and travel the next day, and they replaced just half of the ticket price because I cOuLD HaVe tAKeN AnOtHer TrAiN
If your train is canceled, your ticket is automatically valid for all other trains going in the same direction (doesnt have to be the same route, as long as it will reasonably take you to your destination) for the whole day.
Depending on how mutch later the next connection arrives, you can get all/parts of your ticket price back.
I’m so confused. You still swore. We knew what you meant and you knew what you meant. You just censored the text. We’ve got alternatives with no censoring. Message me for Jesus Approved cursing. (please don’t)
the phrase that people are repeating is not ‘screw ice’ or ‘screw the police’. ‘f***’ is much closer to the original. i just prefer not to type out the actual letters; is that so bad ?
Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Basically the federal border control cops that for some damn reason have jurisdiction anywhere within 250 miles of the border.
If this was downtown or at parks I can kinda see them providing something. Knowing this is likely at a university library or building its just removing access that was already there.
No, it’s just what the usage/power/maintenance is. It’s not $1.99 times anything. $1.99 doesn’t enter into it anywhere. $1.99 was made up out of the whole cloth.
Right this is what I really mean. It’s a trivial cost in the grand scheme of things for a municipality to provide public drinking fountains. This shouldn’t be outsourced to a for profit private enterprise.
It’s going to sound like I’m defending them in some way, which I’m really not because the whole thing is stupid, but they’re not charging for the drinking fountain they’re charging for the cold filtered water, which is going to incur some kind of power and maintenance cost that’s while negligible at scale is beyond the norm. Room temperature tap water is still free here.
I also hate privatising costs for social services so we’re in agreement on that…
… but no cost faced by the municipality is trivial. They correct taxes to pay for it. You can go to the meetings and have your say in how it’s spent. More water fountains means more money.
If it were up to me we would increase taxes so we could have all the fountains.
Refrigerant and filter systems need to be powered, replaced and maintained, that DOES cost money. What math, if any of substance, was applied on top of that cost to reach the subscription price is debatable. Though perhaps ironically, if they didn’t expect many people to actually bite, then the cost per user would end up being abnormally high.
Refrigerated water fountains have been existing in parks, schools, libraries, and public buildings for decades with no on-demand cost to their end users. Our tax dollars paid for them easily and the cost is obviously trivial compared to everything else your local or state government spends money on.
There is no valid justification for this. It’s just greed.
Thank you for stating the obvious. I fucking hate this future where even the basics of the past are starting to seem unreal. Little gray cubes with a wide bar you push and out comes cold water from a spout at the top; used to be everywhere outdoors growing up.
Realistically the cost of filtration is already covered by the municipal water system’s budget, and the power and maintenance is already covered by the cities parks/public infrastructure budgets. So there is a small cost, but it’s at a scale where it’s negligible
Obviously it isn’t, if it was there wouldn’t be a user facing cost. The fact this is a private venture basically proves that wherever this is, the municipality or building owner is only committed to providing tap water (which we see here is “free”) the cost is for the extra, private, infrastructure that has been added in order to provide cold filtered water. If you aren’t US, I’ll note that municipal water treatment and filtering vs the more “Britta” level implied here are entirely different and very much a thing for some people.
200kjoules of heat must be removed from a gallon of water to cool from 55F to 32F (out of the ground down to pleasant drinking temperature).
Assuming a COP of 2 for your compressor (conservative), that’s 100kjoules or 1/36 of a kWh.
High price for a kWh of electricity is $0.25 in the US. So for your $2 subscription, you can pay for 8kWh per month or enough to cool 288 gallons of water or roughly 9 gallons per day. More than anybody would rightly use.
Not to mention that, in a place like a public park, 55F water is totally fine. It isn’t the coolest most refreshing drink of all time but it’s damn good from a public fountain on a 90F day.
I drink to hydrate anyway. The thing that’s satisfying to me is liquid going in. The temperature’s nice if it’s cool but if it’s cold I can’t drink the water fast.
Sure, but if everyone drinks a half gallon a day (still a lot for a normal person), that’s still 95% revenue which will absorb the installation cost quickly, and maintenance is minuscule on something like this.
Not to mention that since its subscription based, a broken dispenser is actually more profitable in the short term.
No it’s providing new access. Used to be, you had to take refrigerated water. Now you can have room temperature water which is superior because you can actually just drink it instead of having to sip it ultra slow.
What’s the point in having an AI run the search and present the found answer for you, when you just ran the search yourself and gets the AI finding presented?
As this point AI helpers are just a layer that hides the details from the original search. It’s useless for this. AI is wonderful for lots of stuff, but this just isn’t it. I used to laugh when people used the Google search box to find Google so they could search in Google, but that is exactly what AI is doing for us now.
Plus the insane power consumption for such a marginally useful feature. Especially given that it’s on by default for everyone using google (as I understand)
It’s almost like the feature is not ready but they need to show off to their investors anyway. At the cost of user experience and the environment.
At least with ChatGPT you have to consciously go to their website and use, rather than being the first result of a fucking internet search.
Yes, the search engine AI is a very expensive and shitty filter.
Unfortunately with SEO going nuts these days, it might be necessary to have some kind of spam filter for searching the web just to avoid some of the enshittification created by AI in the first place. Like, the AI goes to Quera and Reddit for answers instead of the marketing links, so at least the answers are less commercial.
Obviously these “human” sources will eventually or are already shittifyed too, with half the posts there also being marketing in one way or the other.
I dislike it, but flooding the web with useless crap may be the key to making some better alternative…
More eyes on your website, means less on other websites, making your adverts more valuable.
And when it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter, because you run the advertising on the other websites too. Bonus: you can penalise rankings for websites that don’t use your advertising network.
Was having a related conversation with an employee this morning (I manage a software engineering organization). He asked an LLM how to separate the parts of a date in Excel, and got a pretty good explanation of how do it with the text to columns wizard, and also how to use a formula to get each part. He was happy because he felt it would have taken him much longer to figure it out himself.
I was saying I thought that was a good use of an LLM - it’s going to give a tailored answer - but my worry is that people will do less scrubbing of an answer coming from an AI than one they saw on a forum. I said we should think of it like a tailored Google search.
For comparison, I googled “Excel formula separate parts of a date” and one of the top results was a forum discussion that had the exact solutions the LLM gave, using the same examples. On the one hand, to get it from the forum you had to wade through all the wrong answers and discussions. On the other hand, that discussion puts the answer given in the context of a bunch of others that are off the mark, and I think make people less likely to assume it’s correct.
In any case, it’s still just synthesizing from or regurgitating training data.
I think LLMs are better for more fluffy stuff, like writing speeches etc.
Excel solutions are often very specific. A vague question like separating a date can be solved in many ways, using a variety of formulas, the text-to-column wizard, VBA, import queries or even just formatting, all depending on what you really need, what the input is and what locality is used and other things.
The text-to-column method is great, because it transforms whatever the input is into a date type, making it possible to treat it as and make calculations as an actual date. It’s not always the right solution though, for instance if the input is ambiguous.
It’s fine that he learned to use this method, but I wonder what he’d ask the LMM in a case where it isn’t the right solution and what it’ll come up with then. He didn’t actually learn to separate a date from the input. He learned to use the text import wizard.
In my experience it’s preferable to learn these things on a more basic level if only just to be able to search more specifically for the right answer, because there is a specific answer. Having a language model run through a bunch of solutions and presenting the most popular one might just be a waste of time and leading you into a wild goose chase.
You might have missed where I said it explained both the text to columns wizard and a formula. He used the formula, which is what he was looking for. He’s a top notch software developer, he just doesn’t use Excel much.
But I agree with your broader point. I keep having to remind people that the “LM” part is for “language model.” It’s not figuring anything out, it’s distilling what an answer should look like. A great example is to ask one for a mathematical proof that isn’t commonly found online - maybe something novel. In all likelihood, it’s going to give you one, and it will probably look like the right kind of stuff, but it will also probably be wrong. It doesn’t know math (it doesn’t know anything), it just has a model of what a response should look like.
That being said, they’re pretty good for a number of things. One great example is lesson plans. From what I understand, most teachers now give an LLM the coursework and ask it to generate a lesson plan. Apparently they do an excellent job and save many hours of work. Anything that involves summarizing information is good, especially as that constrains the training data.
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