The fall of newspapers led us down the path of click bait, low quality, ad driven “news”. Very few newspapers survived the transition to digital because suddenly nobody wanted to pay for access to something they could get online for free. Those that did survive mostly exist in a much smaller form with low funding and reduced quality.
Personally, I’m excited to see it becoming more common for people to subscribe to news services again. I just wish there was more diversity and competition available like there was in the past but I’m hopeful we’ll get there as more people seem to be opening back up to paying for high quality publications.
High quality journalism can’t exist without paid subscribers but there are still ways to access it for those who can’t afford it, visiting a local library for example.
I do agree that more competition with enough subscribers is better. I wish more regional “papers” had been able to convert. I live in a large city with a terrible paper and would gladly pay for better local news and Journalism.
The trouble is it’s hard to subscribe to every paper. I like that you at least get a handful of free times articles.
Medium attempts to provide quality work paid directly to the writers and journalists but it’s hard for them to do big projects.
Several universities and business schools provide op-ed type pieces.
I know “state-funded media” is an ominous word to Americans, but most European countries have their own government broadcaster and news organization, entirely funded through taxes.
Those generally offer high-quality non-biased journalism (of course it’s always based on how authoritarian the government is). The British BBC, the Swedish SVT, the German DW etc. are all publicly owned broadcasting companies.
I honestly don’t think this is a bad idea for the US…for now at least. Right now your typical options for official statements from government leaders are either through (1) politically polarized media like CNN or Fox, (2) paid subscription to better journalism, or (3) social media monopolies like Twitter (X) and Instagram. Can we really not fund something entirely independent of a mega-corporation to get official info out?
The BBC World Service is the largest and broadcasts in something like 40 languages around the world. I think the normal BBC news still uses some of the sound effects traditionally associated with their shortwave broadcasts.
I think it would be great to publicly fund journalism. And make public funding contingent on whether news sources accurately represent the full substance of their source material, practiced evidence-based fact-checking, and had rules to prevent the selective application of either of those first two conditions, and by omission bias their audience.
You’ve just given whatever regulatory body significant power and influence. It will have its own biases if it doesn’t simply become outright politicized, and now they dictate facts or else. Inaccuracy or “fake news” are used by authoritarian regimes all the time to justify silencing of critics.
Not necessarily. You can put safeguards in place. For example our appeals courts don’t ever decide fact. They make rulings about the law.
You can also have bipartisan panels that oversee this, with extremely limited power unless they rule unanimously.
You also have congressional oversight adding another check.
If the original inception and scope of all these things is cleverly drafted, we could see a lot of new media pop up that is vastly superior to the crap we have now.
BBC is publicly funded but they collect the money themselves trough the TV license, they are not funded by the government trough taxes and they make a shit ton of money from commercial operations, like selling shows and formats to foreign networks. That’s probably the best way to keep an independent state network with minimal government meddling. Though we’ve seen that individuals with power at the network can bias the news reporting. Like BBC definitely favors the political right.
Journalism student here. Tbh in my experience I have come to the conclusion that news stations should never be state owned. I think state funding for news is good but I think the best solution is a non profit ngo group running the news. When the government owns the news they can change the news and manipulate what facts get shown as is the case with the BBC.
It scales. Privately owned community newspapers might have a bias, but if there’s one in every town with 1,000 people, then exponentially that increases the amount of different agendas of each of those private entities, and they can sort of cover each other’s weaknesses. It’s the concentration and consolidation that’s the issue.
Of course, private industry inherently wants to merge and consolidate, as is the nature of capitalist competition. So either you continually break up mergers or develop a public community newspapers that are independent of any government - its debatable how independent the BBC or CBC are.
Your second paragraph is severely understated. It completely invalidates your first paragraph.
In the USA there are 4 corporations that own pretty much all TV news, whether it’s local or not. Add another 2 corporations to cover almost everything else on TV.
Online news is a little more diverse, but it’s heading in the same direction.
And the government won’t break up those corporations because they’re too big for that to be possible. It’s too late. Whether the corporations use regulatory capture or just a massive team of lawyers to make antitrust lawsuits prohibitively expensive, they simply can’t be broken up.
It doesn’t invalidate it. It’s accurate that for a time, privately owned, for-profit newspapers would (and did in the past) result in a multitude of viewpoints since the editorial stances will are inherently more diverse between 20 newspapers instead of 2.
Whether or not the current vertical and horizontally integrated media companies will be broken up is irrelevant to the fact that it would result in a more diverse and freer press.
A tax funded solution would most likely take the form of a single entity. If 4 entities dominating the press is wrong, then 1 is even worse.
The US government broadcaster is the Voice of America. For a long time it was unavailable to Americans (propaganda laws), but is now. Some Europeans may be familiar with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, that is also US-funded by the same agency as the Voice of America.
We also have NPR and public broadcasting (PBS), both have news. They receive government funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is supposed to be objective although there have been issues in recent history. They also have corporate donors, which could affect objectivity.
Should have long term funding structures in place (longer than election cycles) so that you dont have different political parties influencing things once elected into power
Absolutely. And a new version of the Fairness Doctrine, and guidelines that take into account everything we’ve learned since then about media malfeasance.
Agree, yet disagree. That article on Suits that shows what the writers got paid vs the views vs the amount of money executives get, shows that all we need to do is get the money into the hand of the deserving people instead of the billionaire stockholders.
Very few newspapers survived the transition to digital because suddenly nobody wanted to pay for access to something they could get online for free.
This has nothing to do with click bait low quality ad driven news.
The cut off of access to information is a fundamental problem of using capitalism to allocate resources in an information economy. Information does not behave the same as matter and energy, it is a fundamentally different physical property of the universe, and unlike matter and energy, it is not conserved and limited in the same way.
With matter and energy, to replicate it, you need the same amount of resources as the original, if you possess the original, I cannot possess it, and to make a copy I need all the metal /energy that you did to make the first one. But with information, once it exists in a digital format, we can effectively replicate it infinitely and immediately to everyone around the globe, for next to nothing. At a fundamental level, information does not have the same property of scarcity as literally all physical goods. Information is fundamentally different at the physics level, then matter and energy.
And that’s a problem now that we’re trying to use capitalism to fund an information economy. Capitalism is entirely based on the idea of scarce things being valuable; despite everyone needing oxygen / air to live, it is not valuable in most places because it is not scarce.
So what has happened? Did we act intelligently and back up and examine whether capitalism is the right system of resource allocation for the information economy where information has the ability to flow freely to everyone? No. We ham fistedly spend billions and billions of dollars and wasted millions of people’s lives building the copyright system, and the patent system, and paywalls and DRM, all in the pursuit of creating artificial scarcity where there was never a need for it.
The money from the fountain gets collected and sent to Caritas, a catholic charity that focuses on health, disaster relief, poverty, and migration. I am a Queer atheist person in Spain that uses their services and they haven’t once made my queerness an issue. Nor have they exposed me to their religious views.
So, shrug, I’m not gonna shit on them doing the tradition that many diplomatic events in Rome do.
Objectively, it sounds like it’s an innocent tradition and a healthy charity.
Subjectively, it’s tone-deaf af, when the rule-makers perform superstition for such a massive world-changing problem. Basically “thoughts and prayers.”
A friend once applied for a job at Caritas in Germany and got rejected for the reason of not being catholic, but christian. I think you could argue that is okay, but by German law it actually is not.
I realy don’t understand why the church still gets to do so many things that are simply not legal. It seems like the law that they have to follow is an older version.
My aunt works for Caritas in Germany. They do seem like they do good work, even if they believe in the whole resurrected vampire man who was birthed by a virgin and impregnated by a dude who flooded the world for fun.
Yet another reminder that people act like the civil rights movment is distant history, but a lot of the people who were involved in the protests are atill alive today.
Yeah, well I had the general bias in my mind that everyone in history books was dead already or almost dead except Neil Armstrong because space stuff and also I met him.
This is called being a child. Even up at 20 years old, longer accounts of time seem huge!
I’ve been learning more lately and I live in a city now. There’s more black people than white people and their mixed reactions to just my existence has made me think a lot about why they feel that way. I’ve seen everything from the defiant angry dudes to older dudes who seemed legitimately afraid that I might notice them. It’s wild.
It’s really easy to grow up right thinking racism isn’t a thing anymore because you yourself aren’t racist and everywhere you look people are looking down on racism.
It’s gonna take a few generations before everyone involved and everyone roped in by the older generations are dead before racism seems like a distant memory. We can’t just go acting like it’s all over with.
It wont be, the scale of service and ease of revenue sharing will keep it as the king of video distribution untill Google kills it (like they do to all their products). FOSS projects and self hosting can not accomodate a viral hit (the slashdot effect), and also a self-hosted project like that would have to find a way to make money for the host to keep the lights on, and even Youtube fails at that one.
Who does scale really benefit, though? I don’t see how it matters from the audiences’ point of view. Say I watch Youtube for fishing videos - all the competitor needs to do to attract and keep me is offer fishing videos. I don’t really care that I can’t watch music videos on it, or cookery, or make-up tutorials, etc.
The preoccupation we have with scale should be re-examined when it comes to video distribution. A combination of user-friendly banner advertising, modern codecs, and P2P hosting should go an awful long way. If I knew ad placements provided material funding for a video site/community I loved, I’d whitelist the URL.
All you need is a federated link aggregator like lemmy/mastodon with a UI made for videos.
You post a link to whichever video hosting service and attach a bunch of metadata (thumbnail, description, tags) and the comment section is built in already for each post. Nobody cares where a video is hosted, as long as they can follow creators and topics.
I think scale matters because almost no person is as much of an island as your example fishing video guy. I actually have noticed almost the opposite in most people I know, YouTube is the default place to get entertainment. Across all their interests.
From both sides the network effect might be strongest with YouTube, the creators can’t leave because YouTube has virtually all of the audience, and consumers don’t want to watch singular people on other platforms because on YouTube you can stumble over interesting videos and all the people you like to watch are already there.
The only way I see for other platforms to actually grow is forced interoperability, as in videos of other platforms appearing in the YouTube frontend. Which Google would never do so the government would need to force them.
Yep, my entertainment is 90% YouTube and the rest some show. On YouTube I find everything: from a dude that does reviews of air filter for cars to somebody explaining some obscure Japanese woodworking techniques to the omniscient Indian dude that explains complex programming concepts. If there was fragmentation I wouldn’t be even able to find stuff, like in the early days of the internet that you knew the website existes because somebody shared the URLs in some usenet or some forums, before search engines became a thing.
You make good points, but I still think what I envision would be able to attract enough people interested in specific hobbies, without achieving anywhere near Youtube’s scale. I’m thinking of a scenario where the video platform is more an extension of a web community, such an an old-school forum, rather than a straight video host where the primary aim is to gain any engagement whatsoever, and where (let’s face it) all engagement is generally fungible. It’d be something member-funded and run, like good torrent trackers, and the content is an interest ‘ecosystem’ - so not only fishing content, but fishing gear coverage, and camping and hiking stuff, and meat prep and storage, and boating, etc.
This couldn’t be any worse for either creator or viewer than what YT subjects them to. There would be no having to optimize for an opaque algorithm. The pressure to self-censor would be greatly relieved. Monetization scope and content guidelines would be accountably managed - ie. by the community itself. Creators would still have their Patreon/Liberapay/etc income streams. The platform can place the odd banner ad too, like 4chan.
I wonder how much convenience and (perceived) income security is a passionate creator prepared to sacrifice in order to start exercising power over Youtube by uploading elsewhere? We all know creators hate the place…
The benefit of scale is it attracts the creators. The people making the content we want to watch aren’t all doing it as a hobby, so the chance of attracting a large audience needs to be there. Otherwise they won’t come and the site is populated with really random, low-choice stuff.
Could just make a system to automate the ads like muting(or white noise) them and automatically clicking skip, is not as good but still feels like a small win
The funniest part is they want to watch an ad (trailer) but they aren’t allowed to watch that ad without watching other ads first! Xzibit would be so proud.
This is a pretty common thing in the American Midwest. You see it a lot around houses on the tops of hills, especially in new construction. It looks kinda silly for a few years but it’s the best you can do sometimes.
like i tend to always pay attention to how nice a property looks when i’m travelling past it, and good god it looks so much more enjoyable when you have a bunch of shade and greenery around you!
Properties without some sort of tree/hedge wall surrounding it out in the open just look absolutely miserable and trigger a long dormant part of my brain that fears being picked off by a giant bird.
It’s a fire and falling hazard having trees that close to the home. There are places here in California where you legally have to have a 100 foot wide firebreak around the building, like up around the foothills where wildfires are common.
I love this idea and am filing it away for the imaginary future where I own a home and need more greenery, damn it! Because it’s going to be so lush and green. And there will be water and mountains and a rainbow…
This website is amazing! How have I never heard of this before?! Did you know that using glue will make your cheese extra stretchy? Who would have guessed it? This is my new favorite site.
Nowhere does it state that the relative can’t be killed by you, or that there relative has to be dead in the first place. Very convenient. This should be an open and shut case (the STATE will lose)
Batteries are cylindrical because it’s the most efficient shape to make them in. There is a central electrode with the electrolyte around it. By making it cylindrical it’s distributed evenly. Imagine having it square, then in the corners the layers would be thicker than on the sides.
So that explains why the cells and normal AA batteries are cylinders. So why not have a 9 volt cylinder? That’s because the chemistry used for alkaline batteries produces 1.5 volts. A single cell, regardless of size, only produces 1.5V. So how do you get 9V out of a 1.5V battery? By putting 6 of them in series. 6 x 1.5V = 9V.
I mean, of course. For the record, that wasn’t the type that cites its sources intrinsically as part of its response creation process, although it wouldn’t be immune to hallucinations even if it was.
just thinking logistically, I imagine that happened a lot. Anyway I expect a decent number of his calls were made by aides and he just took the phone after they got through to the right person.
Im surprised the aides from each side didnt do all the logistics of connecting with one another and the president wasnt just handed a phone with the call already connected through.
That was the aides from Obama’s side calling 100%. The minister was newly elected, maybe fairly new to politics as a whole? Maybe he just doesn’t like middlemen. Edit: **Re-**elected, I missed that. I guess the second option then.
Its a news site but the only place you can find the date of the article is in the URL. Sometimes I am baffled by the weird design decisions people are making.
I did this before cellphone and any sort of digital maps. It was hell. I memorized my city, that wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was the people who didn’t have their houses properly labeled with their address. Bonus points if they left their porch light off, as well.
“Why is my pizza cold?”
“Because I had to use complex mathematics to derive your house number among all of the unnumbered houses on your street.”
”Because I had to use complex mathematics to derive your house number among all of the unnumbered houses on your street."
Wouldn’t even be able to do that in the neighborhood I grew up in. They numbered the houses in the order they were built/the lots were purchased and that wasn’t often next to each other lol. So 64, 67, 88, 90 are next to each other for instance.
Wasn’t on any sort of grid pattern either. The roads just kinda meandered around willy nilly and would sometimes loop back on itself with random “bridge” connecting roads which I know isn’t extremely uncommon but definitely added to the difficulty of navigation.
Ahh yes, you grew up in a west coast subdivision. I am assuming either a late 60s to early 80s split level or a slightly more upscale true two story neighborhood, where every house is one of either two models, or a mirror image of those models to create the illusion of variation.
It is always funny, the first time you go to a friend’s house and use the bathroom, their mom will offer to show you, but you would just be like, “I know where it is.”
You got some right! All 60s-70s houses. Mine was split level. Decidedly middle class. However, it was smack in the Midwest and basically all the houses are about as different as houses built in that era can be. Now, the subdivision that popped up in the field next to my neighborhood in the 00s were cookie cutter 3-4 of the same houses (but sometimes the floor plans/elevations were mirrored to make it seem different haha).
I grew up in a split level as well. When I die, I hope in the afterlife I find whichever architect designed the American split level. I have so many design questions, mostly why was the billards room more important than a functional living room that could fit everybody at once? And if the billards room was so important, why is it always next to the laundry room?
Lol! We didn’t have a billiards room but we did have a wet bar that literally was never used and for the first 10 or so years of my life I was afraid to go near.
They aren’t called billards rooms these days, almost always just “family rooms” but they typically are essentially sized to fit a regulation table and a bar.
The neighborhood I grew up in had a scheme that made sense once you were told what it was, but you’d never figure it out looking around.
There was a center point to the town where all addresses started, as you went away from that point in any direction the numbers got bigger. Numbers are 3 digits. Each block away from the center gets a new top digit, so the four blocks that touch one of the axis lines are 100, one block away is 200 etc. There’s a North, South, East and West, so there can be a 200 North Something St. and a 200 South Something St. and they will occasionally get each other’s mail.
One side of the street gets the even tens, the other side gets the fives. So 330 West Example Ave is across the street from 335 West Example Ave.
Many homes sat on multiple lots, and they skipped the unused lot numbers (the tens digit) and even then they would skip a number in between, so it’s not unusual to see 205 East Example ave on the corner, and 235 East Example ave is next door.
Apartments or townhouses with multiple addresses on the same lot get a letter suffix, so you might have a 635B West Name St.
There are other context clues, like the North-South roads are “streets” and the East-West roads are “avenues”. But still it would be difficult to grasp this system if you weren’t told about it because “There’s three houses along this block, why are the numbers 30 apart?”
The misnumbered/not numbered houses is still a big issue. GPS can only be relied on to get you in the general area, and even then sometimes it points you to the middle of a field.
My real gripe is apartments. People will often fail to give you the apartment number and even if they do, every single complex has their own numbering system and layout. There is one complex near here where the signs on the buildings are completely illegible at night due to the lights above them casting shadows. I hate having to go there.
Almost every apartment complex I have ever been in has followed the exact same numbering pattern.
A single building will have the floors be a letter with each unit being a number like 01 while a multi building complex will have the buildings designated as letters and will use 3 digit numbering schemes starting in the 100s. The first digit applies to floor while the second two apply to units.
If a complex has more than 26 buildings, that is when things become funky. The 27th building will likely be the AA building and it will either be the second building chronologically. Next comes BB and it will either be the 4th or 28th building, and so on.
Another thing they might do is just have those duplicate named buildings be sectioned off into a slightly more prestigious part of the property, gate it off and give it a name like Chateau @ Bronson Heights (assuming the apartment complex is named Bronson heights). If something like that is done, they will just completely restart the numbering convention.
Also, if a complex layout doesn’t seem like it makes sense while being driven, say an E next to an S, imagine it with a top down view, they likely named left to right regardless of cul de sacs, so you should have a rough idea of where each building logically should be if not chronological by drive.
What specifically about my post makes you think I’m angry? And defensive doesn’t even make sense as we haven’t spoken before. Maybe take a deep breath yeah?
I’m not the delivery driver you replied to. I just thought it was dismissive to reply to a person saying “it’s difficult to figure out apt numbers” with a long explanation on why they’re wrong and how it’s actually easy.
Why would you find it dismissive of me to take time out of my day to give somebody a basic overview of the very thing they outright told me confused them?
Because your source of info is places you’ve lived at personally, and I assume a delivery driver would have seen a wider range of apartments than you. So without additional context, you seem to be making assumptions that most places would be like the ones you’ve seen, and “correcting” someone based on that assumption.
I live in an apartment complex where the only distinguisher between the two halves is street number, they share a name entirely and have the same numbers.
Nothing changed drove for Grubhub for awhile. Google maps isn’t 100% correct and the amount of customers expecting food to be delivered with their porch lights off and no numbers on their homes. It was a shit show.
I delivered pizza for a few years in my early years, and poorly lit addresses were the absolute worst. I was delivering in the pre-smartphone but post mapquest era, and we had a computer in the shop with a touch screen (which was crazy at the time) map on it so you could figure out where we were going. But God forbid you ended up on a one way street looking for an address that was poorly labeled or unlit and you got somebody behind you laying on their horn… At some point I bought a 1000 candle spotlight that I used at night, and that got me pulled over several times because people would call the police about “a slow driving car shining a spotlight out of its window”… Like… For fucks sake. I’m just trying to deliver some pizza.
With that said, while working I smoked a bunch of weed, listened to a bunch of good music, and generally got tipped well so… It was a good time.
I had to visit a house the other week in a place I hadn’t been before. Sat nav got me to the post code just fine only but the problem is it’s one of those villages on a long road where everyone thinks they are special and don’t need house number. Instead they all have names. It’s horrid! Driving up and down real slow, blocking the road, while I read every bloody house name.
There were a couple of times where I just turned around and went back to the store with the pizza and said no one was home. That would have been one of those times.
Agreed. If you need to calculate rectangles ML is not the right tool. Now do the comparison for an image identifying program.
If anyone’s looking for the magic dividing line, ML is a very inefficient way to do anything; but, it doesn’t require us to actually solve the problem, just have a bunch of examples. For very hard but commonplace problems this is still revolutionary.
I think it’s still faster than actual solutions in some cases, I’ve seen someone train an ML model to animate a cloak in a way that looks realistic based on an existing physics simulation of it and it cut the processing time down to a fraction
I suppose that’s more because it’s not doing a full physics simulation it’s just parroting the cloak-specific physics it observed but still
I suppose that’s more because it’s not doing a full physics simulation it’s just parroting the cloak-specific physics it observed but still
This. I’m sure to a sufficiently intelligent observer it would still look wrong. You could probably achieve the same thing with a conventional algorithm, it’s just that we haven’t come up with a way to profitably exploit our limited perception quite as well as the ML does.
In the same vein, one of the big things I’m waiting on is somebody making a NN pixel shader. Even a modest network can achieve a photorealistic look very easily.
I think the joke is that the Jr. Developer sits there looking at the screen, a picture of a cat appears, and the Jr. Developer types “cat” on the keyboard then presses enter. Boom, AI in action!
The truth behind the joke is that many companies selling “AI” have lots of humans doing tasks like this behind the scene. “AI” is more likely to get VC money though, so it’s “AI”, I promise.
Exactly. Explaining to a computer what a photo of a dog looks like is super hard. Every rule you can come up with has exceptions or edge cases. But if you show it millions of dog pictures and millions of not-dog pictures it can do a pretty decent job of figuring it out when given a new image it hasn’t seen before.
As a subscriber, one of the things I like about Kagi is how responsive the Kagi team is. I’ve reported a few bugs (4-5 maybe?) and they all got resolved fairly quickly. You can also find the founder on the Discord server talking with users. This was a breath of fresh air to me when I signed up.
I use Kagi too - they have a feature I haven’t seen before where you can basically optimize your own SEO. You can uprank or downrank any given website to varying degrees based on how much of that site you want to see in your future search results (I use this a lot for game wikis that have since migrated off of Fandom etc, but the stale Fandom page always shows up first in google search).
They’re also working on a feature to warn you which articles are paywalled directly from the search result, which I will use the hell out of.
They also have something they call Lenses, which are essentially search profiles that emphasize certain types of results (programming lens upranks stackoverflow, github, and API docs for instance).
All in all I’ve been extremely pleased with the quality of the product and the directions they’re exploring in. And being able to easily chat up the devs in discord doesn’t hurt either.
I had Kagi for a bit and enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I use search enough to justify the price tag.
I didn’t know about the personalized SEO thing- I wonder if you could have a “default SEO rank” that would basically average all the specific uprank/downranks from other users. So power users tweak their algo, and everyone else gets the benefit of using that human feedback to improve their results.
I can customise it to ignore AI spam with custom filters + academic search + custom rankings + other custom tools. I can yeet domains from ever being seen again. It’s just very tailored to whatever you need. I hardly go elsewhere now. I find it curbs my compulsive rumination googling because I get clear, trustworthy answers and not AI telling me I have cancer or am distracted by something dramatic.
I hadn’t even seen other paid providers but I got real sick of Google about six months back, tried kagi on trial and paid for it before the trial was up, that’s how good it is.
Here is an example for searching for “cats” with academic turned on. It’s not just .edus but it’s definitely part of the weighting. Nature is usually the first hit obviously.
You can also make custom searches with parameters and link easy access third party buttons. I did one for Google shopping for instance.
Yup, yup. Should be under recently visited in the selection settings iirc if you visit the page first. Trying to pen in my Google use to very specific things, but Brave will probably be last to go. Excited for mobile FF!
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