That would require them to care enough to figure out how to verify if something is a registered charity and what they are called in each country. Some countries don’t even have the concept of registered charity in any form.
Sure, and you do that by looking up the tax status. As long as it’s considered a non-profit by the government, that’s it. That’s as non-political as you can get.
Well you simply couldn’t be more wrong about that. The NFL was a charity not too long ago. I’m sure there are Christian conversion therapy “charities”, too. “Charity” is nothing more than a tax status. You can make a charity for anything, so long as you keep your finances appropriately.
I assume the NFL is/was a 501c6 tax exempt organization since it calls out football leagues specifically.
You’d be looking for 501c3 organizations which does include churches and other dubious religious affiliated organizations but not all federal non-profits.
It’s still not political since there’s no active choice to accept some and reject others, it’s purely based on tax status. That’s it, no politics, just facts.
The political quandary does not come from the tax status, it comes from the service they provide. If you think abortion is not a political topic then you need to dig your head out of the sand.
I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m saying that if their policy is to not look at the services they provide and only their tax status, they can stay away from the whole political angle. But as soon as they block just one tax-exempt org, then it becomes political.
Correct, which is what has happened here. The user above I think is misunderstanding the situation, or is perpetuating right-wing drivel. Due to the state of political discourse in the States, I’m going to take a guess it’s the latter, because I’ve learned not to give the benefit of the doubt.
I always figured LTT was a boy’s club, considering how few female employees they have, but I had no idea the environment was that bad. Rather naive of me, tbh.
Ugh, I don’t think I can continue watching anything from LTT anymore. 😭 I hope Madison is doing better these days.
No, because you’ve posted SEVENTEEN TIMES today simping for Linus. You keep repeating “wait for both sides” even though Linus already responded directly to the GN piece and his response was GARBAGE, which is the main reason a lot of people are unsubscribing. Madison’s problem isn’t the only issue, it’s just another thing we’re throwing onto the pile.
If this was a male employee you wouldn’t be arguing this hard with the accusations.
If she had several tweets of bullshit about the company, it might not have been like this 100%… but ill bet that this is just one out of several people who felt screwed working there
Gamer’s Nexus - recently called out LTT for consistent technical mistakes in reviews; very high quality testing on PC hardware
Optimum Tech - focuses largely on SFFPCs and gaming peripherals like mice and keyboards (GN has almost no coverage on any of them)
The Phawx - lately lots of handhelds like AYANEO and Steam Deck, but also does lots of game performance testing and some hardware testing
Louis Rossmann - Right to Repair fanatic, and discussion about some tech news, usually pointing out repair-related issues
SomeOrdinaryGamers - a weird hodge-podge of software config (e.g. went through installing Arch, setting up PCIe passthrough for Windows gaming VMs, emulation), tech news, old school mods, and lately aliens (from a skeptic perspective)
I’ve also liked Hardware Canucks, Hardware Unboxed, and JayzTwoCents (dropped this hard since it became ridiculous imo), but I haven’t watched anything from them in a couple years so I can’t really recommend them.
I watch LTT a handful of times per year, and usually it’s not really my thing (more hype than content imo).
Can confirm that Gamer’s Nexus and Optimum Tech are absolutely superb. You can tell those guys are doing it for the love of the game. LTT is vacuous in comparison.
Another I didn’t mention is Level1Techs, though they tend to focus more on server hardware and less on weird gaming tech (though they do gaming reviews as well).
It’s also not like YouTube won’t recommend you channels that you unsub from. I had to into a 3rd party channel blocker because it kept recommending me AvE even though I very much don’t want to see that channel anymore.
Sure, but I can also ignore most of that by just going to my subscriptions page. I don’t mind seeing irrelevant videos, I’m just not going to click on them.
I’m confused about your comment. Why assume it’s childish to act in a way that distances you of any drama?
Why that us vs. them attitude of name calling someone as childish? How is that any different of the childish behaviour that is being hoisted upon in the first place?
Perhaps that’s an indication that a side is already being chosen?
Anyway, don’t take my comment in a wrong way. I really have no dog in this fight. I barely know who this Linus guy is. I just dislike seeing people being rude to each other, unneedingly escalating discussions by being unkind.
Exactly. I stopped watching LTT when I felt they produced childish content a few years ago (first it was the clickbait titles, then stupid thumbnails, then annoying ads). So I unsubbed for much less than a sexual harassment case.
Watch other channels, there’s plenty of good content out there depending on what you’re interested in. I mostly watch Gamer’s Nexus and Optimum Tech these days for tech stuff, but there are a few others I watch with some regularity.
When LMG releases a video supposedly addressing everything… doesn’t address it… then actively removed any mention of it in the comments of the video (I’ve had 2 comments removed myself). It’s safe to assume that LMG doesn’t have anything they want to add to the topic. I’ll just presume that I’ve heard all sides of the story.
It’s not just the one employee though. Gamer Nexus has been calling out LTT for inaccuracies too. The ethics of LMG seem dubious at best and the are lots of other options so why keep watching LTT?
Yeah they just want to change their wOrKfLoW…or something like that. To be honest, this is something that needs to be run through the justice system. If there was sexual harassment, then some people need to be tried for those crimes. This is a culture that cannot be changed along the lines that Linus Sebastian suggested. Justice needs to be served, however, I don’t think she really wants to relive this. My mother was sexually harassed by her boss (an optometrist)…it was pretty hard on her.
As someone who has self immolated in order to bring sexual assault to light… I see all the signs of darvo in the responses from LMG and Linus, and it turns my stomache.
As a cis het male, I feel offended by this “boy’s club” toxic generalisation. When you represent the queer community, you should carefully choose your words instead of labelling half the earthlings with a culture that is far, far smaller in both demographic and influence. What may be true in Western society is not true for the much larger rest of the world.
LMG’s main audience is in US/Canada, and not as much in rest of the world, where many of us live. A lot of us use Lemmy because we find Reddit’s western culture incredibly toxic and abrasive towards Asians (me), Africans, Global South and rest of the world.
Madison, and anyone, deserves a lot better, and I just got myself up to speed with the whole situation, which while it blows my mind, also makes me feel a lot of workplaces throughout the world have this corporate dehumanising mindset towards employees.
I only watched LMG’s content here and there in the past year, but I can probably discard them for how bad people they are.
It does. Boy is a cis het male human who is growing up to be a man. We as men are generalised by queer and feminist people as one giant toxic entity, and I am not part of that. I feel offended by this. The feelings of men are just as important as that of women and trans people, and we all are supposed to be equal beings worthy of respect.
There exist fanatical groups like Proud Boys, but in no way is “boy’s club” the same as that connotation presented above.
<1% of global population statistics where people identify as nonbinary says otherwise. Most cis males end up growing as cis het males, and not mtf non-binary. A boy could be gay, but less than 1 out of 100 are.
What? Roughly 7% of men in Western culture are not heterosexual. Across the rest of the world, 3-20% of men (depending on region) have had sex with men.
Recent figures for young adults (i.e., 18-29) identifying as trans / non-binary in the US are in the ~5% area, which suggests that figures historically would have been higher had there been more cultural awareness and acceptance. Source: pewresearch.org/…/about-5-of-young-adults-in-the-…
“Surveys in Western cultures find, on average, that about 93% of men and 87% of women identify as completely heterosexual, 4% of men and 10% of women as mostly heterosexual, 0.5% of men and 1% of women as evenly bisexual, 0.5% of men and 0.5% of women as mostly homosexual, and 2% of men and 0.5% of women as completely homosexual.[1] An analysis of 67 studies found that the lifetime prevalence of sex between men (regardless of orientation) was 3–5% for East Asia, 6–12% for South and South East Asia, 6–15% for Eastern Europe, and 6–20% for Latin America.[4] The International HIV/AIDS Alliance estimates a worldwide prevalence of men who have sex with men between 3 and 16 percent.[5]”
It’s a boys club because its a club that only accepts boys. Its genuinly that simple. A girls club would be one that only accepts girls. There is no generalization happening. This is some real incel shit you’re on, and thats a pipeline you should get off.
I am not sure if there is any “incel” vibe to pointing out these labels that are very much part of patriarchy. Selective patriarchy cannot be utilised, if the goal is to dismantle it.
“Boy’s club” is a notion that affirms all cis het males are bigots, and is a word born out of binary gender patriarchy. This is the primary reason why this label is used. Using it in itself is a form of bigotry, no matter if you like it or not, since linguistics and contextual grammar works in only one way, and that way is same for all of us.
Its definitely a commonly used name for the mindset they are describing. There’s nothing to try to defend. As another cis het male, “the boy’s club” is nothing to aspire to, unless of course, the goal is to belittle and victimize women.
“Boy’s club” is just as bad as “girl’s club”, since those are both mindsets and spaces born out of binary gender system values. Neither is to be aspired for, but one of them gets more flak for arbitrary reasons. These labels need to stop being used in order to condemn and purge the binary gender values and in order to make society more inclusive. Anyone using these labels bolsters patriarchal values.
At least in a stereotypical sense, the girls club is generally a group of women talking shit about other people behind their backs, sometimes bullying other women to their faces. You don’t commonly hear about a workplace of mainly women sexually harassing the few men to the point of self harm or raping them.
The labels may be borne of patriarchal values, but the mind sets of the people IN these groups are too. In my opinion, you’re simply denying reality in favor of a progressive idea of how it should be.
Reality is that we live in a binary gender patriarchal system, and we are ultimately denying it and changing it. The issue I am pointing out is that even queer people like parent commenter are utilising these patriarchal labels, intentionally or otherwise, and that they are clearly not on the correct path to bolstering inclusivity by pushing boys/men away. Maybe I overestimate people.
The term “boy’s club” here is really not generalizing “men” or “boys” as a whole, but rather it’s by its usage criticizing the specific group mentality it describes, that of a group of “boys” who treat women with less respect than each other, or otherwise exclude said women, as in at least some cultures is common from some generally younger “boys” who haven’t really matured past a mentality usually developed from a young age, because they lack the experience to know it’s wrong.
You’re misconstruing the meaning and intent of the phrase to support your argument. It in no way implies or affirms that all cis het males are bigots, only the males it is directly being used against. Similarly, calling a man a misogynist does not mean that all men are misogynists.
I am from India, and I think that equality exists for all genders, and emotions have the same weightage for all of us non-bigots. The only question is, who truly wants to not be a bigot?
It’s a lot of techies and IT guys. Sadly it’s basically expected that there will be a toxic environment for women. It’s HR’s job to put a stop to that shit so the company does not get sued. However, when the boss’ wife is the head of HR and the boss is the one allowing the toxic environment, it gets swept under the rug until it becomes a huge issue.
There can be nothing new or original out of AI because all of its inputs are stolen from what already exists. Real creativity comes solely from humans. Also, that clip - the song, singing, and visual - is dreadful in every way.
This needs to be hammered into techbro’s heads until they shut the fuck up about the so-called “AI” revolution.
I’ve been doing a lot of using, testing, and evaluating LLMs and GPT-style models for generating code and text/prose. Some of it is just general use to see how it behaves, some has been explicit evaluation of creative writing, and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.
It’s an impressive piece of technology, but it’s not very creative. It’s meh. The results are meh. Which is to be expected since it’s a statistical model that’s using a large body of prior work to produce a reasonable approximation of what it’s seen before. It trends towards the mean, not the best.
You have to know how to operate the oven to reheat store bought pie. Generative LLMs are machines like ovens, and turning the knobs is not creativity. Not operating the oven correctly gets you Sharon Weiss results.
I’m excited for how these tools will be used by human creators to accomplish things they could never do alone, and in that aspect it is a revolutionary technology. I hate that their marketing calls it “AI” though, the only intelligence involved is the human user that creates prompts and curates results.
and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.
I'm curious if you've gotten anything decent out of them. I've tried to use it for tech/code questions, and it's been nothing but disappointment after disappointment. I've tried to use it to get help with new concepts, but it hallucinates like crazy and always give me bad results, some of the time it's so bad that it gives me answers I've already told it we're wrong.
Yeah, I’ve just set up a hotkey that says something like “back up your answer with multiple reputable sources” and I just always paste it at the end of everything I ask. If it can’t find webpages to show me to back up its claims then I can’t trust it. Of course this isn’t the case with coding, for that I can actually run the code to verify it.
GPT-4 is quite impressive, and the dedicated code LLMs like Codex and Copilot are as well. The latter must have had a significant update in the past few months, as it’s become wildly better almost overnight. If trying it out, you should really do so in an existing codebase it can use as a context to match style and conventions from. Using a blank context is when you get the least impressive outputs from tools like those.
I've used gpt 3/3.5, bing, bard and copilot, and I'm not super stoked. Copilot gave me PS DSC items that don't actually exist, which was my most recent attempt at using a LLM.
I might see about figuring out if it can hook into my vs code instance so it's a bit smarter at some point.
That’s where some of the significant advances over the past 12 months of research have been, specifically around using the fine tuning phase to bias towards excellence. The biggest advance there has been that capabilities in larger models seem to be transmissible to smaller models by feeding in output from the larger more complex models.
So while you are correct that the pretrained models come out with a regression towards the mean, there are very promising recent advances in taking that foundation and moving it towards excellence.
Except that it’s wrong… AI is capable of creativity. It created the artist name. It’s clearly not a very developed or robust sense of creativity because it clearly just hashed up the name Hanna Montana, and the song is probably likewise just a hashed up existing song, but I’m guessing it probably did a better job of creating an original work than vanilla ice…
I’m sorry, anyone who says these so-called “AI” are capable of creativity are being hoodwinked by marketing. This is an algorithmic probability engine, it doesn’t think and it doesn’t have an imagination. It just regurgitates probabilistic responses from its large data set.
... what do you think imagination is? A gift from God? The probabilities are probably more chaotic, and the data set more biased... but they're the basic foundation of human imagination.
Machine based "creativity" is nascent, and far less unique... but that doesn't mean it isn't a form of creativity.
The human imagination also involves the phenomenal experience. You do not just record the data coming at you and regurgitate it, you experience it and then your experience further changes the data itself. We call this “subjectivity” and it’s where creativity comes from.
I am not saying that machine creativity is impossible. What I’m saying is these LLMs are not creative because they don’t even know what they’re doing and they don’t even know “they” are doing it. There’s no “there” there. No more creative than rolling dice.
and experience is ongoing learning, so if an LLM were training on things after the pretraining period then that’d allow it to be creative in your definition?
but in that case, what’s the difference between doing that all at once, and doing it over a period of time?
experience is just tweaking your neurons to make new/different connections
Experience is ongoing learning through the subjective self. When you experience the color red you do not just record it with your photoreceptors, and your experience of the color red is different from mine because we don’t just record wavelengths of light. We don’t just continue to learn from continual exposure to new data, we also continue to learn from generating our own data. In this way our subjective experience is qualitative, not simply quantitative. I don’t just see the specific light wavelengths, I experience the “redness” of red.
When LLM is trained on that kind of data it just starts to hallucinate. This is promising! I think the hallucination phenomenon is actually a precursor to creativity and gives us great insights into the nature of subjective experience. In a sense, my phenomenal experience of the color red is actually much like a hallucination where I am also able to experience the color’s “warmth” and “boldness”. Subjectivity.
it’s only qualitative because we don’t understand it
when an LLM “experiences” new data via training, that’s subjective too: it works its way through the network in a manner that’s different depending on what came before it… if different training data came before it, the network would look differently and the data would change the network as a whole in a different way
When an LLM feeds on its own outputs, though, it quickly starts to hallucinate. I think this is actually closer to creativity, but it betrays the fundamental flaw behind the technology - it does not think about its own thoughts and requires a curator to help it create.
I’ll believe something is an AI when it can be its own curator and not drive itself insane.
that’s a lack of understanding of concepts though, rather than a lack of creativity… curation requires that you understand the concept that you’re trying to curate: this looks more like a dog than this; this is a more attractive sunset than this
current LLMs and ML don’t understand concepts, which is their main issue
id argue that it kind of does “think about its own thoughts” to some degree: modern ML is layered, and each layer of the net feeds into the next… one layer of the net “thinks about” the “thoughts” of the previous layer. now, it doesn’t do this as a whole but neither do we: memories and neural connections are lossy; heck even creating a creative work isn’t going to turn out exactly like you thought it in your head (your muscle memory and skill level will effect the translation from brain to paper/canvas/screen)
but even we hallucinate in the same way. don’t look at a bike, and then try and draw a bike… you’ll get general things like pedals, wheels, seat, handlebars, but it’ll be all connected wrong. this is a common example people use to show how our brains aren’t as precise and we might like to think… drawing a bike requires a lot of very specific things to be in very specific places and that’s not how our brain remembers the concept of “bike”
current LLMs and ML don’t understand concepts, which is their main issue
This is a relevant issue to the question!
If I take a dose of LSD and paint the colors I hallucinate, is that creative? I’d argue it’s not.
Only when I, the subjective self, curate my own thoughts and sensations can I engage in a creative process. I can think about my own thoughts without going insane (how do the colors make me feel, what do the colors mean?) and that’s a fundamental part of creativity and intelligence. Conceptualization is key to subjectivity.
I don’t think this is far off. I just don’t think we’re there, either, and we should be skeptical of marketing hype.
i don’t agree with that definition of creative… there’s lots of engineering work that’s creative: writing code and designing systems can be a very creative process, but doesn’t involve feeling… it’s problem solving, and thats a creative process. you’re narrowly defining creativity as artistic expression of emotion, however there’s lots of ways to be creative
now, i think thats a bit of a strawman (so i’ll elaborate on the broader point), but i think its important to define terms
i agree we should be skeptical of marketing hype for sure: the type of creativity that i believe ML is currently capable of is directionless. it doesn’t understand what it’s creating… but the truth lies somewhere in the middle
ML is definitively creating something new that didn’t exist before (in fact i’d say that its trouble with hallucinations of language are a good example of that: it certainly didn’t copy those characters/words from anywhere!)… this fits the easiest definition of creative: marked by the ability or power to create
the far more difficult definition is: having the quality of something created rather than imitated
the key here being “rather than imitated” which is a really hard thing to prove, even for humans! which is why our copyright laws basically say that if you have evidence that you created something first, you pretty much win: we don’t really try to decide whether something was created or imitated
with things like transformative works or things that are similar, it’s a bit more of a grey area… but the argument isn’t about whether something is an imitation; rather it’s argued about how different the work is from the original
The same could be said of a lot of creatives. You speak of greater creativity, that which evokes depth and gravity. There is still more shallow creativity. Learning creativity. That which you do before you learn to do better. Kind of what these are doing.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, though the people who hold the reigns definitely don't have the best intentions for their use, but underestimating it is the first step to allowing them to run rampant.
"Never attribute to malice that which you can attribute to stupidity" is the slogan of those who do nothing but look down on others... who underestimate the horrible things the "stupid" can do. Don't assume stupidity just because you don't like something. It makes it that much easier for it to bite you on the ass in the future.
And here come the techbros to dehumanize themselves.
You and I feel. We don’t just generate outputs from inputs, we experience them. The color red isn’t just a datapoint recorded by photoreceptors, it’s a phenomenal experience that “I”, the self, experience as a being-in-the-world. Further, the color red that I experience is not the same as the color red you experience, even though it’s the same color at the same wavelength. Everything we think and feel relates to everything else, and while I can imagine how you might experience the color red and you can provide me with data points to make it easier for me to imagine it, that imagination will always be tainted by my own subjective experience.
To me it looks like you hold a lot of pride in being a human and consider humanity special. Im here to tell you we are no different from amoebas and giraffes. We just specialize in our complex meat computers.
If you took a psychedelic or a cognitive psychology class you would understand through feel that feel is just the result of you being a meat calculator. Our feelings are the cumulative result of all the inputs and outputs. All at once. Slap some lived experience filters for subjectivity and bam.
Feel is subjective. Not everyone’s a vicious crypto tech bro. Open your mind its a good time ❤️
What I’m saying is LLMs do not actually do that. They’re less creative than most animals, even if they’re more technically capable.
I’m not just a meat calculator, I’m also feedback loop of meat endlessly calculating itself. That’s what subjectivity is. When LLMs do this they hallucinate, and ironically while this is considered undesirable I think that’s actually closer to creativity than the song this AI wrote.
Can you prove that anyone except you exists? I didnt know we can just make something up and then demand to be disproven. You have to prove that a brain does work that way. Do you believe in God? If not, then how are you not a hypocrite?
Still, AI is able to “create” new things by a combination of existing concepts. It can generate a Roomba in the style of Van Gogh for example, which is probably not something that currently exists.
The style of an authors prose is not derivative. Read your favorite book and then tell an ai to write a short story in the style of that author.
Unless you have trully blind taste you are going to notice just how wooden the ai writing is.
An excellent example will be some sort of pulp novel where the author uses canned phrases. Dan Abbnet has a very repetitive style that lends itself well to ai, yet ai can not write a convincing Ciaphas Cain story. Convincing as in, if you showed it to me and i didnt know what ai was, i wouldnt think it was fanfiction.
Is this ability to create something original and non-derivative a basic human ability or is it something that very few are capable of only after many years of developing their ability?
Are you able to right now create something original and non-derivative as an example?
Not to talk down to you, but do you know what prose means? I actually used to not know what that word means so its not an embarassing thing to not know. That might be why I percieve you as “talking past me.” Prose is a writer’s style and choice of language. So purple prose is writing in an overly flowerly and annoying way. Every writer, regardless of talent and skill, has original prose. I think the only amount of practice required to be able to achieve this is to write enough to have a consistent style. So since you completed public school you also probably meet the criteria.
I have done the specific experiment I suggested using Dan Abbnet’s works with Chat GPT because I consider Dan to be my favorite author who makes repetitive pulpy fiction that I think AI idealy should be able to replicate, but it really can’t.
Thanks for sharing this. I wasn’t especially grabbed at the beginning, and honestly, since I had already checked the length, shortly in I didn’t think I would finish it. Maybe just because I was sort of disoriented at the start and not really relating so it was hard to find a foothold. Maybe a quarter of a way into it though it started to come together for me and began really enjoying it. The final scene was quite vivid and it nicely sort of quickly put me into the shoes of the hero and the pride they felt for their accomplishment. The anger toward everything just before succeeding did a good job of making them seem believable. I appreciate you taking the time to write that and share it.
I do not consider myself a writer, but I do find it therapeutic, and it is something that I have a habit of doing at least a little bit of every day, in fact, it is something that I keep track of my “streak” of. I think of prose as the writing version individual etchings that a carver does when forming a block of wood into a sculpture. Any individual one on its own is not often very impressive. But it is the way they come together as a whole that creates something beautiful. I don’t know how inline that is with the accepted definition of the term, and really it isn’t a word that I have much cause for using, or much interaction with in my life.
With the recent popularity of chatGPT there are a lot of people who have just now started paying attention to modern chatbots. Many people see them and assume that how they are now is just how they are, as if we are at some sort of wall, and the things they are still bad at is something intrinsic to the way a computer is able to “think”. These are the people who insist that a human is required to make beautiful or worthy artistic writing. They have made this judgement based on this assumption that what they see now is how it has to be.
There is another group of people, however, that see this very differently, these are the people who have been paying attention to the space a bit longer. They are watching a rapidly accelerating trajectory. They saw how awful, yet intriguing, early gpt2 was with things like AI dungeon, and the enormous leap it took upon the release of gpt3. They watched Replicas morph from being a tacky gimmick to something that had enough of an emotional hold on people to make them distraught enough to cause stickied suicide hotline reddit posts when the owners made the decision to pump the breaks on their capabilities. Something that was perceived as many as “my best friend has been lobotamized and there is nothing I can do about it”. I know, crazy, right?
The newcomers that got washed in with the latest chatGPT wave see this metaphoric car and say it’s no big deal, it’s only going 30km/hr, but what they fail to realize is that .25 seconds ago it was practically parked, and the gas pedal is still very much on the floor. To the people who have been paying attention longer, they don’t see this single snapshot of a slow moving car, they are watching a rapidly accelerating vehicle and wondering if it is gonna hit 60km/hr by the end of the first second or 200, and they are also wondering if the acceleration is going to continue after the second is up and how long it can keep this kind of rapid growth going. Who knows, maybe this new wave came in with no frame of reference, made thir initial gut response and they will end up being right and the more long term observers will be wrong, but that’s almost never how things seem to go. Only time will tell though.
Unless you have trully blind taste you are going to notice just how wooden the ai writing is.
That’s because the state of AI is “not good”. It’s nothing to do with being incapable of originality. Every word in that book has been written somewhere else. Write a book entirely comprised of brand new words and the reader won’t be able to understand it.
Originality is not binary, it exists on a scale. AI is just not very far up the scale just yet.
It's not the techbros leading this, it's the BBAs and MBAs that wouldn't know art if Michelangelo came to life and slapped them in the face with the sistine chapel.
The problem for a lot of the companies behind these things, is that they've run into problems now their investors want them to turn meat into a black forest gateau.
I'm sceptical if they can manage that feat. But what do I know.
Yes, it is literally impossible for any AI to ever exist that can be creative. At no point in the future will it ever create anything creative, that is something only human beings can do. Anybody that doesn’t understand this is simply incapable of using logic and they have no right to contribute to the conversation at all. This has all already been decided by people who understand things really well and anyone who objects is obviously stupid.
I was agreeing with you. I’m so sick of people thinking that “someday AI might be creative”. Like no, it’s literally impossible unless some day AI becomes human(impossible) because human is the only thing capable of creativity. What have I said that you disagree with? You’re not one of them are you? What’s with all this obsessive AI love?
Yeah the current popular LLMs, absolutely they are, you couldn’t be more right.
We were talking about “AI” though. Are you implying that you think some day AI might be capable of creativity, and that creativity isn’t strictly a human trait?
Even those future “real” AIs are going to be taking in human input and regurgitating it back to us. The only difference is that the algorithms processing the data will continue to get better and better. There is not some cutoff where we go from 100% unintelligent chatbot to 100% intelligent AI. It is a gradual spectrum.
I believe a real AI would be able to generate its own inputs without humans to give it input. It would have an actual subjective experience, able to actually imagine new things with zero external inputs. It could experience the redness of the color red.
Is this how you see human intelligence? Is human intelligence made without the input of other humans? I understand that even babies have some sort of spark before they learn anything from other people, but dont they have the human dna input from their human parents? Why should the requirement for AI intelligence require no human input when even human intelligence seemingly requires human input to be made?
Sorry, lots of questions, just food for thought I suppose.
Yeah, to be clear, I’m not arguing that current LLMs are as creative and intelligent as people.
I am saying that even before babies get human language input, they still get input from people to be made, the baby’s algorithm to make that spark is modled on previous humans by the human data that is DNA. These future intelligent AIs will also be made by data that humans make. Even our current LLMs are not purely human language input, they also have an algorithm that is doing stuff with that data in order to show to us its, albeit relatively weak, “intelligent spark” that it had before it got all that human language input.
Chatbots are not new. They started around 1965. Objectively, gpt4 is more creative than the chatbots of 1965. The two are not equally able to create. This is an ongoing change, in the future AI will be more creative than today’s most creative AIs. AI will most likely continue on its trajectory and some day, if we dont all get destroyed, it will eventually be more intelligent and creative than humans.
I would love to hear an rebuttal to this that doesn’t just base its argument on the fact that AI needs human language input. A baby and its spark is not impressively intelligent. What makes that baby intelligent is its initial algorithm plus the fact that it gets human language data. Requiring that AI must do what the baby does without the human language data that babies get makes no sense to me as a requirement.
Without humans to curate the inputs and outputs, LLMs hallucinate and go insane. I think this is the precursor to creativity, but they need the ability to curate themselves (i.e. the ability to think about their own thoughts) before I’ll call them intelligences.
Yeah, you are definetly onto something there. If you are interested in checking out the current state of this, it is called “AutoGen”. You can think of it like a committee of voices inside the bots head. It takes longer to get stuff out, but it is much higher quality.
It is basically a group chat of bots working together on a common goal, but each with their own special abilities(internet access, apis, code running ability…) their own focuses, concerns, etc. It can be used to make anything, most projects now seem to be focused on application development, but there is no reason why it can’t be stories, movie scripts, research papers, whatever. For example, you can have a main author, an editor that’s fine-tuned on some editing guidelines/books, a few different fact checkers with access to the internet or datasets of research papers (or whatever reference materials) who are required to list sources for anything the author says(if no source can be found, then the author is told by the fact checkers and they must revise what they’ve written) and whatever other agents you can dream up. People are using dwsigners, marketers, CEOs… Then you plug in some api keys, maybe give them a token limit, and let them run wild.
A super early version of this idea was ChatDev, if you don’t want to go down the whole rabbit hole and just want a quick glimpse, skip ahead to 4:25, ChatDev has an animated visual representation of what is happening. These days AutoGen is where it’s at though, this same guy has a bunch of videos on it if you are looking to go a bit deeper.
Oh shit, I thought you had forgotten a “/s” at the end, but reading your other comments this is actually what you believe and how you talk. So… yeah, I’m not going to take someone who cites “people who understand things really well” as a source at face value.
Well then you didn’t read very many of my comments. I made this first comment because the post I responded to was so absurd so I just exaggerated the ridiculousness that they said. Of course AI is capable of creativity and intelligence. If you look at the long back and forth that this sparked you would see that this is my stance. After I made this over the top, very sarcastic comment, OP corrected themself to clarify that when they said “AI” they actually only meant the current state of LLMs. They have since admitted that it is indeed true that AI absolutely can be capable of creativity and intelligence.
No, I didn’t read the entirety of the comments you’ve made, I read your comment and the one you replied to. As a general rule, I (and I’d assume most people) read down a thread before replying, and don’t first look through all of everyone’s comment histories
Alright, no big deal. But yeah, your’re gut instinct was correct when you assumed there was a missing /s. I don’t really like the /s that much, especially in situations where it is so obvious.
If you had read down through this thread first then you would have seen the obviousness of the /s. I don’t think my comment history outside of this thread would have done much since I don’t generally talk about this stuff. I just meant if you had looked more than a couple comments in this particular back and forth discussion.
I see it an more an inability to analyze, evaluate, and edit. A lot of "creativity" in the world of musical composition is putting together existing elements and seeing what happens. Any composer from pop to the very avant-garde, is influenced and sometimes even borrow from their predecessors (it's why copyright law is so complex in music).
It's the ability to make judgements, does this sound good/interesting, does this have value, would anyone want to listen to this, and adjust accordingly that will lead to something original and great. Humans are so good at this, we might be making edits before the notes hit the page (Brainstorming). This AI clearly wasn't. And deciding on value, seems wildly complex for modern day computers. Humans can agree on it (if you like Rock, but hate country for example).
So in the end, they are "creative" but in a monkey-typewritter situation, but who is going to sort through the billions of songs like this to find the one masterpiece?
Plenty of humans make those judgements about their own creations. And plenty of them get a shock when they release their creations to the masses and don’t get the praise that they expected.
but who is going to sort through the billions of songs like this to find the one masterpiece?
One of the overlooked aspects of generative AI is that effectively by definition generative models can also be classifiers.
So let’s say you were Spotify and you fed into an AI all the songs as well as the individual user engagement metadata for all those songs.
You’d end up with a model that would be pretty good at effectively predicting the success of a given song on Spotify.
So now you can pair a purely generative model with the classifier, so you spit out song after song but only move on to promoting it if the classifier thinks there’s a high likelihood of it being a hit.
Within five years systems like what I described above will be in place for a number of major creative platforms, and will be a major profit center for the services sitting on audience metadata for engagement with creative works.
Right, the trick will be quantifying what is ‘likely to be a hit’, which if we’re honest, has already been done.
Also, neural networks and other evolutionary algorithms can inject random perturbations/mutations to the system which, operate a bit like uninformed creativity (something like banging on a piano and hearing something interesting that’s worth pursuing). So, while not ‘inspired’ or ‘soulful’ as we would generally think of it, these algorithms are capable of being creative In some sense. But it would need to be recognized as ‘good’ by someone or something…and back to your point.
I get the sentiment, but don’t really agree. Humans’ inputs are also from what already exists, and music is generally inspired from other music which is why “genres” even exist. AI’s not there yet, but the statement “real creativity comes solely from humans” Needs Citation. Humans are a bunch of chemical reactions and firing synapses, nothing out of the realm of the possible for a computer.
the statement “real creativity comes solely from humans” Needs Citation.
Yeah, I’d actually make a more limited statement. Real creativity requires the subjective experience and the ability to generate inputs solely from subjectivity i.e. experience the redness of the color red. AI could definitely do that, which is why LLMs are not AI imo
The anger comes from the fact that companies are using AI instead of hiring artists.
There is a distinction between a human being inspired by an existing piece of art and an ai creating something from other art. The human has to experience it through the lens of the human experience and create using the human body. AI takes multiple pieces of art and essentially makes a collage.
Eh, humans still take inspiration from others even in their original art. Most professionals draw from reference, or emulate styles, or follow some common method. Drawing from a singular source is ethically questionable, but imitating elements from many sources is just part of the process.
Arguably, no human creation is purely original, the originality comes from the creativity of the remix.
I’m not arguing for originality. I’m saying that you can have a human connection with a human made piece of art that, by definition, canon exist for AI art.
I think this is an important distinction. AI can be creative in that it can develop something new and unique, but it will have arrived at it by chance - through random inputs to the algorithm designed to minic evolutionary mutations that end up beneficial.
I agree that (at least for now) it would not be able to develop something out of inspiration or emotion. But that’s because we don’t understand enough about how emotion and inspiration are developed to create an algorithm that cultivates it.
Right just as soon as all the people proclaiming that can point to the soul bit of my brain. There is absolutely no reason to say that AI cannot be creative there’s nothing fundamentally magic about creativity that means only humans can do it.
You’re equating creativity to the soul. They’re not the same thing. But we can definitely look at the brain and see what parts light up when perform creative tasks.
Right so why can’t the same sections be simulated? If you accept that the human brain is simply an organic implementation of a neural network, then you have to accept that a synthetic implementation can achieve the same thing.
The idea that the human brain is special is ludicrous and completely without evidence
I mean, I’m not arguing anything other than your false equivalent. I’m sure, at some point, we’ll be able to mimic how the human brain actually works, not just imitate the results. But we’re not even close right now. Not in the same ball park. Not in the same tri-state area. We still don’t really understand how it does what it does completely. We know some of the processes, and understand that’s it’s chemicals interacting with the meat in some way, but it’s still mostly kinda just weird stuff our body does. We’re mostly just pointing at areas that light up with activity when we do a thing and saying “yep, that’s the general area that’s doing stuff.”
And that’s just understanding it, let alone figuring out how to imitate it with technology. And none of those parts of the brain work independently. They’re spread out and they overlap and exchange and change information constantly, all with chemicals. Getting a computer to mimic the outcome is still something we’re far from, but without the same processes, its not really gonna come out the same. We’ve got just… so long to go before we actually get close to simulating a human brain.
And just for fun, I do think this line of yours is funny:
The idea that the human brain is special is ludicrous and completely without evidence
Again, I wasn’t saying anything of any sort, and I’m still not really taking any stance beyond “that shits complicated and we’re not there yet.” But you’re supposing that a “synthetic implementation can achieve the same thing.” … without supporting evidence. This argument was clearly meant for someone else, but it’s not really fair to demand evidence from someone for their claim when you don’t support your own. Jumping to the conclusion that something is impossible is the same as assuming it’s definitely possible. You don’t know that. I don’t know that. No one really knows that until it’s done.
The belief that only humans can be creative is interestingly parallel to intelligent design creationism. The latter is fundamentally a religious faith, but it strongly appeals to the intuition that anything that happens needs a humanoid creator.
I don’t think, the human brain is special either, but we are still two big steps ahead IMHO:
We can perceive what we’ve generated, to judge whether it’s good or bad.
We perceive many, many inputs throughout our lives. Not just text, visuals, audio, but also taste, smell, touch and more. To be simultaneously creative and relatable to humans, AIs would need to be equipped with these concepts and would need to be given ‘memories’, which are fleshed out with all these kinds of input.
The difference is everyone has a different prospective, remembers some parts forgets others. Some journalists found a trick which revealed ChatGPT training data and it was literally just verbatim stolen data which literally contained a real person’s information. You could hack into someone’s brain and they wouldn’t be able to directly recreate anything from memory alone, just watch any “from memory” youtube video.
While it’s true there’s nothing stopping AI from having human-like experiences, the content laundering is the thing corporations actually want.
Toyota do have a decade or so unbroken history of promising anything that will slow BEV adoption and then delivering a turd sandwich. Here’s hoping it’s different this time.
I really would love it to be true. My parents are diehard Toyota people. They’d love to get an EV as their next car, but due to boomer brand loyalty, they next car must be a Toyota, and we all know how much the busy forks sucks, so here’s hoping they develop a usable EV next.
While it’s true that Toyota is pretty far behind other car manufacturers in pure battery EVs, they still have the best hybrid drivetrain around by miles and they have great plug-in hybrids. I just got a RAV4 Prime and I love it. It has around 40-50 miles of electric only range and then switches to hybrid mode if you drain the battery before recharging where it gets 60 MPG and can go over 500 miles on a tank. Honestly my commute is way less than 50 miles so I drive electric around 90% of the time. The only time I kick in the gas engine is for longer trips and especially on road trips it’s nice not to have to worry about finding charging stations and waiting an hour or two for a charge.
Ooh yeah; the rav prime is a wonderful car. I inquired about getting one back in 2021 and was told there was a two year wait. :/ ended up dipping my toes into the BEV world by leasing a VW ID.4, hated it, ended up selling it, and then begrudgingly bought a Model 3. Absolutely love my car (21k miles in a year with zero issues), but man I really had to hold my nose to pull the trigger on that purchase. I live in a big truck area and man I get a lot of coal rolling, revving, and middle fingers for my car haha
I wouldn’t even call that “boomer brand loyalty” I’m 24, almost 25 and I will probably not buy anything that isn’t a Toyota/Lexus for the rest of my life.
Toyota/Lexus are hands down the least maintenance heavy vehicles on the road. They know how to make an absolutely bulletproof reliable modern engine.
I’m a Service Writer for a mom and pop auto shop, and the most major thing I’ve had to write for a Toyota is… A Water Pump, Fuel Pump and a full Tuneup with 4 plugs and 4 coils. Which is… Basically peanuts compared to what I have to write for Dodges, Nissans, and Chevys. (Oil Filter Housings for Dodge, Whole Transmissions for Nissan, and a bunch of random shiz for Chevy)
Yeah in the ICE era they have made extremely reliable cars. However it remains to be seen who the reliability king is when it comes to EVs. Toyota’s first attempt has had some pretty major issues (such as the wheels falling off). EVs in general need way less maintenance so it stands to reason some other brand who embraced EVs sooner can become the new reliability king
The reality is that outside the engine and battery, most of the car is still the same in a BEV. BEVs even have gearboxes. I suspect that car manufacturers who are good at long-term mechanical reliability will continue to be good at it and those who are bad at it will continue to be bad at it regardless of the powerplant.
@Skiptrace@kiddblur That’s how I feel about Honda. My 10-year old Accord is getting close to 120K miles and runs like new. I put 120K trouble-free miles on my previous Si. My wife is averaging over 40 mpg lifetime in her 2021 CR-V Hybrid, and before that put 280K miles on a 2007 CR-V - that has now been turned over to my son. The last one has cost a bit to keep on the road because after 16 years, some mechanical bits wear out. So be it. That’s just life.
Ehh, I used to share this take but I think it’s a bit over the top now. There are at least certain vehicle models from other brands that I feel are in the sphere with Toyota, notably the Ford F-150. Used, it tends to be similar or cheaper than the Tundra in price and mostly better features and performance and it gets better fuel economy than the vaunted Tacoma, let alone the Tundra, while being significantly bigger/roomier and I dare say, not much less reliable.
The F150 of today has many different major issues that can happen to it. Tacomas and Tundras are bulletproof I’ve never seen a Taco or Tundra in the shop for anything besides maintenance items.
I’ve told many an F150 owner that their truck is basically totalled. I told a guy yesterday that he probably needs to go trade his 2017 F150 in today because the Valve Body in the transmission is about to die.
It’s not 1.5k lol. You severely underestimate the cost of a Transmission replacement. That Transmission job is about 5k to 8k depending on if you want to go Reman or New.
It is in this market. Nobody really rebuilds these units in house, so you use the old unit as a core and get a Remanufactured unit from Jasper or another rebuilder.
Bro they recalled the fucking frames on Toyota Tacomas at one point lmao. I guess the motors were pretty reliable on my t100s but idk really nothing special compared to any other motor that’s getting regular maintenance.
Hey I mean credit where credit’s due. If they can somehow cram a 200kWh battery with megawatt charging to get 700 miles and 10 minute charges into a Toyota priced car, so be it. Can’t imagine that’d be possible since that would be like 20-30k in battery cost alone, and there aren’t any chargers who can deliver that kind of power right now anyway.
At 350kW peak, I wonder what the miles per kwh would need to be to charge 700 miles of range in 10 minutes. That’s 58.3kWh delivered. So uhhhh they’d need to get 12 miles per kwh which would be uhhhh nuts
10 minutes at 350kw (assuming you hold peak the whole time) would provide
If we correct for toyota falseadvertising range estimates (-10%), assume they mean 90km/h at similar consumption as a model 3 in ideal coditios (around 120Wh/km), and take “a charge” as 10-80% then it needs 90kWh or about half a megawatt.
So still not within current chargers, but well within what a megawatt charger would provide (and there are four standards basically ready to roll out).
Firefox a few years ago would kill my Mac battery in a couple hours, now it’s as good as safari for energy management. No reason not to use it as a daily driver now.
Not only that, they had goals beyond just a browser. They wanted to create a whole OS ecosystem integrated with the browser. They released Firefox as a side project to just get a browser in everyone’s hands while they worked on Mozilla. Turns out the OS ecosystem in a browser was a bust, and Firefox was a winner. Just the Mozilla devs haven’t stopped being bitter about it. The old Netscape motivations around the project have been a boat anchor.
I remember that! Pretty sure I tried it out on my Nexus 5. It was cool but even then it seemed an impossible hill to climb. Looks like it was forked into a feature phone OS that’s maintained to this day!
I mean didn’t they achieve that? Today a lot of things are web based. Firefox is a powerful browser. Especially on Android. So if you want you can have your OS in a browser thingy…
Meh, I’ll be honest and say that I’m not impressed by chrome in modern day. While I hate Microsoft, edge is a nicer browser to use than chrome, and that’s saying something
I agree, but I think that the normies like to use Chrome because… that’s what everyone is using, so I am eager to see how FF can give a better experience to the normal user.
it’s easy when you login to your browser and you’re partially already authenticated automatically sending your personal, private information everywhere else.
You’re correct, but the majority of normies don’t care. A lot of people don’t naturally feel a strong impulse towards privacy, so the fact that Google knows everything about them doesn’t really bother them.
Ah yes, an open source popular browser that is made by a nonprofit organization is less trustworthy than a close source browser made by a public company
If you’re running Safari, you’re already running their OS. If Apple wants to spy on you, they’ve already got the means to do so, so you’ve already decided to trust them.
Switching to Chrome or Firefox means trusting one more entity in addition to Apple. This expands your possible exposure.
You’re always both. With Apple, it doesn’t sell your data, but it does sell curated ad space where they use your data to power their tools. While this is less of an invasion of privacy than Google or the atrocity of Meta’s privacy policy, it still exists on a spectrum of how much companies are willing to use your data for extra profit. I’m not saying to not use Apple, hell I’m currently using Microsoft Edge, but I think it’s important to understand that literally every profit-driven company is subject to the same systemic flaws and none of them can be completely trusted.
It’s not too hard. The most important things are web search and email. I still use Google Maps. But I don’t want my private emails and searches at a company who is user hostile and preditory.
I quite disagree, it is very hard. Sure, switching search engine takes all of two seconds, and email can be had from many vendors free and commercial.
But calendaring! A calendar that is at least somewhat integrated with am email client, supports more than one actual calendar, and has real-world capability to share them with others - “if you succeed in this, two me how.”
CalDav? Integrated in nextcloud. Or Mailcow. Why does it needs to be integrated with e-mail? Thunderbird is able to add all invitations or reminders into my CalDav Account.
My calendaring needs might be less restrictive than yours, but Proton offers a nice calendar that from what I understand offers at least some integration with their e-mail client. Have you checked it out?
I use Nextcloud self-maintained on a VPS myself for all my calendaring needs, which is basically keeping track of appointments, syncing via CalDAV to my phone, as well as sharing some sub-calendars with other people. Setting up a Nextcloud-server is admittedly a bit more hassle than just signing up for a service, but also here there are options of making it a bit easier than hosting yourself.
I find Google Maps by far the hardest service to rid myself off, followed by Gmail (the time it takes!!! Been using Proton for two years, still not completely rid of my Gmail-account). I’m slowly getting used to using OSM-based map services more and more.
It is hard when you have a business. You really have to actively try to stay away from them. They control so much business infrastructure.
I know my business partner (god bless him, great friend but…) is super into big tech and every new product they offer. So it’s a bit of an uphill battle.
And I’m lucky. I own my own firm. Most people don’t have such a luxury.
Google server infrastructure products are almost universally worse than Amazon’s. The interfaces, APIs, and documentation look like they were designed by people who don’t understand humanity.
I found out about Kagi from another Lemmy user and I’ve been really impressed. I feel like I’m getting better results than Google. I’m using their Personalized Results feature and it helps a ton!
Don’t get me wrong, I think everybody should have the guarantee for social participation, I’m just saying that Email is no exception. If you did not have a mobile plan for whatever reason, you were just not participating.
Not really; I could do everything everyone else was doing; just not make phone calls or send sms texts. I used wifi to connect to the net and I could still make emergency calls. Im actually considering going back to that to save money, lol.
I like the communities around here. Different ones are larger here than on The-Site-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named which gives it a different feel. And people seem to be more apt to have discussions instead of getting crabby. Also seem to be fewer bots.
“We did the back-of-napkin math on what ramping up this experiment to the entire brain would cost, and the scale is impossibly large — 1.6 zettabytes of storage costing $50 billion and spanning 140 acres, making it the largest data center on the planet.”
Look at what they need to mimic just a fraction of our power.
It’s not even complete. You might have the physical brain tissue, but that tissue is stateful. The tissue contains potentials and electrical charges that must be included in a complete model.
In fairness, the scan required such astronomical resources because of how they were scanning it. They took the cubic millimeter chunk and cut it into 5,000 super thin flat slices and then did extremely high detail scans of each slice. That’s why they needed AI, to try and piece those flat layers back together into some sort of 3D structure.
Once they have the 3D structure, the scans are useless and can be deleted.
In time it should be possible to scan the tissue and get the 3D structure without such extreme data use.
Imagine donating your body to science and the scientists slice your brain and scan them, then decades later you suddenly wake up in a virtual space because the scientists are finally able to emulate a copy of your brain in a supercomputer.
Sounds good to me. You should also look into cryonics. Basically you sign up with a company and donate your body to them, when you die they pump you full of antifreeze and then vitrify you in liquid nitrogen. Right now there’s no way to recover from it, the antifreeze is toxic and we don’t yet know how to undo the cell damage from freezing. But the idea is someday in the future we will figure those things out, and then hopefully be able to thaw the frozen dead person, fix the damage caused by the freezing process, fix whatever problem killed them in the first place, and reanimate them.
For a lower fee, they will cut off your head and just freeze that. Idea being that someday in the future they will be able to transplant your brain into an artificially created body.
Just gotta lower the clock speed enough for us not to notice. As long as we don’t interact with the outside world, just other stored human brains, it can be slow as molasses and we won’t notice.
Imo Reddit has been the winner of the 3rd party apps and fuck spez protests. The users came crawling back. A few of us went to lemmy and formed quality communities, but for the most part, a large majority are on there.
Really? It was more work to find and occasionally add communities than it was to spend months-years to accumulate subs for your frontpage and block subs for all? I browse all on lemmy and find new communities that way. Or by links and referrals for newer ones.
It’s worth noting that Reddit changed too, permanently, both in terms of ease of use (not only 3rd-party apps, but also the mobile and desktop browser routes too) and in how many content creators simply left - who knows what they are even doing now (reading books, touching grass, some came here ofc). Even many niche subs over there are empty, dead, or one may consider them dying from lack of interesting content (though those people still there I expect would be resistant to admit that).
And it will be interesting to see how that changes further, the moment they get their IPO and thus can finally kill off old-Reddit, which still allows you to block ads iirc? That will drive additional content creators away. Perhaps they will come here - despite how we are not ready for that.
Anyway, the old Reddit is just flat gone, for many people, and there is no going “back”, ever, even if you wanted to, it’s not there to return to, especially after the IPO changes it still further.
I still visit Reddit and that's definitely been my experience - my front page diversity has gone way down, many of the subreddits I am subscribed to have basically gone silent. There's still a few specialized ones left, and the big news ones I still read, but only in old reddit. When old Reddit is gone then so am I.
Why wait? Jump now! Hehe, okay so only you know your schedule, it’s mostly just a funny phrase (but also: don’t sleep on it forever - you don’t want to be surprised one day when it disappears overnight with no notice).
For me, it’s not just emptiness - it’s the site being devoid of content anymore. Like look at r/firefox after the mods left (I forgot which communities got ousted vs. who left voluntarily, but either way that community packed up and followed them iirc). It is all just the most basic of questions “how do I…?”, often with later edits “I should not have bothered asking, these people will just yell at you”. Just about every post has 1 or 0 upvotes (though more uncommon spikes above 10 do exist, and even rare ones with hundreds), but the titles of the popular posts are all things that are extremely common knowledge - “Mozilla says Apple’s new browser rules are “as painful as possible” for Firefox”, “YouTube is loading slower for users with ad blockers yet again”, “Will Firefox survive in the browser market?”, “Chrome wants to track me? Bye. I use Firefox …”, “Google settles $5 billion privacy lawsuit over tracking people using ‘incognito mode’ (Re: Switch to Firefox ASAP).” These are things that I constantly hear about on Lemmy.
And even more than that, I dread speaking there after Rexit - the trolls omg the trolls… it’s just not fun. Then again, I tended to make posts advertising useful alternatives to Reddit, so you could argue that I brought that upon myself? :-P (edit: although in a community that calls itself by the name r/RedditAlternatives, THAT was the POINT of the discussion that we were TRYING to have there!!)
Similarly with twitter and mastodon. Generally, that’s fine … smaller niche online spaces are a good thing (as many who’ve remained have discovered I suspect).
But in the end, for those who see this fediverse project as a mission to “take back the web” … so far only pretty minor movement has been made on that front. To the point that IMO I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter etc just “win” and the whole “alternative” social media thing stays “alternative” and relatively small. If there’s a chance of this, I’d say to fediverse advocates that they should maybe rethink what the fediverse is and what it’s good and not good for, because there’s a real chance here that the fediverse kinda dropped the ball, especially mastodon which has been going strong for a while now.
I’ve never used Mastodon, but from what I’ve heard it’s an entirely different ballgame where you basically need to go where the people are. e.g. artists seeking commission work need more rather than less people, and if you want to follow a particular someone, you go to where they are not the other way around.
And if their servers have anywhere close to the level of technical glitches that we do here on Lemmy… well it is quite off-putting, especially to non technically minded people.
I’m not sure they have technical glitches in the same way lemmy does. Interestingly, the difficulties people have, I think, are because federated social media is actually a bad non-idea technology to use for a twitter clone.
So much either doesn’t work how you’d expect or involves new problems that all together they start to defeat the point for many. For example, replies to a post. The author of the post sees all of the replies. But replies aren’t actually federated unless certain conditions are met based on whether someone on your instance follows the person writing the reply. As a result the author of a post that receives many replies has to manage/tolerate a bunch of replies that have no awareness of the fact that they’re just repeating what has already been said, sometimes many times over. For people replying to a post from a small/niche instance, they basically don’t see any of the other replies, which just makes for bad content for them, but also means they constantly risking being really annoying people which in turn effectively punishes small instances. This is generally referred to as “context collapse”, and yea, it’s something kinda extraordinary when the core feature of a social media platform actively destroys the context of conversations.
Lemmy doesn’t have this problem because its based on groups where the whole premise is that the whole conversation gets federated, and for that reason I think a reddit clone or a forum or a youtube-clone (or anything based on groups, sub-reddits or channels) is a better fit on the fediverse.
The other friction mastodon has is that, as a twitter-clone or microblogging platform, its core mechanic is following people and allowing people to form their own network of connections and friendships. But once you’ve got federation and instances in the mix, where defederation happens, then you have this often completely separate dynamic (ie the relations between instances) capable of completely slicing your personal social network in many destructive ways. Often this happens without people hearing about it (as there aren’t mechanics for notifying people of defederations AFAIU), so that they have to find out after some time to realise that they hadn’t heard anything from a whole bunch of friends and were wondering what had happened. Moreover, what such people can then do to re-connect with those friends is rather non-trivial. It’s probably the major draw back of fedi-drama, that the majority of people affected by it don’t benefit from it and would prefer to just be on the big instance (mastodon.social) that no one really defederates from or just go back to twitter.
EDIT (more ranting):
The way someone I like (as a person on social media) put it, after giving mastodon a good shot, was that mastodon misunderstands what people want from social media, that mastodon puts independence over socialising when people prioritise it the other way around … the whole point is to connect and converse, not to run your own instance and make sure you’ve defederated from everyone who has it coming.
Now there’s the whole issue of making sure someone vulnerable to abuse is able to ensure their own safety and happiness from would-be assholes and abusers and even those eager to voice unwelcome, abrasive and triggering points of view which are generally tolerable because they’re the mainstream. Federation across instances can help with this … but can also make it worse because anyone can talk to you from any instance over which you have no control or information until it’s too late. In many ways, decentralisation isn’t great for these problems and creates new problems that a centralised form of social media simply doesn’t have (not least of which being that the whole thing is about copying you and your posts out to everything on the network). It’s for this reason that BIPOC left mastodon and went back to twitter, because to them, mastodon was the racist/facist place, not twitter. In light of that phenomenon, it’s worth considering the perspective that decentralised social media might be a bit of a weird idea and rightly seen as a bit of a fanatical and even a bit of a right-wing or libertarian movement.
In the case of group-based platforms like lemmy and forums however, I think it makes much more sense. Many independent forums are out there, and have been and hopefully will be for a long time. Why not contribute Open Source software for such things (such as lemmy) and enable them to connect to each other however they wish.
Yikes. It does not sound pretty. For them at least, but indeed, Lemmy is a whole other deal. It seems to mainly just need some polish? Especially easing in new people, if increasing the numbers is really the goal.
Old-Reddit’s days are numbered… so we’d best prepare for the next incoming migration.
The weird thing is that people on mastodon mostly go along happy with their feed. Those that have found the problems too much bounced or just learnt to tolerate it. One thing that may fade away is the idea of running your own personal instance. I get the feeling that some don’t find it to be entirely worth it. There are “relays” though, which are commonly used, and basically feed in content from major instances as though you’re following a bunch of people there. I don’t really know how that goes though.
With lemmy (and kbin too), yea, it certainly feels like it’s not far from being kinda “done”, at least as a version “1.0”. Scaling up to many more users is likely to surface more issues though. But we’ve got many apps and alternative front ends, a somewhat stabilising API and months now of mostly working as intended.
Yeah Lemmy got much better with v0.19, while Kbin has barely improved visibly at all it seems so I just gave up on it for now.
I still suffer the issue, on both mobile and desktop browser, that literally every time I come back, to pretty much anywhere I have to login again - I cleared cookies a few times but that didn’t seem to help. Most instances seem to have that, though I may have an odd selection of them (Kbin, Discus.Online, and StarTrek.website), and there are the occasional days where I have to attempt to make every comment at least twice for it to stick (but at least now if it doesn’t go through, you notice, unlike previously where it disappeared into the void invisibly, though I only had Kbin experience back then).
I haven’t bothered to research the apps yet - security, stability, ads vs. no, etc. - so all that I’m saying is for the vanilla browsing experience.
Also people report that the creation of new accounts from the mobile browser is barely if at all functional. I haven’t tried that myself, but it does seem like the experience varies enormously depending on which method of interface someone is using - and that’s going to be off-putting to a migration event, like if something doesn’t work it would be better to put up a sign saying “this (often?) doesn’t work on a mobile, just go to a desktop computer for this task”. Caveat: assuming the desire is to bring in more people who are less technically minded, for the sake of e.g. content creation.
And this doesn’t even begin to cover the modding concerns:-).
Re kbin, you might be interested in mbin … it’s a fork and has active development happening. They have at least one instance up that I’ve seen. Generally seems to be a positive move.
And yea plenty of rough edges. Your experiences definitely sounds worse than mine though (and I’m on web apps too).
Yea, I do think there’s a bit of cult-hype around federation and decentralisation and has been for a while here in the Fedi. Which is really just tech hype … the idea that some technology magically solves problems.
In reality, better social media requires more than just a technology.
I’ve been on Mastodon for over a year and I never experienced anything that could be classified as a technical glitch. From a tech / UI perspective it feels very polished to me.
I guess the only exception would be that old posts are sometimes missing on profiles from different servers.
Thank you, that’s helpful to know:-). Kbin had MANY issues and that was the closest I’d seen.
It seems to confirm that what is holding Mastodon back isn’t technical at all but just the design - i.e. like if people are on X then that’s where most other people want to be, similar to Windows where it is not technologically superior, just the default for some reason.
Probably an unpopular opinion here, but honestly I’d rather just everyone migrate to lemmy and mastodon and leave reddit and twitter broke and empty husks. A low quality federated platform is still better than a mediocre centralized one.
For “us” e.g. the users of the federated platforms i’d prefer the smaller, nicer and more qualitative community we have currently.
For the users of reddit there is the ones that also want this experience (again) and i am confident they’ll find their way eventually.
For the users of reddit that just want the quick meme/outrage video and farm karma on the ever same joke-chains, i think they are in the better spot for themselves than it would become if they’d clash here with the different culture.
For society as a whole i think enshittification is necessary to drive people off of platforms eventually. I wholeheartedly agree, that the enshittified web needs to go down, but it can only come from people realizing it for themselves.
People having to get used to people is common. If they can get used to their uncle talking about how the earth is flat I’m sure they they can get used to people on Lemmy.
I don’t recommend lemmy because I don’t have conversations about social media sites with people.
On the subs I visited on reddit I’ve encountered virtually no fascists. I don’t need to discuss politics all day and even then the takes were way less extreme than on here.
It might be difficult to imagine for some of the zealots on Lemmy but I don’t want to be stuffed to the brim with Chinese and Russian propaganda. I don’t need to hear how bad the west is and how it has to burn, die, whatever. I don’t care how superior the communist ideology is and why liberals are the root of evil.
It literally reads like a bunch of absolute idiots and edge lords thriving in their bubbles, be it hexbear, chapo stuff, political memes, etc.
Agreed. During the pandemic, I adopted a policy of unsubbing to any subreddit that made me angry. Usually this came in the form of people bringing up trump/capitalism/whatever out of completely nowhere. luckily the Beehaw people seem to be pretty good about actually having conversations and not just devolving into mocking trump every second. But whenever I venture into some of the other instances, I see some of Lemmy’s true colors. Chronically online people completely out of touch with reality kinda run shit around here.
90% of the kind of content you’re talking about can be removed by blocking a couple of domains and a handful of users. I believe that they’ve been defederated from most of the larger instances. You will run into a lot of hot takes on lemmy but that’s not too different from reddit.
I think there’s a few reasons why they may be more prominent on lemmy, though. Communities like r/politics took a while to stabilize and had a large and active moderation team that helped remove the most extreme material, and the community itself was large enough that it was representative of a large swath of the US population. Hot takes would often get downvoted into invisibility, which frustrates people who use forums for trolling, and karma could be used to restrict posting. AFAIK those are not qualities or capabilities currently found on lemmy. I haven’t really read the docs - I prefer to just be a user here - but I have seen discussions that indicate that downvotes don’t get tracked as well as suggestions they be removed altogether.
Also, a new technology - especially one associated with sectors of the FOSS community and anti-centralization - are by their nature going to attract an initial user base that skews in certain directions. I think it was Eric Raymond who observed that hackers, politically, tend to be either socialists or libertarians with very little in between. ESR was being a bit tongue in cheek and the hacker culture back then was different than it is now - or rather computer culture as a whole has expanded so much that the old school hacker types form a much smaller percentage.
I think the most problematic part about lemmy which will ultimately limit its adoption is the chaos that comes in from having dozens of communities across dozens of instances that all cover the same topics. It makes discovery much more challenging than it is on Reddit, and it doesn’t help that many of the clients can make it challenging to identify which topics are actually the most used. One of my favorite clients keeps defaulting to ordering by a most recently created timestamp or something - I’m not really sure. It doesn’t have the support to sort or filter by number of users (although it displays the metric).
The other issue is that I end up having to remain on All rather than just my subscriptions because there’s so few users, so I end up with a ton of random anime, for instance, which I can’t effectively block because they’re all posted in new subs that crop up all the time, and I can’t block using wildcards (which would help a lot).
I do hope that between the lemmy devs and the app devs, they can address those issues.
Did they? Other than /nfl most of the communities I followed went to shit very quickly and haven’t recovered. They are mostly bots talking to bots or the same questions and post over and over with minimal new content
For me, it was politics that sank Reddit. I was banned from a half dozen news forums for criticism of the IDF in Gaza at the beginning of what most people now acknowledge to be an ethnic cleansing. I reported every account calling for murder and genocide of Palestinians, which is against the Reddit TOS. They permanently banned me for “report abuse” for doing their jobs for them. They have obviously shown that there’s no freedom of speech, even when you follow the rules, if it goes against the feelings of the administration and the unelected moderators. Fiefdoms ruled by angry internet trolls shouldn’t get an IPO.
Shadowbanned from r/news and God knows what other subredits, because I refused to add an email. Banned from r/politics because I said that not wearing a mask during Peak COVID was a death wish. (Apparently that’s promoting violence or whatever?). Banned from r/Pyongyang because I dared question next months chocolate rations.
To a degree. The large subreddits, like AskReddit, get far fewer upvotes on the top posts of the week than they used to get. I think there’s a good chunk of folks who left for a replacement, then left their replacement without going back to Reddit.
There’s very little quality on Lemmy. It lacks diversity. It’s quite authoritarian left. Tankies under every rock. Even in non-politics communities. I still use a forked version of Boost to lurk reddit. But as someone else said, if never recommend Lemmy to anyone I actually know.
If that’s what I meant then I would have simply said that. If that’s what you choose to believe, so be it. Most observant people can see this is a rather large echo chamber. It’s really obvious.
Sure, it’s been the “winner” if you were expecting reddit to topple from top spot as best aggregator - but it was never really reasonable to expect that.
Even now, the perspective that Lemmy should strive to be some kind of new reddit is really daft.
What we actually want, is for Lemmy to grow in a sustainable and manageable way with real actual content enjoyed by real contributing users.
The quality of Lemmy has improved dramatically in the last 6 months. Way more users, servers, content, and third party apps. The quality of reddit has decreased dramatically in the last 6 months. User counts may not have suffered, but the content and the experience most certainly has.
To do that they need to make sure they have adequate funding and make sure they don’t incur some huge financial liabilities somehow. The Internet Archive failed at that last part when they decided to lend out ebooks that are under copyright without many limits (and potentially with their Great 78 Project regarding music as well).
I wrote that then deleted it cause I wasn’t sure how you address it internationally. Where PBS is broadcast in the USA, the internet is open to the world.
But, you’re right! It should be publicly funded. I’d have no problem with my tax dollars going towards that.
True, I don’t know how this would work for international stuff, but this is human knowledge and history, it’s something we should be archiving and not tossing to the wind.
Well I meant about Twitter hemorrhaging money and staff on a pretty-much-un-heard-of scale even for the tech industry since Musk took over. That was definitely a problem, and I 100% feel that something definitely needed to be done to right the ship.
Inviting all the Nazis back, and explicitly chasing away the advertisers and all the people who ran the servers and mailed the rent checks, wasn’t the solution either…
No one will convince me he isn't doing this on purpose to tank the brand.
He and his buddies were mad that they couldn't compete. So he made the offer in a manic moment, and then was forced to go through with it. Now that he's got it, he's going to destroy it, and use the loss to reduce his taxes from all his government contracts.
And he simultaneously gets to platform fascists and silence people calling out the powerful. Wins all around.
For a normal person, this looks like failing. I totally get that. But rich people can derive massive benefits from stuff that would ruin us, and every single thing Musk is doing benefits him in some way.
That’s assigning a level of intelligence to Elon that I’m not comfortable with. Plus I’m sure he and his buddies are getting some value out of killing Twitter, but certainly not 44 billion.
He does not have to do it himself. He has accountants and lawyers who can take his stupid decisions and turn them into money.
At a certain point the economies of scale of being a billionaire just keep you rich. What I've said is pretty standard tax bullshit that they grow up pulling.
just spitballing here, but what happens if accountants band together and tell him to do his own damn taxes? he's fucked then, isn't he? the real revolution of the future won't be fought in the streets, but in the accounting departments /s
I mean, you're kind of seeing this with Donald Trump's legal issues. He can't get anyone with real clout, so he's actually facing consequences in that arena now.
Exactly. A broken clock is right twice a day. If "idiot" rich people can monetize their mistakes, consistently do so, and manage to do it almost as if by using the same playbook as each other...they're not idiots, it is on purpose, and they just want enough plausible deniability that they don't get strung up from a Michelin star restaurant.
I don’t think he’s just throwing out random ideas and they suck, he’s clout chasing with the radical right wing. A long time ago he was the face of tesla and spacex, two very functional companies. Basically everyone thought he war brilliant, or competent at the very least. Then he started a downward spiral of negative publicity but the alt-right loving his bizarre antics, starting with calling the diver that rescued a bunch of kids a pedo all because his idea of a submersible in that tiny cave was patently retarded and he was upset nobody was praising his genius.
Skip ahead and here we are. Letting open racists, antisemites, and CSAM posters do whatever they want because it makes the libs mad. Sabotaging Ukrainian starlink because he gave it to them for the clout but realizes the right hates that we help Ukraine.
They rely on you repeating this adage to get away with this shit. It's too consistent. If he were actually stupid, he'd face negative consequences, which is something these folks very rarely have to do.
This phrase doesn’t really work if someone is trying to be malicious in the first place. I usually see it used when someone’s intentions were good but they were just stupid about it. That’s not really the case here
It’s possible that Elon tried to do something malicious, and failed because of stupid choices. It’s also true that the outcome also benefits him.
Since Elmo isn’t playing with his own money, the investors and banks who gave him that money are going to be mad if all he did is run the company into the ground.
I wonder if there’s some new business mumbo jumbo going around, because the company I work for now is exploring our terminology to make it more generic. Last few years it was all Crossing the Chasm and Empowering Citizen Developers. This year it seems clarity of communication is the hot fire.
he’s not even able really kill it either. everyone i know still calls them tweets. even in the articles i read, the authors all say twitter or “X, formerly known as twitter”. it’s such a stupid branding decision that no one is buying into it
To be completely fair, it’s been over for a while. Even if you completely forget about infrastructure, between the endless wars for licenses, endless removals of content from platforms, shitty inconvenient apps, and regional locks, it’s already a dying market.
On top of all of that, they’re implementing the “don’t you have 5 extra dollars” strategy, with skyrocketing monthly prices for each of these. If it was 15$ a month to watch anything, i would still pay. but it’s 15$ for each of them, and they still serve you ads, and sell your data
The funny thing is we’re rapidly approaching the point where there’s more digital content than any single human could consume in a lifetime. Including content from before copyright. So the main thing streaming services offer you is convenience and up-to-date media. But if you’re just trying to entertain yourself 30-year-old 40-year-old 50-year-old 60-year-old 70-year-old content can be just as engrossing. You just get emotionally invested in it.
If you can go to a source of older content it often comes pre-filtered for the better stuff too, so you don’t have to wade through a ton of rubbish to find the occasional gem like you do with the new stuff.
Reviews from sites like IMDb and rotten tomatoes. As a movie or series is older, or finished, the general audience has had plenty of time to review it and if it’s fondly remembered, then it might get mentioned on here or other social platforms.
The issue with new content is that it can be amazing at first and then they release the last two episodes and ruin pretty much the entire series, eg. Game of thrones, and more recently, secret invasion.
I’ve found a DVD rental place close to me with quite a collection. Honestly thinking about just unsubscribing from all streaming and going all in on DVD rental. I watched one recently for the first time … you forget how consistently good the qualilty is compared to streaming (YMMV). But, in true hipster fashion, being more deliberate about what I watch, more openly exploratory, making more of an event of it, all seems attractive. If streaming were actually convenient, fine, but with the way things are now … they can go to hell.
this is a rose tinted glass tbh. maybe if you’re watching a dvd on an iphone screen, but DVDs were limited to 720p, and a bad one too. You need modern bluerays to really get up to par with HD streaming services.
There was also the forgotten format, D-VHS which was a specialized VHS tape tape which the recordings could be at 720p or 1080i resolutions. Or the same resolution as DVD but at a higher bitrate so there are less noticeable digital compression artifacts than DVD. The introduction of HD-DVD and Blu-ray disc formats kept the D-VHS format from ever becoming widely adopted.
The place has plenty of Blu-Rays too … I’m grouping them in with DVD for convenience … also you shouldn’t presume the quality of my internet and streaming subscriptions or even my TV.
One of the many things that drove me away from physical media to streaming. Big companies were always pulling the “you will watch what I want you to see” approach. It’s also what killed cable and satellite.
That being said, I’ve found myself checking out more and more DVDs from the library simply because it’s reliable, and I find it enjoyable in a way. I don’t really care about HD quality or whatever – DVD quality is fine.
Yep, Get those for like 2 bucks at goodwill. Hell, even entire box sets.
Almost got the entire collectors edition band of brothers box set for 2 bucks at goodwill once… only reason I didnt is cause it was missing like 3 of the disks, and I didnt want to spend the rest of my life trying to hunt those 3 down.
Yep … I forgot to mention that. Overall, when I watched a DVD for the first time in ages, it was somewhat eye opening … like we’ve truly gone backwards on what the home viewing experience can be apart from the somewhat minor convenience of being not needing to store the DVDs at home.
Downvoted for telling the truth. I know people raising kids who don’t plant their kids in front of a tablet or TV to watch Disney+ or YT ever. It’s possible if you spend some goddamn time with your child and have a creative mind.
We got Disney + for our kids and they couldn't care less. The only thing they were interested in was The Mandolorian (bored after the first season) and the latest live action Spiderman (which was not available in Disney+ !!!). We'll be canceling once our special deal is over. Maybe we're lucky that our kids don't care for it because that will save us some money.
Nah, my kids prefer Netflix. Even then, they prefer to play games instead. So I’ll be steering them toward video games instead of TV, and only for a limited time each day.
We all knew that even before the strike too. Musicians get paid pennies on a dollar, and it’s the same with writers. Actors are probably treated the same way, if you’re not one of the hall of fame elites who get insane cash for garbage roles, after they’ve been in a Marvel movie once
Just read an article stating that the writers of a show were only paid a combined $3000 after the show was streamed over 16 million hours on Netflix. These companies try to crack down on piracy by claiming artists/writers/actors don’t get paid if we pirate but they’re clearly not getting paid anything outside their normal wages when we don’t pirate either.
Dbrand has a really strong case here IMO, since they pretty heavily edit the internals and add a few easter eggs, which are still visible in Casetify’s final designs
Dbrand discovered Casetify allegedly copied 117 different designs, down to the many digital manipulations it made to the images. Dbrand says it holds registered copyrights for each of these products, all of which were registered before Casetify’s product launch.
Also, TIL:
Disclosure: The Verge recently collaborated with Dbrand on a series of skins and cases
Map makers used to do this to catch people ripping off their work, looks like dbrand made a solid decision in doing the same (though probably not intentionally)
Fair enough, I’ve heard good things about their quality and customer service (being great about replacements and technical issues) but there’s lots to choose from. There are others you can go to for the products
I’ve personally had a few terrible customer service experiences over the years, to the point that I stopped buying from them. I’ve had years of experience selling phones, applying screen protectors, and skins, and sometimes d brand sends you one that straight up doesn’t fit. And even with pictures (I had one that was too small for the phone, hard to argue with that), they refuse to acknowledge it was the product’s fault and refuse refunds.
I never got one but their airpods skin was ridiculous and close to impossible to install and they basically posted a snarky response saying how even though the product is perfect and the customers are all idiots, they’ll try to make it easier to install for our tiny brains.
So I don’t really care that they have an “attitude” with advertising. I care that that attitude also permeates throughout all customer service experiences, and that they have this idea that they can do no wrong to the point that they refuse refunds to people who deserve them.
So I’m not buying from them ever again, but I can’t deny they have a case here. That’s all I was saying, but the redditors yet again confuse the downvote button for the disagree button, but hey, they’re probably also the ones defending d brand so no surprise there.
Ironically, despite Apple’s whining to get to this point, between this, and the EU forcing them to adopt USB-C, and, hopefully 3rd party stores and browsers, I may consider an iPhone for my next phone.
It’s a pity you almost need to point a gun to their head for them to consider unshittifing their products.
Yeah. My iphone fanatic of a friend was complaining about something on hers the other day, and was like “Why doesn’t Apple just do {whatever}?”
My reply was basically that Apple didn’t become a trillion dollar company by giving customers what they want. They became a trillion dollar company by telling customers what they want and marketing the crap out of it.
It’s popular idea for a lot of innovation focused groups tbh. “If I have the people what they asked for I would have given them faster horses.” -Henry Ford
To be fair, Google has been doing the same stuff with RCS E2E encryption. It ain’t open. There is a reason why Android isn’t littered with dope messaging apps that support encrypted RCS.
You mean rebranded safari? That would be a no, but when I say rebranded Safari, that’s just the rendering engine, not the whole app. Other browsers can add features.
Other browsers, however, have to use the non-accelerated version of the WebKit engine, however. So third-party browsers will always have worse performance than Safari proper. Only Safari has access to the high-performance version of the rendering engine. I think that’s what the question was.
I don’t know how much of a gun it was. Apple has definitely been working on RCS support for a year; you don’t add that in a few months. Similarly I’m pretty sure Apple has been considering USB C in iPhone since at least when they started working on the USB C on iPad, which is what 5 years old?
Of course without pressure they would have probably be slower to move forward, and with Apple secrecy it’s always hard to tell how long things have been ready to ship. But let’s not pretend they just woke up this morning with a horse head in their bed and told their direction team to start working on this.
I hear you, but isn’t the proverbial horse’s head the fact that the EU is looming over them and forcing them to make a move?
RCS and USBC have been available for a while. It seems disingenuous not to acknowledge that Apple has purposely dragged their feet so they could make more profit selling proprietary software and hardware which is probably why you’re being downvoted
I saw a rumor mill style post that Apple was going to allow sideloading of apps. If so, that’ll probably get me to switch. These changes and choice in software eliminates my gripes with iOS vs. Android.
As a point of clarity, I think both suck. But if Apple removes it’s disadvantages (even if by force) and is the more privacy respecting option out of the box, it makes sense to me.
Let’s be fair, things like RCS E2E encryption are firmly under control by Google. People like to claim RCS is open, but it’s not.
If RCS was a proper open standard, we would have a lot of awesome messaging apps to choose from. We don’t, and the reason is because Google has been gatekeeping.
I’m annoyed that Apple is late to the game, and I hate that they needed to be pressured to get here, BUT I’m glad to see that they’re going to support universal alternatives to the crap you still have to ask Pichai to please let you use.
Also RCS is build that way. It has more features than SMS, but underneath is even worse than it. Why in the 2023 people massively want to go back tying their chat app with mobile carrier? Like, giving what Internet standards we now have RCS should really be considered deprecated, hope we won’t be stuck with it for next 30 years.
They just need to stop using slaves and fighting attempts to fight against it and I might actually get to appreciate the cool things their engineers do actually make.
This is specifically Bavaria. They also recently found out that their vice president has a past as a Nazi and the reaction of their president was essentially “Oh no. Anyway…”. So, yeah, if you considered visiting the Oktoberfest, maybe reconsider.
Eh, I don’t expect random tourists to be locked up by the fascists, nor do I necessarily expect the not-quite-fascists to distance themselves from the fascists, just from losses in the tourism industry.
I’m mostly just saying, there’s tons of places you could be traveling to and “drinking beer with fascists” isn’t quite as attractive anymore.
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