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BarbecueCowboy

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BarbecueCowboy ,

You might be overestimating how much content that was. Streaming services try to maintain an illusion of neverending content but last I saw except for prime, the amount of content they offer has been trending down.

Those numbers are fairly accessible for an average person with 3 or 4 large hard drives.

BarbecueCowboy ,

There are resellers in the US who will set you up with the infrastructure to do it yourself. You don’t need much and it’s less expensive than you’d think, almost turnkey.

Demand is more than high enough in poor areas too, they probably made a really good return before it shut down.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Plex operates a service on their end that mostly covers you if you fuck up the network routing. It’s probably the least user friendly part of the setup, so kind of a big deal.

Amazon Mulls $5 to $10 monthly price tag for unprofitable Alexa service, AI revamp (www.reuters.com)

Amazon (AMZN.O) is planning a major revamp of its decade-old money-losing Alexa service to include a conversational generative AI with two tiers of service and has considered a monthly fee of around $5 to access the superior version, according to people with direct knowledge of the company’s plans.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Alexa has a tendency to give you the ‘featured’ product no matter how precisely and specifically you ask her for something. Even if you don’t have to research and know exactly what you want, it’s almost always easier to just go find your phone.

The real game changer for Alexa was always having a voice assistant that you can integrate with just about whatever you want that isn’t tied to someone’s phone. The idea of going into someone’s house and just saying ‘Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights’ or ‘Alexa, is it cold outside?’ is where the Alexa magic lies, but Amazon never could figure out how to make that profitable on it’s own, just doesn’t contribute to the business case.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Google has these phases for the products they develop, right now they’re in the phase where they’ve functionally abandoned home and are giving it just enough support to try to get some other company to manage/fix it and let them profit off of it.

I’m not usually a fan of Apple, but they’re probably going to be the ones defining where things go. If they want the market, it’s basically up for grabs right now.

BarbecueCowboy ,

You’re right that is a real loss. Really, an Alexa that didn’t require a personalized amazon account could still be huge if they could figure out how not to have to justify the costs of running the servers. I think that unwillingness to let Alexa be just a voice assistant is the key roadblock. In a similar vein, Alexa for business could have been a really big deal too if they could have worked it out a bit faster but now I think interest has mostly died out before it had a chance to be adopted.

I’m not a huge fan of the company and I think it’s a coin flip as to whether they would just completely screw it up, but I wonder what would have happened if someone like Crestron had taken a real interest instead of just half-assing an integration.

BarbecueCowboy ,

There was a conversation awhile back about how any term used to describe someone with a disability eventually becomes a slur and history tends to back that up, but I’d say ‘special needs’ is probably about the least offensive qualifier we have today.

For 4chan, that’s like a miracle.

Having to score strangers on their 'empathy' and 'courtesy' and 'knowledge' (anything less than a 5 star is a 'bad grade', I am sure) (lemmy.world)

by that i mean, those are intangible, effervescent parts of a human being that should not be quantized down to a fucking amazon star system. the ‘anything less than 5 stars is actually bad’ thing is disgusting as well - all modern companies do this.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Probably doesn’t matter. Having worked similar jobs in the past there’s usually a question along the lines of how you feel about the company overall and if you answer negatively the whole survey counts against them and it sometimes only takes 2 or 3 of those in a month for them to get fired.

Turnover is intentionally exceptionally high and employees aren’t usually treated that well. Pay was pretty great comparatively at the time though.

BarbecueCowboy ,

It’s from reuters, it was mangled in the initial report:

reuters.com/…/biden-ban-us-sales-kaspersky-softwa…

They’ve leaned pretty heavy into AI usage, who knows who wrote it.

BarbecueCowboy ,

But yes, what kind of unit is this?

How lifelong friendships are made.

BarbecueCowboy , (edited )

Roger Garth claims it’s based on a picture of them from around '05. No original photo found and could just be trying to cash in on the trend, but they knew about where the photo was from and offered details we didn’t have before (Obviously, could have been made up).

Filippa hamilton has also claimed it was her, but with no supporting details.

I think Roger is a way better match.

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity (ludic.mataroa.blog)

How stupid do you have to be to believe that only 8% of companies have seen failed AI projects? We can’t manage this consistently with CRUD apps and people think that this number isn’t laughable? Some companies have seen benefits during the LLM craze, but not 92% of them. 34% of companies report that generative AI...

BarbecueCowboy ,

It’s consistently pretty good for writing items with low technical importance and minimal need for accuracy.

I’ll never write a job description myself again and my need for getting with communications for mass correspondence is almost gone.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Honestly, I use it because it does a better job than who we usually use, the items it adds to the Job descriptions usually actually exist.

BarbecueCowboy ,

If all that is true, then why do I still hate ipv6 so much.

BarbecueCowboy ,

The transience and non-indexability is a feature, it’s easier to manage a community if any problem can be solved by just ignoring it for a few days. Just have to hope the issue stays within Discord, sure you could search within discord, but no one is going to and on any large discord the results are likely to be so numerous that it’s worthless. Worst case you lock down a chat channel, mark it as private due to ‘spam’ and create a new one to serve the same purpose as the old to cover it up the rest of the way.

BarbecueCowboy ,

If you search back far enough on some lemmy instances that have defederated others, you’ll find ghosts of old content from those defederated servers, but it’s all local to whatever instance you’re viewing it on. A large amount of the content from the server that went down should also exist on the servers that server was federated with.

These lemmy instances have got to start running out of storage though, I haven’t heard of any kind of automated purging. I’d bet someone somewhere is already working on an archive lemmy.

‘Will I ever retire?’: millennials wonder what’s on the other side of middle age (www.theguardian.com)

Claire*, 42, was always told: “Follow your dreams and the money will follow.” So that’s what she did. At 24, she opened a retail store with a friend in downtown Ottawa, Canada. She’d managed to save enough from a part-time government job during university to start the business without taking out a loan....

BarbecueCowboy ,

Man, that’s a lot better than my plan.

My plan was just to add a lot more bbq and fried food to my diet once I get to around 60.

BarbecueCowboy ,

I will die the way I always wanted to live.

Surrounded by an assortment of artisanal barbecue sauces and fancy hot sauce.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Germany and to a lesser extent Italy were supplying a significant portion as well and it’s likely others would step up if they pulled out. Probably with worse prices and worse hardware, but we’re not at risk globally of running out of places to buy weapons. It’s horrible what is happening to Palestinian civilians in gaza, but in the end, the US armament supplies aren’t strictly required to enable Israel.

BarbecueCowboy ,

I was under the impression that the October 7th attacks were initiated by Hamas.

I believe the official status was just a ‘cease fire’ previously and the response from Israel may be excessive, but that would usually qualify Hamas as the aggressor as they would have been the ones to break the cease fire. If I remember right, Hamas broke the last cease fire a few years back too and then they broke the one a decade ago when they kidnapped and murdered those 3 teenagers.

BarbecueCowboy ,

A lot of the time it was technically ‘up’, but just non-functional/unusable.

Most common for me was just not being able to do anything but look at the front page, couldn’t click on anything without errors.

BarbecueCowboy ,

I’m not completely discounting the possibility you’re right, it is possible you’re just very unlucky, but your line of thinking is pretty consistent with people suffering from depression, and depression tends to make you make decisions that make you stay depressed.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Not for quite as long, but I’ve been there my friend.

I don’t know how to tell you how to alleviate depression, but I can say that if you manage to, things may look drastically more hopeful afterwards. When you’re really truly depressed, the idea that things can get better just doesn’t make sense. You can’t trust your ability to judge that though because when you’re depressed the part of your brain you need for that just isn’t working right. It’s not capable of telling you whether normal happiness is possible, you no longer have the tools you need to judge things accurately.

If you’re like I was, your depression also tells you that you are special in that the ideas that work for a lot of people who go down a path of trying to get better just wouldn’t work for you and it will take any minor setbacks as proof of the same. Your depression isn’t exactly lying to you, it’s just stupid and it’s not qualified to determine that.

I’m pulling for you.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Those are all legitimate concerns, but I’m not sure the effort required to fix real estate prices, crime, and income equality is comparable to the amount of effort required to ban a social media site and some drones from a country that might not have our best interests in mind.

I’m trying to be optimistic about the ban, I’d love to see the drone industry take off in the us and I’d love to see what we could accomplish. It’s not a huge industry and I honestly can’t name a single US drone manufacturer, but I really hope that won’t be the case in a year or two.

BarbecueCowboy ,

The general idea is that it’s a potential cybersecurity concern, it’s along the same lines as the Huawei ban from a few years back. Not entirely without merit, there have been vulnerabilities found in DJI hardware/software that could be used maliciously and some of them were fairly serious. I don’t think anyone has ever found any proof those vulnerabilities were intentional, but I also think that would be super difficult to prove one way or the other.

BarbecueCowboy ,

I think they were just going off US averages. Our average lifespan has been declining past few years but it’s pretty close to 75 if you’re poor.

Gabe hasn’t always taken care of his body, but he’s rich, he’d be likely to hit around 88 in the US. The average lifespan in New Zealand is also a bit higher, so if he stays there then it may add a few years.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Yeah, anecdotes are a thing, one of my grandpas smoked a pack a day too and he beat yours and made it over 100. Our personal experiences don’t trump collected data though, we’re not the average experience and we can expect most to trend towards that.

BarbecueCowboy , (edited )

That brings up an interesting point, they’ve been here 400 years, at one point does something stop being classified as invasive?

If we say never, then the term invasive kind of loses all meaning, but I wonder where the logical cutoff might be and how it’s defined.

BarbecueCowboy ,

As a kid growing up with deadpool comics, that is still a bit of a trip. Of all the Marvel characters that they could make movies off of, I would have put Deadpool near the bottom. I’ll never get used to Deadpool being mainstream.

BarbecueCowboy ,

I’m not saying that cats are stupid, but I spend a lot of time wondering if cats have anything resembling an internal ‘monologue’ like we do. Obviously, it’s unlikely to be super similar to the typical language/word-based systems a lot of us have, but I wonder what it could look like. Is there even anything going through there at all or is it similar to what you would see in someone with aphantasia.

BarbecueCowboy ,

You’re not wrong, but I feel that level of support for one of their releases would be a bit out of character for Bethesda (Without the long-term monetization present in games like Fallout 76). Especially so with the trend of Bethesda’s comments indicating that the consumers are the ones who are wrong for not liking some of the more problematic game design decisions.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Probably, look into dnsmasq? I believe that was the easiest way with openwrt back in the day.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Looking at demographics, predominately is almost an understatement for the Islamic population, looks like maybe up to 96%? I’m treading carefully on my wording here because I know anything along these lines is always sensitive, but it sounds like they’d be inclined to be supportive of Islamic standards, I just kind of wonder where this ban comes from?

BarbecueCowboy ,

lemmy.ml was one of the targets in one of the larger reddit migration waves before we found out how heavy handed the censorship was there at the time and there’s a few large communities that cling to it. And, it’s fair, the communities there don’t typically generate anything where they would reasonably expect to be affected, but still if you block the whole instance, you basically just have to go without as there frequently aren’t similar communities to fill the void.

BarbecueCowboy ,

If you’re talking about the API blackout, there is evidence that it was broken briefly, but there’s nothing indicating it was purposefully disabled for any reasonable amount of time.

There are even posts from the lemmy.ml admins about how difficult it was dealing with the users who had migrated and how difficult it was to deal with the new users. Maybe you’re talking about a different migration, but I have no idea where you got this idea from.

BarbecueCowboy ,

On the reddit end, the API blackout was probably responsible for the largest reddit migration, around June of last year. It’s the high point for active monthly users for Lemmy on fediverse observer still and we had a lot less lemmy instances then. All those other items would be true beyond turning off signups, there were many conversations about performance issues along with a lot of concerns about moderation.

Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem

I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It’s been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s colloquially referred to...

BarbecueCowboy ,

Saying anything negative about China is a violation of rule 1 on lemmy.ml from the admins perspective. They classify anything critical that gains any attention as Sinophobia and file it under bigotry.

BarbecueCowboy ,

I really want Kbin to succeed, but Ernest seems to see the project as something he checks on once every few months and then ignores, but he still seems to want to be the only one who gets to make decisions. I get that he has stuff going on in his life, but the solution to all these problem starts with communicating and working with the community, not disappearing for months at a time and refusing to work with the people who try to help him. You just can’t have a successful project with an approach like that.

BarbecueCowboy ,

You’re objectively wrong.

Objectively.

maybe… /s

BarbecueCowboy ,

Yo, we need to know which two so we can judge you.

BarbecueCowboy ,

I’m still very interested in where Empire Strikes Back stands.

BarbecueCowboy ,

What happened on March 3rd? (Mass increase in active users)

Oh man, and what happened on April 3rd? (Mass drop in average comments)

Did I miss a meeting where we decided to just have massive shifts on the 3rd of every month? Is something big happening now, am I missing it?

Spotify is raising the cost of Premium subscriptions, again (www.engadget.com)

Spotify is officially raising its Premium subscription rates in the US come July, following reports of the move in April. The platform is increasing its Individual plan from $11 to $12 monthly and its Duo plan from $15 to $17 monthly — the same jump as last year’s $1 and $2 price hikes, respectively. However, its Family plan...

BarbecueCowboy ,

I’m all for going sailing but if there are features you want that that can’t quite replicate, it’s also a great time to look at a VPN service with a server in Turkey… Sign up on a Turkish IP and the exchange rate puts you under $2/month USD. This works for a lot of other things too.

BarbecueCowboy ,

I know.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Kansai region specifically, that is a bit more useful info, but that’s not new either.

BarbecueCowboy ,

At that point, just go ahead and add some vodka while you’re there. You’ve got a screwdriver, a cape cod and a vodka lemonade all in one.

BarbecueCowboy ,

www.phoronix.com/…/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks

I wish firefox was faster but benchmarks are pretty common, it’s not hard to test. It’s kind of an unfair fight at this point honestly, large swaths of the web are just built for chrome. There are other benchmark options out there, but even using Mozilla’s own kraken benchmarking solution, it loses tremendously more than it wins. I honestly really respect them for not building their benchmarking system to make their solutions come out on top.

In some benchmarks the lag from firefox is very significant and then on the other hand, when firefox does win, chrome is usually right behind it. It’s not ideal.

BarbecueCowboy ,

I think this is likely going to be true unfortunately, but I also feel like the title is more than a bit misleading. (The title at Ars is identical to the title of the thread here)

I didn’t see anything in this article indicating that Spotify has made any direct comments on whether they were going to open source it or not. From the article, it also sounds like refunds haven’t been publicly stated as the official solution from spotify, but instead just something some people have managed to get spotify support personnel to approve. In fact, it’s stated that Spotify specifically ‘declined to confirm’ that refunds were the official solution.

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