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scarabic ,

Musk sheepishly suggested that he didn’t mean “advertisers as a whole.”

“Advertisers have a right to appear next to content that they find compatible with their brands,” he told ad giant WPP CEO Mark Read during an interview on Wednesday. “What is not cool is insisting that there can be no content that they disagree with on the platform.”

How is that “not cool?” I don’t understand how he can possibly object to a company spending their advertising dollars wherever they damn well choose to. He repeatedly makes it clear that he feels entitled to their budgets. There is zero basis for that. I truly cannot fathom how he can be so dense about this.

scarabic ,

Fuck you, Jack.

scarabic ,

There’s so goddamn much to swear about in these fucking times we live in that I really respect anyone who can still hold their shit together enough not to.

scarabic ,

Right but the bubble of rightness you speak of is usually only assumed to include the company staff. Really powerful CEOs have their board inside the bubble too, or even public investors. But Elon thinks the customers work for him too. That’s really beyond the pale.

scarabic ,

I am so gratified to learn that others use this term, too. Ain’t nothing wrong with some hamburger meat in a large tortilla chip with cheddar cheese, but it is most definitely not the same food item as you get from a taco joint. This is one of those home cooking exclusives.

scarabic ,

Yeah that’s a good point. We make some pretty gourmet meatloaf at my house so I might quibble with you on that one. But I am sure there’s some awful meatloaf out there too. Manwch is just… I can’t even. Isn’t it basically dog food you put on bread and call it a sandwich?

“Complete Dehumanization”: Israel Killed Over 800 Palestinians in 11 Days (truthout.org)

From June 1 to June 11, Israeli forces killed over 800 Palestinians and wounded over 2,400 as they carried out bombardments and raids across Gaza, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported. This is an average of over 72 Palestinians killed each day at the hands of Israeli forces....

scarabic ,

Maybe that’s because people more concerned than yourself have been risking their lives and going to great effort to inject aid to keep it away for one more day, one more day.

scarabic ,

It will be the ultimate irony when Israel finally carries out its own Holocaust of millions.

scarabic ,

It has been cringe in the extreme to watch them debate whether they are giving their babyman chieftain enough billions to appease him.

scarabic ,

I think if you read between the line, Tesla people aren’t just worried that he will stop working as hard for them, but also worried that he will flip and become an active detractor of theirs. Look at what he’s done with OpenAI. You can say he owns too many shares of Tesla but he could do quite a bit of damage to their stock price merely by selling them.

scarabic ,

It skews young, and young skews left.

Now if only young voted…

scarabic ,

TNG has young fans and you can have enough old farts like me around to populate a TNG forum while the whole is still mostly younger.

scarabic ,

“Virtually impossible?” I haven’t had ads on YT in over 6 years, and I don’t even use a blocker or alt client.

scarabic ,

Every bit of effort and resourcing they spend on this returns revenue directly. Which is more than they can probably say for a lot of things they do. And they’re smart enough to know that they can’t eliminate blocking, just make it harder and harder so that fewer and fewer people do it.

scarabic ,

I pay for YT Premium. It’s 100% worth it based on my very high usage of YT for entertainment and learning. Best streaming service bargain by far. Netflix’s pile of shitty self-made movies is a ripoff by comparison.

scarabic ,

No need to get vulgar, there, chief. I’m just a satisfied customer who doesn’t understand why watching YT videos has to be such a deathmatch with their engineering team all the time. I’ll bet that the majority of people here get the value from YT that Premium charges for, and a sizable number of people here pay for some streaming service that they actually use less than YT. Yet because YT is a website with a free tier, the arms race of ad blocking / countermeasures is never ending. People wind up hating YT and talking about them like the third reich, when it’s really a service that all of us love and depend on. Shrug?

scarabic ,

Your account is a festering shithole. My YT is full of woodworking and gardening tutorials, geopolitics and cosmology explainers, Tolkein lore and a few other fun things I enjoy. I’m sorry yours is not as fulfilling.

Hamas Wants Guarantees Ceasefire Will Actually Happen, While US Says Hamas Is Rejecting the Proposal (truthout.org)

Following the UN Security Council vote to approve a three-phase ceasefire in Gaza, U.S. officials and other international allies of Israel are cynically placing blame on Hamas for a stall in current ceasefire negotiations — even as Israel has insisted on indefinitely continuing its massacre in Gaza and Hamas has said its main...

scarabic ,

“Look at these bad faith negotiators who won’t even accept our empty promises.”

scarabic ,

He realized that if you have a large number of people on remote control, you can do pretty well with Ponzi schemes.

scarabic ,

Right? In all science fiction, artificial intelligence starts out better than us, and the only question is whether it can capture some idiosyncratic element of “being human.” Instead, AI has started out dumber than us, and we’re all standing around saying “uh what is this good for?”

scarabic ,

I actually have a child, unlike some of the people downvoting you, and I agree with you. I’m not willing to watch my kid’s educational environment destroyed by smartphones all for the sake of some “but muh child” panic. My kid doesn’t even own a smartphone. Anyone want to tell me that I’m somehow risking their life? If there’s a shooter at their school, me knowing what’s happening in real time will not save their life.

As a footnote, the top commenter hinted that if someday we could solve the gun / danger thing, THEN we could remove smartphones. But the reality is that that panic will never be satisfied. There will never come a point when people say “I’m content that there are no dangers to my child during the day.”

Ban fucking phones in class. Maybe it’s just me living through my whole childhood without one just fine, but ffs people don’t even see how addicted to them we’ve become. Kids deserve a chance at at least a few years of life without that.

scarabic ,

He’s trying to bring attention to his ongoing campaign to show that OpenAI are somehow evil crooks that cheated him and are going to destroy the world. He projects much.

scarabic ,

It’s good to know that they have pretty good longevity. One thing complicating this is that panel technology has gotten better and better during that time. There’s a graph on Wikipedia plotting how much better the various types of panel have gotten since the 70s. A lot of them have doubled in output since the early 90s.

So on the one hand, these old panels are outputting 75% of what they started with, which is good. But on then other hand they are only outputting about 37% of what new panels could.

Not that we should throw old panels away. There’s plenty of sun to go around (though I guess the average homeowner only has one roof to use). It’s just interesting how fast the tech has improved and how that might factor in to some longevity calculations.

scarabic ,

Yep. Actual coup plotters don’t stand on street corners with signs yelling about it.

scarabic ,

Probably never. Not because I necessarily disagree with you in spirit. This speech is damaging and without redeeming value. My only problem is that the process of deciding what speech is and isn’t permissible is more dangerous than this speech.

scarabic ,

Ah everything you e never actually tried to do seems easy. Especially when you’re 14.

scarabic ,

And that’s the most insidious part. I’m not sure people are voting to do good in the world anymore. Some of these votes are stones thrown at someone. Like a Trump voter told me, “The whole system is rotten and he’s going to destroy it utterly so we can build anew. Things might get worse for a while before they can get better, but there’s no other way.”

I found that statement terrifying because the dude basically said he thought we needed to destroy society but he said absolutely nothing about what to build in its place.

scarabic ,

The larger the organization, the larger their resources, but also usually the greater their complexity and legacy burdens. Large organizations also move slowly. All of this can delay things long after we might think they ought to have happened.

Netanyahu says deadly Israeli strike in Rafah was the result of a 'tragic mistake' (apnews.com)

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that a “tragic mistake” was made in an Israeli strike in the southern Gaza city of Rafah that set fire to a camp housing displaced Palestinians and, according to local officials, killed at least 45 people....

scarabic ,

Israel is a democracy - a democracy that keeps millions of its constituents in an open air prison and occasionally genocides them, but a democracy, and therefore righteous and good.

I’m glad we cleared that up.

scarabic ,

The whole war is a civilian meat grinder. How are they possibly saying oops we made this one mistake?

scarabic ,

…that the Israeli people somehow keep making over and over again.

scarabic ,

Yeah that’s the problem with stooping to exchange low blows with a terrorist group: you become a terrorist group. With nukes.

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)

You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...

scarabic ,

I think you’re right that with sufficient curation and highly structured monitoring and feedback, these problems could be much improved.

I just think that to prepare an AI, in such a way, to answer any question reliably and usefully would require more human resources than there are elementary particles in the universe. We would be better off connecting live college educated human operators to Google search to individually assist people.

So I don’t know how helpful it is to say “it’s just expensive” when the entire point of AI is to be lower cost than a battalion of humans.

scarabic ,

Humans aren’t great at reliably knowing truth from fiction too

You’re exactly right. There is a similar debate about automated cars. A lot of people want them off the roads until they are perfect, when the bar should be “until they are safer than humans,” and human drivers are fucking awful.

Perhaps for AI the standard should be “more reliable than social media for finding answers” and we all know social media is fucking awful.

scarabic ,

A fair perspective.

scarabic ,

They should test it and rule out the health concerns. No one should leave room for Greenpeace to make scientific claims. If its safety hasn’t been studied and proven, then Greenpeace are doing their job of forcing that to happen.

scarabic ,

If it’s been studied and proven safe, there shouldn’t be any room for Greenpeace to make their claims. They’re not a science authority. So what has been done to study its safety and why is anyone even listening to Greenpeace?

scarabic ,

Yes as your granddad points out, you can’t just plug a power source into any old outlet at any time. Selling a system like this on Amazon to apartment dwellers seems to encourage just that behavior.

scarabic ,

But isn’t a power outage the time you need it?

scarabic ,

As your own story shows, even in today’s modern times, there is planet of aging wiring still out there and in use.

If you’re asking whether it’s possible to build a home that can work this way, it’s been possible forever and it doesn’t require anything fancy, just a properly rated input outlet (not the same as a regular old bedroom wall plug) and a switch to disconnect from the mains so you aren’t electrifying the grid while workers are repairing it. Whole house generators have been a thing forever. You just have to take some elementary precautions. You don’t just plug some dynamo you bought off Amazon into any old bathroom outlet and say “tada!”

scarabic ,

You don’t want to be sending current up into the grid while workers are repairing it during a power outage. If you just plug some shit into your bedroom outlet, that will happen. You need to disconnect your house from the mains. Whole house generators are old news, but no, your bedroom wall plug isn’t rated to power your whole house, and no, you aren’t just electrifying your own wiring if you try to do so. Whole house generators aren’t hard but they aren’t this easy. And you should be suspicious at how magically simple it sounds to just plug a dynamo into your wall to power everything. It’s the kind of thing we would love to be true because it’s so elegant but there’s a little more to it.

scarabic ,

Whole house generators have been around for a long time and they are usually wired, at the junction, into a few specific lines to essential appliances like refrigerators because it’s hard to produce as much current as the grid on your own, and you want to spend what you can generate on site wisely. Trying to power your whole house through some bedroom outlet is not going to work well. Your TV will sit there sucking some of that power listening for your remote to turn it on while your lights will flicker and your fridge will chug chug chug and not stay cold.

scarabic ,

Yeah this is not an emergency backup at all. It’s an attempt to add some local storage to the grid and lower your bill. Everything about it is wrong for a power outage. I’m SURE they make this clear on the box!! ;D

scarabic ,

Because as the article says, consumers use more power during non-solar hours.

The Ukraine war has also caused oil and gas prices to rise in Europe, so all alternatives to those need to remain on the table until Russia fucks off.

scarabic ,

The thing is that it does represent some problems. First of all if Germany has already reached the limit of what it can do with solar then that’s sobering news because it is far from 100% sustainable. More solar than it can use? We should ask why. Not enough storage capacity: that’s a problem when consumers use more power in solar off-hours. And if energy prices become too volatile or even negative, that could harm the non-solar energy provider who provide the backup that solar requires.

I get the anti-corporatist message and all, but really we should look a little more deeply than our favorite narrative if we want to understand things. Reddit also needs to realize that business pages cater to business interests and investors, so not every headline is framed in terms of consumer benefit. News outlets can publish articles for business readers whether or not they are owned and puppeted by them.

scarabic ,

Well in a very basic way, more solar than we can use means there is waste. Too many panels produced and installed. And if solar generation capacity is going to waste, that means Germany doesn’t have enough storage to keep it in, and that’s a problem. And who knows what negative energy prices will do to the other power producers who back up solar (which, you know, doesn’t produce at night). That would be a problem. So there is a little more to this than just the headline. Also, Reddit needs to learn that business stories are written for investors and business readers and they don’t frame everything in terms of broad human interest.

scarabic ,

Gee, you mean some internet rando didn’t figure out a solution that no one in German energy could think of?

scarabic ,

There’s no upper limit on either really. But why would you ever install more than you can store? That’s still waste. Solar panels have nonzero cost and environmental impact.

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