“Data, stop. Data. Stop. Data, SHUT UP!”

This is sort of implicitly true. You can’t get people’s money if they can’t figure out how to use your product/service.

At the same time… People are pretty dumb.

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

Lol, I read that as “There’s no reason to believe Trump still has classified documents”, and I was thinking “bull shit there’s not!”

The actual headline makes much more sense.

How do you figure? I remember reading somewhere that using a phone while driving is worse than driving drunk, and I see people using their phones on the freeway, every day.

I could see the delay being caused by the rise of ubiquitous social media or something. For the first few years, there just weren’t as many reasons to be checking your phone in the car. And there’s the intersection of distracted driving with bigger vehicles.

As a Canadian, I’d love to believe that. As someone who’s recently driven in and out of Vancouver a bunch of times…I really don’t.

Yeah, this was really interesting. The big revelation is that in Europe, the vast majority of cars (80+% or something) are standard transmission, whereas in the US the vast majority (95+%) are automatic.

And the thing is…you can’t use your cellphone while you’re driving a manual.

Combine that with the relatively gigantic cars & trucks that Americans prefer, and you get a long way to explaining the huge gap in relative fatalities.

Of course…that doesn’t explain why fatalities are more than twice as high in the US as in Canada (where automatic transmissions & trucks are similarly popular)

I think they claimed they’re not discriminating against browsers, they’re just better at identifying adblockers on Firefox or something.

Illegal to do…what? Not offer high-res videos? To have any delay before streaming videos? To refuse to serve you videos, even if doing so caused them to lose money? How would you enforce that on Google, much less on smaller startups? Would it apply to PeerTube instances?

Google sucks for doing this. It’ll drive people to competitors–hopefully even federated competitors. But laws to ‘fix’ the problem would be nearly impossible to craft–and would be counterproductive in the long term, because they’d cement the status quo. Let Google suck, so that people switch away from it.

Well, fair. But even in that case, they have every right to degrade your YouTube experience, as owners of YouTube. As ISP (I mean, assuming NN was still a thing) they couldn’t selectively degrade traffic, but YouTube has no obligation to you under net neutrality.

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Google is not an ISP. With or without net neutrality, Google could fuck with YouTube users.

I’ve installed Linux on at least 20 laptops & desktops in the past decade, many for first-time users. I generally go with Mint or ElementaryOS for newbies. I can’t remember ever having a compatibility issue. I’m sure they still happen sometimes, but when people talk about it they act like it’s still 2005.

They’ve never released proper open-source drivers for Linux, or helped external developers make any, or made it easy to use their closed driver with Linux. They’re just hostile to open source, basically. That used to be pretty common in the old days, but most companies have given up and joined in, which is why installing Linux is usually a smooth experience these days.

If you’re using Linux: get an AMD card. They just work out of the box, no failures to boot to GUI or anything. It just works…like everything else. Which, having spent 20 years fighting with graphics drivers on Linux, is sheer bliss to me.

Oh, but the defacto standard for anything AI-related is NVidia. So if you ever wanna mess with LLMs, object detection, speech recognition, etc…you’re likely stuck with NVidia, and the old routine: Got a problem? Of course you do. Try reinstalling the drivers three times, then uninstall some random other packages, then burn some incense, say 10 Hail Marys, and make an offering to the GPU gods before restarting the computer. Didn’t work? Well, repeat all those steps in a different order. Fifth time’s the charm!

That was true in 2000. The situation had improved a lot by, like, 2005, but it was still pretty rough. You were still likely to have to drop to a console at some point even in 2010.

These days there’s 20 distributions that are easier to install, use, and maintain than Windows, and you don’t even have to know ls to use it.

There’s an important difference, though, especially with Lemmy. You used XMPP to communicate with particular people. When Google convinced, whatever, 70% of users to use Talk and then slammed the door shut, the smaller instances were no longer viable. People on those instances lost contact with their friends. They aren’t going to just chat with whoever else happened to be left outside the walls.

But I don’t look for specific people on Reddit, or on Lemmy. Any large-enough instance is fine. Just like people moved from Reddit to Lemmy, they can move from one instance to another. A major rift could drop the quality of the experience, at least for a while, but the instances would still be viable. They’re not suddenly useless the way an isolated Jabber server was.

FTX stole from customers. Binance didn’t sufficiently spy on its customers. They are not the same.

You think Google was fishing for VC money?

H1B holders are chained to the employer (as are other visas), but green card holders are not. Source: green card holder.

That works if you’re dominant in the market, and you have companies rushing to make software for your platform. If you’re not, you end up as an also-ran platform with a handful of half-baked ports (like every “smart TV”).