The kind of farming that makes any money isn’t slow work.

It is, however, tangible work with tangible results. Unlike spending months changing the polarity of nanoscopic silicon structure for the non-appreciation of an utterly clueless salesperson whose braindead ideas will have left the world in a worse state than you found it despite anyone’s best efforts.

I should seriously get into woodworking. Kidding. Sorta.

I learned the term Information Kessler Syndrome recently.

Now you have too. Together we bear witness to it.

Of course not. There’s glory, there’s internal CCP politics, pooh bear’s ego, claims over the South China Sea, reducing the US sphere of influence, the fulfilled narrative of a “united China”, etc.

China doesn’t stand to gain anything pragmatic by invading Taiwan. However humans, and dictators in particular, do not always act perfectly rationally and in the best interest of their nation.

There is without a doubt a connection to ScarJo. They asked her to voice the AI, they asked her again right before release, and the CEO tweeted “her” on release.

The only question is whether, backlash aside, they could technically get away with it (which does not make it right).

There is almost certainly internal communication that basically reads “hey let’s get an actress who sounds as close to ScarJo as possible”. There’s also the CEO tweeting “her” on the day of release.

Is that legal? IANAL, but OpenAI’s reaction of immediately shutting that shit down leads me to believe they realized it is, in fact, illegal.

Your comparison is also incorrect. You’re not getting a JEJ soundalike, you’re getting a JEJ soundalike to do a Darth Vader impersonation. Meaningfully different semantics. They don’t just want “white american woman who vaguely sounds like ScarJo I guess” they have proven beyond doubt that they want “The AI from the 2013 movie Her starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson”.

Also legality aside, it’s really fucking weird and ethically wrong. I don’t care if it’s legal or not, you shouldn’t be able to make an AI replicate someone’s voice without their consent.

New notification, old notification, either way it auto-dismisses the system notification after 5 seconds. Why? I guess they don’t trust the DE to manage notifications properly??

So my colleagues know if they send me a message I’ll get to it when I’ll get to it because I probably will have missed the notification.

I know Brave browser has had a lot of controversy in the past regarding their business practices, including rolling out their own crypto-coin.

They apparently make the really bold claim of using their own index exclusively. If true (given their track record I am not 100 % willing to accept that as truth without seeing some independent analysis), that would do wonders for the search ecosystem. I’m definitely interested to see how it pans out.

Wow, looks like they just updated that page and removed all references to their external indexes. Very shady stuff, Kagi. I’d go as far as to say they are now lying by omission.

The archived version of that page from March does open with (emphasis mine):

Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Mojeek and Yandex, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, and other APIs.

Then it goes on to say:

Kagi’s indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and “small web” discussions surrounding a particular topic.

Now reading between the lines, and more importantly knowing how much sheer capital goes into indexing the entire web, I can say with much certainty that Kagi is probably powered mostly by Google since it and Bing (which they aren’t using) are basically the only meaningful players in the space. Yandex is for the Russosphere, and Mojeek is nice but nowhere even close to Google or Bing’s coverage. By their own admission Teclis is more narrowly focused and not meant to replace Google’s index. So I’m going to go ahead and call them big fat liars.

I wouldn’t even care that Google is their main index, that’s fine and they can’t be expected to compete with the billions of dollars Google spends on indexing. But the lack of transparency and shady business practices are a big turn-off for me.

Kagi is just Google’s index with fancy features and filtering on top. They include a few other sources but for regular search it’s almost always going to be Google’s index providing the base results.

They already are! Some young artists are already doing those 2000s nostalgia CD releases for the kicks of having a physical medium.

However a big part of the marketing for vinyl has historically been “the sound is warm/high definition/whatever audiophile bullshit”. Anyone can achieve the same “warmth” with an EQ and some crackle/white noise (it works so well it’s a whole genre called lofi…), but the “vinyl sounds better” crowd will make the unfalsifiable claim that “it’s not the same”.
However, good luck claiming that “CDs sound different from FLACs”!

In the end both vinyl and CD enjoyers are doing the same thing: enjoying music through personal and ritualistic manipulation of physical objects, that also come with nice album art. It’s just that some vinyl enjoyers are attributing some of that enjoyment to a largely made-up supposed “superiority” of sound (yes there are edge cases like “bad” remasters of songs originally released on vinyl, but is that really why anyone buys a turntable? Be honest.).

Kinda was. That’s why the UK and France have a permanent seat on the UNSC but Germany and Japan categorically do not.

Yet another day where I get to use the “sound cleverer than I am” cheat code by just randomly inserting French words in my English.

It’s not. You have the “explore” tab which is more like “today’s viral toots” (which tend to be a lot more varied than Lemmy’s “All/Top 24h” since Lemmy is a link aggregator and doesn’t really lend itself to jotting down thoughts or diatribes), and you have your personal timeline which is people you actively follow. It’s not a cafeteria, it’s your RSS feed.

Where it gets shouty is in replies, especially as those get federated weirdly. But that’s only a problem for the few percent of users who are making content, not for consumers.

At that point he’d outed himself as an asshole to the general public, but he still got big results with SpaceX and Tesla. That incident could have been lost to time and a legacy of undeniable successes.

Hyperloop is where things went cuckoo-bananas business-wise IMO. The delays and broken promises at Tesla were weird, but anyone who’d heard of subways could tell the whole hyperloop thing was doomed to fail, and it became increasingly obvious to anyone who read tech headlines that he wasn’t just any asshole, but a clueless asshole.

“Because safety isn’t a thing we can measure” reads exactly like a dril tweet.

… holy shit there’s a whole academic-level analysis of dril’s tweets. I am enchanted.

Hahaha that’s what frontend devs think, but the backend requirements are just as vague: “Just make this button work”. In my example all the requirements would actually be figured out bit by bit over months, nevermind the prescience required to foresee future architecture-breaking features or scaling requirements. At least you can make a mockup and get instant feedback, flawed as it is.

On either side it takes experienced engineers to suss out actual requirements from customers/PMs. The main difference is that the backend (especially on the infra/devops side) is only accountable to itself if everything goes well, but ironically that means no-one knows or cares about the amount of engineering that goes into keeping PMs blissfully ignorant of the risks and complexity.

I love shitting on Fullstack devs as much as the next guy. However, sometimes it really just does make sense for an (often internal) product maintained by a one-person team, and it doesn’t have to mean that the organization doesn’t value them. I’ve seen it happen.

However I would not recommend it as a career path because it’s essentially impossible to tell what you’re getting into when you get hired. Could be what I just described, could be that you inherit the full responsibility for a 20 year-old perl+php5+xhtml+angularJS mess.
I think it can only truly make sense if you work independently and get to build projects to your own quality standards, assuming you manage to find a “scope is small enough that specialization doesn’t make sense” niche. This is very hard which is why in practice “full stack” tends to mean “master of none but good enough to get a product out the door cheaply”.

Real back-end requirements: when x, y goes in (in JSON-as-an-XML-CDATA-block because historical reasons), I want you to output x+y+z+æ+the proof to P=NP.

æ will require you yo compile x+y in CSV, email it to Jenny, who will email back the answer. She doesn’t quite know how to export excel sheets though so you’d better build a robust validator. No, we don’t know what æ is supposed to look like, Rob from Frontend knows but he’s on vacation for the next 8 months.

The request must be processed under 100 ms as the frontend team won’t be able to prioritize asynchronous loading for another 10 sprints and we don’t want the webpage to freeze.

And why does your API return a 400 when I send a picture of my feet? Please fix urgently, these errors are polluting my monitoring dashboard and we have KPIs on monitoring alerts.

They’re the fuckers who almost turned OF into Pinterest as well? Not surprising in retrospect. The crazy thing is how all news outlets ran with the narrative and payment processors are so flaky with adult content. De-platforming sex work shouldn’t be this easy.

Eeeeeeeh. There’s nuance.

IIRC there were only a handful of verified CSAM videos on the entire website. It’s inevitable, it happens everywhere with UGC, including on here. Anecdotally, in the years leading up to the purge PH had already cleaned up its act and from what I saw pirated content was rather well moderated. However this time the media made a huge stink about the alleged CSAM, payment processors threatened to pull out (they are notoriously very puritan, it’s caused a lot of trouble to lemmynsfw’s admins for instance) and so regardless of the validity of the initial claims PH had to do something to gain back the trust of payment processors, so they basically nuked every video that did not have a government ID attached.

Now if I may speculate a little, one of the reasons it happened this way is probably that due to its industry position PH is way better moderated than most (if not all) websites of their size and already had verified a bunch of its creators. At the same time the rise of OnlyFans and similar websites means that real amateur content has all but disappeared so there was less and less reason to allow random UGC anyway. So the high moderation costs probably didn’t make much sense anymore anyway.