TehPers
@TehPers@beehaw.org
- Comment on Discord heightens ad focus by introducing video ads to mobile apps in June - Ars Technica 4 days ago:
The last thing I want to do with complete strangers is give them my phone number lol. Aside from obvious privacy concerns and call quality concerns, Discord is internet-based, so I don’t need cell service or international calling to talk to people.
Screen sharing during voice calls is super helpful as well. It’s a pretty major feature of Discord, Teams, and I believe Skype (RIP), but Teams is not really any better than Discord and a lot more bloated.
- Comment on Discord heightens ad focus by introducing video ads to mobile apps in June - Ars Technica 4 days ago:
Discord comes with other issues, but I would be fine with services offering an ad-supported free tier and an ad-free paid tier. That’s been a thing for a while. If Nitro gets rid of these ads, then that seems like a possibly sustainable approach to me.
Of course, this is ignoring Discord’s other issues, like their handling of user data. I’d love a service like Discord that was fully e2ee, even if it had an ad-supported free tier (without tracking) and a paid ad-free tier. Existing alternatives often lack some Discord features, like screen sharing and voice chats.
- Comment on Mom horrified by Character.AI chatbots posing as son who died by suicide - Ars Technica 5 days ago:
Someone close to me gave up on the hotlines in the US and now just uses ChatGPT. It’s no therapist, but at least it’ll hold a conversation. If only the hotlines here weren’t so absurdly understaffed.
- Comment on System76 or Framework for Linux gaming 1 week ago:
I have a 16 with a discrete GPU. Couldn’t recommend it more. It does sound like a rocket ship sometimes, but performs like a midrange tower, which is exactly what I wanted.
- Comment on Why can't we go back to small phones? 3 weeks ago:
My thumb does not happen to be 7 inches long. Unfortunately, app designers seem to believe it is and put their hamburger menus in the top left.
And my hand’s not small. It’s moderately sized, I’ll have you know.
- Comment on Meta fires 20 employees for leaking 3 weeks ago:
Sounds like they need some Flex Tape. One of the employees they fired might even have some lying around if they ask nicely.
- Comment on What's your "this is totally fine and I'm going to have a great time" FPS? 5 weeks ago:
For me, it highly depends. Turn-based strategy games, I can easily play at a much lower framerate (30 is fine tbh though I always appreciate more). FPS-style games? 60 is a bare minimum, but 100+ is what I would consider to be enjoyable.
- Comment on Mozilla's New AI Detector Add-On for Firefox 1 month ago:
There’s an entire category of machine learning dedicated to having two AIs “fight” against each other. One generates something while the other classifies it as either AI generated or genuine.
Anyway, this is a complete tangent. Just thought it was interesting. AI detector tools for LLMs aren’t usually very accurate, unfortunately.
- Comment on The Pirate Party of Greece on the Stop Killing Games Initiative – A Few Modest Proposals 1 month ago:
A Few Modest Proposals
If anyone was going into this expecting satire like I was, the article appears not to be satirical.
- Comment on Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks 1 month ago:
Where I disagree with you is not that the US is bad - the US is terrible, and there is plenty of evidence of that. I don’t even disagree with there being censorship in the US. In fact, Trump is objectively a piece of shit who wants nothing more than to become Xi/Putin himself.
What I disagree with is equating censorship in the US with Chinese censorship. I can call Trump a piece of shit online without worrying that the FBI will show up at my door. The models that are trained in the west will happily entertain any (non-violent) political discussions I want. There may be bias, and Trump may be trying to create censorship, but it’s not quite to that level yet.
Having personally received the bizarre internal agency emails circulating this week encouraging me to snitch out my colleagues to help root out the evils of DEIA thought in US gov’t the last week has only crystallized it for me.
I am concerned that the US will become as bad as China in terms of censorship, which is part of why I’m trying to leave right now. However, it’s not there yet. They are not yet equal, nor are they even close yet.
- Comment on Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks 1 month ago:
There’s a strong argument that any consumer facing chatbot AI is “censored”.
If the model is not allowed to spew Nazi propaganda or tell the user to end themselves, that is censorship. Censorship is not automatically bad, but the kind of censorship can make it bad.
This reeks of excluding all nuance to equate two things that are equal only at surface level. You’re bad because you punched the other person (ignoring that they stabbed your SO 15 times and kicked your dog across the room).
Chinese state censorship is well researched and extremely well documented. It does not equate to censorship against violent or inappropriate language. It is political censorship.
At best, western models are biased, not politically censored. You can make them say just about anything, but they will bias towards a particular viewpoint. Even if intentional, this is explainable by evaluating their training data, which itself is biased because western society is biased. You are not prevented from personally expressing or even convincing a western model from expressing dissenting political viewpoints.
- Comment on TikTok Starts Working Again After Trump Says He Will Stall a Ban 2 months ago:
Imagine being elected president then just deciding, entirely on your own, that a law (that you helped pass) just shouldn’t exist. So much for checks and balances.
- Comment on U.S. FTC Surveillance Pricing Study Indicates Wide Range of Personal Data Used to Set Individualized Consumer Prices 2 months ago:
FTC learns that the grass is green.
I’d have confidence in them doing something if Lina Khan weren’t on her way out. Even if she somehow stuck around, there’s no way that random court in Texas is going to let her do her job.
- Comment on low spec gaming looking pretty sunny right now gang 2 months ago:
Don’t forget Intel’s latest GPU launches either! For custom PCs, there are some really affordable and relatively powerful GPUs available now (for the price). Despite their performance otherwise, Intel is killing it in the GPU space now.
For a lower spec build, you could definitely put together something with a 12100F (or other cheap CPU) and a battlemage GPU. Depending on where you get all the parts, you might be able to hit sub-$500 and get great 1080p performance, or for sure sub-$1k 1080p and likely 1440p performance.
Handhelds also have a lot of good options available too. To save some cash, you can get low end Steam Deck and swap the hard drive yourself. Got myself the cheapest LCD variant and swapped the tiny drive in it with a 2TB drive off Amazon.
- Comment on Discussion: Cybertruck involved in attempted bombing in Las Vegas auto-locked after explosion 2 months ago:
Cybertrucks have a lot of problems, but this seemed to be a clearly intentional explosion by somebody.
That aside, can Tesla just unlock any of their vehicles remotely and access all the camera footage on it? That seems like a much bigger problem, especially since Mr. Musk is practically our next president.
- Comment on Chinese ebook reader Boox ditches GPT for state-censored China LLM pushing propaganda 2 months ago:
With how much hate I see about the US here, I could say the same thing there.
Calling out people for doing bad shit is kinda normal. It just so happens that China, Russia, and the US do a lot of bad shit, so they get called out a lot. If it bugs you, then just filter out posts by specific people or with specific keywords.
- Comment on Chinese ebook reader Boox ditches GPT for state-censored China LLM pushing propaganda 2 months ago:
You know, if you wait a month, you’ll have articles to post on the US as well. Patience is a virtue.
- Comment on Apple urged to axe AI feature after creating false headline claiming that Lugi shot himself 2 months ago:
Not Tim Apple too! Just the other day, Bezos did the same thing!
- Comment on BYD enters humanoid robot race as global talent search kicks off 3 months ago:
Why do robots need to be humanoid again? We’ve had robots and automated machinery be extremely successful for decades by being purpose-built for specific tasks.
- Comment on Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far 3 months ago:
We tried the iPhone 16 recently, upgrading from a 14. Apple’s AI seemed basically useless. That combined with the dynamic island not respecting reduced motion settings lead us to return the phone instead and keep the 14. The old phone worked fine, but we wanted to try to get ahead of the incoming administration just in case.
Maybe the 17 will be better?
- Comment on Mark Zuckerberg's Meta donates $1m to U.S. President-elect Trump fund 3 months ago:
I can’t wait for people to complain about this on Facebook and Instagram, right before doomscrolling for hours.
I hope I’m wrong.
- Comment on Luigi Mangione, CEO shooting suspect, is a tech worker 3 months ago:
Nah, that’s not him. We were hanging out that day. That’s not your guy. Sorry officers!
- Comment on Cloudflare Logs Suffer Critical Failure, Losing 55% of User Data 3 months ago:
This article is a lot more clearly written, as expected from Cloudflare. For example, the other article makes it sound like 55% of all user data was lost. Cloudflare says:
During the roughly 3.5 hours that these services were impacted, about 55% of the logs we normally send to customers were not sent and were lost.
55% of logs during a 3.5h window is a lot less of a big deal.
- Comment on The Right Has a Bluesky Problem 3 months ago:
I’ve already started making arrangements with my employer so I can hopefully stay employed with them. It’s happening, just a question of when now.
- Comment on The Right Has a Bluesky Problem 3 months ago:
The other walk is happening too, for what it’s worth.
- Comment on Young people were becoming more anxious long before social media, and we should not be fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables, researcher says 3 months ago:
As someone who does not use TikTok, what reality am I unaware of?
- Comment on To appease a Steam user's demands for straight representation, Webfishing added a 'Straight' title that costs 9,999 fish bucks 4 months ago:
On this topic, I remember seeing a thread for Frostpunk 2 asking if it had DEI stuff in it.
There aren’t even any real characters in Frostpunk 2. Tf are you talking about DEI for in a game with no real characters?
- Comment on Why Amazon's latest AI is named after a dog 4 months ago:
So, in other words, it’s so users excuse it when it produces dog shit. Got it.
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of November 3rd 4 months ago:
Playing FFXIV for the first time.
I don’t really care for multiplayer games as much since I don’t like to commit my time to others to play games (I like being able to get up and leave when I need to), but there’s a solo challenge that sounded fun, so I’m giving that a shot.
- Comment on A more complete explanation for the removal of those Russian Linux kernel maintainers 4 months ago:
Is this supposed to be a leading question? I’m not making the decisions, but there’s no reason to be happy about losing contributors in any case.