fwygon
@fwygon@beehaw.org
Beehaw alt of @melody@lemmy.one
@fwygon on discord
- Comment on Please ban data caps, Internet users tell FCC 4 weeks ago:
I’m suspecting these companies are trying to use Data Caps to “Deter Piracy” without saying as much.
Unfortunately; the reality now is that these Data Caps do not just affect rampant pirates or people who download a lot of things. They are trying to justify an outdated policy that no longer works as intended; and hoping customers won’t notice them taking a bit more profit off the top.
They’ve been more than caught now and the practice must stop or customers will get federal regulators involved
- Comment on Low Tech Magazine: Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse 1 month ago:
I think not.
We’ve been bathing in private for the past 200 or so years hereabouts. It is difficult, if not improbable, to reverse such a trend in society and culture so quickly.
While I may actually feel this is a thing that society might benefit from; I don’t see this happening outside of nations with a lower societal taboo on nudity. It works in Japan simply because that’s how their entire society has been structured from the start, and their society largely agreed that communal bathhouses made much more sense logistically and economically; largely due to the fact that it is an island nation, and land space is more precious there.
Furthermore; I personally also prefer privacy. As a trans individual; that privacy is strongly necessary to me for many valid reasons concerning my own safety and health; and for ensuring others do not feel unsafe; regardless of their reasons for feeling that way.
Society is not ready for this kind of thing anymore and has mostly chosen to abandon the practice to antiquity.
- Comment on After is a new dating app that tries to tackle ghosting 1 month ago:
I don’t think this app is problematic. I think it’s attempting something interesting. Whether that will work or not will remain to be seen.
As with many “untested” dating app concepts; “May the user(/buyer) beware.” My advice to people who doubt the app is to ‘avoid it’. There’s plenty of valid reasons why you may feel that it won’t work. I’m not going to invalidate those feelings nor those experiences.
Enough people will vote with their feet; either by using it, using and quitting it, or not using it at all that we will probably see within a few years if it works or if it quickly dies and languishes in obscurity.
I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing how well things performed in 5 years from now for this concept. I do feel it could help, especially if the boilerplate rejection text is designed intelligently enough. I certainly feel like enough people struggle with mental health that what they are trying to do could be beneficial to encouraging people not to act impulsively. I think providing mental health resources right there in the app may allow rejectees to seek help they need; instead of pinning their hopes on finding a potential mate to address their issues, then lashing out at, or stalking, those potential mates when they’re rejected.
To be clear; I do understand that many kinds of scary or bad experiences are a thing for some dating app users. I simply feel that, for those people who have not had such an experience and might feel safe or safer with such a messaging mechanic in a dating app; I do not see the harm in it.
At no point do I recommend this app anyone who feels that it’s unsafe to do anything but ‘ghost’ a bad match-up.
^Please,^ ^do^ ^not^ ^try^ ^to^ ^change^ ^my^ ^mind.^
- Comment on AI tool cuts unexpected deaths in hospital by 26%, Canadian study finds 2 months ago:
Agreed; when an AI is used to bring things to the attention of a qualified human handler; the two working in tandem can be pretty effective.
AI alone should never make decisions; and humans should always evaluate an AI’s findings carefully before acting on them.
- Comment on My dead father is “writing” me notes again 2 months ago:
We can no longer trust anything that is specifically sent to us via digital means.
Technologies like the Document Scanner and even the Photocopier will now have to encode secret data to authenticate that a real, functioning machine has digitized the document.
This can in fact, cause a great amount of trouble for people.
People will be required to never digitize themselves handwriting all letters of the alphabet; lest their handwriting be vulnerable to an AI learning it.
- Comment on Chrome will block one of its biggest ad blockers 3 months ago:
Firefox is open source. It’s not going anywhere; even if Mozilla Co. goes broke and closes down the Mozilla Foundation.
- Comment on Logitech has an idea for a “forever mouse” that requires a subscription 3 months ago:
Most reasonable consumers won’t go for this. it’s a greed play.
Give me mice that I own; not mice to rent.
- Comment on Logitech has an idea for a “forever mouse” that requires a subscription 3 months ago:
Disgusting. Utterly disgusting. This idea belongs in the garbage bin.
- Comment on 98% compatibility 4 months ago:
Linux must achieve 100% compatibility. Otherwise the doubters will not shut up.
- Comment on Alternative YouTube clients having issues loading videos 4 months ago:
github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10397#issuecommen…
Looks like there’s several causes.
- Comment on Alternative YouTube clients having issues loading videos 4 months ago:
I should point out that this isn’t always “Google is trying to block adblockers” again!
Google can, will, and does simply change how the YouTube watch pages look, feel and operate behind the scenes quite regularly.
Thankfully we have people like those at the FreeTube, NewPipe and yt-dlp projects to sift through those changes and update the code to cope with the new output.
- Comment on Android Dialer App Recommendations? 4 months ago:
In general; I strongly don’t recommend anything on the Google Play Store except the Google Dialer.
If the Google Dialer is not to your liking; I strongly recommend only trying Dialers you will find on F-Droid.org
- Comment on Spotify Premium User Slams App Over Audiobook Feature 5 months ago:
They could certainly “clearly pass the cost” of this on to the user by not offering Audiobooks to users who didn’t pay for the “+ # of Audiobooks” tier of Spotify Premium; instead of this horrible enshittified crap where it cuts you off midsentence like a greedy telecomm provider would. Or perhaps their limitation should be on how many titles you can listen to concurrently in a certain time period. (So if you open X books; that’s it; you have to shelve one or wait it out)
It certainly means that Spotify did a bad job at negotiating their rights to these audiobooks as well. That matters too; because that makes the product worse; and that should never have been allowed to happen. If they couldn’t have offered it nicely, they could’ve just not offered it at all or added it to a higher service tier so that the cost is diverted better.
- Comment on OpenAI Insider Estimates 70 Percent Chance That AI Will Destroy or Catastrophically Harm Humanity 5 months ago:
It isn’t AI itself, it’s AI as a vector for corporate recklessness.
This. 1000% this. Many of Issac Asimov novels warned about this sort of thing too; as did any number of novels inspired by Asimov.
It’s not that we didn’t provide the AI with rules. It’s not that the AI isn’t trying not to harm people. It’s that humans, being the clever little things we are, are far more adept at deceiving and tricking AI into saying things and using that to justify actions to gain benefit.
…Understandably this is how that is being done. By selling AI that isn’t as intelligent as it is being trumpeted as. As long as these corporate shysters can organize a team to crap out a “Minimally Viable Product” they’re hailed as miracle workers and get paid fucking millions.
Ideally all of this should violate the many, many laws of many, many civilized nations…but they’ve done some black magic with that too; by attacking and weakening laws and institutions that can hold them liable for this and even completely ripping out or neutering laws that could cause them to be held accountable by misusing their influence.
- Comment on Google must face £13bn advertising lawsuit - UK court - BBC News 5 months ago:
13 billion Euro British Franc Moneys?
That’s pocket change to Google.
Note: the above message is satirical. Do not reply.
- Comment on Im converting my boyfriend to linux, first step thigh high! 5 months ago:
Android rates as kneesocks at best; if you’ve rooted and installed a custom ROM
- Comment on Rabbit Gaslit Me, So I Dug Deeper | Coffeezilla 5 months ago:
This is pretty clearly a company practiced at “riding the waves” of what’s popular to sell absolute bullshit.
They appear to raise millions, develop what looks like a minimally viable product for it’s development phase, then pull the rug out and exit with the bag of cash, quickly pivoting away from discovered scams and name changing to avoid too much consumer ire or regulator scrutiny.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the CEO or anyone else at the top levels of this company has an entire resume full of these sorts of ‘scam and run’ operations, the kinds that melt into the background and vanish the moment any real strong consumer or regulatory/legal scrutiny hits it.
Basically this is investment fraud 101; you find something you can trick people into investing into, then spend as little as possible to get a ‘minimally viable product’ that appears plausible enough to give you time to exit stage left with all the fat cash you can take. Because this sort of operation does produce something; oftentimes they get away cleanly; because they did do something and oftentimes they obscure or obfuscate and hide the evidence of any planned malfeasance; usually the only places with any record of it is in the mind of the CEO or other executive(s), if they’re in on the scam too.
Sometimes the CEO gets ‘caught’ intentionally and then fired…or they just run the company into the ground. That latter case can let them off the hook with a tidy golden parachute as well; depending on the circumstances and what they ‘negotiated’ when they were ‘hired’.
- Comment on Chinese social media companies remove posts ‘showing off wealth and worshipping money’ while the gap between the country's rich and poor widens 5 months ago:
The shoe fits on the other foot as well. Both extreme communism and extreme capitalism have tendencies to turn into dystopian nightmares.
If ‘1984’ alarms you; so too should current works like ‘Ready, Player One’ or ‘Ender’s Game’ and it’s associated sequels.
Extremism in general tends to not work. I don’t pretend to know what the exact right balance is; but it does exist.
- Comment on Chinese social media companies remove posts ‘showing off wealth and worshipping money’ while the gap between the country's rich and poor widens 5 months ago:
Censorship like this is one fast track to things like the French Revolution.
- Comment on New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC 5 months ago:
NOPE!
You cannot pay me to use Windows 11.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
This kind of website sounds kind of problematic and useless. The ability to follow a specific person’s post is highly useful, and highly necessary oftentimes. If you want to reduce the friction that “Following” induces; you simply need to not disclose to the users how many people are following them, nor do you need to disclose how many followers a user has. Problems solved.
The same goes for Likes. Nobody but the sender of the like should know about that like. Instead of keeping counts for the recipients to obsess over; calculate a reasonable percentage of people who we can guess “like” the post algorithmically based on views of the post and clicked likes. I get that the feedback mechanism is necessary; but it should be a gentle one that simply encourages people to post what people like and will view. This percentage should not be used to rank a post above or below other posts, unless the user viewing the list asks for the list to be sorted or ranked as such.
- Comment on "No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again." 7 months ago:
SearXNG has fediverse search functionality too.
- Comment on "No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again." 7 months ago:
You do have to host it yourself or run your own personal instance to get the power of SearXNG; if you’ve not tried this, please do not write it off.
If hosting it yourself or even running it locally in a container on your machine at home is too technical for you; nobody is going to bane you for that. In fact there’s several guides and videos out there that might help you if you’re inclined to learn.
If not; you’re also free to continue consuming as you do.
- Comment on "No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again." 7 months ago:
Your argument clearly shows that you fail to see the benefits of doing it yourself. I get quality results from my local instance due to my persistence and work put in to adjust the settings necessary. I’ve balanced the privacy and functionality of the instance to fit my needs and it costs me nothing but a few minutes of my time each week to do so.
Kagi doing it for $10 a month sounds like they’re turning a neat profit off of you; and you’re refusing to accept that I have achieved levels of search competence that Kagi has without paying for Kagi or even using their free searches or service.
Whether or not it makes sense to you value-wise to pay or not pay for Kagi does not matter in this discussion. it only matters that none of the things Kagi can do that I find useful are things that cannot be done with SearXNG.
- Comment on "No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again." 7 months ago:
To be honest the “Privacy” aspect can be taken care of in other ways; like using a VPN for query dilution, for example. You don’t have to recruit 100 mechanical turks to do junk searches for you; although there are browser addons that can in fact do this automated searching for you…I’ve run them before.
SearXNG is a front-end that protects your privacy still. Hosting it locally dilutes it some; but provides maximal control; as you can use VPNs and control things much more tightly than you could if you hosted it elsewhere.
- Comment on "No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again." 7 months ago:
I genuinely won’t even use Brave indexes on my SearXNG instance; I have the engines disabled. My search quality has not suffered; as most of my results end up being DDG or Yahoo anyways.
- Comment on "No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again." 7 months ago:
The nice thing is that I can customize it however I like too; change weights, choose which engines to pull from always, or even from search to search; so I’m not getting cruft.
SearXNG always rearranges the crap most engines serve to the bottom without fail.
- Comment on "No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again." 7 months ago:
I pay nothing for running SearXNG locally on my machine.
- Comment on "No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again." 7 months ago:
I can do everything Kagi does for free…using SearXNG.
- Comment on Your Computer Isn't Yours: Apple stores every program you run, and when and where you ran it 7 months ago:
Why is this four year old story being reposted?