AmbitiousProcess
@AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social
- Comment on Racism restaurant 4 days ago:
I went to her profile expecting her to be the usual brainbroken conservative, and instead she’s like, complaining about a reply getting removed because it had the F slur in it, but she also replied to one of Elon’s AI-generated videos about his Tesla robot saying “Get the fuck out of here with this clanker bullshit”, so I respect it.
- Comment on "I love the round things!" - The Doctor 5 days ago:
I could eat a party size bag of these things and still be craving more.
Good ass snack.
- Comment on *Yawn* 6 days ago:
Increase alertness
Decrease alertness
lmao
- Comment on *Yawn* 1 week ago:
Apparently there isn’t much consensus on what the actual reason(s) are for yawning. Apparently fish yawn though, so that’s cool.
- Comment on I just wanted to compare FOSS Linux budgeting software 1 week ago:
Not all of those videos are fully AI-generated, at least not entirely. (voices and video itself are real, script is AI-generated) They are still slop content, though.
From what I can tell, most of the voices are real (you can hear changes in microphone types & background noises, reverb, natural stuttering, accent changes, proper tone, etc on many of them) but a lot of the scripts seem AI-generated, along with the actual face in the thumbnail, even when the voice is real.
Most of the videos are being generated by a semi-large media generating organization who just pumps out algorithmically optimized videos. I did see a few, mostly from smaller creators, that were entirely AI-voiced as well, though.
I think most of them were just copying the thumbnail design because it got clicks. Not uncommon on YouTube unfortunately.
For anyone curious, the videos are basically just them scrolling through the websites of each, while reading off a paragraph or two of general information about what each is that has that sort of AI-generated tone and order to it.
The video creation process is literally as simple as:
1. Ask ChatGPT “write me a script for a short video talking about what Actual Budget is vs. Firefly III"
2. Record yourself auto-scrolling slowly through the Actual Budget website, then the same for the Firefly III website
3. Record a voiceover of you just reading word-for-word the script from ChatGPT
4. Slap them on top of each other
5. Clone the thumbnail from the other channels that got the most clicks, just like everyone else is doing, so now all of your videos look the same. - Comment on There Are No Weird Blogs Anymore Cause It’s More Fruitful to Drive Them Out of Business 1 week ago:
They also literally just released SlopStop as a community-based filtering mechanism that’ll downrank AI slop, with the CEO saying "We believe AI slop is an existential threat to an internet that should belong to humans. This is the first step towards our ultimate goal: to kill AI slop so you never see it again."
Apparently they’ll be using this to train something that can identify AI slop better based on the database of user-reported sites, and they’ll be making the database open.
Their AI integration philosophy feels incredibly reasonable to me with how out of the way it is, how it properly cites its sources and shows how much of the answer each one influenced, and how the search results are often so good it doesn’t even feel like you need the AI model, and this just sweetens the deal.
I can understand having issues with Kagi, they’re a company, after all, but their stance and actions feel very good thus far.
- Comment on There Are No Weird Blogs Anymore Cause It’s More Fruitful to Drive Them Out of Business 2 weeks ago:
There’s a lot of issues with that analysis.
Oh and they own a t-shirt factory
The linked article literally states that they partnered with a small print shop, not that they own it. It says they bought warehouse space to store and fulfill orders. Now granted, yes, spending that much money on T-shirts can be a bad idea financially, but they do act as marketing because they get people talking, even if the brand name isn’t on the shirt. This recoups the cost over time.
Kagi also heavily relies on organic marketing, so it makes total sense.
First of all, as a project, Kagi stretches itself way too thin. “Kagi” isn’t just Kagi Search, it’s also a whole slew of AI tools, a Mac-only web browser called Orion, and right now they are planning on launching an email service as well.
The AI tools are easily deployed and based on standard open-source tooling. Not that hard to maintain, yet their AI integrations are genuinely much better than the competition, which draws in a lot of people who pay for their higher-priced plan just for heavy AI users.
Orion is a fork, with minimal additional bloat. Again, not terribly hard to maintain.
None of these projects are particularly profitable, so it’s not a case of one subsidizing the other
Their entire business model is based around a subscription. No individual service is “profitable,” it’s just “part of what you get for your subscription.”
and when they announced Kagi Email even their most dedicated userbase (aka the types who hang around in a discord for a search engine) seemed largely disinterested.
Granted, though the hardest part for this is just making a frontend, which they’ve already done. There are many free and open source backends for hosting email services. They haven’t promoted it heavily, and my assumption is because they’re keeping it more on the down-low until they fix bugs, build out more features, and are sure it’s something they can more heavily advertise.
Kagi was not paying sales tax for two years and they finally have to pay up. They just…didn’t do it. Didn’t think it was important? I have no idea why. Their reactions made it sound like they owed previous taxes, not that they just now had to pay them. They genuinely made it sound like they only just now realized they needed to figure out sales tax. It’s a baffling thing to me and it meant a change in prices for users that some people were not thrilled with.
And they later explained it’s because there’s a threshold of buyers you have to pass before paying sales tax, and they did not know if they would ever pass that mark, and later had to scramble due to new user growth to make that happen.
Like most search now Kagi has chosen to include Instant Answers that are AI generated, which means they’re often wrong
The vast majority of my answers from Kagi’s AI were right, when other search engines were all wrong. (yes, I did actually check real sources to confirm) This is just a strawman of reality. Kagi even shows you what % of the LLM’s response was derived from which source, whereas others leave you in the dark.
But the developers of Kagi fully believe that this is what search engines should be, a bunch of AI tools so that you don’t even need to read primary sources anymore.
Oh, is that why Kagi said in the post also linked by the author of that post: “Large language models (LLMs) should not be blindly trusted to provide factual information accurately. They have a significant risk of generating incorrect information or fabricating details”, “AI should be used to enhance the search experience, not to create it or replace it”, and “AI should be used to the extent that it enhances our humanity, not diminish it (AI should be used to support users, not replace them)”
I’m not gonna keep going through every single thing point-by-point here since that’d take forever, but a lot of this is basically just taking minor issues, like the CEO posting about hopeful uses of AI, or talking about completely normal expectations to have of privacy when you trust a company with information, then blowing it out of proportion and acting as though this is a death blow for the service.
The author of the post quite literally talks about how “Kagi’s dedication to privacy falls apart for me”, saying they don’t seem to actually care about user privacy… when just a few months later, they released Privacy Pass, which allows you to cryptographically prove you have a membership without revealing your identity, and to continue using Kagi that way. Not really something someone who doesn’t care about privacy would do.
Overall, this just reads to me as:
1. They could be doing bad financially because of these decisions I didn’t like them doing
2. Okay so they said they were profitable currently even after all that but now they’re doing too many things (which could all bring in new users that would pay them)
3. Okay so people are paying for and using the things but there’s no way they could possibly use AI in any good way
4. I’ve now ignored anybody saying the tools are actually better than others or are working well, but just in case you’re not convinced, they don’t care about privacy!
5. I know they explained the ways in which companies are going to get data on you and there is going to be a degree of trust when using a service that requires things like payment information but I still think they don’t actually care about privacy!I’m not saying all the points are completely false or don’t mean anything, but a lot of this really does feel like just taking something relatively small (giving out a bunch of T-shirts during a time the company is primarily trying to grow its user count via organic marketing), acting as though it’s both the current and permanent future position of the entire company and will also lead to the worst possible outcome, then moving on to another thing, and doing that until there’s nothing left to complain about.
Kagi can have its own problems, but a lot of these just aren’t it.
As a person using Kagi myself:
1. The search results are the best I’ve ever had. period, full stop.
2. The AI models are commonly correct, good at citing sources, out of the way till you ask for them, and feel secondary to the search experience
3. The cost is more than reasonable
4. Regular small updates with new tools have been incredibly nice to have (such as the Kagi news feed, which is great at sourcing good news from a variety of sources, or the Universal Summarizer, which is great at providing alternative, more natural sounding and accurate translations compared to Google Translate or DeepL)I haven’t really had any complaints, and contrasting it with this guy’s post, it just reads like someone complaining about something they’ve never even used. Yes, you can complain about something you haven’t yourself used, but the entire post is just “here’s anything even minor that I think could be an issue if it were taken to the extremes”
- Comment on There Are No Weird Blogs Anymore Cause It’s More Fruitful to Drive Them Out of Business 2 weeks ago:
Kagi has a great little feed you can use to randomly explore smallweb blogs. I’d recommend it!
- Comment on The House Of The Guy Calling You A Libtard 2 weeks ago:
That’s how I read it, too.
- Comment on Are physical mail generally not under surveillance? If everyone suddently ditched electronic communications and start writing letters, would governments be able to practically surveil everyone? 2 weeks ago:
Physical mail generally isn’t under surveillance past occasional package inspection (e.g. an X-ray of a suspicious package), and the rare targeted government surveillance operation on an individual or group, at least for the contents of mail.
The U.S Postal Inspection Service has a number of data sources they do collect from, though. If you make a USPS account, for example, then they can get info like your credit card number and IP address. If your package has a tracking number assigned, they can tell where exactly your mail is in transit. And if your address and the sender’s address is on your mail, then they will of course know who sent you which piece of mail when. Pretty standard stuff.
In terms of actually inspecting what’s inside people’s mail, that’s very difficult, because mail isn’t standardized. Some envelopes will have one small sheet of paper. Some will have a larger folded one. That might be folded into 2 pieces or 4. It might be 3 sheets of paper. Maybe it has a smaller paper card inside as well. You get the idea.
Whereas internet traffic is based on actual standards, and so if they want to know the contents of the data in an HTTP request, for example, they know exactly which parts of the packets to look at, every single time.
It would make surveillance more difficult, for sure, because individually opening, scanning, and putting back any possible variant of mail in envelopes is very time consuming and difficult, but it would do absolutely nothing to stop targeted surveillance of given individuals, and would also make individual associations more apparent.
To give another example, the government doesn’t know which people are communicating with which other people if you use Signal, because not even Signal knows, so not even a court order could allow them to find out. If you were sending mail between all those people, the government now has a list of every single time you sent a letter, and to whom.
Using that same example, with Signal, the contents of your message is encrypted. With mail, it’s in plaintext. Anybody could read that. If they intercept the data from your Signal chats, they get encrypted nonsense. If they intercept your mail, they get your entire conversation.
The smart decision is to use tools that preserve privacy and anonymity, making surveillance near impossible, rather than a system like mail, which just makes surveillance annoying and time-consuming.
- Comment on The trauma. The terror. The humanity!!!1!!1! 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think so, but he did say while testifying: “He did it. He threw the sandwich,” that the sandwich “exploded all over” his chest and he felt it through his ballistic vest, and that “You could smell the onions and the mustard”.
The sandwich never left its wrapper.
The defense attorney finished closing arguments with “This case, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is about a sandwich”
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Minimizes crust per bite, while still keeping the largest possible structural integrity from the crust for each piece.
Maximizes surface area per piece, can make it feel like you ended up eating more sandwich compared to traditional slices.
Known as the “Duff Cut”
- Comment on The Guy Claiming That You Have TDS 2 weeks ago:
We even have fucking Marjorie Taylor Greene getting angry at Trump and blaming the shutdown on the Republicans.
If that doesn’t show anyone how common this type of thing has gotten…
- Comment on Got my invite 4 weeks ago:
I fucking hate that emojis of all things are now a sign of AI-generated text.
Like come on, the ONE thing that’s meant to better pass on human emotion and visually represent things in a more fun format just HAD to be co-opted and become so generic and AI-related that people, including me, don’t trust it anymore.
- Comment on LEARN YOU PIECE OF SHIT 4 weeks ago:
It’s been doing it more and more for me on Futo as well as time has gone on, but I keep the app disconnected from the internet (GrapheneOS setting) so it shouldn’t be impacted by anything other than training.
It was happening even when I went a while without updating it.
Something makes me think it might be a little self-reinforcing. You get a bad suggestion, you don’t instantly correct it (e.g you press space and then go back to correct it), the app originally assumes you wanted the faulty change, doesn’t backtrack after since you already pressed space)
Maybe I should just turn down the effect or just disable training entirely and see if that changes anything.
- Comment on Load bearing Tupperware 5 weeks ago:
I can see why your account is marked with two red marks on PieFed for low reputation, because man do you come off confrontational.
How many banks didn’t work? Which ones? You have a source?
Search engines exist. Use them before acting as if I"m making shit up.
The list of financial institutions that had issues, as far as I can tell from industry reporting and downdetector graphs, is Navy Federal Credit Union (~15 million members), Truist (~15 million customers), Chime (~8-9 million customers), Venmo (~60 million users), Ally Bank (~10 million customers), and Lloyds Banking group (~30 million customers).
Assuming no overlap, that’s nearly 140 million people that lost banking and money transfer access.
Sounds like you’re just trying to exaggerate around an edge case that frankly isn’t the end of the world even if it were common for 4 hours a year
The outage lasted for 15 hours in some cases, due to many AWS services recovering after the outage, yet having a backlog to work through, which took many more hours. Many services also depend on AWS in a manner where AWS coming back online doesn’t instantaneously restart service. These systems are complex, and not every company that relied on them could instantly start back up the moment the main outage was resolved, let alone when many services were still marked as impacted for hours and hours later as they worked through their backlog.
Why aren’t you blaming the bank for having redundancy outside a single DC? How many banks do you know if that were out susessfully using other providers that have a higher SLO/SLA?
I also blame them for not having additional redundancy. I blame both them for not having a fallback, and AWS for allowing such a major outage to happen. Shockingly, more than one party can be at fault.
- Comment on Load bearing Tupperware 5 weeks ago:
The outage also took down people’s banks, which stopped many of them from doing things like buying groceries 💀
I don’t think saying it’s good for us “touching grass” is a good argument here when AWS hosts such a substantial portion of all online services.
- Comment on Bargain 5 weeks ago:
I’m talking overall, including things like their crackers, and relative to weight, in terms of if you were to eat a similar amount of food off a charcuterie board.
Regardless, lunchables tend to have highly processed cheese and meat that has a lot of saturated fat, added sugars, and yes, a lot of added sodium. About 33% of your daily sodium in a tiny pack with 3 few millimeter thick slices of meat, 3 of the same of cheese, and 3 (small) crackers.
That same pack also contains 35% of your max total daily intake of saturated fat, in just 250 calories, which is over two and a half times the daily max recommended rate of saturated fat compared to calories.
I do think that lunchables tends to have lower fat content relative to other meats, like hard sausages, salami, or prosciutto, but a higher sodium content relative to them. The overall lunchables sets tend to have more calories than their respective weights in other foods often found on charcuterie boards.
- Comment on Bargain 5 weeks ago:
…but with more variety and less processed ingredients and better taste and less calories and less sodium and less lead and-
- Comment on And they mocked me for my WoW subscription 😗 1 month ago:
Finding new music is harder (I imagine)
In my opinion, it’s harder, but not even necessarily because it’s harder to do it in the end. More because it’s just harder to get started.
For example, I find way more music I enjoy listening to through Bandcamp than I ever did on Spotify, but that requires having existing artists that I follow and can see their recommendations for, having a feel for which genres I actually like instead of a vague mental concept of what I like to listen to that I can then keyword search by in Bandcamp’s search/discover section, and hoping that the human curators on Bandcamp’s newsletter pick artists I like. Bandcamp doesn’t really have algorithms, so those are my only real options.
It’s more effort, but it’s infinitely more rewarding.
- Comment on He died doing what he loved. 2 months ago:
People can care about school shootings while also not wanting to see a dying body and someone's bloody gunshot wound randomly appear on their timeline when they're just trying to look at some fucking memes.
This is like if I started filling your timeline with random snuff films and gore videos, and when you complained, went "OH you don't like this? Well the human trafficking victims used in these videos didn't either."
- Comment on Just a little bit more 2 months ago:
Woah woah woah there pal, we don't even say sw--r around these parts, that's too far! If you're going to censor an image at least do it right. smh /j
- Comment on WATER! 2 months ago:
I doubt that's the case, currently.
Right now, there's a lot of genuine competition in the AI space, so they're actually trying to out compete one another for market share. It's only once users are locked into using a particular service that they begin deliberate enshittification with the purpose of getting more money, either from paying for tokens, or like Google did when it deliberately made search quality worse so people would see more ads ("What are you gonna do, go to Bing?")
By contrast, if ChatGPT sucks, you can locally host a model, use one from Anthropic, Perplexity, any number of interfaces for open source (or at least, source-available) models like Deepseek, Llama, or Qwen, etc.
It's only once industry consolidation really starts taking place that we'll see things like deliberate measures to make people either spend more on tokens, or make money from things like injecting ads into responses.
- Comment on First time posters be like 2 months ago:
It's also just generally easier for first-time users to start using. For anyone curious, their little "feeds" of communities you can follow in one go by topic are super handy.
For example, if I subscribe to the activismplus feed, I automatically subscribe to communities like antiwork, solarpunk, socialism, leftism, anarchism, unions, antifascism, human rights, left urbanism, etc, from a number of different instances all at once.
For a first-time user, it's easier to pick a topic they're interested in and automatically be following all the relevant communities across most instances, rather than subscribing to communities one-by-one over a very long period of time.
- Comment on Everytime i come across a 3d printing post 3 months ago:
The MSDS for the filament I use says that it doesn't contain any PBT/vPvB substance or endocrine disruptors. I presume that means it's likely fine, at least for the brand I use.
The only 2 ingredients are PLA, and calcium carbonate, which is also found in egshells, some vegetables, and is coincidentally commonly used as an additive to composting piles that can eliminate pathogens.
I also think the overall amount of pigment entering the environment from something like this will be quite low compared to practically any other contaminant that enters the waste stream from people who just don't know what's compostable throwing random things in the bin.
There's also the fact that there's probably larger overall harms from all the microplastics existing in a landfill rather than being broken down entirely into plant proteins in a composting facility but with a minute amount of contamination. It's not perfect, but it's probably better than leaving all the microplastics floating around for decades if not centuries, depending on the environment.
- Comment on Everytime i come across a 3d printing post 3 months ago:
I have absolutely no clue how to calculate that by myself. I think that would call for a... lifecycle analysis.
...
Get it?
...
I'll show myself out.
- Comment on Proton shifts out of Switzerland over snooping law fears 3 months ago:
How is it not a shift? It would be an expansion if they were increasing their overall coverage by region in addition to Switzerland, but they're actually moving their infrastructure out of Switzerland, and not hosting it there after the switch is completed, (other than what I'd assume would be things like a VPN endpoint for those who want it, or any services for Swiss customers that want data to remain entirely within Switzerland) because this law would put them under too much scrutiny.
They even state at the very bottom of this blog post about their new AI features that "Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland"
Sadly though, I agree with you on the chat control part. I don't think they'll easily be able to escape this no matter where they go. Any still standing bastions of privacy seem to be falling right before our eyes.
- Comment on Everytime i come across a 3d printing post 3 months ago:
This paper estimates the CO2e emissions of roughly a 1kg spool (estimates are done by length of filament, not weight, but weight would end up being about 1kg) of PLA filament at 3.10kg of CO2e.
The model used to print the alleged ghost gun is the FMDA 19.2 by "the Gatalog," which when I load it into my slicer shows an estimated 55g of filament used to print when using 15% infill, and 94g with 100% solid infill, for an estimated 0.1705-0.2914 CO2e of emissions for the printed parts. (This doesn't include any support material, depending on print positioning)
There's no easy way to determine how much of that could theoretically end up as microplastics though.
As for the metal parts, I have no clue lmao, I don't care to estimate it that much. - Comment on Everytime i come across a 3d printing post 3 months ago:
From what I've seen, at the bare minimum, it will break down completely back into plant polymers faster than other plastics could hope to break down into anything non-dangerous to the environment, and even if it does break down into microplastics quicker, I'd rather have something like that, which can then later break down into plant polymers, rather than something that slowly leeches microplastics into the environment for the next few centuries, and doesn't really break down into anything much less dangerous past that point.
To cite some interesting points from the paper you referenced:
The biodegradation of polylactic acid occurs in two main steps: fragmentation and mineralization. [...] which can be biotic or abiotic. For instance, biotic hydrolysis involves microorganisms and/or enzymes, whereas abiotic hydrolysis involves mechanical weathering.
This means it can break down via multiple mechanisms, with or without the presence of any microbes, but only given specific environmental circumstances, which is why it doesn't work well in aquatic environments, as previously mentioned. However, some of it does still break down there, and if it later exits that aquatic environment, other processes can begin to break down what remains.
The authors concluded that polylactic acid and its blends are similar to non-biodegradable plastics in terms of biodegradation in aquatic environment.
[They] proposed that low temperatures along with low bacterial density make the sea water unsuitable for the biodegradation of polylactic acid.
However, on the microplastics point, while they do state it degrades quickly, in terms of overall quantity of microplastics produced, it's actually lower than other common plastics.
The authors reported that polylactic acid forms almost 18 times fewer microplastics as compared to the petroleum-based plastic, polypropylene.
They do still mention that it will still likely have many negative effects on marine life, though, even given that. Surely we'll stop dumping plastics in the ocean now, for the good of the planet! Or not, because profits matter more, am I right?
From another study, it seems that soil with certain combinations of bacteria, at regular temperatures found in nature, could mineralize about 24% of PLA in 150 days, which is pretty damn good compared to how long it would take non-bioplastics to do so.
And of course, when put into dedicated composting facilities that can reach high temperatures, PLA can be composted extremely effectively. And this is just regular PLA we're talking about, not things like cPLA, which can be 100% composted within regular composting facilities within 2-4 months. (coincidentally, most biodegradable utensils are now made of cPLA)
I wouldn't doubt we start seeing even more compostable variants of filament for 3D printers specifically popping up as actual distribution and manufacturing for the material becomes more cost effective and widespread. I was able to find cPLA filament at a reasonable price just from a simple search, and there's even a biodegradable flexible filament as an alternative to TPU, made of oyster powder, which is 100% compostable (though is about 4-8X the price of regular TPU per gram as of now)
None of this discounts any of the current environmental impacts of 3D printing materials, of course, but a lot of PLA now can already be almost entirely, if not actually entirely composted in local municipal composting facilities, and there's even more compostable alternatives that exist today.
I compost my failed or no-longer-needed PLA prints, and my city even explicitly states to put it in my compost bin, as it's supported by our composting system.
- Comment on Mississippi Senator tells his constituents to 'get a life' 3 months ago:
I don't think a lot of these people understand what it means for them to be a public servant. This is not a job where you put your interests first. You are quite literally a servant to your constituents, and your entire purpose during your term is to serve their wishes, to carry out the will of the people. The amount of people that will get elected into a role like that, then be shocked when the people that elected them ask them to do things for them is baffling to me.
