aard
@aard@kyu.de
- Comment on How screwed would one be if their email provider shuts down? 5 days ago:
Some years age when I was still using some more google stuff (like an account for calling out from my PBX) I had each service assigned to its own google account to limit the impact of google doing something crazy to an account.
Apart from playstore youtube red is now the only service left - and that’s about to go as they now made it too expensive, especially taking into account that they enshittified it so much that we’ve blocked it on the TV, and “adfree on TV” was the main use case there…
- Comment on Aldi announces wage increases up to $23 an hour; hiring thousands of employees 2 months ago:
I think only one is currently still working in the company - but they do own it via a bunch of “Stiftungen”. IIRC that construct was selected back then to make sure that spoiled brats can’t fuck it up eventually.
- Comment on Aldi announces wage increases up to $23 an hour; hiring thousands of employees 2 months ago:
You’re joking, but quite possibly he’d not even want to buy the one.
The owner family is very reclusive after a kidnapping in the 70s - but we know at least that the founders were living relatively frugal.
Ownership of Aldi is by a handful of “stiftungen” - and one of the more recent judicial squabbles in the family were of one side accusing the other trying to pull more money out of Aldi than necessary to live a non frugal livestyle.
Don’t get me wrong - they’re billonaires, though probably quite limited liquid assets. But based on their behaviour they have a good chance to survive the revolution.
- Comment on Usernames in the Fedivers 😫 5 months ago:
One thing I like about bluesky is that your identity doesn’t have to be tied to an instance domain - you’d still have issues if you want to change is later, but if you plan ahead and use your domain you can just move it between instances.
- Comment on A bad influence 7 months ago:
Vanilla teams is a a stinking pile of shit. Corporate policies just add a bit of bonus nuclear waste to that.
- Comment on Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI? 7 months ago:
A problem of this bubble is that it is making AI synonymous with LLM - and when it goes down will burn other more sensibly forms of AI.
- Comment on Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI? 7 months ago:
It surely is a bubble - so probably a bit different than many other bubbles.
I think OpenAI made the right call (for them) to commercialize when they did - as that pretty much was their only chance to do so. Things has moved fast over the last 1.5 years - and what used to take a decade in tech has happened within months: OpenAI is the dinosaur company grandfathered in, while for already about a year it’s been more sensible for anybody wanting to do something with LLM to selfhost (or buy hosting capacity, but put up own data) one of the more open language models, and possibly adjust or re-train it.
As a company owner I get a ridiculous amount of spam for a year already from all kinds of companies building products on top of OpenAI stack, or are trying to sell training or conferences. All those companies will be left with nothing once all the slower users realize technology has moved on. It’s like somebody trying to build all their product offerings based on VMWare stack nowadays.
If you as a company want to offer something around AI right now the safest option is probably offering hosting, or if you want to do more hands on, adjustment of open models. Both of those are very risky, and many will go bust in years to come - but not as suicidal as building on top of a closed dinosaur.
- Comment on My RuneScape inspired indie fitness MMORPG WalkScape is looking for more beta testers 8 months ago:
Any option without patreon? I deleted my account there a few years back after they tried to push those shitty payment policy changes.
- Comment on Krebs on Security: "Using Google Search to Find Software Can Be Risky" 9 months ago:
- Comment on Krebs on Security: "Using Google Search to Find Software Can Be Risky" 9 months ago:
You nowadays even need to pay attention on Android as you might get an “software related to what you’re currently trying to install” with an install button on top of the install button you want - in the location where the install button used to be in googles playstore. Whoever came up with that stupid idea needs their computer privileges revoked for the rest of their life.
- Comment on Your next Windows PC may need at least 16GB of RAM 9 months ago:
RAM is cheap, and even if you’re just doing absolute basic shit your current PC will work better with 16GB of RAM (also looking at you here, Apple). If it’s not a phone you’re buying don’t get anything with less than 16GB.
- Comment on life hacks 10 months ago:
Make sure you use a long extension cord to a fuse without RCD for the hair dryer, though - otherwise the constant resetting of the breaker will eat up all your time savings.
- Comment on Cloudflare Employee records her final meeting where HR tries to fire her 10 months ago:
Here in Europe the 4 months she was at would be somewhere mid to end of the trial period, during which you can be let go without having to provide a reason on relatively short notice. This is also pretty much the only chance you get to easily let go a specific individual - so if there are indications it’ll not work out doing just that is a good idea.
But having that done by arbitrary HR drones is just crazy, and obviously you’ll be entitled to unemployment benefits or other social benefits after that.
- Comment on Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI 10 months ago:
- Comment on Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI 10 months ago:
It generally doesn’t have a high opinion of translators (note that the emojis here are inserted as path markers to help with prompt debugging - but everyting else is from the LLM):
- Comment on Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI 10 months ago:
I wasn’t quite sure what to think about this, so I’ve asked my local LLM. Seems it is fine.
- Comment on Google has started disabling third-party cookies for Chrome users 10 months ago:
Did they also finally fix google drive? Last time I needed something from a shared drive I needed to enable a third party cookie exemption for that.
- Comment on German Art 10 months ago:
While failing at art he was still Austrian.
- Comment on [deleted] 10 months ago:
Turns out, countries where religious extremists are stuck in the past and were allowed political power tend to legitimate killing by the state (also looking at you here, USA). They’re also perfectly fine with women dying for that, so I don’t think this statement is wrong when applied to extremists of any related religion.
- Comment on 'Leave them stranded': Rideshare drivers shut off apps at Atlanta airport, boycott for hours 10 months ago:
…which everybody with half a brain knew already over a decade ago when that stuff started.
I do understand that you guys have shittier taxi service over there than we generally do have in Europe, and it was tempting to go for something new - but there’s a service like this has fixed costs, including car maintenance, and giving a higher cut to the app company than you was doing during taxi times where you was hardly getting by doesn’t really work, once the venture capital dries up, and they try to make a profit.
Since everybody was running after uber like sheep you my end up with the actually sustainable transport destroyed - fortunately regulation saved us from the worst over here, though uber did have some negative impact.
- Comment on [deleted] 11 months ago:
This all is personal stuff. A lot of us started their pages before things like wikis or blogs existed, so the content often has elements of what you’d later find there - and depending on if it makes sense or not a blog may have been added later on, or not. Or still is not what would be considered a classical blog, but just an easier way of updating regular content.
- Comment on [deleted] 11 months ago:
Homepage?
- Comment on I'm locked out of my 6 year old Chipotle account because they now say my email address is invalid when I login. Here is me asking for their help: 11 months ago:
I’m not aware of any correct email validations. I’m still looking for something accepting a space in the localpart.
Also a surprising number of sites mess with the casing of the localpart. Don’t do that - many mailservers do accept arbitrary case, but not all. MyName@example.com and myname@example.com are two different mail addresses, which may point to the same mailbox if you are lucky.
- Comment on And this is why I no longer have cable. 11 months ago:
That was one of the reasons why I was watching pirated versions of the Amazon shows even when I was paying for prime.
- Comment on A good deal of IT work, too 11 months ago:
In IT contracting (at least the fields I’m around) it’s quite common that “being able to acquire new skills quickly” is one of the skills you get paid for, and the time needed for you to do that is accounted for in the project planning.
- Comment on A psychopath getting 3 wishes from a genie would be a great horror movie. 1 year ago:
I’d just let them see, but make them temporarily go blind every time they’d be about to see something they care about, or are in a dangerous situation where being able to see would be useful.
- Comment on Non-native english speaker here. Need help with my work emails 1 year ago:
Lack of accountability goes both ways, though…
- Comment on Non-native english speaker here. Need help with my work emails 1 year ago:
For the usual candidates I either keep detailed notes, or make sure I can quickly find an earlier conversation (chat, email, whatever).
So in that case I’m then just answering “As we’ve discussed on 14.04. at 13:39, 17.04 14:30 and 20.04 at 14:15 already…”
They typically get the hint that when I’m capable of remembering in detail when we discussed it they maybe should make an effort of remembering what we discussed.
- Comment on "Sponsored recommendations": I pay for Spotify Premium, and yet somehow I'm still the product? 1 year ago:
Spotify pissed me off with some billing or API thing (don’t even remember the details) back in 2012, so I cancelled and never looked back. From what I’m reading now and then things is just getting worse and worse - and I have no clue why people (especially paying ones) are sticking with it.
