deweydecibel

…what? What are you basing this on?

When the children were small, Wendy and Mike worked various jobs, including machine operator, housekeeper, and cashier.

…

Wendy had become a certified nursing assistant, but she continued to struggle financially. The family was repeatedly evicted.

…

In 2018, shortly after another eviction, Wendy filed for bankruptcy. She developed a gastrointestinal bleed that required hospitalization, and Faith was also hospitalized, after an attempted overdose involving over-the-counter painkillers

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/05/kyle-rittenhouse-american-vigilante

No she literally isn’t. It was bought for him by somebody else in another city, where it was kept.

Sure, but she’s also his mother, not a random family member. I’m not going to fault a mother for standing by their child, no matter what he did.

She didn’t let him buy anything, but she couldn’t make him get rid of it because it wasn’t in her house. It was locked up at a friend’s house in a different town.

She was also ill, poor, dyslexic, and a single parent dealing with a difficult child. She doesn’t seem to have much in her life but her children, I’m not going to condemn her for not banishing him from her life. It’s not an easy thing for a mother to do.

So it’s helpful for saving time typing some stuff

Legitimately, this is the only use I found for it. If I need something extremely simple, and feeling too lazy to type it all out, it’ll do the bulk of it, and then I just go through and edit out all little mistakes.

And what gets me is that anytime I read all of the AI wank about how people are using these things, it kind of just feels like they’re leaving out the part where they have to edit the output too.

At the end of the day, we’ve had this technology for a while, it’s just been in the form of predictive suggestions on a keyboard app or code editor. You still had to steer in the right direction. Now it’s just smart enough to make it from start to finish without going off a cliff, but you still have to go back and fix it, the same way you had to steer it before.

Another friend of mine was reviewing software intended for emergency services, and the salespeople were not expecting someone handling purchasing in emergency services to be a hardcore programmer. It was this false sense of security that led them to accidentally reveal that the service was ultimately just some dude in India. Listen, I would just be some random dude in India if I swapped places with some of my cousins, so I’m going to choose to take that personally and point out that using the word AI as some roundabout way to sell the labor of people that look like me to foreign governments is fucked up, you’re an unethical monster, and that if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)

This aspect and of it isn’t getting talked about enough. These companies are presenting these things as fully-formed AI, while completely neglecting the people behind the scenes constantly cleaning it up so it doesn’t devolve into chaos. All of the shortcomings and failures of this technology are being masked by the fact that there’s actual people working round the clock pruning and curating it.

You know, humans, with actual human intelligence, without which these miraculous “artificial intelligence” tools would not work as they seem to.

Just make a throwaway account. The VPNs work fine when you’re signed in.

I know that’s not an acceptable answer for some but if they want to associate your activity with a throwaway account, let them, because they still have no way of knowing which person on the VPN is using that throwaway account.

Let’s not pretend it’s all about “bad actors”. They don’t want masked traffic at all, the “bad actors” gives them an excuse.

And we know this because if the IP was the issue, they wouldn’t let you use the site at all, but they will work fine after signing in. Any of these VPNs work as long as you’re logged into reddit, even with a throwaway account.

I know some artists don’t mind it, but I just can’t hear the word “creatives” as anything other than silicon valley speak for the source of the content they sell. It feels dehumanizing.

Particularly in this case, it’s Adobe, so you can just call them artists, designers, photographers, etc.

Or, ya know, just users.

Because the investors/stockholders in the tech industry started tightening the belt and demanding profitability from these huge tech companies. What’s happening at Google is happening everywhere: the avenues for extracting more profit from their apps or services are being scoured and taken advantage of. Prices going up, advertising increasing, free features removed, etc. Different strategies all around, but the pattern is clear.

YouTube has never been profitable, but Google was ok with letting the rest of the profits from its other divisions subsidize YouTube’s losses so it could remain free. They did that to choke the market; no other company could handle the sheer scale of it while offering it for free. As long as Google ran YouTube for free with relatively few ads, no competition could ever possibly come to exist.

But because the shareholders are demanding profit now, and because Google itself is struggling on multiple fronts, the time to force YouTube into a profitable enterprise has come at last.

And this is what it looks like.

As for risking competition, at this point, I don’t think they care anymore. Competition in the web service and software space seems to be a thing of the past. Users are intransigent, algorithms favor the oldest and most popular services, and content creators seem to be incapable of separating themselves from their abusive platforms.

I also have a theory that Google is using YouTube as a way of rallying all platforms and services to combat ad blockers more fiercely. If they can beat them on YouTube, other sites will dig their heels in. There’s a long-term strategy here to nuke ad blocking permanently. That’s what that web environment integrity shit was about, and you better believe that will be back with a new name.

That’s kind of what I’m thinking too.

Legitimately, the degree to which proton advertises, the sheer amount of blog spam and such, made me very, very resistant to it. I really don’t care how private it all is or how well it works, I have spent enough time on the internet and engaged with enough small tech company services to recognize a fierce push for growth, and experience has taught me to avoid a for-profit company that sells to you that hard. One day the growth will stop, and the cannibalizing begins.

But a move to a non-profit model is, at least theoretically, a move in the right direction. I’m more willing to engage.

I still don’t trust that they won’t change their mind down the road, but it’s a start.

And the point about OpenAI is moot because being non-profit doesn’t make the actual purpose of the company any less shitty. Especially when Microsoft was feeding it money for the purpose of harvesting what they would create. They still had shitty motives and created a tool that is very ethically “questionable” at best, and that was true from the very beginning.The fact their ethics team was gutted the moment they tried to exercise their purpose tells you everything.

The non-profit company created a tool that will be used primarily by for-profit companies and hurt individuals. The moniker barely applies.

I don’t give a shit if it’s reasonable anymore.

Google has done enough terrible things over the years, ruined enough services, some of them paid services, continually harmed content creators with their trash algorithm, refused to defend them from bogus copyright strikes, refused to provide meaningful support to anybody but advertisers, all the while hosting hate on their platform, for profit. So I don’t give a damn what’s fair to them.

They won’t get a penny from me ever again. I’ll continue to find every way of accessing any content on that platform that I choose, without ads, and without paying them, and it has absolutely nothing to do with ethics or reason. It is entirely, 100%, because fuck Google.

Fuck their ad network, fuck manifest 3, fuck their “integrity” checking, fuck all of this. I’d rather see it all burn to the ground than help them turn the internet into cable tv.

Thr FN part is notable if you have a recent computer. A lot of laptops and keyboards ship out with media keys as the default on the top row now, and you must hold the FN key to use F10. Lot of people don’t realize this and think Shift+F10 isn’t working.

Possibly an easier option: you can let it connect to the internet, and then when it tells you to set up a Microsoft account, click on “Other sign in options” (or whatever it says beneath the text box). Then select “Domain Join instead”. It’ll let you use a local account, expecting you to join it to a domain later, then you just…don’t join it to a domain.

Always be sure to use something like O&O ShutUp10 or Winaero Tweaker after you reach the desktop, so you can shut off all the bullshit, otherwise it will keep harassing you to make an account. I think you need to uninstall OneDrive too, to stop it hijacking the address bar in file explorer with constant nagging to set it up

I’ve discovered over the years that curiosity is maybe the most important aspect of being good with technology.

Technical skills, patience, problem solving, organization, all that is critical, obviously.

But more often than not, it all starts with just wanting to know what’s possible. I’m the kind of person that, after installing something for the first time, be It software or a game or whatever, the very first thing I do is open the settings, and look all the knobs and levers that are available.

I was genuinely stunned to find out that the vast majority of users never look at the settings ever. And maybe that’s why developers seem to be increasingly unwilling to even provide options for those of us that like tweaking settings.

I keep hearing this but it’s perplexing.

Students have been using laptops in school and college for a long time now, no matter how much time they spend on their phone.

What I encountered in IT isn’t people who have no idea how to use a computer, it’s people that have very little idea how to use Windows over Apple or occasionally Chromebook. But even then, they usually still know Windows from needing to use it at some point in school. It’s the settings and other little things they struggle with, not the basics.

I have to explain things like how to right click because a lot of people have grown up only using phone/tablets

Or they come from iMac or MacBooks where right clicking is less emphasized as it is on Windows.

Think back to when we were kids. Remember that period of time when not everyone owned a computer? Or if they owned one, it wasn’t necessarily used much? There were people that were “computer people”, who used computers daily for entertainment or tinkering or socializing (once the consumer internet took off) and there were people that didn’t need or care about them outside of their workstation at the office.

Even after the Internet, this dynamic was there. You had the enthusiasts who really spent time on their computers and got to using them well, and you had people that simply owned them and checked email or browsed the Internet from time to time.

The enthusiast/non-enthusiast dynamic has always existed. There’s always a gap. It just takes different shapes.

Now, everyone owns a smartphone and uses for everything. They’re critical to life, enthusiast or no. That’s the baseline now. The gap is entirely in skill and usage, not so much hardware or time spent on it.

Before computers and the internet, no tech skill was needed to interact with our modern world.

After them, and for a few decades, the skill floor rose. You needed to learn technology to participate in the modern world.

Now technology has reached a point where the skill floor has dropped down to where it was before.

The mistake we made was in thinking that our generation learning to use technology was happening because they wanted to. It was incidental. Skill with technology comes from desire to obtain it, not simply using technology a lot.

Need some more details here.

A “guys” laptop? Like a student or a faculty member?

Did you report it to the police or to the IT department or other faculty? Who were you in this school? Teacher?

What do you mean by the cops “investigating” you? Like asking a few questions to get it on record? Or getting into your computer? Were they accusing you of something? Who called them in the first place?

The problem is the software isn’t making it simpler to operate just by abstraction, much of it is by subtraction.

It’s not turning two buttons with individual functions into one, it’s removing a button all together, even for the people that knew how to use it.

The problem with the abstraction is, the more you rely on technology to replace certain skills, the more dependant on it you get, and the tech industry is getting less dependable and increasingly predatory when it comes to the users that are now dependent on them. That dependence also leads to more market entrenchment.

For example, if you don’t know how to manage files, you are trapped forever with iCloud or OneDrive until they create easy ways to transfer everything seamlessly between clouds (and they won’t). That’s bad for users and for the industry overall.

Basically, without the skills, you have to trust the tech companies to guide you by one hand and not stab you with the other, and they are increasingly unworthy of that trust.

They’re also market-locked. If you have so little ability to function outside of an app, you become incredibly resistant to moving from one to another unless it’s identical, and you’re incapable of using marginally more complex things.

It also gives immense market control to the app stores, have been allowed to exist mostly unregulated. Thankfully that might be changing.

When everyone must be spoon-fed, that makes the only company selling the spoons insanely wealthy and powerful.

It’s also going to have a degrading effect on popular software overtime. When the only financially viable thing is to make apps for the masses, you are not incentivized to make something extraordinary.

Compare Apple Music to iTunes, just on a software level. Just on the sheet number of things you can do with iTunes, all the nobs and levers, all the abilities it grants a user willing to use it to its max potential. At some point, it no longer became viable to create an excellent piece of software, because most people have no skills or patience or desire to use it.

So you start making things that don’t empower the user, instead you make things that treat them like children, and your products get stupid.

Driving behavior analysis, or telematics, as the insurance industry calls it, could be better for consumers, leading to personalized rates that are more fair. Plus, if people have to pay more for their risky driving, they may drive more cautiously, leading to safer roads. But this will happen only if drivers are aware that their behavior is being monitored.

I’m so sick of this shit.

Just like the stop sign cameras, this only increases safety by penalizing and then monetizing minor mistakes that humans make. This is not about safety, it’s about maximizing income through technological micromanaging of drivers who have not caused an accident and were not in danger of causing one.

You’d also have to be a damn fool not to realize that all the data they’re collecting may not apply to their rate structure today, but in the future that rate structure will change, and suddenly a history of driver data you let them gather about you goes from being unremarkable to indicative of a problem.

The shareholders are demanding a blood sacrifice, so rates suddenly go up for people that have a driver score beneath a certain threshold where previously that threshold was higher.

Or some new bullshit study comes out claiming people that listen to podcasts while driving are infinitesimally more likely to cause an accident than people that listen to music, and whoops, Michael Barbaro has been your constant companion on every morning commute for the last 4 years. That’s a pattern of risky behavior.

This is why federation should have a standard that needs to be followed. Been saying that for a year now.

Instance level administration/moderation has an effect on the democratic system that is the backbone of the entire federation. We can choose not to federate all their actions, but it still has an effect on instance A when something isn’t visible on instance B and instance B visitors can not not vote on it. It skews the outcomes for everyone.

So there should be a standard for federated instances to administer and moderate fairly and honestly, in line with established and public rules.