Can I ask what you’re planning to use block chain for? To verify each account? Or to federate instances?

I’ve spent more money on retro gaming handhelds and gotten less for it. Looks pretty good.

Nicki Minaj doing what she does. Being a self hating bigot.

Lack of context for what was being discussed, mostly. No joke I read this without context and was very confused (and I had already read a similar article about this event).

Wulfden Wulffden on YouTube does quite a few reviews of these handhelds, especially niche ones. Might be worth checking out.

It did what now? What the hell is this title?

“We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars.”

Is the actual title. What gives?

They do this because it allowed them to track how often you shop and what you normally buy. This helps them to manage their stock, keeping popular items that regular shoppers buy in stock etc.

The way it normally works though is that the item is $1.99 but if you have their club card or member card the item is $1.50.

This means you save money in exchange for allowing them to track your shopping habits.

Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of … We’ll call them questionable reasons why business want to track your shopping habits, and that tracking doesn’t necessarily stop as just tracking what you buy.

But it was never meant to be item is less expensive but you only get the less expensive price if you have their card. It was supposed to be, we’ll give you a deal on said item if you let us track you in exchange.

I think they were being facetious.

The point was that alienating their main player base this way will lead to the demise of companies that use kernel level anti-cheat and those companies will deserve it because they did it to themselves.

Probably because it gets you in trouble with the feds.

There was a scam going where they would offer for someone to apply for a role and use that good candidates clean information to get it v they would do the work and split the pay with the person who’s info they used.

In exchange that person would get “job experience”, the perks of WFH, and the ability to hold down more than one of these figurehead jobs simultaneously.

There have been versions of windows where this wasn’t completely possible out of the box (looking at you windows ME). I was referring to when it was a native windows feature, no extra software of any kind involved. And you didn’t have to program hotkeys or anything.

A couple of weeks ago a WAYMO Taxi drove through an active crime scene.

A bit ago they had to patch their taxis firmware to prevent them running down children (something you’d think they already would be programmed to do).

Passengers have reported being held hostage by their taxi when it stopped suddenly and refused to move.

There’s a laundry list of things that have been wrong with them. Some have had reasonable fixes (and some of those fixes should have been implemented before they were allowed on the road).

I wonder if this is a holdover from when you could navigate windows completely without a mouse using only the keyboard and shortcuts.

Obviously there might be some overlap between some keyboard shortcuts (and a very much targeted use of Apple’s shortcuts for certain programs that MS has ported to Mac). So office/365 programs get Mac shortcuts and everything else is using Windows standard shortcuts built up over time. There’s not reason for a mac user to use Windows version of notepad.

Either way, truly a mildly infuriating niglet so my upvote is yours.

Well. This is good news.

No. You don’t get to decide what is put on my personal computing device just because you want to force the general public to bear the burden of protecting children rather than forcing parents to do their fucking jobs.

Yeah. I often forget this one because AI isn’t replacing my job any time soon. At best maybe it could potentially be used to streamline some processes to do with tech data and work flow management (what tests and protocols get done when, and combining tests/troubleshooting steps to prevent rework). But that would have to be a very targeted and very very regulated and tested thing before it could be viable.

I think this is a case of the lesser of two evils here. Not being Elon Musk is such a low bar to clear.

Their statements each time something bad happens with their products don’t bear out that things will change in a meaningful way any time soon. There are a lot of reasons I’d never ride in one of these but even putting that to the side, objectively they each seem to have significant problems with implementation that are receiving lip service instead of actual fixes.

The crazy thing is, none of these articles seem to want to admit that AI is bad. They keep making articles like this. Keep saying that approval is falling among the general populace. But when touching on why that is, there’s always some wiggle words. Always some spin.

It’s never “people being forced to use it are seeing it as a detriment to them” people using it are seeing a decrease in efficacy of the results it gives for the amount of prompting required. Or people don’t like it because it’s going to have significant detrimental affects on the environment and their utilities.

All of those are solid reasons for the decline in both the use of AI LLM’S and the approval of them.

The cost of goods and services relating even tangentially to AI are going through the roof. The amount of slop is increasing at a furious pace, directly contributing to things like enshittification and dead Internet theory. The effect on the economy is looking to be extremely catastrophic.

But oh no. It’s lack of authenticity on social media spaces that people are worried about. Sure.

And yet WAYMO taxis have been driving through bus stops like it’s going out of style. They aren’t necessarily better.

You are assuming that A. Google isn’t scraping data for their own AI, B. that these companies will create their own instances (which opens them up to a certain amount of liability and requires them to retain moderation/admin and maintenance staff (which costs money)). C. That the enshittification of corporate owned versions of Lemmy and the fediverse won’t push people to Lemmy sooner or later.

A fourth assumption you made is that the Threads federation push was made in order to do anything other than create hype around a feature that might draw people away from places like the fediverse. I kind of assumed (maybe I’m wrong) that they were offering it as a way to have all the benefits of federation - namely the assumption of FOSS adjacent services, but with all the “benefits” of corporate social media.

The truth is that it’s likely that Meta absolutely has had a detrimental effect on the fediverse because it has things that pull users away from the fediverse. Instagram has content. For days. And because the fediverse is small (shrinking as you say), and because it doesn’t have an algorithm that pushes certain content to certain users, Meta and the other services that have analogs in the fediverse continue to be popular.

A lot of this is because the fediverse still hasn’t figured out a way to be profitable to content creators and we no longer live in the early 2000’s of YouTube etc where content creation for free was popular.

I’d argue that a lot of the appeal of the fediverse is organic conversation and communication. The popularity of that as a whole is declining because of algorithms that tickle just the right feel good chemicals in our brains.

As for your comment about these corps investing in the fediverse? The only reason for them to do that is if they can make money off it. The major money making scheme the internet is relying on is ad service. So there’s a catch 22 here. I would rather donate money to fedi services than have the fediverse infested with ads.