72 karma · joined November 13, 2019
Who has the time to track all the stuff Google collects about you? At least spread out the tracking by NOT using every Google app. They've become the single largest surveillance organization in history, dwarfing even China's government.
Besides Firefox and Duckduckgo work so well I don't notice the difference.
Next, dropping Gmail...
So Apple, retire it with the silly touch bar, push really hard click, and the lightning connector. Maybe these devs would be happer making touch text editing more than awful.
Doing anything on a mobile device is far more painful than people assume. A generation of people are now unfamiliar with using a PC and although it has its problems, the use cases are far easier.
Are these really solved cases?
- multiple tabs in a browser. Why not put tabs/shortcuts on the desktop (errr mobile top?)
- apps in general, why do they exist at all? Most are just slightly better web pages--ok I know it's just to give Apple&Google gatekeeper status and create a way to get paid for the app. but at a cost to users that is more and more annoying. Why have a mobile aware NYTimes.com AND an app? Ditch the apps where not really needed and do a decent one-page web app instead. No need to update, no special gatekeeper for install. If the first issue was solved, it would make mobile devices easier. I have no sympathy for the Mush burdened x-twitter but if they have a gripe with Apple do a decent web page and no gatekeeper is involved.
- &^&%$#$$% passwords. Partly because of apps in general, all your passwords are hidden from your password manager, which is of dubious value on a mobile to begin with. Typing in that auto-generated password created by a password manager is HELL on a mobile device, text being hell as this article points out.
Why are paywalled posts left or even allowed on HN? I'm sure there are other sources of this exact content. I have nothing against paywalling unique content, just don't expect me to buy a subscription just to blab about it here.
I use the YouTube recommender extensively and understand the issues about getting increasing crap in recs. I really have no interest in fake science crap or conspiracy theory crap! So I aggressively "do not like" videos or channels that turn up with this junk. I'm not sure I could use YouTube without the recommender and would not use it if I got constant crap. The "do not like" tells the recommender not to send that particular type of crap and though more crap will inevitably drift in, the result is a pretty useful feature.
ML was overhyped but has proven useful, OK.
But the new Generative AIs are fundamentally different. They are trained without any notion of a ground truth. They therefore have no concept of reality. They only know what is real-ish. They are psychotic. Temper the hype with the caveat--"but what it produces is often untruthful or unreal" and the hype is instantly clear.
This essay fails to account for why GAI is so different. This problem can only be solved with new methods for training that have as yet not been invented. Older style ML is based on using some ground truth and comes with a metric that measures how close it is to this truth. Not so of any of the new GAI, so continue to beware until researcher figure out how to measure truth--and good luck with that.
One of the simplest AIs is a recommender. We put guardrails on using its predictions inside ecommerce apps by limiting what it learns from (purchases for instance) and limiting what it is used to predict (purchases). When Facebook uses a recommender it learns from time-on-site (a value to FB but not necessarily to the user and a complex behavior that can be comprised of may non-beneficial sub-behaviors) and use it to recommend things that lead to more time-on-site. This application is dangerously devoid of guardrails as so much recent evidence has shown.
Now we have a text generating AI that has been trained from a great swath of human knowledge. That means the teachings of Gandhi as well Hitler, etc. What do you expect it to "know" as truth? Generative AI that is used to generate thoughts from this training corpus MUST have contradictory and downright evil ideas since it has no way to judge between ideas it learns from.
Generative AI in this form can be nothing but psychopathic until guardrails can be devised to limit its psychopathic responses OR the corpus it learns from can be labeled in a way to flag what is "bad", if we can even agree on what that means.
Psychopaths can be useful if they are knowledgeable but beware, you are talking to a psychopath in ChatGPT.
Don't force subscriptions! If everything I ran - occasionally - required a subscription, no matter how small, I would drop 99% of it. I have already done this for MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite. I don't need updates and certainly not their online "collaborative" features, which are pretty lame IMO.
Not sure how this works for them. A customer doesn't need services or updates but they disable their SW so, what, the user will come back to them. No, they just force us to find pay once alternatives or stop using the functionality. Because of this baffling practice I no longer consider their formats the standard.
Remember that ALL early investors are diluted when new money comes in. For example the first Angel investor may opt to add more money to new investment rounds to buy anti-dilution shares. Think of your continued contributions as adding more value in return for anti-dilution shares.
That said, getting rich from options is a fool's bet. Take a good salary then save and invest it. You'll be better off and the risk is much lower. You are far too close to the situation right now to judge the likelihood of success for your startup and have no idea how many factors hidden to you will make or break that bet. FTX, Theranos, ...
The reason VCs can play this game is that they have certain advantages and they place 100 bets to one success. You can place only one in that same timeframe. Even they would not play that game.
The things that seem interesting about M are around "no algorithm" and separation of user groups by server membership. These help address the huge need to restrict the reach of messages, which is ignored and made worse by Twitter policies and algorithms. Twitter makes more money if people click on infuriating anger producing tweets and spend more time online reading and making them. They advantage this by teaching their algorithms to promote this type of content.
Mastodon has no algorithms and begins with a way to draw boundaries around reach by server-user spaces. It will stay this way until someone wants to make advertising money with Mastodon.
Twitter could drop ad revenue and the algorithm that feeds it brains but would then go bankrupt. They are a cancerous, leperous, zombie, unable to stop eating brains.
Give me a reasonably polite Mastodon server (keep your cesspool server) over feeding my brain to the zombie "bird".
Said another way, maybe counties with poor medical facilities, poorer people, etc. are more attracted to voting Republican. The title might read "The downtrodden are more attracted to Republican ideas"
Not saying this is true either it's just that the causal factors may not be part of the study. They tried to include race/color and gender but the effect is still visible across the board.
They did not study obesity or income level, which I suspect would show even stronger correlation to an increase in AAMR than what the county voted in the last election.
WTF, legal problems?
I sometimes clear cookies, use Brave in private mode, edit the html to remove a fade out etc. But 12.io makes all that BS a thing of the past.
+10 12ft.io
BTW speaking of billionaire owned news... doesn't work on washingtonpost.com
Create a hypothetical new stable coin. Issue one coin for every dollar put into the stable coin. For every dollar subtracted pay out the dollar and take the coin out of circulation until another USD comes back in. Make money on exchange fees ONLY. No fair using the coins or dollars in any other way.
The schemes for stable coins ALL have failure mods until someone does #3. The most likely entity to do #3 is the US treasury (or other national entity). But if someone is willing to live with income from fees only, they could do #3. Crypto currencies have efficiencies enough to make this a viable option.
But it does generate money and so it is given free reign to bait us into psychopathic behavior if needs be. It is encouraged to inject whatever it needs to into our communications in order to keep generating wealth without any recognizable constraint.
I hope a counter or limiting factor evolves before we start killing each other as its thralls.