icantevenhold

It’s interesting because my experience is inverse (b2b software) - the bloated shiny solution what actually doesnt work at all performs better in the market than the sober, unsexy solution that just works.

Companies like Oracle or Microsoft are so massive not because they sell simple and focused products that work well; quite the opposite

Might be different when you’re selling to endusers

It’s an underrated life skill and was discovered by Lao Tsé probably around 2500 years ago

I disagree - it’s best never to talk to users because they have no idea what good quality is and will constantly push you to implement stupid features that only they uniquely need because of their fucked up business practices.

Or weaken your security so it works with their fucked up legacy firewall that cant ever be changed and so on.

Talking to users -> not even once.

Might be only this bad in B2B software

The physical collection doesnt exist anymore sadly.

But you are right that many of the my dads CDs cant be found on streaming services.

People don’t even realise what they lost, but then again they probably don’t care either way

Almost 90% of what I listen is not on Spotify.

Besides being a plight for culture and enemies of artists Spotify is quite a bad collection too.

Mostly because I need to login to a Microsoft account nowadays

Nah I know plenty of people who don’t care about venture capital but have been ripping cds for decades

Tbh just recently I found the full extended version box set of LotR on DVD just lying on the street together with ~dozens more decent movies. I could probably fund my viewing habits entirely out of found stuff.

As for music; my dad ripped his whole CD collection many years ago, many thousands of CDs; more than I could listen to in a lifetime probably.

Plus I buy music on bandcamp to support a few artists I really like.

Paying for streaming services is just fueling the wholesale of our culture or worse the military industrial complex

I want a smaller phone, but am burned out on android; had too many android garbage phones.

I’m leaning towards getting an old iPhone mini - but maybe someone knows a better alternative?

No I also think it’s insane how normalised this has become

Yes it does. According to their official stats they have around 45M users of which ~500k are paying customers (of which 1000 are Enterprise customers)

Yea I don’t think this will blow over just because trump (might be?) is gone.

Frankly this already started under GW Bush from my perspective and just has gradually gotten worse.

I don’t think you can unboil a frog that quickly. This will take many years to resolve / build up trust again.

Isnt that basically Palantirs business model?

Heck the NSA backdoored our head of states phones - if “NSA wants my data” is your threat model you are pretty much cooked everywhere. Even if you host on your own server and operate everything yourself it’s no big secret that the NSA is listening in on the node/isp level

No longer in operation since 2017, =(

edit: wonder if that means they sold everything

IMO it’s hard to see how we would even end up in such a situation given we actually developed AGI. I’m sure a sufficiently intelligent - even if alien - mind can grasp how utterly stupid and useless wars are and take steps to prevent them ever occurring again.

In what scenario would it be rational to unleash complete and utter permanent nuclear destruction of all life (including artificial) life on earth?

Not only is policing not immune against perfidy, but I would argue perfidy is built into the police system as a core tenet. There is a lot of widely available evidence

Idk we will figure it out

We the people

We should break these companies apart - they should not have that level of power.

404 for me

(unless this was a jest)

Nah but be a little bit more specific than just sprinkling random FUD - what is the relationship and why is it problematic ?

No one is saying that every US company is an evil data hungry entity and EU companies are saints.

But fact of the matter is that the US is rapidly sliding into totalitarianism and at the same time US tech companies have an hu huge influence worldwide.

I commend any alternative that comes from outside the US and also offers an “open source” selfhosted option.

Mistral OCR is really good and their small models are great for simple translations, I use them regularly.

Of course I’m not always on the most bleeding edge forefront of the latest hyped model so there might be better alternatives, but I’m happy with what they provide

This means exactly what?

I think you would be hard pressed to find any relevant tech company that doesn’t have a relationship with the Saudis or is funded by them - or any government for that matter…

Tbh there is much more regulatory pressure on EU AI companies than US/China - of course you can only use local models which Mistral actually releases unlike the US alternatives.

So out of all the bad options this still seems to be one of the best

Yea I also stumbled across that one. Overall the article was really enjoyable to read, but this one sentence threw me off.

X isnt y it’s Z needs to die

While I agree I have to say that AI-detectors are complete bullshit

We’ll give it 50-100 years down this trajectory and we will have arrived there